Sifting through my email this morning I read my regular blogs including Chris Brogan’s. I was fortunate enough to see that Run Level Media captured a recent talk he gave at New Media Atlanta last week. I’ve been fortunate enough to see Chris talk a few different times on the topic of social media, but this one seemed a whole lot different (see video below).

Throughout the talk, Chris hits on several points that I believe are so relevant for businesses participating or looking to participate in social media. After hearing Chris talk I was inspired to put together the Top  3 Ways Businesses Must Embrace Social Media:

1 – Listen & Learn: How often do we forget as marketers that our organization’s biggest fans aren’t fans because of the product, service, upgrade, enhancement or features that we offer & often promote through our various communications platforms. The reason your organization has fans, advocates and perhaps even a growing Tribe is because you make them feel special. I believe part of triggering such feelings and emotions with your audiences are to spend some time on these various social media platforms listening & learning.

2 – Solve a problem: Once we have observed our audiences through listening and learning about their problems, we must do whatever we can to begin answering these questions, solving their problem or referring them to others who can. This act is so incredibly humbling and selfless and should be done in a way that may not immediately feel so comfortable…but in its essence is so incredibly natural.

3 – Give others a voice: You can be a large Fortune 100 company or a small business with very few customers and perhaps no other employees. Regardless, your end result across all of these social media platforms should be to empower and educate others to be the voice of your organization. You should view social media as your organization’s opportunity to create a tribe, army, nation of individuals that will do one of your hardest jobs for you – promote the value of your organization to others.

I’ve been blessed over the past two years of diving in head first into social media. I’ve learned so much from folks like Allan Schoenberg, Kelly Olexa, Sarah Evans, Chris Brogan, Arik Hanson, David Mullen, and literally hundreds of others. If for nothing else, I hope that you can add to this list in your comments below and pass along to others that might add to these “best practices” and/or perhaps learn from them.

Thank you & have a wonderful day!

I’ve had the great fortune over the past two weeks to speak with some of the top government agencies throughout North America at the Social Media for Government Conference (with the top federal U.S. government agencies in attendance) and then in front of some top local municipal governments in Canada via a webinar last Thursday.

I find it a bit ironic that for the first time – ever – our governments are now trying to be transparent and sharing the vast amount of information they possess. In fact, Computerworld wrote a nice piece from the SM for Government conference talking about this subject.

For those of you that aren’t aware, President Obama signed a bill on January 21, 2009 that called for “openness, transparency and engagement” among the U.S. government.

Here we are nine months later and what has changed? Surprisingly, I have found many great examples of social media being used in the government sector – some of which I’ve shared in my presentation from SM for Government. Overall however I found that many of these large federal government agencies face the same issues of the private sector. One head of communications for a large federal agency was telling me how they have to roll out engagement on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. – yet most of these sites are blocked:).

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out within the public sector. I’d be curious to hear what your thoughts are on this subject…do you think our government should be sharing everything with the public? When does this approach a security breech? For those agencies that are utilizing SM…are they empowering the people within these platforms?

Is it possible that social media is bringing our great nation back to its roots?

I’ll leave you with the concluding paragraph from President Lincoln at the Gettysburg Address in 1863, “…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Who do you follow? After only reading the first half of Seth Godin’s Tribes, a better question might be who do you lead?

Perhaps you’re immersed in a cause you really believe in, advocating daily about something that is really important to you or better yet leading a tribe. Seth Godin seems to hit the nail on the head with his book, Tribes.

If you’ve already read Tribes, I welcome you to add to this list. If you haven’t, I hope these three points made by Godin encourages you to go out and buy it!

Loaded with many great case studies and points, I would like to point out three things that Godin talks about in Tribes that I think are worth sharing with each of you (again, I’m only halfway through):

1 - Be a leader not a manager – “My thesaurus says the best synonym for leadership is management. Maybe that word used to fit, but no longer. Movements have leaders and movements make things happen.
Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.
Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.”

2 – People don’t care about your product or service; they care about how you make them feel - “Too many organizations care about numbers, not fans. They care about hits or turnstile clicks or media mentions. What they’re missing is the depth of commitment and interconnection that true fans deliver. Instead of always being on the hunt for one more set of eyeballs, true leaders have figured out that the real win is in turning a casual fan into a true one.”

3 – The social media tools we’re using today won’t matter if we don’t adopt the right social media mentality - “Blogs and Twitter and all manner of other tools will come and go, possibly by the time you read this. The tactics are irrelevant, and the technology will always be changing. The essential lesson is that every day it gets easier to tighten the relationship you have with the people who choose to follow you.”

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Tribes tonight…then on to Meatball Sundae (also by Godin) and Now is gone by Geoff Livingston and Brian Solis – both of whom I have a ton of respect for within this space.

If you’ve read Tribes, I’d be curious to hear what you took away from the book. If not, I’d still like to hear your thoughts on these three points…do you agree these are very strong points to make about social media, business or life for that matter?

I’m sure you’ve all been in a similar discussion. Last night I was playing poker with my neighbors and someone brought up how frustrated they were with their wife always on Facebook. Another chimed in, “she’s on Facebook while I’m on porn. I’m good with that!” Which you can imagine lead to a series of discussions that took us in many directions:).

With my ”social media advocate” hat on I quickly turned to the Internet on my BlackBerry to see what I could find in the debate – Social Media vs. Porn. To my surprise I came across a number of posts from this June that proved my poker buddies wrong…Social Media has become a more popular online activity than porn! Steven Stark talks about it in his blog post, “Social Media Beats Porn” which references the SearchEngineWatch.com article by Erik Qualman entitled, “15 Social Media Maxims for Marketers” from June 1 citing recent Hitwise data. Although I question the interpretation of the study…I still think it’s a pretty cool stat to throw out as we’re educating folks about social media.

So I suppose we as Americans have now added to our vices? Sex, gambling and Social Media?! I suppose it could be worse:).

As I was participating in #journchat LIVE last night here in Chicago (which was a great event…thanks Sarah Evans!), I realized that many of the topics we were discussing, although important to our chat topic, were really the types of conversations we need to be having with non-marketing folks.

In fact, I just wrote about this subject last week in my post Social Media Advocacy: Stepping Out of Our Silo.

Then I wake up this morning with several voicemails from local media asking me to talk with their business listeners/readers about this very subject. It turns out one of the local papers the Northwest Herald did a piece in today’s paper, “PR firm a Pipeline to social media for firms” . Although I’m very humbled (goofy picture aside…below) to receive this coverage, my vision is that CEOs and general business professionals will realize the value (or not) of social media instead of passing it off to the marketing/communications team.

Sometimes I realize if it’s the “social media” term that throws them off? Perhaps we need to start advocating around “the new word of mouth” – maybe this is a term that is more C-level friendly?

I had to chuckle when somebody left an online comment about a Chicago Tribune story this morning. The article, ”Twitter forcing a strategy shift for business,” was lambasted by someone as “glorious nonsense.” If you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to do so for the impressive social media usage stats that reporter Julie Johnsson shares.
Glorious Nonsense? Not one bit! Any business person who laughs at Twitter’s future potential does so at his/her own peril. I agree with Forrester researcher Josh Bernoff- the dialogue is happening on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. As we remind those who attend our Social Media Workshops, the dialogue will happen with our without you, so why not glean valuable business intelligence and engage with customers as well?

Threadless‘ Jeff Kalmikoff makes an excellent point – this is a new marketing frontier, and first arrivals and risk-takers will be viewed as leaders. Yes, it’s a big experiment now & what better time to try new things when business is hurting for creative marketing tools that are free and can attract loyal customers.

Besides ceding control, companies must also be transparent on social media. Twitter and Facebook are not places for corporate mouthpieces. Comcast and Ford Fiesta are two brands that have demonstrated the benefit of being genuine and really engaging.

While  Twitter and Facebook are free, they require a commitment of staff resources. Too many companies jump on the social media bandwagon and pump a lot of time into learning about, creating a fan page or a Twitter handle, and then do little more. If you’re going to take the plunge into social media, assign someone internally who is committed for the long haul.

As a marketer and PR professional I am targeted (weekly if not daily) with a new seminar, conference or webinar on various ways I can leverage social media and the various platforms for my profession. A recent example includes a “Twitter Boot Camp for PR & Internal Communications Workshop” hosted by Ragan Communications (a very trusted source in our industry) which is actually being led by two folks I really admire – Allan Schoenberg (CME Group) and Barbara Rozgonyi. In fact, I recently led the conversation for a “Twitter 101″ webinar for PR professionals with CISION, the leading media relations software provider. Over the course of two sessions we had more than 2,000 participants!

I think its great our profession and industry are embracing social media advocacy and I can honestly say that I’ve never been on a call, webinar or attended a conference on this subject that didn’t provide at least some value. Most advice has been pretty solid for myself and I can only assume for the other marketers involved with each…but what about everyone else in business??

I’m a firm believer that as marketers and PR professionals we often operate in our comfortable “silos” (or departments). Some common examples of this are when your company receives media coverage and the marketing team might put a link to such coverage up on the website and perhaps have professional reprints made of the story for the sales team. Instead, shouldn’t the coverage be leveraged and packaged for all of your departments to effectively communicate with each of your targeted audiences? Probably…but we don’t.

I bring this up because I believe we’re missing the boat as social media advocates for business (as a whole). Instead we continue to educate within our own comfort zone, to our own people, and in ways that matter to our profession.

- What about the CEO who thinks social media is a waste of time…as he observes his teenage kids constantly communicating on Facebook?

- What about the Sales VP who doesn’t believe Twitter can generate any sales for her company?

- What about the SVP of HR and Legal Counsel who are trying to figure out how restrict their employees’ social media participation while at work?

I think you see my point. What can or should we do? I’m all ears:).

  Chris Brogan          Peter Shankman

Together, they’re now etched in history as “Broman,” thanks to the August 4, 2009 seminar held via Conference Call University.

I wisely spent an hour and $50 yesterday listening to social media gurus Chris Brogan and Peter Shankman talk about how businesses can take advantage of social media. If you already paid that fee to listen to Conference Call University’s hour-long session, you can re-listen to it at http://bit.ly/BZqEy.

I love the pearls of knowledge and wisdom I get from these exceedingly bright and wise sages of social media, and I’ll bet you do too. So I’ve created this summary of the key points I picked up from their conversation. 

My notes reflect the flow of topics and conversation as I heard them. If I’ve omitted something, please feel free to add it as a comment, because I was multi-tasking during the conference – tweeting about it from @michelledamico while taking these copious notes. So I admit, the following is not an exact transcription of the vibrant conversation that took place. But it does capture the essence of what was discussed and I think it’s definitely worth a read. So here are the best nuggets I culled from their seminar:

Listening is more important than talking. Social media provides the opportunity to enhance your personal/corporate brand. It’s the place people go for valuable information. So provide a value for your info. Utilize social media listening. You can’t listen if you’re constantly talking.

The tools are just tools. You’re not going to save the world. If you’re not considering a better way to interact with customer, these tools won’t help at all.

The number one rule, improve your customer service. We’ve seen companies being raised to new heights by rabid fans who fall in love with something the company marketed to them or fixed a problem for them. A company that uses social media tools and fixes problems for them through social media will attract happy customers. Their customers will get the feeling that “I matter.”

In social media, your big job is to get customers and clients to do your PR for you. You can do great things on this scale.

Look at Facebook – Fan Page, a rudimentary way to communicate with your audience. The first hard-and-fast Fan Page rule: a fan page only works with interaction. Shankman said he had inside knowledge from Facebook that people who join fan pages, will soon be able to see month and day of their birth. What does that mean for the company that owns the fan page? Make it your routine to go into Facebook on a daily basis and reach out to each person celebrating a birthday and wish them a happy birthday. That generates a smile and top-of-mind presence, you’re generating interaction. Social media is not a one-way street; Radio is a one-way street. With social media, you ou have to communicate back.

Information used to flow from outside the network in.  Now it flows from inside the network, out. It’s all about listening at the point of me. Bloggers and tweeters are asking Questions every day. There’s an opportunity to do business fast with people who are asking for it.

Are your competitors on there? Are they doing a hell of a job? It’s a defensive move as well. If you’re competitor is on social media, you have to get in on defense.

Chris Brogan said posts case studies at del.icio.us.com (I didn’t have great luck finding the case studies, and will tweet him for the link).

B-to-b use of social media: Thing to remember in b-to-b, people are still in business with people. There are large b-to-b businesses that are doing well in social media, particularly technology companies such as EMC (a storage company) Cisco, IBM.

If you’re a b-to-b company, the first thing you should do on social media is to determine what people are saying about you. Go to search.twitter.com and find people talking about you. Use Blogsearch.google.com to see if they’re talking about your products. It’s not always there.

Chris cited an October 08, Social Media Optimization article said b-to-b marketers are still struggling. Less than 31% use blogs, podcasts, social networks to engage. Don’t be discouraged by those stats: All that’s saying is that they’re waiting for somebody else to pave the way.

Go where there is no road and leave a trial. It’s cheap and inexpensive. You can take first steps without selling the bank.

A lot of services professionals are also questioning the value of social media for their practice. What can come from lawyers on Twitter? They can share interesting thoughts. Answer commentary. People who put interesting thoughts about the industry on a regular basis tend to wind up being searched.

Here’s social media’s secret trick: putting our wishes and wants on the web every day.

You have to switch from thinking about ”where do I advertise?” to “where do I listen?”

To move at the speed of trust will generate revenue. If not today, than it will happen down the line. Pass along information we find fvaluable and can trust and we will give it to others. If we trust it enough, we’ll put it out there. We are participating in the action call to viral.  You can’t create anything viral. But you can create something good!

Funny and timely don’t necessarily = viral. It has to be helpful to be viral.

Some of the best revenue generators start from doing something with no course of action. Giving information as a free gift will generate people coming to you and asking what else do you have?

Have to answer real questions from real customers. Because  people, more and more will ask real people for help before going to Google. You need to create an army of loyalists for stellar client relations so they come to you first for help.

How can you use the human web to grow your business? By having your clients and customers grow your business.

Shankman cited this “brilliant” idea: Large and small companies are creating “So you found me on Twitter?” pages.  Those companies are asking visitors to provide the names of folks who recommended the firm on Twitter. That gives you the chance to send a thank you to whomever gave the referral.

Build followers by providing valuable info that you know will be retweeted.

Audience question: Should you have one message across all platforms? No, they are different audiences and be human in treating them that way. I’d rather have the most famous Tweets vs. most followers. If you respond to people, you’ll get more loyal communicators.

100,000 followers doesn’t mean that much action. Compare that to the percentage of people who take an action when you ask them for help.

Audience questions:

Q: But what if people are creeped out by companies following them? If you’re posting information to the public, you’ll be surprised when a company answers; not creeped out. You want companies to pay attention to you.

Q: How often should a small business tweet or Facebook? All the time.

(Don’t remember if this was a question or a comment) Some of most interesting stuff we’ve seen comes on a corporate level. The most informative tweets come from people who have screwed up royally and are willing to teach people what you’ve learned from it. Saying sorry fast is also huge.

Tony from Zappos. He shares  real personals thing. Shy is interesting. He has admitted that he doesn’t understand humor so well. Share your failures. They are people like us. We’re all at different parts of the race.

Final inspiriting quote from Peter:  Only way to silence the voice of self doubt is to cross the starting line. It’s a lot of fun out there!

Jumping on Twitter this morning I was bombarded by numerous updates about the continued love fest for Twitter (for which I’m certainly a part of) including – Adam Lavrusik of Mashable’s, “5 Reasons Why Twitter’s Growth Cannot Be Stopped”  and Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch’s, “Twitter Reaches 44.5 Million People Worldwide in June.”

All this love for Twitter and social media in general reminded me to make a point that I had been meaning to blog about for some time -

“Social Media (including Twitter) and the relationships we develop, massage and foster online are only as good as those we can convert offline.”

What I’m ultimately getting at is that we can get all hung up on the love around Twitter and social media – including these very impressive stats – but unless (as business professionals) we can take these relationships offline (where business really happens) this is all worthless.

I know this is a pretty broad blanket statement, but in general I think we need to realize that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogging, etc. are additional communications vehicles to help us more effectively do whatever it is that we do in our careers.

I’m stoked that Twitter had more than 44.5 million unique visitors in June. It’s shocking and reassuring to see all of the stats around this space we all love (here is a great presentation on that). But none of this really matters if businesses don’t understand how to leverage their social media strategy and initiatives to help accomplish their business goals (shocking…I know). Yet the overwhelming majority of businesses I’ve talked with on this subject don’t have a formal strategy in place.

I’ll get off my soapbox as I’d love to hear more from you about your feelings about where social media is heading for business. Of course, I’ll continue to advocate:).

I’m usually pretty good at including links in my blog posts (as I advise any of my clients to do) but surprisingly, I can’t find much about a topic that has been very near and dear to me recently – advising businesses on how to effectively leverage their media coverage and other news to their targeted audiences.

Myself included, I believe that PR professionals should take a hard look at how we are conducting business. Too often the end result of our efforts are in the form of a “clip report” listing out all of the media hits we’ve received for the month or targeted campaign. Although media coverage is an essential part of what we do, it is only the beginning to an end.

As a result I’ve come up with “5 Steps to Effectively Leverage Your Media Coverage”:

1 – Gain Organizational Buy-In - It is so important that the most influential departments of an organization (not just marketing and sales) understand the value of passing along successful media coverage to their targeted audiences. These departments don’t need to create new ways to communicate with their important audiences, they just need to understand the value in “merchandising” these stories to such audiences. By doing so your entire organization is hedging your PR spend bet by ensuring these audiences have seen the coverage…directly from you.

2 – Customize Your Distribution – Once you have buy-in from the most influential departments (i.e., sales, marketing, customer service, HR, IT, IR, etc.) you need to make sure the materials you are arming them with are customized for their specific needs. For example, HR might prefer to send something out to the employees via an email while sales might prefer some speaking points about the coverage since they typically meet face-to-face or over the phone. In order to support the entire organization, you must customize your correspondence accordingly.

3 – Designate a Department Contact - It is one thing to arm a department with the right tools to effectively communicate with their respective targeted audiences, it is another thing to assume they know what to do with these tools and/or will use them at all. As a result, you must have a point of contact within each department who takes ownership of this communications strategy. Someone who can train, advise and measure how effective such outreach was within each department.

4 – Measure Your Impact - Building on point #3…you must develop the appropriate mix of measurements that are consistent with you management team’s expectations. Typically this is a blend of quantitative and qualitative measurements. Quantitative might be tracking how many people each member of your department reached out to with these tools – via email, phone, in-person, etc. Qualitative might be some anecdotal feedback you received from your targeted audience about the coverage.

5 – Report to Key Management – Once you’ve discovered the right mix of measurements for this program, you have to ensure that the executive teams are able to see how such a program is being implemented across your entire organization. In addition, they have to see how effective such outreach is for the overall goals of the organization. Seeing that you’re creating a minimal amount of work and leveraging existing means of communications…they’ll likely see the value of such a program.

I’m sure I’ve left out some of the important steps or details but I believe we as communications professionals need to remember that the validation we create with media coverage is only as good as the number of targeted audiences that see it. What am I missing? As always, thanks for reading and/or joining the conversation!