A recent article entitled “How to Extend Your Customer Experience Through Social Media” offered some additional validation for concepts we’ve discussed here on The Right Click earlier – “Give It Time” “Dedicate Resources” “Define Some Goals” – but also has some interesting thoughts about social media policy development.

For companies large and small, exploring the brave new world of interactive social media can be daunting.  How should you react if someone says something unkind about your company?  How can you interject yourself into a conversation between two people about your company?  For these an other new frontiers it’s important to think through what you wish to convey about yourself, and then make sure everyone in your company understands and adheres to your vision.

Recently I saw a great example of how not to use social media.  On Yelp, a leading review site featuring “real reviews by real people”, a business owner reacted to negative comments with over-the-top angry and insulting responses.  He called the people who reviewed his business names, including using profanity, and generated a firestorm of response inside Yelp for his boorish reactions to what most felt were polite, if negative, comments about people’s experience at his place of business.  The ensuing community response was swift and sure – many people being pointed to his comments who otherwise may not have even seen them, most of them announcing their intent to not only never patronize his business but also warn others about what type of people work there, etc.

In another interesting phenomena of internet communities, some members started doing research into just who owned the business, and tried to ascertain what the exact relationship the person representing the business had.  It turned out he was listed as the “General Manager”, and the Owner’s contact information was rapidly disseminated.

I’m sure you can imagine the notes began flooding into the Owner’s inbox, all decrying the behavior of his General Manager.  Within two hours the Owner was posting apologies to the Yelp community, with assurances that all employees would be “retrained” in not only the proper etiquette of participation in online communities, but in customer service response to negative experiences at their place of business.  The Owner made inroads into undoing the damage caused by his employee, but it would have been much better to have conducted training before any of this took place.

The linked article above provides some starting points to developing some social media policies for your business.  It’s not as difficult as you imagine, most are common sense:

• Define what your company stands for and make sure all employees understand it.
• Make sure anyone with responsibility for posting to your website and social media outlets understands the importance of being polite and respectful, even when it seems most difficult.
• Honesty is the best policy – really.  If you think a complaint has merit, admit it and tell everyone what you’re going to do to prevent another occurrence.
• Be firm but fair.  Some people are just not going to be happy.  You can’t help that, but you can speak your mind and stay consistent.  Most customers appreciate consistency.

Remember, social media is a two-way street.  The best blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter accounts all get people talking.  Monitor your outlets, look to see who’s talking about you.  Get involved in the discussions in a positive way, and don’t just send out marketing messages.  Let the audience know that you’re listening, and reacting, to their thoughts.

A new article today in USA Today discusses how social networking has made significant inroads into the business world.   What’s nice about this article is that they provide some specific, real-world results of the efforts, something often missing from discussions about effective use of social media tools in the business world.

For example, Intuit, maker of the popular Quickbooks software, launched a new small business site, incorporating Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  The result was that customers flocked to the site and shipments of their flagship product were up 57% year over year.

Papa John’s Pizza launched a Facebook-based marketing campaign and gained thousands of customers, and saw traffic on their website soar by over 250%.

Companies like Comcast and Lenovo are using Twitter to conduct elements of their customer support, and seeing a reduction in call center traffic.

It’s heartening to see some companies realize tangible benefits to their investments in social networking.  All too often you hear more about the ineffective use rather than successes.  Who cares how many Twitter followers you have if it doesn’t benefit your bottom line?  As more and more stories such as this one come out, we expect that more companies will start to evaluate social networking for their own purposes, and we are here to help.

There are the usual caveats, however, as you read stories about these companies’ successes:

• Social networking is not a replacement for other, more traditional marketing tools, but rather an additional tool to leverage.  In fact, the key to success is figuring out how to integrate between all your marketing tools to get the biggest return.
• It takes time to build an audience.  Most all of the successful practitioners have invested time and resources into making sure that their efforts will lead to measurable benefits.  You can’t use the “check box” mentality in this effort, namely just saying “Oh yeah, we have a Twitter account” but not really using it to any specific end.
• Some companies are not particularly suited for social networking.  Most obvious are any industry with tightly regulated information.  Allowing customers to freely post their thoughts could quickly devolve into an administrative or even legal nightmare in such industries.

The article closes with an important warning for those who choose to dismiss social networking in their business plans.  “Companies have no choice.  This is where their customers are going.”

This article in Smashing Magazine outlines some of the more common flaws with many of today’s corporate blogging efforts, and reinforces many of the concepts we stress to our clients when they ask us if they should be blogging, namely:

• Your blog isn’t a one way channel, it’s intent should be to initiate a dialog
• It takes time for a blog to generate readership and activity so you have to remain committed
• Get more than one person at your company engaged with your blog
• Allow comments and expect some criticism – be prepared for it!

Successful blogs, in fact, successful social media efforts in general, are all about engaging people with your business.  Don’t fall into the trap of using your social media tools as just more arrows in your traditional Marketing quiver, it’s a recipe for failure.

• How do I measure success?
• Which social media tools should I use?
• How much time and effort will this take?

Let’s face it, social media is an emerging force, and one which is constantly changing.  It can be difficult for companies to justify dedicating resources towards social media, especially when success is not clearly defined.  The use of social media can be a fundamental shift in corporate policy towards marketing, customer services and other areas, or it can be just another “checkbox” which gets token effort and returns token rewards.

Ask yourself some of the questions contained in the article, do the research they outline, and soon enough you’ll have clear vision of whether social media can add a quantifiable benefit to your business.

The folks over at Wired have started a wiki topic on the matter, and the initial posts are encouraging in the sense that they are reasonable and well-intentioned.  Some seem obvious at first, but may not to be to all.

One of my favorites and one which I wish I was more diligent about is “Delete Unwanted Posts From Your Wall”.  If we are truly judged by the company we keep, it’s important to realize that your coworkers and managers may not be pleased to see some of the more outlandish entries some Facebook users seem to post.

If you are like most people, your Facebook friends list contains real (non-cyber) friends, family, coworkers and potentially even others.  The chances that some of them may post material which could offend someone else are high, so keep an eye out for the random comment which could reflect badly on you, fairly or not.

I have a friend I’ve spent a limited amount of time with who occasionally posts comments about her love life which by most people’s sensibilities would be considered crude.  The two times (so far) I’ve seen them I’ve remarked to others “I can’t believe she just posted that!”, but I did not think to delete the entries entirely from my wall.  I need, we all need, to consider the fact that others will view my wall and potentially make a judgement about me based on her crudity.

The Wired wiki has really just begun, and they are solicting entries, so if you think you have something valuable to add, we encourage you to help build up this body of knowledge.

In any event, you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon. Through a nifty little Flickr-Twitter integration you can now link your Flickr and Twitter accounts and add a little eye candy to your 140 characters.

Through Flickr’s email upload, you can simultaneously upload an image to your Flickr account and Tweet it with a link. You can also tweet an image directly from your Flickr account.

Here’s the official post with instructions…

Monkee-Boy Social Media Commentary: While this integration presents a great opportunity to enhance the business value of your social presence (for us we can easily share screen-shots of new designs and approved customer success metrics with our tweets), it also presents an equal opportunity to look foolish and harm your reputation.  Remember, the next time you have one drink too many at a professional function, the pictures could be re-tweeted to your colleagues dozens of times before your headache subsides.

Hey, I’m just sayin’….

We’ve seen a lot of blogs, and frankly, most don’t offer the kind of value necessary to make a business decision worthy of the investment of time and resources. As a way of helping you make the right choice, we’ve put together a short set of five “rules” to govern your life in the blogosphere. Read through them, let us know what you think by commenting, and together let’s make sure that your efforts return maximum value.

1. Have Something Interesting To Say: Seems basic enough, yes? But you may be surprised at how little truly interesting, or unique, things are being published in blogs today. The “signal to noise” ratio of blogs is heavily weighted towards the “noise”, unfortunately. This is understandable given the fact that blogging by nature makes it easy for just about anyone to publish their thoughts quickly, and make them available to a world wide audience cost-effectively. The key to making your blog successful is to offer something of value or unique. Do you possess thought leadership in a space which you can share on a regular basis? Can you offer information which provides value to your readers, especially information which may be hard to obtain elsewhere? These are good questions to ask yourself before committing to publishing a blog.

2. Prepare to Engage: By nature, blogging and Web 2.0 implementation requires interaction. The intent of your blog should not be to just have you publishing your thoughts, but to engage responses from subscribers. Truly successful blogs not only generate responses to the original posts, but often spawn new discussion topics based on the back and forth found in the comments. The authors of blog posts need to understand their role in staying involved with their posts, to respond to comments, clarify positions, and deflect incorrect responses – albeit in a calm, professional manner which reflects well on the business.

3. Be Committed To It: An often overlooked aspect of jumping into the world of online publication is the need to have regular content flowing. You can start out of the gate with some intersting, valuable things which excite readers and compel them to subscribe and respond, but they won’t stay with you if you don’t have new content to offer on a regular basis. A good rule of thumb is to have several cycles worth of content ready before you publish for the first time, and create an editorial calendar which identifies topics and authors for a period of time in advance which makes sense. As an example, let’s say you plan on publishing a blog entry every two weeks. We’d recommend that you have four entries close to finalized before you publish your first, and have a calendar showing 22 cycles (the remaining two week cycles for one year) of topics, with authors identified. There’s no requirement that you actually have to adhere strictly to that calendar of topics – you can adjust as you watch market forces change – but it helps you plan your time and provides confidence that you don’t have to sweat thinking of new things every two weeks.

4. Define What Success Means: This is the least understood aspect of blogging, and Web 2.0 in general, for businesses. It easy enough for a political writer to gauge success for their blog – people read and comment, they get quoted by pundits, and eventually become pundits themselves (see Drudge, Matt). For a person blogging about food, they can measure success by the number of subscribers and the contributions of content (photos, recipes, etc.) by contributors. So how exactly should a business define success for their blogging efforts?

Let’s start by saying right off that one way to ensure that you will NOT be successful is by applying traditional, sales-based metrics to define success. The intent of your blogging may well be to drive traffic to your site, and eventually sales, but you’ll end up doing headstands to try and directly tie blogging to such direct sales.

Each business will need to define success in their own way, but in general, the end game of blogging is to be seen as an expert, a ‘go to’ resource for information and advice in a certain field. As we discussed earlier, being a thought leader in a particular space can provide immense value to a business, if only due to people thinking the company is a source of reliable information about that space. Hopefully, as those propsective customers get closer to the point of purchase, they’ve already legitimized your business as a reliable source of the product or service, giving you a ‘leg up’ on your competition.

In searching for hard metrics, the only empirical data of value would be fairly obvious – number of comments, rate of comments, number of subscribers, etc.

5. Be Patient: It takes time to build an audience, whether you’re talking about blogging, television shows, writing a book – really anything. Remember the television show “Seinfeld”? Its hard to remember that such a powerhouse show, now revered as one of the greatest shows of all time, was almost cancelled its first season, as the audience figured out the unique brand of humor they offered (“Its a show about nothing.”) It’s rare than any business will instantly see a flood of comments and subscribers, the key is to keep publishing, try to find other online outlets to link to your blog, and gain readership and participation slowing but steadily. Again, each business will need to decide for itself what the minimum commitment of time and resources will be for their blog, but if you’ll take the steps we outlined in point number 3, we think you’ll find the effort worth it, and give yourself enough time to let your blog have every chance of success.

Like many new concepts, social media is widely misunderstood and used in ways which bring little to no value to its users.  Twitter is the latest social networking darling, with exponential growth in users quarter over quarter, culminating with “Servers are Overloaded” messages occasionally popping up, a tribute to the fact that the owners of Twitter did not predict its rapid ascent.

For every valuable “tweet” I see, there are probably 10 of dubious value, including ones providing information about the poster’s dinner, or what kind of day they had or similar nonsense.  People seem to be confusing Twitter with Facebook, which actually encourages such trivial status updates in order to generate online conversations between friends, and in fact Facebook is quite successful with this.  There is little value, however, for businesses to know what kind of day you had.

But this is the internet after all, and that means there is a wealth of valuable knowledge out there on how best to engage social media for your business – the trick is to separate the wheat from the chaff.  A successful social media strategy will involve some forward-thinking approaches for businesses, including non-traditional ways of measuring success.  One of the most common pitfalls for businesses is to try and force traditional success metrics onto social media efforts, ensuring dissatisfaction.

We’ve spent some time and effort to learn about the emerging social media market, filtered with an eye towards how we could leverage it successfully for our clients.  We’ve attended conferences such as South By Southwest Interactive to hear thought leaders talk about the successes and failures, we’ve participated in panel discussions with other social marketers and business leaders, and we’ve compiled a list of trusted resources to help us understand the best paths to success.

Here are some links to information sources we feel will help you understand social media marketing, in plain English and without the heavy use of newly-emerged buzzwords.

Mashable: Social Media and SEO:  5 Essential Steps To Success – a concise article providing some common sense steps to begin a successful social media journey.

Social Media 404: Social Media Best Practices – a PDF presentation about their propriety metholodology called OASIS, but chock full of best practice information for anyone considering a social media plan.

Social Media Explorer: How To Embrace The Process Of Social Media – a good article on a very informative web site, giving you basic concepts to embrace once you decide to expend effort in social media marketing.

There are countless other social media marketing information sites on the internet, and we’ll keep looking and reading to decide which provide the best information – concise, actionable, up to the minute – and keep honing our skills.  Social media marketing is not suited for every business, and requires investment in time, capital and perhaps most importantly, thinking differently.

We know that you rely upon us to help you maximize the effectiveness of your online presence – through the design and development of an attractive and user-friendly web site, SEO and SEM efforts, online marketing campaigns and more.  Employing an effective social media marketing effort may be the right answer for your business, too, but it helps to have a partner who understands the landscape upon which you’ll be traversing, and stays with you every step of the way.