Corporate Social Media: After the Buzz
I was a guest on This Week in Social Media hosted by PJA Advertising + Marketing. The show was rebroadcasted last week. I had a chance to listen again and thought there were some interesting nuggets. Mike O’Toole and I talked about the practical aspects of running social for a public company. I really like the way we came up with a top five list of “rules” for helping an organization be more social.
1. Find people who are willing to speak in the first person and aren’t afraid to have a personal point of view. You need people who are passionate about a given topic and have the domain expertise to add value to the conversation.
2. Be ruthless. Help your team find time for social marketing activities. What will they stop doing to make time to join the emerging conversations? Find the bottom 10% of activities and stop doing them – life is a zero sum game and something has to give.
3. Think small and simple. Social media can be overwhelming so people need to get started in simple ways and scale from there.
4. Use agile project management. Social media is still quite speculative and you will need to test things before making bigger investments. Agile provides an adaptive approach that helps accelerate learning.
5. Need to create an open, principle-based policy to provide guidance to the team. It is impossible to create rules for every possible scenario so you need to give people baseline behavioral guidance.
There is much more to the conversation if you have the time to listen.
Are there any other things we should add to the list?
One last ask: I could also use your support for my panel on Agile for Social Media at the SXSW conference. Vote early and vote often my friends. And as always, thanks for your support.
