Junkets and other related boondoggles have a long history – probably the first one was a rich Babylonian who invited some scribes out to brunch at his hanging gardens so they’d say good things about him. And we all know about junkets for doctors and journalists and politicians, and the rules many organizations have to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Everyone in social media is obviously watching the new FTC guidelines (I like these comments from Steve Hershberger of ComBlu), and most of us have heard stories about all the good stuff that can get sent to bloggers.

So let’s just take as a given that this kind of thing can go very wrong indeed in the wrong hands. This event was in very right hands, however. I’m somebody who often gives things to people in my job role, so I’m very interested in clear guidelines and disclosures, which will be a topic for another day.

The funny thing is that when we think of a junket, we think of a Mai Tai by the pool in Hawaii. Tech Field Day was not that kind of experience, but it was geek heaven, just the same.

Let’s turn over this introduction to organizer Stephen Foskett:

from Rod Haywood’s post: Gestalt IT Tech Field Days 2009.

Note what Stephen says – although it was sponsored by a set of vendors, this event was not controlled by the vendors. Sunshine Mugrabi helped organize the event and talks about how it rapidly came together. Attendee Rick Vanover describes the schedule and answers the vacation question:

Q: Is this industrial tourism?

A: To an extent, but it is not a vacation. Our day on Thursday started at 7:00 AM and went until 9:00 PM. Friday started at 7:30 AM and we didn’t get back from dinner until around 8:30 PM. Yes, we had fun – but we were busy giving the sponsors our full attention.

The event was a huge success for all the participants. 1,274+ tweets and dozens of well-disclaimed blog posts later, the vendors felt like they were able to communicate very intimately to a set of influencers. The attendees, all top-notch independent technologists, were stuffed full of information about new technologies, which was a plus for their jobs, and they were also able to convey what their perspectives to their readers, which was a plus for their blogs. A second Tech Field Day is now being planned.

An important part of the event was the quality of the presentations. You’ve got to bring smart technologists to talk technology with these guys. No marketing fluff, although you can talk benefits, as long as they’re real. Everybody loves a good benefit. Attendee Rich Brambley wrote about the experience in  Thoughts About Presenting to Engineers. Ed Saipetch, another attendee, also wrote The Five Rules of Tech Day Club:

The genesis of this list comes from the question I asked myself and other attendees constantly which was, “What can we do to get deeper than a standard technical presentation or trade show booth demo.” …

2. Cover the basics and then get into the weeds – We love the weeds. Some of us do anyway. It shows us you know what you’re talking about. It separates you from your competition. Tell us your strengths and weaknesses. We are more effective when we are armed with more information.

What were the success factors of this kind of event – new to our corner of the blogosphere?

• Strong commitment from the organizers of no quid pro quo. What the bloggers wrote was up to them. Even when there is a vendor as a sponsor, like HP, this has to be the case. (Disclaimer: I’m pitching this kind of event to several groups inside VMware. I think it’d be a blast.)
  
• Independent technologists who have their reputation at stake. I respect all these guys, and their reputations are based on being good communicators about their honest technical opinions.
  
• Full disclosure. Disclose, disclose. When the topic comes up again in a few months, disclose some more.
• Deep technical mind melds. The most successful vendors (the ones that generated the most love) had some of the coolest products, yes, but they also sent in top-notch technologists to have a deep dive with the visitors. This is critical; spewing marketing bs at a bunch of technologists is deadly – even if they don’t like your product, technologists like talking to other smart technologists.
  
• A grueling schedule (14 hour days on and off the bus probably qualifies) that no sane person would mistake for a vacation.
• Invite the right people: don’t aim for super-connected influencers whose greatest claim to fame is how often they get retweeted. In this kind of event, you want people with authority and respect in the communities you want to reach. Their opinion counts where it matters.
  

Obviously, we’re just catching up to the MommyBloggers here. Have you participated in an event like this? What ethical obligations do we all have going forward with these kind of events? What are other ways that we can get the opportunity to communicate deeply with people who specialize in our domains?

[Updated with more on presentation tips from Ed, and a final bullet point on inviting the right people with authority.]

I call this diagram a social media map, although I’m not sure if there’s a more standard term. This diagram attempts to put your various social media channels and platforms into a relationship with each other and with your other online properties. This particular diagram is modeled on the way our company is structured, but I’ve tried to generalize it to make it useful to anyone at a large enterprise technology company. This is Version 0.1. Your comments and feedback are welcome, and I’ll try to incorporate them into the next version.

In case it’s not clear, grey blobs are web properties. Grey circles are blogs. Blue squares are Twitter accounts. Punch-card-looking blue rectangles are Facebook pages. Arrows are links. Most components should have arrows between them, because a link goes one way or the other at some point; I’ve just shown some of the more meaningful links.

Marketing Funnel. I’ve tried to spread out the components on a continuum across the marketing funnel — characterizing activities from the earliest awareness activities on the left to the care and feeding of happy customers on the right. This is for convenience and shouldn’t be taken as restrictive or prescriptive — most social media channels are used all in all phases of the marketing funnel.

The primary web components

Corporate Website. We’re talking about resources to be consumed and talked about — social media objects, if you will. For us, these are things like new white papers, webinars, product release notes, event schedules, etc. Most of those resources reside on the corporate web site. On our product pages, we point out to relevant blogs and community forums.

Campaign Landing Pages and Microsites. We try not to blindly spam our community with links to our campaigns, but when our campaign offers are cool and of interest to a community (white papers, research reports, interactive calculators, sales promotions), we’ll link to them from appropriate blogs and Twitter accounts.

Webinars, Events. Maybe include technical white papers and other resources here as well. On our site, these are hosted in a separate application than our regular CMS; thus the circular blob.

Program Blogs. We have a number of blogs from various product and program teams on our blog site (hosted on Typepad). Most of them act more as announcement platforms than dialog platforms, but some get a good back-and-forth going, and all are useful. These often point back to resources on our site. Although blogs live under a subdomain of our main URL, conceptually and tonally they are separate from the corporate site, so I’ve depicted them floating above the main site.

Community. Our community site is large and healthy. We get a lot of questions and a lot of traffic, from Google and elsewhere. There’s a lot of troubleshooting information there, and it gets linked to quite a bit. Our community platform (Jive) hosts blogs as well, so I’ve included a few of those here. Until recently, our community site was one of the 5 key tabs on the top of our page, and it’s still has corporate trade dress and is linked to from all over the main site, so I’ve depicted it as firmly embedded in the corporate site.

Knowledge Base. Our more structured site with known issues, tips, and suggestions. KB articles are authored by us, not directly by the community. but suggestions do get incorporated regularly into the content. Recently, the KB team has begun experimenting with producing some videos.

The primary social components

Central corporate channels: blog, Twitter account, Facebook page. Designated by the dotted line circle as sort of a single entity, these main corporate channels can act as ‘the voice of the company.’ Since the blog can hold more text and multimedia assets, it can act as your main content channel, with the Twitter and Facebook platforms pointing to it. Although similar content can go up on each of these channels, we find that quite different conversations take place on each platform. These channels link to all the other social media platforms as well as the corporate web site, but I’ve omitted those arrows for clarity.

@Events. Our particular webinar/event/white paper CMS application doesn’t emit RSS.  (It’s coming.) The content doesn’t seem deep enough for its own blog, since it’s mostly listings. However, we do have a Twitter account for events. This is a human-powered account that talks about upcoming events, both online and offline. This Twitter account both serves almost as a town crier: “Starting the 9am webinar on disaster recovery http://bit.ly/abcd” as well as a way of getting butts in seats when an offline event isn’t full. We were a bit surprised that a global Twitter account can help fill up a user group in Indiana, but it seems to work.

Facebook Product Pages. We have a few Facebook Pages dedicated to various Products. Since we have a somewhat wide product portfolio, but our products are often used together, we’re still figuring out how many different Facebook pages we should have. Right now, our main criteria is audience. Since our main audience is IT professionals,  our product for consumer and enthusiasts on the Mac gets a separate page, but yet another product for the data center, no matter how awesome, probably doesn’t need a separate page.

@Blogs RSS. A Twitter feed from every blog seemed excessive. We already aggregate our blogs on a single page, so we took the RSS feed of that aggregation, ran it through Twitterfeed, and made a Twitter account. It’s clearly an automated posting, so we haven’t had any confusion that it’s a human being. By serving up blog titles to people interested in them, it gets retweeted a lot. Although I’ve recently started using an RSS reader for the first time in years, Twitter is really the place most people seem to get their news these days.

@Topics. We have one team (our Performance team) that has taken all the content from their various corporate and personal blogs, plus all the new threads from their community forum, and then fed all that RSS to a Twitter account. Then an actual human acts as host/concierge to the account. It’s a useful way of aggregating very specific topics into a single feed, and the goal is also to drive people to answer new questions when they get asked in the forum. A joint robot/person account can be confusing, however, so the person part of the equation needs to be active or people will think this account is just another RSS feed.

Support Blogs & Twitter. Our support team has a dedicated resource covering social media. They have two blogs — one dedicated blog listing new content on the KB and one human-powered blog with featuring new resources, curations of entries around particular topics, and other important announcements. They also operate two Twitter feeds, one just about new KB news (human-powered), and one as the principle customer service response point on Twitter.

@Community Blogs RSS. We also pull together a few dozen of the best blogs in our area written by customers, partners, analysts, and journalists. Again, we aggregate, take the resulting RSS feed, and push those titles into the Twittersphere. They get retweeted a lot.

The Twittersphere. These days in our area, most of the directed conversation (troubleshooting, specfic questions) takes place in our community, and most of the undirected conversation takes place on Twitter. Most of the interaction takes place among personal Twitter accounts. We have a lot of employees on Twitter, and we just assembled the ones who tweet mainly about technology and work topics in a Twitter List. This standing chat room is the best thing going on right now among this group of technology peers. A lot of news and interesting resources — from the corporate mother ship, the media, or lots of blogs — gets passed around here. Most of the influential bloggers in our space at least check in. In 2009, Twitter is the engine that moves the rest of the social media train. So mentally draw in arrows from here to everywhere else in the diagram.

So what have we learned?

The modern enterprise web and social media presence is a complicated thing. This kind of diagram starts to break it down in big chunks, but each one of those chunks has its own goals, strategy, tactics, and owners. In fact, all of the areas should be governed by an overall corporate social media strategy before getting down to “what Twitter account goes where” sorts of details. The landscape of use patterns and social media site capabilities is changing too fast without some higher-level goals.

What are we missing? Hmm… Our YouTube channels. Our Planet blog aggregation pages. Our Partner-facing social media channels. The entire community of bloggers. News and community sites from 3rd parties.  I’ll try to incorporate them in the next version.

This kind of diagram, while it incorporates some primitive notion of “links go from here to there,” really doesn’t talk about the flow of information or the canonical locations of news and resources. That’s an entirely other conversation.

Is this kind of diagram useful to you? Any additions or suggestions? What’s your social media map look like?

This whole exercise in diagram construction was inspired in part by Matt Zellmer’s post on Integrating Community into Corporate Websites. Thanks, Matt!

1. Technical Infrastructure Management. Manage the software and accounts that your social media program run on. In our case, it’s administration of the community platform (from Jive), the blogging platform (from Typepad), and then all the external accounts (Twitter, Faceboook, YouTube, SlideShare, etc.). If you’re hosting your own platform (as we do with our community site), you need resources in IT Ops, software development, web development, SEO consulting, program management. For our blogging platform, which is outsourced to Typepad, we still need administration and web design. External sites need icons, background design, administration – even down to where you are keeping the passwords, and tooling (like CoTweet or Ping.fm).

2. Program Channel and Community Management. Somebody’s gotta blog. Although we have some centralized channels, different programs within our company work with different subject matter and audiences. Often these are outside our core social media and community team, in the product or program team themselves. However, for us, our main technical customer/partner community is taken care of by the communities team. I run a blog and a weekly podcast, and each of those need content, and that requires resourcing for editorial, production,  publishing, and promotion. These are of course social media channels, so each of those needs somebody to be present and interact on the channel.

3. Influencer Relations and Advocacy Program. Although you can operate out of your home base, somebody has to venture out and work with the greater community. In some companies, this might be a PR function, but for our company, the main community is filled with techies, and you need a techie to hang out with them. So I run our main “blogger” relations program, trying to keep up with bigger virtualization conversation and make sure I know most of the people there. It would be hard to do with without my postcast & Twitter channels mentioned in Program #2.  Within this category, I also run an advocacy program, where we give awards to our best evangelists, the people who have given back the most to the overall community.

4. Social Business Consulting. I firmly believe that in the future, there will be no social media programs, just social media baked into all other programs. But for now, somebody needs to be working with all parts of the organization and seeing how they can be using social tools and processes. I think I’ve met with just about every part of our organization except finance. The need for social media interactions in the various groups I’ve talked with range from the very simple -  just needing to get their news out to our existing community via existing channels – to being fully engaged managing their own social media presence.

5. Social Media Training. Somebody is training people. This needs to include both an overall stance toward social media (yes, you can talk to somebody outside the company on this website without being a spokesperson) as well as tactical training (strategies for using Twitter).

6. Social Media Policy. If you do it right, this doesn’t have to be revisited that often, but somebody has to do it, and hopefully it’s a collaboration between many somebodies. Our social media guidelines were inspired from public policies published by companies like IBM, Sun, and Intel.  You need to set overall policies for social media participation at the corporate, the program, and the individual level. You can include policies for individual channels (like Twitter), but be sure you are talking core policies and not specific tools and tips, because those evolve very quickly.

7. Monitoring & Response. Somebody’s got to watch out in general, and somebody has to figure out how to respond to situations. In an ideal world, you’d have many eyes watching (which can include your external community and programmatic listening platforms), a single place to report issues, a well-defined routing and escalation procedure, and a set of identified responders, depending on the topic and the venue. We’re not in an ideal world yet, but we have pretty good antennae and reflexes.

7. Analysis & Metrics. We’ll have an argument about both metrics and ROI some other time. In any case, somebody needs to be measuring some baseline metrics just as a health check – things like fans, followers, traffic. If your business goals include it, campaign traffic, conversions, and revenue get measured. Although I’m all about the relationship benefits of our social media programs, we are starting to track some campaign-oriented results – mostly a matter of always attaching our Omniture tracking codes inside the links we share online. In our organization, the existing web analytics team tracks metrics.

8. Central Corporate Channel and Community Management. I’m listing this as separate from #2, although the activities are similar, because for us it’s a different function and worried about by a different set of people. For us, the channels include our corporate blog(s), and some accompanying Facebook and Twitter accounts. A lot of time press releases get little respect in my technical community, but a modern corporation has all sorts of news and announcements streaming out in all directions beyond just their press releases – programs launched, products patched, and events scheduled. Social media channels, done right, enable people to receive just the announcements they want, in just the venues they want to receive them in. And as always, somebody’s got to run that, and then be there for the questions and feedback.

Again, you can slice your overall social media efforts in different ways than we do, and eventually this stuff gets smeared across the enterprise. A fully functional social media program should thinking about all these areas, and just as we quickly moved beyond the solo “webmaster” in 1999 to a full web team of marketing and production specialists, with this kind of breadth we’re quickly moving beyond the solo “social media expert” in 2009.