Are your social media programs focused on short-term campaigns or are they supporting your long-term business objectives and operations? Your company communicates at every level with its ecosystem of industry players, customers, partners, and enthusiasts, and your social media programs should be enhancing and [...]]]> See Part 1: Daily business communication using social media: people and objectives.

Are your social media programs focused on short-term campaigns or are they supporting your long-term business objectives and operations? Your company communicates at every level with its ecosystem of industry players, customers, partners, and enthusiasts, and your social media programs should be enhancing and extending these communications.

In Part 1 of this series, using the Forrester POST framework, I listed the People involved in your ecosystem and Objectives of the social media programs that are interacting with them:

• Listen and Talk with the general industry community.
• Support your partner and customer ecosystem.
• Support and Energize enthusiasts.

Now let’s move on to the next two steps in the process, Strategies and Technologies. Each one of these objectives will translate into a different social media program.

Central Corporate Communication Program

Strategies

You want to establish a central corporate communication program to widen the “voice of the corporation” beyond press releases. Your goals are to increase awareness, improve brand equity, establish thought leadership. An inevitable side effect of using social media is going to be opening another feedback channel. This central channel will act as both your “corporate newspaper” and your “social media lobby.”

This program publishes corporate news, acting as a digital hub that links out to various programs and properties. It’s not the personal blog of a company spokesperson, although it should have a host who responds to comments. It should not be the personal blog of a thought leader, although it can include items that help establish thought leadership, like white papers, conference keynote reports, or essays from your CTO. In fact, it’s not a blog at all by some measures, although you’re going to use blog software to publish part of it.

What’s goes in the channel? Because of the nature of social media channels, you can increase the frequency of your communication beyond your normal press release schedule. The criterion here is not “is this piece going to be written up in the trade press?” Instead, you are developing a rhythm of news that reflects the daily business operations of your enterprise. Essentially, you’re running the corporate newspaper, and in fact, if you have a corporate newsletter, you can coordinate the two programs. Think of this as the newsletter exploded with each item individually packaged and published in a coordinated set of social media channels.

This channel can be an outlet for all the program news that comes to the PR group but either doesn’t rise to the priority level of a press release or otherwise can’t find a spot on the PR calendar. Items could include:  product releases, new service offerings, contests, events, keynotes — either upcoming or recorded videos, promotions and campaign offers, new or changed programs, new services and tools on the web site, new translations of your site, new micro-sites, key hires or key new openings.

Since this is a more official corporate channel, news items should go through an approval process similar to that used by press releases. An approval process can help clear up ambiguous language and avoid statements about the future of the business or the market that your lawyers may not want people to assume are the official predictions of the company.

Your own press releases can go into this channel. If you decide to include them, you can use the blog post as a digital hub just for that release, a sort of digital press kit of Social Media Release, if you will. You can include screenshots, widgets, other press clips, white papers, and links to related resources. One example where we used this kind of technique was a blog post that pulled  together links to online calculator, a press release about the calculator, and a very long post on a another blog explaining the methodology behind the calculator. None of the other components easily linked to all the other components, since they were coming from different people at different times, but the blog post easily gathered together links to all the relevant resources.

The Official Google Blog is a nice example of this kind of central corporate communications channel, although in their case, they don’t include press releases. It’s also a nice example of tone, with short pieces laying out the news, sometimes with a personal touch, and always signed by someone from the company — usually not an executive.

KPI. Direct: surveyed attitude, increased & better coverage with press, analysts, blogs. Indirect: traffic/subscribers, retweets, inbound links, and other engagement metrics.

(Engagement and traffic are both the easiest kinds of social media metrics to collect. While they shouldn’t be ends in themselves, they are at least a measure that you’re being valuable to someone, if not a direct measure of revenue or of people’s attitude toward your company.)

Risks/barriers

Resources. You’ll need to resource this program to step up the cadence as the Managing Editor and respond to comments as a “Social Media Host.” One scenario for starting out is for one person to manage the channel and split their time managing a central corporate listening program.

Schedule. The cadence should be kept reasonably high: 2-3 pieces a week seems about right. If you have fewer than one item per week, it will still work as an announcement channel, but you won’t develop a natural returning readership. More than daily news may overwhelm and should likely go to the Ecosystem Communication Program I’ll detail next.

Content. This channel must be interesting and avoid corporate bloviation. Don’t try to force everything into a release-like template, but do establish editorial guidelines. The language can be more informal than a press release. Use as many graphics, images, and videos as you can. Again, I think the Official Google Blog keeps to a friendly yet not indulgent tone.

Response Policy & Process. Since this is a social media channel, you’ll have to actually have a human being hanging around it. The editor (or another Social Media Host) should check daily for comments and questions on the blog, via Twitter, and on Facebook and then answer them. Since this particular blog is mostly about outbound news, you may not get many comments. However, these channels will now be acting as your social media main point of presence — your “social media lobby,” so to speak — you can get all sorts of oddball questions coming in. Because the host does need to respond as quickly as possible and without a great deal of oversight, you don’t necessarily want to give this to the most junior member of your marketing team or an intern.

Your company policy should specify that these responses do not need to come from a company spokesperson, because (1) they’re mostly going to be very tactical and (2) any sort of approval process will overwhelm this lightweight conversational mode. There will be the occasional comment that is either incendiary or hard to answer, you will also need to specify a response and escalation process so that your host can get respond effectively. (That’s a topic for another post.)

Technologies

A blog will act as your digital hub. A blog platform, as opposed to a Facebook page, is the most flexible and controllable tool for this. The blog can be run in-house or on an external platform.

You want to ensure that the information can be received by your readers in the format and location they choose to receive it:

• RSS should come free with the blog, although there are vendors that can provide more control & analytics.
• Email subscriptions. Integrated into your lead-generation and email management platform is best, but you can always get a free email subscription service from Google Feedburner or a few other vendors. Check your corporate email management policy — there may be issues using a separate email system.
• Twitter. The Blog should have a Twitter presence. Since this is the Central Corporate News channel, the account name could be simply @Company, or it could be something like @CompanyNews. This account can be fed manually or via an automated tool like Twitterfeed.
• Facebook. The Blog should have a Facebook page. Again, this can just be the primary Company Page or a news-specific one. Updates look nicer if they’re manually shared, since you can pick up some nice graphics, but it’s easy to use the blog RSS feed to publish automatically to the Page.
• There may be other geographic or industry-specific sites you’ll need cover. If LinkedIn ever makes it easy to automatically publish news to a group, I’d use that as well.

That’s the overview of this Central Corporate Communications Program. As with all social media programs, the devil’s in the details of execution, and there are no end of tips online about what to blog about, how to get links, how to increase engagement, how to measure traffic and engagment, and all sorts of other tactical best practices. What I’ve tried to show is how social media can support the corporate communications programs you already have with your external stakeholders.

Stay tuned for Part 3: The Ecosystem Communication Program.

Catch up with Part 1: Daily business communication using social media: people and objectives.

Social media conversations often fork into one of two directions. Some conversations get caught up in the revolutionary movement and we [...]]]> Many people want to hear from your business, but are you talking to them? Do your social media programs include your existing ecosystem of partners, analysts, investors, customers, and even your own field sales teams?

Social media conversations often fork into one of two directions. Some conversations get caught up in the revolutionary movement and we talk about how we’re driving engagement and equity for the brand, but without a clear connection to ROI. Other discussions gets stuck in a direct marketing mentality and we talk only about short-term campaigns, SEO, and conversion rates.

But your company is more than your brand, and your company does more than find new leads. Your company is a business. Are your social media programs supporting your daily business communication and operations?

Much of the overt communication of a corporation splits into two levels: one is a high-level voice of the corporation, with communication typically coming via press releases, interviews with spokespeople, and executive presentations. But there is an entire spectrum of lower-level daily operational output from a variety of teams and programs across the corporation: product teams, distribution channel and supply chain partner programs, education, professional services, promotional campaigns and events, technical support, customer programs, and on and on. They are producing items of interest that don’t belong in a press release, things like secondary product launches, new or changed programs or policies, events, case studies, webinars, white papers, calculators, contests, documentation, or even changed website sections or new capabilities. Often, though, it’s hard for people to keep up or even find what they need.

This kinds of daily operational communication can and does result in customer acquisition and increased brand equity, but that’s not its primary goal. Social media can be instrumental in conveying those program messages and also in enhancing the two-way communication between the program managers and their stakeholders.

Let’s loosely use the Forrester POST method on one scenario about this kind of a corporate ecosystem and see where that leads us. Here a few generalized assumptions about the current situation for many businesses:

• You have a set of people who want to hear from you. These are your customers, partners, and even your employees.  How do the people who would be interested in your company find out about the output of the corporation at a level of detail below press release-sized chunks? You send out email, but does it get opened? Would people prefer to get their information in other ways? People now spend more time on social media sites than they do with their email.

• Attitudes surrounding corporate communications have changed. People want to hear directly from the company, not from the press and not from the partner and distribution channel. Although email can be forwarded, it’s hard to share on social networking sites. People who hear about policy changes via word of mouth often desire an official confirmation. (A customer enthusiast recently told me: “In my country, your channel partners get their information from me.”)

People

Here are three groups that actually want to hear from you, because they need to be talking with your company to do their jobs.

• General industry audience. A wide variety of people from across the business spectrum want an overview of the company’s business activities, and they want a one-stop shop. They tend to be Spectators, at least in this context. This is a separate group from the prospective customers that come to the front page of your website.

• Partner and customer ecosystem. These are hands-on sales, marketing, and technical types who want the tools and resources to work with your company. They get email from you and come to your web site often. To do their job, they need to be Collectors of news and tools. This audience also includes your own employees in the field, who also need to keep up on the latest tools you’ve made available.

• Enthusiast community. Your product is useful to them and their careers.  Usually part of the ecosystem group, this crowd wants tool and resources, but they also need hands-on information about how to design, use, and troubleshoot your product, and they often are the ‘gurus’ that others turn to for help, online and off. They use blogs, Twitter, and other online communities to connect with their peers. They are Creators, Critics, Collectors, and Joiners.

Objectives

So using the somewhat formal language of the POST model, what do you want to do with these folks?

• Listen and participate in the ongoing industry conversation. Using these operational social media channels will push you towards listening. This will increase your agility and reduce risks, because you will have better early warning systems and hopefully will be using the feedback to course correct.

• Talk with the business community. Because you are going beyond press release-sized chunks of conversation, and because you are going directly to the community without the filter of press and analysts, this general audience will better understand what the company is actually accomplishing and where it’s trying to go. You will increase their awareness & improve their attitude towards your business, establish thought leadership, and hear what they think about your strategy and execution.

• Support your partner and customer ecosystem. Much of this mutual benefit is from simply communicating better, more frequently, and in the channel that each person prefers. This will increase your ecosystem’s ability to execute and will allow them to better leverage the assets you are already producing. If you’re listening, you’ll also find out which resources are actually useful and what you should be doing more and less of.

• Support and Energize enthusiasts. You goal is to make these enthusiasts successful, knowledgeable, and more influential by giving them the tools and training they need. By empowering them to be better advocates, and giving them the tools to pass along resources to others, they will help you increase the number of successful customers you have, and in fact will help increase the effectiveness of your marketing activities across the funnel.

See Part 2 where we finish the POST process with Strategies and Technologies and present the first of three corporate social media communications programs:  The Central Corporate Communications Channel. Part 2: Daily business communication using social media: the central corporate channel

Please let me know what you think! Are we moving beyond Social Media 101? Is this model resonating with you? Does it make sense for your type of business?