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!