I conducted a Social Media Training in Chicago yesterday as part of my Hands On Training tour with Social Media Today.

I had senior executives and C suiters from the corporate sector, nonprofits, B2Bs and agency principals attending.  Here’s a picture of me with some of the attendees at the end of the session, who all seemed very happy.  I’m very excited about his new workshop. I think its definitely got legs.

After 7 years leading Social Media Boot Camps all over the world, I wanted to add this new workshop to my roster to focus more on applied social media communications skills. Once you know what social media is and why it’s important, you need to learn how to actually use it effectively.

Most people know by now that search engine optimization is important, but how do you actually learn how to do it? How do you learn keyword discovery, how to use embed codes, how to add Facebook Like buttons, Tweet buttons, Linkedin Badges, how to launch Facebook pages, use Tweet and Follow buttons and use Linkedin Answers, Signal and Groups? How do you launch a blog? Bloggers know this stuff already. But most people don’t blog.

There’s a whole wide world outside the tech bubble that can really benefit from learning these skills. The problem is, there’s a very real dearth of practical soial media training opportunities.  A hotel conference center with anemic Wi-Fi, not enough power strips, banquet chairs and round tables is no way to conduct a computer training course.  But unfortunately,  these types of conferences are all most people know about, and their only option for learning how to use social media for business.

I’ve been on the conference circuit for years and I’m here to tell you that while you may hear motivational speakers, interesting success stories and provocative, high-level theory about why social media matters and where it’s headed, you’re unlikely to get any practical know-how. The war against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or PowerPoint. What’s required is hands on training.  Because at the end of the day, somebody has to actually do the work.

I put together a comprehensive, balanced cirriculum covering all aspects of social media communications, so attendees can get the skills you can put to use immediately.  No hotel conference centers.  I teach at computer trainng facilities with reliable broadband, proper seating, ergonomic desks and enough power strips to go around.  No PowerPoint. No canned demos.  All exercises are conducted live.  And if you need help securing an internet connection, there’s a certified Microsoft network engineer on-site to resolve your issue.

Attendees bring their computers, logon and get real world experience learning to use social media for business.  Or for those government or military personnel with locked down laptops, we provide desktop a computer they can use for the session.  I’ve been wanting to teach this class for a long time. And I’m really glad it was received so positively. My US tour wraps with a final session in San Francisco tomorrow and Friday.

But given the positive feedback, I expect to announce dates for additional sessions in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I publish my training calendar here.

Or, if you’re based in Europe, join me for my German-American Social Media Boot Camp in Berlin October 10-11, 2011.  In my upcoming social media training in Germany, I will be adapting the cirriculum to feature local case studies and examples.

In fact, as part of my research to prepare, I recorded a Social Media in Germany panel last wel with Thomas Praus (@stylewalker), Oliver Gassner (@oliverg) and Sebastian Vasta (@sebastianvasta) who are all social media specialists in Germany.  If you’d like to down that panel as a podcast, here’s a link.  Enjoy and hope to see you in Berlin!

Thanks to all who attended, and if you have a moment, please share your experience at the session as a comment to the blog.  Would you recommend the session to others?

(PHOTO BY POOJA) Pictured left to right are Sarah Theresa (@sarahtheresa), Reed Evans (@GreenActionGal), Lydia Baehr (@LBPR), Moyra Knight (@moyraknight), moi [seated], Peter Vukosavich of Studio V Design, Annette Howard, Erika Roberts (@JigGarden), Jim Papariella and Sherry Bale.

The first step is the toughest one. But it’s also the most important.

Provide everyone with clear-cut, easy-to-follow guidelines to help them distinguish between conversations that can happen in public, and conversations that need to be kept private.

Social media has become an integral part of our personal lives.  Unless organizations take the time to specify how (not if) employees can use social media at work, they risk forfeiting the chance to:

• Capitalize on social marketing opportunities
• Attract and retain top-notch personnel
• Thwart obsolescence

Here’s why:

On social networks, trends direct our attention.  We have more confidence in crowds than individuals. A Yelp restaurant listing with a 3-star average and 300 ratings is more meaningful than one with a 5-star average and just 12 ratings.

For the same reason, organizations realize the true value of social marketing when everyone gets involved.  The more people there are discussing a topic, the greater the likelihood others will discover it.

A corporate Twitter feed and Facebook page driven by a PR department are nice to have, but they’ll never be as useful as the conversations of a diverse, engaged community.  And the larger the community, the more confidence we have in what they say, and the more likely we are to give it our attention.

Whenever an employee uses social media to get their job done, they leave behind a digital record that can be found and shared indefinitely.  If you have no policy, that notion is more than a little scary.  But if you’ve thought it through, it becomes a productivity windfall, because marketing becomes the byproduct of using social media to get the job done.

Remember, your employees are using social media already in their personal lives.  If you’d like them to use it for business too, they need to know what’s expected. Leadership needs to set clear-cut boundaries, so employees know what is and isn’y acceptable.  Companies that fail to take this step, will most likely also fail to mobilize their personnel to make the best use of social media.

It’s critical that the social media policy leadership sets be fair and just.  Blocking access to Facebook from the corporate network while expecting employees to respond to email outside of business hours sets uneven standards.  In fact, blocking access to social networks is both unfair and futile, because workers should have the right communicate with their friends and family, as long is it doesn’t interfere with the quality of their work.

Social media blackouts are the result of digitally illiteracy. They are enacted by misguided leaders from an age when the restricting information flows was possible and effective.  But as Wikileaks, Twitter and Napster have proven, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Or as Esther Dyson said back in 2006, companies that profit from inefficiency will die, and for many types of communications, social media is simply more efficient.

Once the boundaries are in place, and everyone knows what can be public and what should be private, social media becomes a productivity gain, not drain.

Check out how Johns Hopkins and Avery Dennison are using internal social networks, or the workplace productivity gains of Chatter.

In this environment, the organizations that can draw a clear line between public and private have a huge advantage.  The road to getting there runs straight through policy, because you can’t draw that line between public and proprietary unless you do the homework to figure that out, and you can’t teach others to respect boundaries if they don’t know where they lie.

Social media without governance is reckless. And rules without training are toothless.  Take a look at my Social Media Policy Template to accelerate your policy development efforts or attend my upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011, where we spend a fair amount of time on this subject.

Welcome to the social media world of uncontrollable communications. You’re in it, whether you like it or not.

In my next post, I’ll start getting into what it takes to host an effective social media training.

Company and industry events are a great way spark online community interaction.

Professionals with common interests and goals regularly invest time and money to attend B2B events where they can network with others in their trade.

They’re engaged.

They’re motivated.

And they’re all in the same place, listening to the same speakers and visiting the same exhibitors.

They’re all on the same page.

What better place to launch a digital initiative that extends the excitement and the knowledge shared via social media?

After the carpet’s rolled up, and the staging’s been struck, and the keynote speakers have all gone home, what do you have to show for your efforts but a stack of business cards?  But if you could capture and archive what happened online, it could be discovered through search, shared on Facebook and Twitter and pay dividends in perpetuity.

Earlier this week, I conducted a B2B social media workshop for event planners at the Event Marketing Summit in Chicago (#emschi) organized by Dan Hanover.  I showed plenty of examples of how B2B marketers can use social media to generate excitement before, during and after business-to-business events like trade shows, conferences and strategic corporate training events.

Here are some of the take-aways from my workshop:

Socialize Your Event Website – Make your hashtags easy to find.  Include them in your logo, or in the banner of your event website.  Don’t gang all of your sessions up on one page, or one page per day.  Put each session at its own permalink, so people can tweet links to specific sessions. Include each speaker’s Twitter ID in their bio and make it clickable. Use Linkedin “Share” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons.  Never mind that Facebook isn’t distinctly B2B.  People spend time there, and there’s nothing more powerful the a personal recommendations from a friend.  Install a Facebook “Like” button as well.  And include an “add to calendar” widget that makes it easy to add sessions to your Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar with one click.  Make sure the calendar item has all the pertinent info about the session including the Twitter IDs of the presenters and the hastag for the conference or session.  For some ideas on event website best practices, check out the Event Bright and Cvent webpage templates.

Offer Social Sync on Your Website – How many times have you registered for a conference and wondered who you might know that’s attending?  At SXSW 2011, Janrain built this feature into the SXSW website, so you could cross reference  registered attendees list with your Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter contacts.  This was an awesome feature, because it gave you the chance to schedule more meetings and network smarter.

Promote Your Call for Speakers - If you want to generate excitement before an event, promote your call for speakers harder than the event itself.  Email market a call for speakers with a deadline and send two reminders as the date approaches. People are more responsive when there’s something in it for them.  Blog your call for speakers as well. And share a link to your blog post on relevant Linkedin Groups and via Twitter.

Post Your Event to Linkedin and Facebook – Go to Linkedin > More > Events and select the “Add an Event” tab on Linkedin Events.  Post your event and send out notifications to your Linkedin contacts who might genuinely be interested. You can also advertise your event on Linkedin, and the targeting options are very precise.  Post the event to the Events area on your Facebook page. Ask an easy to answer question and rewrite your meta data to encourage engagement in the stream.  The more “Likes” and comments you get, the higher the post will rank and the more people who will see it.

Post the Speaker PowerPoint Decks to SlideShare – Set up a channel and post the PowerPoint presentations directly following each session.  Velocity here is key, because tyou want the session attendees to retweet the link, and they’ll be more inclined to do so right after the session, then a day of two later.  Use your momentum wisely.  Tweet out a link to the deck with the conference hashtag and the Twitter ID of the speaker and watch the ReTweets come in.

Register Your Event on Foursquare – Take the time register your event in advance, and ask your sponsors NOT to register the event themselves on Foursquare, so you don’t wind up with multiple registrations for the same event, which confuses attendees.  If it’s an annual event, start the name of the event with the year, so people will be able to check in at the next event regardless of the location.  If you can get your hashtag into the name that you register on Foursquare, all the better.  And ask  each speaker before the start of their session to remind everyone to check in on Foursquare.

Podcast Your Sessions - At this point, the cost to record the audio from your sessions and make it available after the fact is pretty much just the cost of labor.  Bottle up the knowledge and insights your speakers share on stage and make them available immediately.  Draft a search engine optimized transcript, give the final MP3 file name that’s search friendly, upload it your blog, park your RSS feed at iTunes, social media optimize your feed and count the downloads. If you have the dates and location for next year’s event, include a brief, soft-sell announcement at the beginning of each recording to generate excitement for next year’s event. Don’t worry about losing registered attendees because you’re giving away the session recordings for free. People go to events to network and press the flesh.  You can’t do that on a podcast.

Offer a Branded Mobile App – DoubleDutch, a San Francisco start-up that recently secured VC-funding, offers a ready to go, skinnable mobile app with all the features you’d want at a B2B event.  Users can create profiles, connect with other profiles, use social sync to find Twitter and Facebook friends, share status updates, photos and links to an activity stream, like and comment on items, publish out to Facebook and Twitter, check in on the app and on Foursquare, unlock badges and watch video.  Cisco Events is using the app very effectively to sustain the buzz they generate at their corporate events.  They’ve even built in QR Code reader right into the app, which can be used for check-ins. Now you can use incentives to drive foot traffic to exhibitors and sessions by offering unique QR codes at different destinations.

By the way, I recorded the audio for the workshop which I’ll be releasing at On the Record…Online, so head on over now and subscribe if you want to make sure you don’t miss it.

How do you use social media for B2B events? Share your best tips for applying social to B2B events here as well.  And if you attended the session, what you think of it, and how are you applying social media to B2B event marketing?

According to a story by Steve Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) of the New York Times, the National Labor Relations Board threatened to sue Reuters last week for reprimanding an employee for using her Twitter account to publicly criticize the company.

The employee, Deborah Zabarenko (@dzabarenko), who is also the head of the Newspaper Guild at Reuters, posted the following tweet as an @reply to a Reuters corporate Twitter account:

“One way to make this the best place to work is to deal honestly with Guild members.”

She was reprimanded for the tweet by her direct supervisor, who said her public critic could damage Reuters reputation.  But according to the National Labor Relations Board, which tipped off Greenhouse through an anonymous source, employees have a legal right to engage in public dialogue, however critical it may be, to improve their working conditions.

A Reuters spokesperson replied by saying that the company has a social media policy, but I couldn’t find anything that applies to how employees can use social for internal communications.  Erin Kurtz (@eekurtz), Reuters Head of Publicity has not yet responded to my email asking for clarification, but if she does, I’ll definitely update this post.

No compliant has yet been filed, and according to Greenhouse, the National Labor Relations Board has been known to threaten legal action as a way of forcing out-of-court settlements.  The National Labor Relations Board is a U.S. Government Agency.

The issue of whether or not employees can publicly criticize their employers via social media has never been tested in U.S. Federal Court.  Greenhouse notes that in November 2010, a Connecticut ambulance company settled out of court with the NLRB for firing a worker who posted a Facebook status update critical of her supervisor.

And while the amount of that settlement was undisclosed, the two incidents may warrant revisiting your company’s social media policy to see of you’ve got any language in there that could be seen as restricting your employee’s rights to free speech.

In my Social Media Policy Template, in my section of confidentiality, I have an item that reads:

External social media channels should not be used for internal business communications among fellow employees. It is fine for employees to disagree, but please don’t use your external blog or other online social media channels to air your differences publicly.

But given the risks that potentially restricting free speech may pose, you might consider asking your legal counsel about adding the following language:

Worker’s have the right to engage in conversations with co-workers to improve working conditions.

With the use of social networks in business becoming more pervasive, it’s going to get tougher for companies not just to avoid developing an official social media policy, but also to ensure those policies are constitutional.

As social media becomes a common channel of communications, corporations with policies need to make sure their legal staff has the social media literacy to keep them up to date.

We will be discussing this matter in depth in the next episode of the B2B Social Media podcast with Chris Boudreaux who specializes in corporate social media policy development.

What’s your view on this development? Will you update your social media policy as a result?  And if so, how?

At a time when Japan is responding to a devastating tsunami and a man made nuclear disaster, this crisis communications post mortem features 3 critical lessons learned during the Haiti Earthquake by Barbara Burfeind and Lt. Commander Heidi Lenzini, who shared responsibility for informing the world about the devastating earthquake that killed 300,000 people last January.

When disaster strikes, you can never be too prepared.  So take a moment and ask yourself, if you were tasked with communicating on behalf of your organization during a major crisis, are you ready?  Consider these insights straight from the trenches about crisis communications for emergency response for evaluating your emergency response readiness:

1. Determine How Bandwidth will be Allocated during an Emergency

When phone lines and consumer internet fails, emergency communications become tied to logistics.  Image capture and communications rely on transportation, supply and the availability of transmission bandwidth.  Juggling communications and the actual recovery efforts is an ongoing balancing act.

As the recent, planned internet blackouts by besieged North African despots in response to prodemocracy demonstrations underscores, unless a priority is placed on communications by leadership, it is impossible for communications to get out. Involve leadership in your preparedness exercises to identify the means by which transmission bandwidth will be managed and allocated during an emergency.

2. Minimize Inbound Demand with Discoverable Media Channels

Combine old tools and social media channels to manage the avalanche of inbound requests during a crisis by making information discoverable on a self-serve basis. Old standbys like the voicemail greetings and web pages became valuable tools during the Haiti earthquake, and they were consistently updated with fresh, useful information. Facebook pages and Twitter feeds added another level of discoverability by allowing the team to disseminate links, while reducing inbound call volume and keeping people up to date.

3. Identify Back-Up Communications Channels

What would you do in a disaster without telephone, power or cell service? The U.S. Military has back-up communications systems in place.  Do you?  Emergency communications preparedness also means securing the right equipment to call for help or alert the authorities during an emergency that chokes off your existing channels. At a bare minimum, get a two-way radio with a hand-crank charging option so you can signal for help and get the word out when all systems fail.

This blog post was written from an audio interview with Burfeind and Lenzini conducted by Eric Schwartzman for On the Record…Online.

LISTEN

Burfeind is chief of Plans and Integration for Defense Visual Information within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.  Her team had the task of ensuring that Combat Camera (COMCAM) photographers were able to arrive and capture images used by the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. military commands to understand the extent of the damage, and which assets should be sent immediately as part of the disaster recovery mission. Her group oversees the Defense Imagery Management Operations Center (DIMOC), which in turn administers defenseimagery.mil.

Lenzini, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. She was manning the Public Affairs duty phone for US Southern Command when the Haitian earthquake hit.  Her crisis team was the lead source of emergency communications to for the world press on Haiti until a joint information center was established up a week after the quake.

Natural and man-made disasters always seems far away, until they strike.  According to geologists, the State of California, in which some nuclear power plants operate close to fault lines, has a 67% chance of experiencing an earthquake of the same scale as the Honshu, Japan quake within the next 30 years.  If you haven’t taken the time to establish an emergency communications plan, or haven’t drilled your crisis communications program with leadership lately, now is the time.

We stirred up a heated back channel debate that’s still going on a day later.  So be warned that if you read this blog post, you might wind up feeling angry, upset or possibly even threatened.  If you’re an agency person, you might feel the need to speak up and defend yourself, or your clients. And you might think that I’m your enemy.

But if you take the time to read this ENTIRE post carefully, and genuinely consider the argument I am about to make, you’ll probably wind reassessing your approach to social media marketing altogether, and realize that I’m not writing this post to deprive you of agency billings.  I’m writing it to help you by telling what no one else will. I’m going to show you how and why the way you’re trying to win new business for your clients is distasteful at best, unethical at worst.  And also why, ultimately, it’s a dead end strategy.

But before I ruffle your feathers, let me first say that if you’re a client, I DO think it IS possible to outsource much of your social media marketing workload, and if you’re an agency, there ARE plenty of ways you CAN help your clients with social media marketing.  There’s no shortage of billable social media hours to be outsourced.  The mistake, as I see it, is that a lot of clients are taking an unsustainable approach which is likely to result in a rude awakening, kind of like the wake-up call Chrysler’s agency sent to the automaker’s management last week.  Had there not been such a severe case of social media illiteracy in the boardroom, Chrysler never would have outsourced their voice in the first in place.

So here it is, the bomb I’m about to drop.  Are you ready?  Clients outsourcing their voice, and agencies accepting that bsuiness, are blowing it big time, because when it comes to social media marketing, outsourcing your voice is almost like outsourcing your integrity. The smarter approach is showing employees how to use these channels appropriately, because they know more about your business already, and have a much stronger incentive to see your company win. At the end of the day, most employees care more than outsourced labor, because they get more than a paycheck for their efforts.

Outside the Austin Convention Center during SXSW were hoards and hoards of temporary hires handing out coupons, stickers and postcards. If you ask any of them a question about the brand, product or service they’re promoting, it becomes clear rather quickly that they have no specialized knowledge in what they’re promoting at all.  What’s the ROI of that strategy?  By handing out collateral and not being able of having an intelligent conversation with prospects, they’re going the megaphone route.  They’re not listening.  And they’re incapable of responding.  It’s antisocial behavior.

And that’s why for most companies, outsourcing the conversational side of social marketing is a bad idea, because unless your representatives are as knowledgeable about your products and services as your employees are, they’re not going to be able to hold up their side of the conversation.  Marketing has become analogous to a sort of cocktail party.  It’s not about monologues.  It’s about dialogue.  And the only person who can represent you at a cocktail party is you.

As a former big agency guy, I’m going to tell you something the big agencies will never admit.  Agencies, regardless of what they’ll say publicly, would be out of business if they invested that heavily in any one client relationship.  Sure, there may be a few out there that can brag about 20 and 30 year client relationships.  But they’re in the minority.  Client turnover happens so often  it’s the driving news beat in the ad trades.  So if you’re okay with flying soulless, go ahead and outsource your voice.  But if want hold onto your integrity, outsource anything BUT your voice.

In my next post, I’ll give 3 smart strategies for outsourcing social media marketing without selling your soul.

Photo by Thomas Churchwell under Creative Commons License.

This post (written based on the presentation embedded above) explains how the Facebook “Like” button is poised to kill online display advertising as we know it, and help you understand why the social networking giant has been valued at $50 billion.  It is the second in a series of posts about marketing with Facebook. The first post with about marketing with Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads.  Let’s get started.

At first, the web was about surfing the information highway. Then it evolved into a place where the focus was on web content, pages, databases and documents. Today, it has become a place to connect with friends and trusted colleagues.  The web of tomorrow will be about finding relevant content from our friends, signaling the end of algorithmic search as the dominant means of locating relevant content online.

Facebook is a platform, which means third-party software developers can create applications that run inside the service. Since the launch of Facebook in May 2007, more than 550,000 Facebook apps have been created.  Today, more than a million developers are creating Facebook apps. And, as you probably know, the social network counts 500 million users.

Facebook “Like” buttons are the killer app for achieving the kind of reach that up until now, had been the exclusive province of mainstream media. “Like” buttons are the most used and easiest to use of Facebook’s Social Plugins and they provide a practical way for filing URLs and other online objects as nodes on the Facebook social graph.  But if you count all Activity Feed (meant for news sites), Live Stream (meant for Live Events) and other Facebook  widgets, more than 2 million websites are extending Facebook functionality to their sites and roughly 10,000 new sites  are joining them every day, using Facebook social plug ins.  Today, 250 million people use Facebook through destination websites without visiting Facebook.com, every month.

Life is Short. You’re Busy.  Why Bother?  Three Reasons:

• Traffic - Getting people to your website who wouldn’t otherwise have found it.
• Engagement – Like, comment and share functionality results means they do more and stay longer.
• Insights – The ability to see exactly how people are engaging with your brand, get demographics on who they are, and improve your efforts over time, whether its at Facebook.com or via your destination domain using Facebook Connect.

How Do You Do It?

What’s the easiest way for a nontechnical person to extend Facebook functionality to their website?  Here it is.

“Like” Button – This is by far the most important Facebook Social Plugin.  It’s how Facebook users can attach an object, like a web page, to their newsfeed and social graph.  They click the “Like” button and create a feed story, which can be seen by their friends at Facebook.com.

Their friends can “Like” it as well, attach a comment to it or forward it to their Facebook friends by clicking the “Share” button, extending the object’s reach and adding social relevance. “Liking” an object also means it becomes a node on the Facebook graph, so it appears in search, and if it’s a product, brand or service, it also appears on the Facebook profile page of the “Liker.” On social optimized sites, the “liker” or recommender’s profile picture appears beneath the “Like” button. So in this case, if you like the movie The Social Network, your Facebook friends will see your “like” as a recommendation on IMDB as well.

Last summer, Facebook director of media partnerships Justin Osofsky launched a campaign to get more news media outlets to integrate Facebook functionality, so their audiences can share articles in their newsfeeds, and find articles that their Facebook friends have “Liked.”  The Independent newspaper in the UK has done so by positioning the “Like” button in the upper right-hand corner beside every article on their website.

The advantage of integrating the Facebook like button in this manner — rather than just using a simple share button such as Add This — is that if any of my Facebooks friends “Like” an article, I wind up seeing their profile picture on the Independent’s website. In the example above, if my Facebook friends happen onto this story on the Independent’s website, they can see I’ve recommended it.

The article also gets posted to my newsfeed. The more of my friends who “Like” it and comment on it:

• The more people who see it
• The more social relevance it gets
• The broader the reach
• And the more referrals to your website

When installing a “Like” button, you can elect to show faces, and set the width . Given the amount a real estate the default settings require, the inclination is to go adjust the setting and so with the smaller “Button Count” or “Box Button” options.  But these are not nearly as effective because profile pictures do not appear.  The options shown below right, which are the default “Like” button widget settings, are much more likely to encourage engagement.

Seeing faces amplifies the likelihood of getting click recommendations ten times, says Facebook partner engineer Simon Glass.  As the research from Facebook shows, once just two Facebook friends have clicked a “Like” button, the likelihood that others will click it as well increases exponentially.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica is using the Facebook “Like” buttons to let users subscribe to their content in their Facebook newsfeed.  Instead of relying on users to come back to their destination website to “like” content, La Repubblica readers can use the “Like” button to subscribe to news by subject-matter, and any stories the published on that subject appear automatically in their newsfeed at Facebook.com.

Readers can “Like” their favorite football team, and links to stories about their team are syndicated directly to their Facebook newsfeed in one click. La Repubblica got 104,000 “likes” in the first 5 weeks of deploying their new “Like” button subscription integration.  “You can kind of think if it like RSS, but that people actually use,” says Mr. Cross, who formerly worked as a developer for the Beeb.

What are the benefits of using Facebook “Like” buttons?

• Distribution on Facebook.com
• Collect social recommendations
• Reach new people through personal recommendations
• Drive inbound traffic and user engagement

Half of Facebook’s users visit Facebook.com every day, and many of them do so multiple times daily.  Before La Repubblica integrated Facebook, readers had to go to the website to check for updated content but with this new integration, the newspaper can get links to it’s articles in front of readers where they spend the majority of their time on the Net.

Facebook users spend on average 5 hrs 25 mins on Facebook.com per month, versus 2 hrs 17 mins on Yahoo, 1 hr and 52 mins on AOL, 1 hr and 41 mins on MSN, 1 hr 17 mins on YouTube and 1 hr 14 mins on Google.

This blog post was written using source material from a special session at Le Web 2010 presented by Facebook partner engineer Simon Cross, a complete audio transcript for which is available at On the Record…Online. At the time of this writing, the PowerPoint presentation he used was also available.

Michael Rice, SVP Digital at McCann Erickson Los Angeles, Adrian Sexton, CEO at New Medici, Yacine Baroudi CEO at FasTake and David Bloom, Principal at Words & Deeds share their first impressions on Google Instant at the iHollywood Forum Panel on Social Media for Brands.

Special thanks to Erik Deutsch for his help.

If you want to get an idea of what I cover in my Social Media Boot Camp or attend the workshop remotely, I’m live streaming my Los Angeles session on Aug. 18-19 from 9 to 4pm PT right here.  So bookmark this page and come back anytime during the workshop to view the live stream.

Free Videos by Ustream.TV

Attendance is limited to 24 and my workshops are very interactive.  I will be taking questions from attendees as they roll and helping people one-on-one through-out the course of the Boot Camp.  But that only goes for paid attendees. You can audit via the web for free, but questions and one-on-one counseling is limited to the folks on site.

I will not be taking questions from the chat room.  Also, I make no guarantees as to the quality of the audio or video, but we have a pretty good prosumer rig, a live camera operator and a Sennheiser shot gun mic so hopefully it’ll be more than  watchable.  I’d certainly appreciate your feedback as a comment to this blog post if you’re inclined to share it.

For Upcoming Social Media Boot Camp dates, visit www.SocialMediaBootCamp.com.

by Intersection Consulting

Just as we use the telephone and e-mail to communicate with our colleagues, friends and family, people of all ages are increasingly using social media to communicate as well. that means most of your company’s employees are using social media throughout the course of the day to contact friends and associates, make plans and organizes activities.

Since those interactions are often discoverable after-the-fact, organizations are developing social media policies to provide employees with clear-cut guidelines of what is and is not permissible use.

Prior to social media, issues of public disclosure were often relegated to a paragraph in an organizations code of conduct policy that was written to restrict unofficial spokespersons from releasing official company statements through conventional channels like the mainstream media or press releases.

But today, if I were to happen on to a discussion between an employee of a company and someone else about anything related to the category in which the Company competes, that discussion would probably impact my perception of that organization. And it would probably, in many cases, have more of an impact than would a company’s marketing copy or official company line.

In this blog post, inspired by a discussion with Chris Boudreaux and Paul Gillin about developing corporate social media policies, I’ll suggest 7 aspects of policy development you probably haven’t considered:

1.  Sometimes You Can’t Stop Blocking — Shel Holtz maintains a website called “Stop Blocking” to compel organizations to loosen access to social media sites from within corporate networks.   But in industries like financial services and insurance,  it may be that the reason the company is on lockdown is because the current social media tools simply lach the necessary audit trail to The comply with government regulations.   companies may be required by regulators to store communications for number of years and unless the company’s CRM solution accommodates social media this may just not be possible.

2.  A Winning Business Case is Key — I recently spoke with Brian Solis about how he builds the business case for social media initiatives inside companies which you can listen to as a podcast.   Chris Boudreaux says organizations can and do turn on and off access to social media sites quickly, so don’t assume that because a company is blocking access to social media sites that it’s in some way going to take them longer to come up to speed.  You can listen to my discussion with Brian here.

3. Organizational Complexity is More Important than Size — The more business units there are, and the greater variety of subcultures that exist,  the longer it takes to develop and initiate a corporate social media policy. So if you find competing agendas among the various stakeholders who will be involved in developing and approving a corporate social media policy, it’s probably going to take you longer to accomplish it.

4. Strong Executive Leadership Eases the Way – It is leadership’s responsibility to think ahead of its employees and establish policy to protect them and the organization. Those protections are even more important if the employee is using social media as part of their primary job function. “The best policies are born out of a desire to utilize social media in a way that advances the corporate objectives, and to both protect the employees as well as the company. And that takes an understanding of the business which is is usually strongest among the folks who are running the business,” says Chris Boudreaux.

5. Legalese Can Kill a Social Media Policy — Like American linguist William Lutz, who I spoke with in this podcast about the dangers of doublespeak, Chris Boudreaux agrees there’s not much sense in a policy if the people it’s designed to guide can’t understand.  Policies should be written so that they can be understood without the aid of legal counsel.   and since many companies make fair social media policies public it may also be a good idea for those charged with writing the policy to collaborate with the marketing or public relations departments to ensure its accurately reflects the characteristics of the brand.

6. Policy Can Also Shape Opinion — Fairness can also be a smart objective of the social media policy. Many organizations make their social media policy available on the corporate website Where it appears as a testament of the organizations trust and respect for its employees. Harsh language and overly strict guidelines may reflect poorly on the organization and by association, your product brand or service.

7. Be Realistic About the Impact of Your Policy on the Organization —  In most cases, it’s probably unrealistic to think you’re going to change a company’s management style or corporate personality with a social media policy draft.  Social media policy needs to support the existing leadership style of the organization. For example, if the organization is inclusive and collaborative in its management style, that will lead to one type of social media policy. On the other hand, if you’re in station is commanding control, like say Apple Computer, that will lead to a different type of social media policy. It may be naive to think you can change an organization’s leadership or management style through social media policy.

It is the responsibility of those charged with developing a social media policy to create one that supports the company’s objectives in a way that is compatible with their existing business.  “You or I may not like a lot of the answers to a lot of leaders arrive at. But we have a choice to not work for those people,” says Chris Boudreaux.

As I mentioned earlier if you’d like to hear the podcast with Chris Boudreaux and Paul Gillin on corporate social media policy development, you can find it here.

If you’d like an opportunity to learn more about how to approach social media policy development for your organization you might also consider joining me at my upcoming Social Media Boot Camp in Los Angeles August 18 — 19, 2010 or my Social Media Master Class in Los Angeles August 20 — 2010, where I cover policy development and social media strategy in a workshop environment.

This video was filmed at the Marines Corps Recruit Station, Parris Island.

When I demo all these services in my Social Media Boot Camp, people get excited. Their first reaction is that they’ll be able to leverage these tools to syndicate their messages everywhere. After the eyes glaze over with just how many places there are to communicate on the social web, at first blush these tools appear to be a magic bullet for social media engagement.

The problem is, these tools are made for talking. And that’s just what they do. As just like that Nancy Sinatra song, if you’re not careful, one of these days these tools are going to walk all over you.

Some, like Seesmic and TweetDeck, are starting to include some degree of listening. But for the most part, these tools make it easy to talk, or perhaps I should say scream, for the highest mountain through as many canyons as possible.

Syndication tools will continue to improve, but as it stands, there’s no one tool that allows you to syndicate what you say and get everything you need to hear back, without significant blind spots. In fact, I’ve often thought they can may actually work against you by serving as social media ear plugs, or creating duplicate post feedback, as we FriendFeed and Twitter App our way into our very own echo chambers.

If you rely on these services to display your content on multiple social media networks automatically, it is much more likely you’ll forget to actually log into Linkedin or Facebook in a reasonable amount of time to see if you get questions that deserve a reply. If you have, and don’t respond, you’re using social media as a publishing platform, instead of building stronger relationships with people and organizations.

As long as you remember to listen, these tools do offer new efficiencies. But remember, you can’t have conversations if you don’t listen to what people have to say. And as it stands now, social media syndication tools need to learn to listen as well as they talk.

Once you’ve come to an understanding that social media is a team sport, and begun to participate in conversations — always listening, chiming in only when you can genuinely advance the conversation constructively — it’s only natural to start to wonder why it is that some people are more popular than others. And the more popular someone is, the harder it generally is to get his or her attention.

In “Trust Agents” Chris Brogan and Julian Smith warn A-listers against creating the impression of “one-way intimacy” by engaging more people in conversations then you can keep up with, and then walking away without saying goodbye. But the truth is, they were addressing a high-class problem experienced mostly by the elite few with networks of thousands. The more common scenario is the one of the little guy, trying to get noticed by the power social networker.

Sooner or later, if your aim is to build your professional network, there’ll come a time when you’re going to have to figure out how to catch the attention of the digerati, also known as the ones who are constantly bombarded with incoming requests for something from someone they don’t know.

It reminds me of the days when press releases were the primary communications format businesses used to get the word out. In those days, press releases were written to appeal to journalist watching a veritable sea of announcements clearing a newswire. Not entirely unlike tweets or status updates fed over social media, is it?

But the difference is, in the press release newswire scenario, the only way you knew if a headline worked was by the number of inquiries that resulted, whereas in social media, it’s about the impact your updates have on the community, as measured by clicks, comments, favorites, embeds and thank yous.

But I digress. What I really want to do int his post is share a gem of knowledge I got from last week’s episode of On the Record…Online with Jeff Pulver.

I spoke with Jeff, the producer of the 140 Characters Conference and the father of the VoIP industry, who appears to have mastered the art of B2B social networking. In our conversation, which you can download in its entirety, he shared how he uses social media to cut through the clutter and catch the attention of the hardest reach online personalities, whether he knows them or not.

We also covered cross-pollinating social networks, where the VoIP industry is headed and whether or not government regulators should be looking beyond net neutrality to search neutrality.

But if you prefer to read Jeff’s power social networking tips alone, here they are:

Identify, Remember and Use Preferred Communication Channels
If you’re reading this, chances are you already tweet, Facebook, e-mail, make phone calls and have even started experimenting with Google Buzz for business communications. But we don’t all use the same channels for the same purposes. For example, I tend to send e-mail primarily to talk to people I know, or people who I think may already know of me. On Twitter, I share and engage mostly around professional or business oriented topics.

I syndicate my tweets to Facebook, where my contacts are business and personal, and where I share and engage on personal basis too. So a useful Mashable post gets shared on Twitter, and pictures of my kid get shared on Facebook. If you’re a business contact and you don’t want to see pictures of my kid, follow me on Twitter. If you’re friends and family on Facebook, you probably don’t mind seeing my work-related stuff, cause it helps you keep abreast of what’s up with me.

You may use these emerging channels differently. But if you take an old school communication channel like the phone which has had enough time to percolate culturally, you probably have similar feeling about cold calls. No one likes telemarketers or robocalls.

The lesson is that while communication channels are developing, people tend to use them differently. For most people, the phone is not an appropriate channel for interruption marketing. Phones are better for fast, one-on-one problem solving and logistics. Direct ssales on Facebook is kind of tacky, but lead generation on Slideshare is expected.

We all have our own personal communication matrix, a sort of map representing how we use different communication channel. As Jeff put it, the future of marketing rests in one’s ability to identify, remember and connect with prospects through their preferred communication channel.

Pay Attention to Personal Usage Patterns
But even if you do get the preferred communications channel right, that may not be enough. It’s going to be much easier to get someone to respond to you via social media while they’re live on the service. Jeff says if he wants to get someone’s attention, maybe someone with a lot of followers, he’ll visit their profile first to try and spot a pattern with respect to when they tweet. If there is, he’ll contact them then.

When is a big deal in social media. The “now” nature of Twitter means that tweets get less and less desirable the longer they live. Which again, is not unlike a press release, which dies on the vine if it fails to stir interest after the first day of release.

What about Google Buzz?

Given the rapid rise of Google’s new social networking service, which is tied to Gmail, if you want to be an effective online social networker, it’s obvious you’re going to need to stay up on your game. In just days, Google Buzz has taken the Internet by storm, attracting many of the early adopters who tend to lead the charge for the rest of us onto these new social networking services. And since Google Buzz wraps all your social networking activities into one service, it may soon become a preferred channel, which means you’ll have to learn and identify with whom as well.

It’s all about knowing you’re prospects preferred communication channel, contacting them while they’re live, respecting the rules of the road and never letting your understanding of their personal communication matrix get stale.

B2B sales cycles exceed those of B2C, because the former requires someone be walked through a process, learn best practices and see relevant case studies to arrive at a purchasing decision. And currently, PowerPoint presentations are the popular media used in business to get that done.

Google Adwords and online display ads may bring the horse to water, but before a B2B customer drinks, they need a more comprehensive understanding than ads can provide, and presentations solve that problem.

But just what kinds of presentations work best at actually generating leads on SlideShare?

That’s one of the questions I asked Rashmi, in a conversation that also touched on the shortcomings of user-ratings, making sharing beneficial to community members and encouraging high quality business conversations by discouraging anonymity, which is available as a special episode of my “On the Record…Online” podcast.

But if you’re looking to generate leads on the SlideShare, and you want to know how to do it, here’s a cheat sheet directly from SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha:

1. Get Personal — SlideShare may be a business-to-business social network, but the service’s real strength is its ability to promote business with personality. To see how this works in practice, check out SlideShare’s homepage on any given day and see what types of presentations rank high. You’ll find dryer, text-heavy presentations — though packed with useful information — are much less popular than those with a strong dose of personality and individual flair.

2. Visual Essays Work Best — In the real world, when you use PowerPoint as a visual aid, you are able to to narrate your presentation. But on SlideShare, your deck has to speak for itself. Using imagery to add visual punch works to communicate more information with fewer words. It’s more attractive to viewers because it requires less effort to look at pictures than it does to read.

3. Serve an Underserved Audience – Most of the content on SlideShare is tech-oriented. So if this is your addressable audience, you’re prospecting in the most competitive of SlideShare’s markets. If, on the other hand, you’re visual essay is about some type of subject-matter that’s less prevalent, you may be appealing to much a smaller audience, but there’s also much less competition, so the probability of converting members into leads is higher.

4. Presentations as Media – On SlideShare, your presentation is media. And good media is different from a good presentation. While good presentations include all the ins and outs at the expense of requiring more time and attention, effective media typically promises quick gains for a small time investment. A SlideShare presentation that works as a lead generation tool, is less about driving actual purchasing decisions than it is about sparking someone’s curiosity. Lead generation is about opening doors, not than closing them.

Rashmi says SlideShare is fixing the broken “white paper download paradigm,” one of the more common ways B2B marketers generate sale leads online. The problem, she says, is that in the white paper download model you have to forfeit your contact information before you know whether or not the content is any good. By introducing a social layer of comments, embeds, favorites and downloads within an active B2B community, SlideShare lets members use a social filter to more efficiently identify what might be compelling content for them.

Are you using SlideShare to generate leads? is there anything I’ve missed that can add to this post?

Credibility - Your website is the only corporate communications channel *more* credible than a press release on a paid wire service, according to a study [PDF] by PR Week and PR Newswire. If it lives on your website, people are confident that it really comes from you. On a third-party site, the source can be questionable. It could be an unofficial page established by the community, rather than the official company line.

Conversion Leaks – Effective online communications are not just about getting the message out. They’re about leveraging information to drive measurable transactions. And it’s far more difficult to convert awareness into a measurable transaction on a third-party site. On your site, you control the user experience.

Check out this screenshot of the online newsroom iPressroom built for the LA Opera.

The podcast lives on their *own* site, increasing the likelihood that a listener can be converted to ticket holder. On a third party site, best practices like this are impossible. Furthermore, with newspapers and magazines going belly up weekly, using podcasts to drive traffic reinvents the value of PR against clicks instead of clicks, a strategically wise move as the influence of the fourth estate wanes.

Measurable Transactions - As you wade through the waters of online communications, ask yourself, “If my online PR efforts are successful, what measurable transaction will occur?” In this scenario, just getting the word out or building buzz isn’t enough. You have to actually define what impact that buzz will have on your bottom line.

Which is what makes online communications so liberating for PR professionals. For the first time, you’re not dependent on the news media to achieve results.

There’s no way to draw a straight line between a print news placement and sales, but if someone clicks through your Facebook page to your website and converts, there is. Think about how you’re going to leverage social media to engage constituents, generate word of mouth and build awareness. If they discover your website through those channels and click through, what measurable transaction will occur? Here are some realistic objectives:

Think of social media as the bread crumbs that lead the right people to your organization. These are the stepping stones that let you make your web presence discoverable, and they can be a powerful alternative to shotgun, interruption tactics like email blasts or wire releases. Here’s my social media channel map, to give you a visual on the steeping stones to choose from:

Each channel has its own unique characteristics and benefits. Facebook is where people discover and connect. So use your Facebook page to solidify your existing relationships, make new friends and participate in conversations that matter to your constituents. Use your Facebook page to socialize your brand.

Your own website, in the other hand, is where conversion activities will most likely occur. If you’re in public relations, this is where you can drive conversions through original content, like press releases, feature stories, blog posts, images and video. And more likely than not, that information will be hosted in the online newsroom section of your corporate site.

If you are interested in leveraging social networks for organizational communications, Facebook recently changed their page offerings for brands and business with enhanced functionality that lets organization engage more socially online. If you’re looking to strategically leverage Facebook for organizational communications, C.C. Chapman’s Advance Guard new media consultancy has a free white paper you should definitely check out.

If you’re in PR, corporate communications or marketing, what do you think? For organizational communications, is social media a means to an end, or an end itself?

Stepping Stones Photo by Paul Stevenson

New Media PR White Paper

Presentations:

Mark Jen [PDF]

Debbie Weil

Eric Schwartzman

Larry Thomas

Phil Gomes

Dave Friedman

Shel Israel

Katie Paine

Greg Jarboe

Lee Odden

“On the Record…Online” subscribers are in for a treat this summer. I am going to recording podcast interviews at Media Relations 2007 [PDF]. We’ll be releasing them weekly after the conference has concluded so while it’s certainly no substitute for attending, you can subscribe to the podcast and hear what some of the conference keynote speakers and panelists had on their mind. The podcasts will be recorded as one-on-one’s on site in the conference pressroom. They will NOT be actual session audio recordings, which are usually available for a fee through Bulldog Reporter. Instead, these will exclusive interviews with the biggest names speaking at the event.