Editor’s note: This is the last post in the series of Lessons Learned:  Easy tips on how to create and grow a social media program.   This series includes a discussion on the following topics:

1. Create a Social Media Policy
2. Research your business
3. Set goals
4. Write an Editorial Calendar
5. Create content
6. Start the program
7. Grow your social media program and overall web presence
8. Handling mistakes and attacks

Mistakes and attacks

Everyone makes mistakes. In social media, mistakes are recognized and companies are rewarded based on how gracefully the mistake is corrected.

Determining whether to respond:

One of the smartest things companies can do is to ensure that they are prepared internally on how to handle complaints.  Many times online complaints reflect conversations sales and customer service teams already handle.  Use them to help ensure quickly and timely issue resolution.

If your brand is attacked online the first thing you should do is assess the situation/impact of this interaction:

Use Compete or Alexa to determine the visibility of the website, including:

• Size of site – How large is the website?
• Site visibility – How popular is this site in search engines?  How likely is it that your customers will come across the site?
• Audience type – Look at the demographics.  Is this site frequented by your target audience?
• Site tone  - Is your product discussed in the same tone as everything else on the site?

Use the data here to determine your response and method of response:

• Update your blog with correct industry knowledge
• Outreach publically responding directly on a blog or a micro blog platform
• Outreach privately by asking the complaining party to discuss via phone or email
• Don’t respond (some fights just are not worth the battle)

One note, while I do believe there are times when a company should not respond online, it must be done with care.   This is a terrific article from TechCrunch on FTD’s social media mistake which occurred when they chose not to respond to angry complaints online.  As you can see, if they had simply just outreached publicly asking to contact each person off-list, they could have avoided this entire mess.

Social media mistakes happen.  Use them to your advantage by handling them quickly and easily and you will find a happier, more visible vocal fan base.

This series has been a great journey for me!  I hope you enjoyed reading it in parts.  I would love feedback on this series as well as any topics you would like me to cover next!

Related posts:

• Lessons Learned: Easy Tips on How to Create and Grow a Social Media Program
• Lessons Learned: Starting and growing your social media program
• Lessons Learned: Setting Goals in Social Media

Editor’s note: This is part 6 & 7 in the series of Lessons Learned:  Easy tips on how to create and grow a social media program.   This series includes a discussion on the following topics:

1. Create a Social Media Policy
2. Research your business
3. Set goals
4. Write an Editorial Calendar
5. Create content
6. Start the program
7. Grow your social media program and overall web presence
8. Handling mistakes and attacks

Start the program

Once you know where to start and what to say, create your online accounts on determined platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook, Delicious and more.

• Start posting your content
• Respond when someone replies or mentions your company/brand
• Test your messaging, modify messaging as needed
• Watch your messaging to see what resonates with your audiences.
• Time test tweets to see what time of day you receive the best

Reserve Your Name

There are more than 100+ social media sites/networks across the web.  Preserve your company name and reputation by registering for accounts across all relevant platforms.

• Knowem
• Namechk

Grow your social media program and overall web presence

There are lots of ways to use social media to build a reputation among your core users. Here is a quick lists of several individual ideas:

• Include a link to all social network platforms within all employee’s email signature
• Include a link to all social network platforms within all outbound email marketing
• Create a Google profile to ensure people can easily find you within Google search results.
• Ask all employees to update their LinkedIn with links back to your blogs, videos and more
• Answer questions in LinkedIN to enhance company position as expert in their industry
• Have your sales team determine who your prospects are, see if you are connected to any of them via LinkedIN
• Search Twitter and other key platforms to find users by location or topic follow those key to your markets
• Upload your mailing list into social network platform and invite your members to join
• Follow your prospects on Twitter – it is a great way to get involved in the conversation, and a great way to see what is important to them
• Set up RSS feeds to send you relevant industry info, share this info on all streams to show industry leadership
• Reach out to smaller social networks and discussion partnership opportunities
  • 43things
  • Diddit
  • Whrrl
  • Foursquare
• See what else is being done online!  Check out wiki.beingpeterkim.com for a great list of social media programs

Related posts:

• Lessons Learned: Easy Tips on How to Create and Grow a Social Media Program
• Lessons Learned: How to create social media content
• Lessons Learned: Setting Goals in Social Media

Editor’s note: This is part 5 in the series of Lessons Learned:  Easy tips on how to create and grow a social media program.   This series includes a discussion on the following topics:

1. Create a Social Media Policy
2. Research your business
3. Set goals
4. Write an Editorial Calendar
5. Create content
6. Start the program
7. Grow your social media program and overall web presence
8. Handling mistakes and attacks

Create content

People learn in one of three ways:  reading, watching or doing.  Up until now, the web was primarily a textual platform, ignoring a very large audience of people who learn by watching or doing.  By adding multimedia elements to your program, you have the opportunity to reach customers and clients in the formats they are most comfortable with.

TIP: When creating content remember that engaging your customers is an integral part of every social media campaign.  Ask engaging questions.  Ask your customers to share their stories, photos or video.

Write copy

Text is still an extremely useful way to present a company’s messaging.  Core textual platforms include blogs and the status update section of micro blogs and social media platforms.

• How to blog:
  • Use Wordpress as your blog platform as it has the best plug-ins for visibility and customization
  • Commit to a long-term plan: write an editorial calendar, outsource blog writing to key members of your senior management to provide a more-rounded view of their company
  • Include a photo or video to support your text
  • Keep your text short, include links to key sections of your website
  • Use Q&A sections on LinkedIN to help find interesting industry topics
• How to promote your blog
  • Include a link to your blog in employee’s email signature
  • Register your blog in RSS feeds throughout the web
  • Include links in all outbound marketing materials
  • Use tools like Hootsuite, Ping.FM or Tweetdeck to promote blogs via status updates on all relevant SM platforms: Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook, Delicious
  • Tag your blog posts so they appear higher in search results
  • Add an RSS feed to your blog so people can sign up for auto delivery
  • Submit links to each blog post among RELEVANT news aggregator sites like:  Yahoo Buzz, Digg, Delicious, Kirtsey, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more

Use photos and video to promote your social media program

Create video

There is no denying that video is a highly successful platform for company messaging and new video cameras such as Flip and Kodak makes shooting and editing video easy

• Create short videos of your company
  • Interview senior management and employees about the company or other topics
  • Show customers interacting
  • Use video to clarify areas of your business
  • Show video of any interesting events
  • Create a commercial for yourself, put on above sites
  • Upload video to YouTube, Mixx and other relevant video platforms (use TubeMogul for easy distribution across mass platforms)
• Tape record your presentations and make them available via podcast
• Create a photo page on flickr, search the site and friend people who have used your company tags in their photo descriptions
• Create a company page on YouTube, search the site and friend people who have used your company tags in their photo descriptions
• Engage your users!  Ask customers to share their photos, video or audio with your audiences
• Include multimedia in all outbound PR efforts

Related posts:

• Lessons Learned: Easy Tips on How to Create and Grow a Social Media Program
• Lessons Learned: Starting and growing your social media program
• Lessons Learned: Mistakes and attacks in social media

Editor’s note: This is part 4 in the series of Lessons Learned:  Easy tips on how to create and grow a social media program.   This series includes a discussion on the following topics:

1. Create a Social Media Policy
2. Research your business
3. Set goals
4. Write an Editorial Calendar
5. Create content
6. Start the program
7. Grow your social media program and overall web presence
8. Handling mistakes and attacks

Write an Editorial Calendar

One of the most helpful steps in this process continues to be writing out an approved Editorial Calendar of topics and replies for commonly asked questions, allowing a company social media team to act quickly and consistently when dealing with online audiences.  Use this as an opportunity to provider clearer information on topics that results in bad service complaints.  Weave in industry updates and you have a smart posting calendar and schedule that will help you start conversations and trigger real interactions.

Calendar information includes data from:

• Website FAQ
• Sales force customer feedback
• Customer Service Dept feedback
• Outbound marketing emails
• Previous press releases
• Industry updates/industry news
• Vertical market news
• Key message documents
• And most importantly, topics that are of interest to your customers

I use an excel sheet for my calendar.  Column A is the topic, Column B-D are messages written that support the topic, broken out by platform. Additional columns include links to supporting sections of the website and available multimedia.

Related posts:

• Lessons Learned: How to research your business
• Lessons Learned: Mistakes and attacks in social media
• Lessons Learned: Setting Goals in Social Media

Editor’s note: This is part 3 in the series of Lessons Learned:  Easy tips on how to create and grow a social media program.   This series includes a discussion on the following topics:

1. Create a Social Media Policy
2. Research your business
3. Set goals
4. Write an Editorial Calendar
5. Create content
6. Start the program
7. Grow your social media program and overall web presence
8. Handling mistakes and attacks

Set Goals

Setting goals is one of the most daunting yet easiest things to do in social media.  First it must be noted that every company has a different set of goals for social media.  For some, it is simply raising awareness or using social media to help disseminate company messaging, for others it is email capture or to drive traffic to a website for a sale.   It is important that you establish what you want to measure before you begin.    Here are a few examples of popular social media goals, including how to track relationship building or website traffic:

Related posts:

• Lessons Learned: How to research your business
• Lessons Learned: Mistakes and attacks in social media
• Lessons Learned: Starting and growing your social media program

Editor’s note: This is part 2 in the series of Lessons Learned:  Easy tips on how to create and grow a social media program.   This series includes a discussion on the following topics:

1. Create a Social Media Policy
2. Research your business
3. Set goals
4. Write an Editorial Calendar
5. Create content
6. Start the program
7. Grow your social media program and overall web presence
8. Handling mistakes and attacks

Lessons Learned:  How to Research Your Business

• Measure: Look at your Google Analytics to see which social networks appear in your referring traffic figures as well as what terms are being used to find you online (use these terms to help determine messaging)
• Find your audience online:
  • Ask your employees where they play online
  • Ask your sales force where their clients interact online
  • Create a small survey and ask those on your email marketing list.  Tip:  add a cash/gift incentive to ensure higher # of respondents
• Find out what people are saying about you online:
  • Search popular network sites like Twitter and Facebook and see how many results appear.  Don’t forget to check the social networks relevant to your industry as well (Yelp, TripAdvisor, CruiseCritic  etc)
  • Search sites like www.peoplebrowsr.com, www.socialmention.com as well as a Google comprehensive (web and blog search) for your company name and see what sites appear the most.

Related posts:

• Lessons Learned: Write an Editorial Calendar
• Lessons Learned: Starting and growing your social media program
• Lessons Learned: Mistakes and attacks in social media

I have been fortunate to spend the last year implementing and growing a wide variety of social media programs.   Over the next few days I will be sharing with you the steps needed to start your own program, including:

1. Create a Social Media Policy
2. Research your business
3. Set goals
4. Write an Editorial Calendar
5. Create content
6. Start the program
7. Grow your social media program and overall web presence
8. Handling mistakes and attacks

Every basic social media program starts the same way:  setting goals, finding out where your audience is, listening and engaging your audience, and growing the program in ways that benefit the company and its audience. So what are the specific steps one should take to set up the program?

Create a Social Media Policy

Before starting a social media program, be sure to update your company guidelines on what can and cannot be discussed online.  Without guidelines, employees are left unaware of what is or is not off limits to discuss online.

For public companies, there is a fine line in creating an effective policy that is specific enough to keep you within RegFD guidelines and yet broad enough to encourage your own internal fan base to promote your company and brand to their family and friends via social networks.

Social media policies should not only include what employees can or cannot discuss online, they should also include ways to handle customer complaints, s well as a way to implement current crisis communication plans through online channels.

Here is a great list of social media policies for your review:  http://123socialmedia.com/2009/01/23/social-media-policy-examples/

Once you have a social media policy in place or at least in process, it is time to get started.  The next step is doing the research needed to create your plan, finding your platforms and figuring out what is being said about your online.  We’ll discuss this in greater detail in tomorrow’s post.

Related posts:

• Lessons Learned: Starting and growing your social media program
• Lessons Learned: How to create social media content
• Lessons Learned: Mistakes and attacks in social media

Startup Army would like to recognize our own Serena Ehrlich for her new advisory role with UCLA’s Marketing and Advertising programs.

UCLA’s Certificate in Marketing consists of four track concentrations focused on marketing management, sales and marketing account management, marketing communications, and a “create your own” (*hint* *socialmedia* *hint*) track. We are very pleased to know that Serena will be aiding students to develop their analytical, critical, and creative thinking skills in the realm of Social Media knowledge.

Serena has always been involved with Social Media and integrated communications. Her 14 years of experience at the newswire service Business Wire enabled Serena to stay at the vanguard of industry trends and technologies. She now leads the communications team at the LA-based product and company accelerator Startup Army as the Senior Vice President of Social Media, Marketing, and PR.

Communications is a true passion for Serena. She is a founding member of the Social Media Club, serves on the Board of Directors for the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) Los Angeles, and is a long time member of YoungPRPros.

We are excited to see where this new relation takes Serena and the impact that it will have on Social Media, particularly in Los Angeles!

No related posts.

I recently put together a blog post for the Social Media Club (Los Angeles) on the topic of Twitter for Families. This is a bit outside of my usual technology and startup-oriented posts, but I wanted to share some of the human side of emerging technologies.  Here is a blurb to get you started:

“So here you are, espousing your thoughts and a few work tips on Twitter when suddenly you receive an unexpected email. Your mother is now following you. Your mother is now reading your notes. Worse yet? She’s providing her advice. On your lunch diet.

As technologies continue to make it easier to connect with friends and family online, families are turning more and more often to the distribution communication platform that Twitter and Facebook Status Updates provide. Combining Twitter with other social applications (like Facebook) serves to strengthen and magnify the communication capabilities of families on the Internet to an even greater degree.

So why connect with your family on social network platforms?. What is driving this increasing trend?”

Read more about Twitter for Families…

Related posts:

• How does RegFD apply to Twitter and other social media channels?
• Lessons Learned: How to create social media content
• Social Media Don’ts

During the last year, I’ve spoken to numerous investor relations officers (IROs) on the topic of social media and investor relations.  IROs tend to be the last holdouts within a company’s communication teams to embrace changes in the communications process.  Holding out is usually blamed on two reasonable excuses:

• Not enough time in the day to implement and run these changes
• Fear of the SEC due to the possibility of these changes leading to disclosure violations

I’m going to show you two ways IROs can become the company hero based on both of those challenges.

IROs have many, significant responsibilities relating to the health and welfare of the company.  They are often the voice of the company to key financial audiences, are responsible for communicating the company’s messaging to shareholders and stockholders, answer a wide range of shareholder’s questions and protect the company’s reputation.

Everywhere I go, I ask my audiences what is the single most repetitive, time consuming task they perform each day.  Each time I get the same response.  The most time consuming part of the IRO’s job is responding to the same questions about the company over and over, day after day.  And as you know, these calls are a big red flag that company websites are consistently not providing company information in a manner their core audience, shareholders and investors, can understand.

Let’s put some math to this.  If the average IRO handles six repetitive calls a day, taking approximately 10 minutes per call, then 1 hour a day, 5 hours a week or 260 hours a year is spent answering the same questions over and over again.  Want to save yourself 255 of those hours each year?  Update your FAQ’s or create a blog and use this as fodder.  And it’s easy to do.  Simply write out the questions you receive on a regular basis along with the answers you provide, post within your existing FAQs or blog and direct callers to the website.

So let’s do some more math:  What’s the estimated time to write out these repetitive questions and answers?  5 hours a year.  This time saved (255 hours) allows the IRO to focus on other aspects of their role.

Oh and another added benefit?  By updating your FAQs (or better yet, blogging) you are providing clearer, more consistent messaging to your core audiences which in can directly contribute to a more stable stock price.

IROs also experience huge headaches when it comes to stock price’s volatility. From trying to identify what might be causing stock to wobble, to determining a course of action, to trying to rebuild afterwards  this can take anywhere from 8 hours to weeks to repair.

Imagine if companies had a legal way to stop or slow this type of unsubstantiated stock movement within the boundaries of RegFD?  If the company had a blog, this would be a piece of cake.  All a company’s IRO would have to do is:

• The minute a company notice its stock price has started to wobble, IROs should go online and search sites like Google blog, socialmention.com or stocktwits.com – be sure to adjust your search time frame to last five days or less

• Review and determine the common theme/rumor affecting the stock price
• Write a short blog response post reiterating the company position on the rumor utilizing previously disclosed information
• Post this on the company blog ASAP, before the stock price begins to move
• Direct all callers to this post

Most shareholders will check a company’s website to see if a rumor is true or not before they buy/sell their stock.  By providing easy to find access to the information a shareholder needs to determine if a rumor is true or not, a company dramatically increases transparency and decreases stock volatility.

The best part?  Since companies are repurposing previously disclosed information and are communicating before the stock begins to slide, there is no need to distribute a press release.  It should be noted that once the stock has begun to slide or grow, any communications about the stock should be done via a press release to ensure one meets RegFD requirements.

One of my favorite examples of companies using their blog to help ward off stock affecting rumors is Cisco.  Once a rumor is indentified, Cisco uses their main company blog, with a link from the first page, to provide clear, succinct messaging to maintain a more stable stock price.

It is my hope that other IROs will take a second look at how their company website and even a company blog can be used to help IROS throughout their many daily tasks, clarifying reputation messaging, strengthening stock stability, better relationships with core audiences and even give a few hours a week back to the IRO.

Related posts:

• How does RegFD apply to Twitter and other social media channels?
• Lessons Learned: How to create social media content
• Social Media Don’ts