Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

It’s easy to be wise after the event, even better to get advice from those who had to learn the hard way.  A previous post mentioned how to deal with negatives comments, and looking at some of the cases that imploded here are some pointers to avoid going social-media-bust, especially for larger companies.

Don’t execute a tactic without having a strategy

The ‘Let’s do Facebook’ approach is asking for trouble. Once a Facebook page is up, it’s public and open for all to comment.  Social media is not a campaign, it’s about establishing trust, being genuine and having a sustainable long term goal. If you get it wrong that’s public too – have a clear reason as to why you want to engage in social media, what your objectives are, and what sort of audience you can expect to attract. These objectives should be clearly communicated to everyone across the organization, including directing people how to listen and engage in the dialogue.

Be platform agnostic

Facebook has surpassed Google in terms of search results and in order to be found many companies are considering facebook pages, however, it would be better to be ‘platform agnostic’ and think less about the channel itself and more about the dialogue you want to have before you pick the platform. For example, having a facebook page which had little discussion and a mainly ‘brand.com’ type focus goes against the type of community driven platform that facebook is.

Inbound not outbound marketing

What does that mean? Outbound marketing is all about promoting your brand or product and not about having a conversation, it’s about pushing your brand in a one-way flow of information trying to force people to a particular site. Not only does that have the opposite effect in social media, it makes you really (really) boring.  Best approach is to listen and learn to see what questions people have and contribute to the conversation, that’s the sort of expertise people value.  And yes, you would be right in thinking that this could well take more time, certainly initially than simple promotion, however, it also brings a higher return.

Clear terms and conditions, disclaimers

Adding clear terms and conditions on a social media page gives readers clarity about the intent of the site and this should also include guidelines for users posting comments on what is and is not permissible.  The Mayo Clinic have done this very well publishing publicly publish guidelines for employees on their blog which features stories from patients, families, friends and employees

“The main thing Mayo employees need to remember about blogs and social networking sites is that the same basic policies apply in these spaces as in other areas of their lives. The purpose of these guidelines is to help employees understand how Mayo policies apply to these newer technologies for communication, so you can participate with confidence not only on this blog, but in other social media platforms…”

Have a Central Site

A main site, such as a corporate blog can be a way to establish a credible presence to regularly exchange information and distribute content that becomes known and trusted over time – it becomes a place to redirect people to if comments are happening on other channels outside of their control. Larger companies also need to consider if it is necessary to have a 24/7 regular real time response (particularly if they are a global company spanning different time zones). Any corporate website should have links to all relevant social media accounts including blogs.

Open up social media listings, become technology experts

Social media sites need to be accessible by employees so that they can experience it for themselves, and also so that they can learn about different platforms and their limitations. Some employees may then become experts in the technology and be able to answer questions such as: How does the facebook share button work? How does auto-posting work? How does new social media platform X integrate with existing digital strategy and should the company begin to use it? Which tools should be used to measure social media impact and reach? How does the content appear on mobile phones and readers?  How can a post be best optimized for search engines? Expert users not only enable companies to maximize the most out of the content posted, they also save time and potential misuse of information.

Bring competency into different groups to use multiple channels

Although a personal approach is best and a blog or social media account may rely on key individuals it is also important to build a talent pool of individuals who have competency to build social media channels across the organization and establish their own personal dialogue. BMJ Group blogs would be an example of a group who have done this successfully.

A community manager, or overall social strategist, who monitors the entire companies digital assets in terms of social media accounts may also be required, enabling the company to have an overview of the success of different channels and how they are being used. A good community manger should be experienced, know how to handle a full scale organized attack from critics, manage a crisis and protect a company’s valuable digital assets.

5 Tips to Starting a Digital Strategy by Matthew Green

Several months ago I wrote an article on why businesses should be using Social Media. The statistics proposed by NeilsenWire, AdNews, The Australian newspaper and the ABC News website lead to the following conclusion.

“With almost 7,750,000 wage earning Australians currently engaged in some form of social media the answer for most people should be a resounding ‘yes’.”

Being the sort of person that likes to practice what he preaches I established and continuously maintain my corporate social media presence. This includes our website, blog, Facebook Page, LinkedIn Discussion Group and company Twitter account. On top of that I also manage my own personal blog, twitter account, Facebook page etc. It’s a lot of work for a small business with limited resources (not to mention the fact that I am the proud father of five wonderful children) but it is a commitment you need to make if you want your efforts to be rewarded.

Like any marketing activity, a Social Media strategy needs to be planned and Heidi really helped us a lot with this process. Our clients and suppliers are a diverse group of companies but the three main outlets of Social Media they all seemed to use were Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We also discovered that our corporate newsletters were widely read so we had to factor that channel into the equation as well. What we came up with was a corporate blog site that we could feed through to our Facebook Page, Twitter account and Linked In Discussion Group. Heidi also introduced us to an application called TweetDeck that enables us to post Twitter comments to multiple sites including our Facebook page. All of a sudden we were able to write once and publish to many; and all our apprehensions were gone.

Since establishing our Social Media presence and becoming actively involved in the community I have made a number of observations that I would like to share with you.

1. Make sure you ‘tweet’, ‘blog’ and update your Facebook status regularly. Visitors will stop visiting if the content remains the stagnant. How often you do this is a business decision you have to make. I try to blog twice per week for my company and once for myself. However, I update Twitter and Facebook almost every day. Although this costs my company three to four hours per week of my time, I know that the group of followers we have appreciate the effort.

2. On the flip side, don’t be a blog hog. If people see you flooding the twitterverse with useless trivia then you will quickly become associated with spam and filtered out.

3.  Share your knowledge and offer useful information. Don’t just try to sell your wares because that is the surest way to become unfollowed.

4. Don’t get discouraged if you fail to gain instant success. In many instances, building up a viable social media presence takes time and effort. Not everyone will end up the size of Mashable or Hubspot.

5. Be honest! The global social network is an incredibly large organism and the old adage that ‘bad news travels fast’ is especially relevant.

Finally, the most important rule of all in my opinion, and one I’m sure everyone has been guilty of not doing at some stage is, – Reciprocation. If you do not acknowledge a retweet, comment on a blog, or offer an insight into a discussion, how can you expect your community to do the same for you.

About Matthew

Matthew Green is a forty something, father of five and small business owner with a Bachelor of Commerce degree and the author of the popular ‘iDad’ series of short stories. His love for creative writing developed out of telling stories to his children and his first novel ‘Pine Gap’ is awaiting publication. Samples of his work can be found at http://matthewgreen.com.au

Every company has critics, however these critics are now able organize a coordinated global attack using social media tools.

‘Facebook fan page brand-jacking is the new form of tree hugging. As movements form, the organized groups can stage mass attacks on brand Facebook fan pages, overrunning it with negative messages.  Like sitting in trees with banners to slow down clear cutting and spray painting messages on buildings, this is simply the digital form of real-world protest’[1]

This is one of the reasons many are hesitant to jump in and start a blog or facebook page. Anyone embarking on social media, especially companies in health, should have guidelines or an escalation plan about what to do when things go wrong, protecting themselves (and their employees). Guidelines should describe those comments which require an immediate response, what the response will be, from whom, and indicate what to do if negative comments escalate.

Without such a plan you run the risk of being forced to shut your site down or take extreme remedial action (higher profile cases of organisations who got caught out include Nestlé, Sanofi Aventis, Elsevier). Whatever the case, it may not be possible to talk about specific adverse events but let readers know that they have been heard, that communication is open and that their comments have been taken seriously. Sometimes there may be instances where ‘top management’ are visible and active.

Processes Brand Triage

Although these guidelines were made for the ‘corporate’ world, they also apply to individuals, especially within the area of health and research where a comment taken out of context can harm not just reputations but also have clinical implications. The thing not to do is to ignore or block someone out of hand (unless they are a troll), this can lead to an escalation of the problem – a very public example of this was a mistake made by Nestlé in trying to ban a Greenpeace video on YouTube – it simply added fuel to the fire (see ‘Censored Greenpeace video gets helping hand from Nestlé).

Crisis communications is not necessarily about fixing the problem but putting forward the human face of a company and letting people know they have been heard. Addressing an issue will go a long way to building trust (whether that trust is warranted of course is another matter entirely).

References

[1] Jeremiah Owyang: Crisis Planning: Prepare Your Company For Social Media Attacks

How do you get your picture or avatar to come up automatically when you comment on a blog or another social media site?

Getting an Avatar

This is how you do it. Go to http://en.gravatar.com. Fill in your profile, add your picture and the email address you’d like your picture to appear with and you’re done.

then, every time you comment on a blog and leave your email address (the address won’t appear in public), your picture will appear.

Try it!

You may have different personal and professional social media accounts within one application (like a private facebook page and a professional one, or two YouTube accounts) – as someone emailed me recently,

…there are many interfaces and how to manage them all? This can be a very resource hungry experience without a good process

It get’s difficult if you have to keep logging out of one account and going into into another. Here is a time saver that I am using based on Bookmark folders and Browsers.

Managing personal and professional accounts

1. List all of the sites you have and divide them into personal or professional
2. Open your browser (a browser is what you use to browse the web with, for example: internet explorer, or firefox, safari, chrome)
3. Open all your personal  accounts and bookmark them.  Save them onto your bookmarks toolbar.
   (Note, if your toolbar is already  full put the bookmarks into folders – I’ve done a screen shot below)
4. Open a different browser and go through the same exercise with your professional accounts

You now have your accounts separated, and can switch easily between the two without having to log out of accounts. If there are some accounts that you use regularly you can set them to open automatically.

How does this work in practice?

I have two identities – Heidi Allen and associated social media accounts, and Body In Mind (health and research) and associated social media accounts.  How to manage them day to day at the same time?

Heidi Allen

All accounts here are in my firefox browser. Here are the tabs that open automatically and the folders

And here is what is in one of my folders (Heidi Allen Profile) if I need it

Body In Mind

All accounts here are in my Google Chrome browser – again, here are the tabs that open automatically and the folders (this time Body in Mind Profile folder)

I have the same bookmark folders in both browsers but you could have one set on each browser – and if your life is blissully simple and you only have a few accounts – stick to one browser!

Vegard – I hope this develops our discussion further from the previous Digital Strat post.

Do you go online for your company or for yourself?  Do you keep them separate or are they the same thing? Your personal identity and your professional identity are different things although they may appear to be the same.

For example: you may be a manual therapist with your own practice and also interested in health related social media sites, or you may be an employee of a larger organisation such as publishing but also interested in developments of new technologies for publishing (or something completely unrelated).

Your work profile is one thing, your personal profile is another and keeping your personal identity is important online – what happens when you leave the company, sell the practice, change careers and retrain, if you only have one profile you will have to build up who you are online from scratch.

How does this work in practice? Some sites you join will be for your personal profile (for example my dreamingspires identity on twitter, or my blog here) is essentially for me and what I record here is a repository of information for me to go back to and refer to while I’m working, it also identifies who I am and what my interests are.

Work identities, on the other hand may change.  So if you are managing social media accounts for your ‘professional self’ or for a company keep in the back of your mind that you may leave, sell the business but still want to keep your individual identity when that happens.