Social media strategy. To implement social media properly you need a plan. This is the first video in a series that will discuss social media strategy. The strategy process involves seven steps listed below the video. This entire series will discuss each of these steps in greater detail.

Social Media Strategy: The 7 Steps

1. Determine purpose
2. Choose the platform
3. Integrate and enhance
4. Set the budget
5. Sell the idea
6. Implement
7. Measure

I am going to start vlogging. I’ll be publishing on both YouTube and Viddler to reach two different audiences. When I do produce a video, I’ll post it here on the blog as well.

My vlogging topics will be:

• Leadership
• Business
• Social Media
• Organizational Issues
• and other items of interest to me (which I hope will also be of interest to you)

My first video is below. I turned my blog post ‘Top 10 reasons to ban social media access at work‘ into a video. I hope you enjoy. The style of all my videos will likely be the same. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. Enjoy!

Please note: This video and my previous post about banning social media are sarcastic rants. I actually believe organizations should embrace, not block social media.

I was randomly messing around on YouTube last night after conducting a webinar and noticed a news item that read “1080p Launches”. That’s right, YouTube is going from 720p to full 1080p HD starting “next week” (December 20th I assume). I applauded YouTube’s move to widescreen, HQ, and eventually 720p HD. YouTube raises the bar and I again, applaud their efforts.

I urge you to take a look at the Toy Story 3 trailer and go full screen. It is amazing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f-MYl-HzNw

Though I welcome the move to 1080p HD, I hope that their servers can handle the load. I have a fairly fast home connection and a peppy laptop but I find playing HD videos on YouTube is an exercise in patience. The HD videos load slowly, buffer, and skip.

I’ll admit that there were no issues watching the Toy Story 3 trailer in full 1080p HD. So I hope that is a good omen of what to expect from YouTube.

Tweeting great content is essential to gain followers on Twitter and engaging your audience. The question is, how do you find great content to tweet? Look no further. Here are a few ways to find great content.

1. Business Exchange by Business Week

Though not a robust social media platform, I’ve found wonderful, tweetable, content on Business Exchange. The home page presents you with a cadre of topic areas including the Banking Industry, Business Innovations, Social Media Marketing, and even MBA Admissions. Click on a topic and there is a list of articles submitted by Business Exchange users. I’ve found the content quite good.

2. Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Reddit

I use Digg more than any of these other social bookmark sharing sites because the content is well organized. I’m interested in tweeting content about business, the economy, social media, and innovation. Digg let’s me go right to those categories and browse what’s available. StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, and others are okay at listing what’s trending and hot at the moment but I find their categories unorganized.

3. Subscribe to great RSS feeds

Subscribe to your favorite blogs and news sites via RSS. You can download an RSS news reader or simply use Google’s newsreader. You’re newsreader will give you the latest content from every feed you subscribe to. If you see something interesting, tweet it out!

4. Google News

Google news serves up-to-the-minute content from major media outlets. I like the way the content is organized and enjoy the newsworthiness of all the articles.

5. Facebook and LinkedIn

You can’t rely on Facebook or LinkedIn for consistent Twitter content but I’ve had friends post articles on their wall that I’ve tweeted on multiple occasions. So, pay attention to what your friends and contacts are posting. You might find a great nugget of wisdom to share on Twitter.

6. YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo

Most of the folks I follow on Twitter don’t tweet video content. I’m not sure why. I love video and enjoy watching great quality, relevant video to my area of interest or job responsibilities. You can subscribe to users on YouTube, Viddler, and Vimeo who produce video you like. If they publish a great video, tweet it. You can also search these sites for video content.

7. Newsletters in your email

Pay attention to those newsletters you get in your email. Most companies, educational institutions, research foundations, and bloggers produce weekly, monthly or quarterly newsletters. Subscribe to them and read them! Oftentimes the content in these newsletters is not found easily on their respective websites or blogs. So, if you see something interesting in the newsletter, click the link to read more and then tweet that article.

 There are many more ways to find tweetworthy articles but these are some of the ones I use. Share yours in the comments below.

I’ve always wanted a button on this blog that would allow readers to share articles on Facebook, Twitter, or any of a dozen or more other social media sites. The problem was I wanted one WordPress plugin that would allow me to select which networks I wanted use. I use WordPress and was hoping for a simple plugin. Though I feel comfy playing around with code, I didn’t want the headaches.

After scouring Google and experimenting with some abysmal plugins, I came across Richard X. Tripp’s Tweet This WordPress plugin. This plugin does more than just tweet your blog entries. You can setup the plugin to share your blog content on Plurk, Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Myspace, Ping, Reddit, StumbledUpon and of course, Twitter. The installation and setup were radically simple.

Installation:

1. Download the Tweet This .zip file.
2. Run the .zip file and install it in the plugins directory (push it to your server).
3. Login to WordPress and click the ‘Plugins’ link on the left side.
4. Find the ‘Tweet This’ plugin and click ‘Activate’.
5. Scroll down and click ‘Settings’ on the left side of the page.
6. The ‘Settings’ will expand and you’ll see ‘Tweet This’ listed. Click ‘Tweet This’.

At this point you’ll be presented with a page to customize the Tweet This plugin. At first all you see are options for Twitter. Click on ‘Extended Services’ and you’ll see a plethora of other social networks you can add to your blog. This page is pretty self explainatory but for detailed instructions reference the Richard X. Tripp’s Tweet This page.

Tweet This screenshot. Click for full image:

Unfortunately it looks like Mr. Tripp will not be updating this any longer. His page states, “Sorry guys, I’m not planning any more updates to Tweet This. I don’t feel like coding anymore… I’ve gotten lazy.” At least he left us a great plugin and I hope he resurfaces to continue to maintain and improve this awesome plugin.

 You can see the buttons right here below.

I was reading a Wall Street Journal online article titled, For Companies, a Tweet in Time Can Avert PR Mess. It is a great article about how organizations can avert or at least smooth over PR related issues using social media. In the article, I saw a quote I want to bring to your attention.

“Some companies are training staffers to broaden their social-media efforts. At Ford, Mr. Monty plans to soon begin teaching employees how to use sites like Twitter to represent the company and interact with consumers.

Coca-Cola Co. is preparing a similar effort, which initially will be limited to marketing, public affairs and legal staffers. Participants will be authorized to post to social media on Coke’s behalf without checking with the company’s PR staff, says Adam Brown, named Coke’s first head of social media in March.”
from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124925830240300343.html

In my last post, Social Media in the Organization: Embrace it. Don’t Block it!, I mention this specifically. Organization must embrace social media and show employees how to use it to do their jobs more effectively. Ford and Coke “get it”!

And take a look at this article. It appears that Employees using Facebook and Twitter at work are 9% more productive.

I was recently interviewed by Andy Rosen of the Daily Record for his article ‘Lockheed Martin is getting social – with a private network’. According to the article, Lockheed has created its own, internal social network and just recently re-opened access to Facebook. I wanted to delve a bit deeper into this topic and give my thoughts regarding social media usage within organizations.

Companies need to embrace social media…not fight it.

Some companies might feel the need to ban social media entirely. Watching YouTube, checking a friend’s status update on Facebook, or tweeting about a trending topic is a waste of valuable work time, right? Perhaps, but managers need to look beyond the “loafing” aspect of social media and begin to embrace its business potential.

Organizations need to be smart and view social media as a tool to gain a competitive advantage. Social media can provide a wealth of knowledge to employees tapped into the correct networks. Employers benefit from employees who read blogs or are on Twitter reading tweets relevant to their job. It helps them enhance their knowledge base. For example, a software developer might need to troubleshoot a problem. He or she can tweet the issue to his or her followers and obtain technical assistance. This saves time and money. A sales rep can read blogs from a sales guru like Jeffrey Gitomer and gain really great insight (try www.salescaffeine.com/)

Teach employees how to harness its power

If used correctly, social media can be a great tool for employee productivity. The question is, how can companies focus employee’s efforts to use social media tools for business effectiveness? Teach them! For example, an organization should hold seminars on how to leverage social media. Customize the training for various departments. Here are a few ideas:

• Teach the sales department how to tap into sales networks to increase sales (LinkedIn and Spoke come to mind). 
• Teach accountants how to leverage social media to help them become better accountants. The Maryland Association of CPAs is on twitter (@macpa). In my opinion, every accountant in Maryland should be following them on Twitter.
• Teach HR professionals how to leverage Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Show IT development staff which social media can help them resolve technical issues faster than random troubleshooting or calling the tech support line (which can be pricey these days).
• Post training videos on YouTube.
• Have the CEO (or boss) blog like Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson publishers and CEO social media  ”rock star”

In his article, Social media gets the job done at work, Devin Dwyer interviews a few IBM managers. IBM is embracing social media. According to the article, half of U.S. companies ban “blogs and online communities”. In my opinion, this is incredibly short cited. One of the IBM managers states,

“Do companies ban people from going to the water cooler to talk? Of course they don’t. But they choose to ban tools of social media, because they’re scared of them or because they don’t understand them.”

Sure, there will be employees who goof off and spend two hours looking at photos on Flickr or playing Mafia Wars on Facebook. However, these same employees would likely be wasting time doing something else if they did not have access to Flickr or Facebook. Most employees want to do a good job and will use social media in productive ways if expectations are set and they are taught how to use them. If a sales person can gain five additional sales a quarter using a social network, that’s worth the time he or she might spend watching the latest viral YouTube video.

Should companies build their own internal social networks?

I think it is great that organizations are implementing internal social networks. I think they can help build community, leverage knowledge across the organization, and employees might be able to collaborate more effectively using internal social media tools. However, internal knowledge can only go so far and I think employers should use an internal / external strategy. Train employees how best to use the internal social network and how to best leverage the external social networks as well.