What is your company doing to put you on the social web?

August 17, 2010 – 11:22 am | 170 views

Depending on what statistics you believe, somewhere between 75% and 90% of U.S. companies severely limit or altogether exclude employee participation on the social web. And while there should certainly be guidelines in place for any employee activity that occurs during company time, we feel the benefits of unleashing “employee power” far outweigh the risks.

Maybe it’s time to ask your company why it’s not supporting employee engagement and learning through social networks.  Companies using the social web in the right way share three best practices:

Social media policy.  An effective policy should accomplish two things. First, it should mitigate risk and provide clear guidelines for engagement.  But it should also be a document that encourages employees to explore and grow in a responsible manner.

Reasonable security — Corporate security and IT integrity is paramount and cannot be compromised. Still, there are smart ways to manage the firewall for the social web without compromising trade secrets or putting the company at risk.

Training — Instead of having employees fumble around, why not train them to be highly-effective users of social networks?  For example, a systematic approach to workforce branding on LinkedIn can become a competitive weapon for your commercial efforts, but not without a coordinated effort. Similarly, training on how to  handle competitive issues, how to represent the company appropriately, and tips and time-savers all can help your company gain competitive advantage through effectively corralling the social web.

How is your company approaching responsible use of the social web?

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By admin | Posted in B2B marketing, Business strategy, Information management, Social media policies | Comments (0)

Are you using Slideshare as a company social platform?

August 11, 2010 – 5:27 pm | 1,007 views

Everybody has PowerPoint slides right?  The “PowerPoint Meeting” is almost a standing corporate joke.  Well, have you thought about putting those slide to work for you on the social web?

Try Slideshare, a very simple tool to leverage your internal content externally.

It’s exceedingly easy to upload a presentation in a matter of minutes and apply keywords to help people find you.  For maximum exposure sync your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts with Slideshare.  .

For those who are environmentally-minded, Slideshare makes it easy to distribute and share without feeling guilty over how many trees you just killed at the copier.  And if the content is confidential, then create a group on LinkedIn or Facebook and limit your exposure to just your exclusive audience. There are also password security features within Slideshare.

Although many are familiar with the uploading of presentations or documents in such formats as PowerPoint, Word, and PDF, embedding videos and audio can create a complete shareable webinar.  There are some excellent reasons to embed video in your presentations:

  • Great for demonstrating a particular technique when words fall short.
  • Compare different styles or ideas such as comparing Oprah’s interviewing style to Ellen DeGeneres’s or comparing a Ford television ad to a BMW one.  Get the picture?
  • Incorporate interviews or clips of videos related to your topic downloaded from YouTube.
  • Draw attention and captivate to maintain momentum in a presentation.

Slideshare is designed to PUSH your presentation or documents out to the world,  whereas posting them on your website, viewers have to be driven to your site. Slideshare also has social features like “favorite-ing” and commenting. You also have the option to allow viewer to download or embed your presentation.

In one recent case study, an analyst report received 85 percent of its downloads from the Slideshare posting, an indication of a growing acceptance of the site as a corporate communications channel.

Slideshare is getting noticed in larger companies, too, even those with regulatory constraints that might otherwise shy away from social media.  Using this platform organizations are able to share information, such as annual reports and press annoucements.  Pfizer recently launched its own Slideshare channel.

With the growing popularity of this site, it’s likely that these presentations will feature more and more in search engine results too.  So put those slides to work folks!  Give Slideshare a try.

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By admin | Posted in Slideshare | Comments (0)

Why every company must take advantage of the “University of Twitter”

August 9, 2010 – 10:57 am | 485 views

I was catching up on some reading and had an epiphany about the important role Twitter is playing as a competitive advantage for my company. While looking through an in-depth “special report” on social media marketing in an international journal, I found that I was already aware of 95% of the information in the article.

It was not that the magazine had done a poor job on the piece — it was actually quite thorough.  My insight was that  the reason I was on top of the news was — Twitter.

By surrounding myself on Twitter with a meaningful group of people who are thought leaders in business, sales and marketing, I’m constantly seeing links to the greatest sources of business insight on the planet.  I’m being educated slowly but surely each and every day.

For companies, there is an important implication for this constant stream of free information.

What role can Twitter play within the structure of a corporate training department? More than 75% of Fortune 500 companies have some sort of filter in place to keep employees from languishing in Farmville for hours at a time but they’re also missing out on the most powerful training opportunity on Earth –  The University of Twitter.

Let’s say I was working at a company who encouraged me to tune in to the social web every day. How would this create competitive advantage over a competitor who filtered this from employees?

  1. I would probably be much be better informed than my competitor
  2. I would know the market and industry information I need to excel in my job faster than my competition
  3. My training and development would be taking place every day instead of in some quarterly meeting
  4. The content coming at me would be extremely targeted to fill my information needs at this precise point in time.
  5. The cost of my daily “training” would be near-zero compared to formal classroom experiences
  6. I can engage in continuous learning during normal down times like waiting for a meeting to begin or even being in a queue at the airport. My training has become ubiquitous and mobile!

So what aren’t more companies taking advantage of this critical opportunity?

The first reason is a lack of understanding of what the social web is all about. Unless company executives are really immersed to the point of epiphany they’ll continue to view Twitter as something trivial and irrelevant. Undoubtedly, competitive advantage can come through understanding!

The second reason is fear. There are a lot of temptations on the social web, to be sure. But there are also a lot of temptations to abuse expense accounts, travel privileges and customer entertainment. How do companies safeguard against those opportunities to abuse? Company policies.

A well-written social media policy should explain both the benefits of engagement and the consequences for abuse.

The extraordinary benefits of learning from the social web is just too great to be ignored.  At the speed of business today, every company should be taking advantage of the truly meaningful lessons of daily “training” through Twitter University.

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By Nathan Egan | Posted in Careers, Information management, Social media policies, Time management, twitter | Comments (1)

Non-profits lead the way in social media deployment

August 4, 2010 – 4:06 pm | 1,084 views

We’ve had an opportunity to work with a number of non-profit organizations and it’s always energizing to see their enthusiasm for social media. A new study from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research may show why. Non-profits are adopting the use of social media much more rapidly than their corporate counterparts.

The new study compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007, 2008 and 2009 by the 200 largest charities in the United States. And for the third consecutive year, the research shows that non-profits are deploying social tools more rapidly and more broadly than Fortune 500 giants, small companies, and even universities.

According to the latest study, a remarkable 97% of the non-profits report using some social media tool. Social networking sites like Facebook (96%) and Twitter (90%) are now the most common tools used.

There is big news in blogging. While the Fortune 500, the Inc. 500, US colleges and universities and charities have all increased their adoption of blogging between 2007 and 2009, charities are “out-blogging” them all for the third year in a row. The Fortune 500 had the least amount of blogs at 22% adoption, the Inc. 500 with 45%, colleges and universities blogging at 51% and charities now reporting 65% with blogs.

And of those charities without blogs, 56% said they planned to add one in the future.

Podcasting was another big-gainer, up 10% to 36%.  Curiously, the use of video blogging, which was the fastest-growing social media tool between 2007 and 2008, took a substantial dive in usage, from nearly 80% top about 50%. Quite surprising given the popularity of video and YouTube right now.

Charities also report a higher presence on Facebook (93%) and MySpace (30%) than other sectors.

It is clear that not-for-profits are now communicating in new ways and they’re listening too. Sixty-six percent of respondents in 2007 and 75% in 2008 reported they monitor the Internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their organization. A remarkable 93% now report regular monitoring. Most of these organizations realize the importance of knowing what conversation might occur around their cause, their name, their location or constituents.

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By Nathan Egan | Posted in Business strategy, Non-profits and social media, research | Comments (3)

Fun with profile photos

August 2, 2010 – 3:54 pm | 338 views

We wanted to show off a little fun Patrick Baynes had creating a new profile photo with the help of our intern Katelyn Davis.

In the span of literally 10 minutes, Patrick took a couple of random shot of himself and let Katelyn experiment with Photoshop.  The results are pretty impressive.

With content blasting at us from all directions, you need to look for every edge you can. We recently wrote about the need to approach your Linked-in profile as more of an opportunity to tell your story instead of a glorified resume.  Even your photo, as we show here, can be used to express personality and help cut through the clutter of most social media platforms.

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By Nathan Egan | Posted in Personal brand | Comments (0)