Back in 2010 I blogged about the need for organisations to take a more proactive role in managing their social media assets – a few of our customers were asking what to do when they lost track of specific accounts – and at the time telling them to “Pray this doesn’t blow up in your face” didn’t go down very well.

Like a disease, social media proliferation will leave companies crippled — unless they develop a strategy to manage now – Jeremiah Owyang

Social media core channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc aren’t going away any time soon – and the problem compounds with each new service that launches (like Pinterest) or starts to go mainstream (like FourSquare).

Corporations are struggling to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts — a number likely to grow if unchecked. Beyond coordination challenges, unchecked accounts and disparate customer interactions expose brands to a host of legal, compliance, and fragmented brand-perception risks – Jeremiah Owyang

The time to act is now. We should be starting 2012 by developing a clear understanding of what is happening, what risks are evident, and what needs to be done to educate, empower, and manage.

This is the SlideShare presentation containing the report – I highly recommend you download or read it.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this topic

Whilst some of the banks are starting to do some good things around social media, it worth noting that in many respects their smaller cousins – the Mutuals – are quietly getting on with the job of using social media to create different ways of engaging with their communities. One example was bought to my attention this week and I thought it would be interesting to look into this further and contrast it to another Australian Mutual that I think is doing a pretty good job.

As Christophe Langlois pointed out recently the most liked financial institution brand in Australia is actually a credit union – CUA.

It’s impressive to see a Credit Union doing so well with over 90,000 fans. I’m sure this is creating some interesting data for them around the Facebook insights platform – the key question for mine is how this is translating into measurable results – possibly a noticeable increase in new members?

However, one of the key points I keep banging on about to Australian Mutuals is the need to make it easy for their community – members and prospective members to find and engage with their specific social channels. So whilst CUA has a lot of fans on Facebook – you wouldn’t know it if you visited their website…

Contrast this with Queenslanders CU

I’ve written about Queenslanders CU a few times and continue to be impressed with how they approach social media (clearly they’ve had some expert training!).

What’s interesting about Queenslanders CU is they do the simple things really well. This starts on their core homepage – and is reflected in every part of their social footprint.

Their Facebook welcome page is one of the best examples I’ve seen of a welcome page – simple, clear value proposition, and clear references to how else a user can engage with them – links to YouTube, their core website, Twitter, FourSquare, and LinkedIn. They also have the CEO generating blog content (see here).

Finally, they also regularly generate YouTube content – here is an example:

Probably the biggest difference between CUA and Queenslanders CU is how obvious Queenslanders make it to their community that they have multiple options to engage with them – this is key to achieving organic growth in your community – if you’re going to invest in building social channels – let people know…

It’s Sunday afternoon, around 6pm Sydney time and the data around the past 24 hours is compelling. I’ve started delving into the data looking at three basic data sets:

1. Mentions - basic keyword and phrase monitoring of relevant words such as Qantas, Alan Joyce, Qantas Grounded.
2. Media distribution – where is the conversation coming from
3. Sentiment trends – not a huge fan of this but it’s kind of fun to look at

Before

Lets look at the data around Qantas for October, for the period 1 Oct to 28 Oct.

Overall mentions:

Whilst I may be missing some data here – this seems to be capturing a fair representation of the conversation

Media Distribution:

Straight away you can see that mainstream media is dominating the pre-grounding chatter about Qantas. What’s important to note also is that the engine has classified a lot of the news.com.au and Fairfax content as blog content. So what we’re seeing is a large distribution of content via mainstream media – with some mentions coming out of the social sphere

Sentiment:

This one surprised me for a couple of reasons – not least being the clear positive/negative breakout. In my experience, this engine really struggles with Australian slang and sarcasm so this level of clear categorisation is really surprising.

After the grounding announcement

Now lets look at the data for the last two days

Overall Mentions

Note this scale is the whole month. The reason I’ve done this is to show you the scale of the past two days. If you refer back to the earlier mentions diagram, that scale of social media traffic is now represented by the flat line…

This is called going nuclear…

Media Distribution:

Another profound change in the situation. We’ve gone from mainstream media running “noise” to the community exploding into voice. I’ve tracked a lot of issues over the past 3-4 years – and none of them has undergone such a massive change in where the discussion is based in such a short period

Sentiment:

This one surprised me also but in reality I think what we’re seeing here is an engine that doesn’t know how to measure the convergence of emotion and written text.

I’d delve deeper into the green and yellow but the volume of data is such that it’d take me a week or more to get a rough feel for the situation.

What can we conclude from this?

It’s still early days but my initial thoughts are from watching the data unfold is that the three enterprise stakeholders – Qantas, Federal Government, Unions, are all badly managing this situation. There is way too much “message management” and zero engagement.

This will be the topic of my next post – a slap for these three parties as they’ve dropped the ball badly.

The fact is, there is no right or wrong answer to the question.

My perspective as a business owner, executive educator, and social media practitioner is that CEO’s should focus on being the leader of the business – understand the value that Twitter might provide, empower your team, but you don’t necessarily need to be using Twitter.

Whilst there’s no right or wrong answer let me give you some context for both sides of the argument.

Why Would You?

1. You have an existing high media profile as the leader or public face of the organisation
2. You work in a specific industry where Twitter has a high penetration
3. You’re an acknowledged thought leader in your industry and Twitter gives you the channel to communicate and engage with specific communities
4. The fun, real time communication part of Twitter appeals to you – you don’t mind being “out there”

Why Wouldn’t You?

1. You’re not the brand
2. You’re an inherently private person
3. As a leader, you’ve delegated responsibility to a team or team member
4. There’s no demonstrable value for your business because of your industry
5. You get Twitter, but you’ve got more productive things to do with your time

If you find someone from marketing or your communications group is pushing you to be on Twitter – don’t be afraid to push back or to say no.

The world’s not going to end if you don’t participate.

One final point.

If you don’t personally want to use Twitter – that’s fine – just make sure you take the time to understand how and why Twitter “could” benefit your business – encourage your team to experiment, to look for innovative ways of engaging with your community.

Leaders aren’t road blocks

Join me on Monday 31 October for a webinar where I’ll be discussing this topic and inviting audience feedback. Details are here

To help companies understand these recent changes I’ll be running a 45min webinar to discuss these changes, show what users need to do so as to start using the new feature.

The webinar details are here – Tuesday October 18 – 10am (AEDT) and Friday October 21 – 11am (AEDT)

The changes are relatively straightforward but significant in their potential. The 45minute session will allow plenty of time for attendees to ask questions.

I’m impressed at how this field of social media is starting to grow. It’s clearly still in it’s infancy, but as location based services continue to grow (and as the battle for this space heats up) I think those that move early in AR are going to find themselves in a pretty nice space.

A couple of ideas have stood out for me recently, particularly in relation to events and exhibitions.

I was watching this YouTube video from Hidden Creative and it struck me immediately that what they are showing here is the future of how an event organiser will plan and layout events.

We could take this a step further

Why give someone attending an exhibition a static map of the event?

Why not do what Layar is demonstrating here and either embed the exhibition into a Layar vision?

Allow the visitor to use their smart phone to scan the event and plan their own way around? Or better yet, allow them to pick out who they want to engage with and pre-book time to talk to someone on a stand! Why do we need to wait around to talk to the exhibitor when we could dynamically map our way around an event?

Given the built in social connectors, this type of social interaction actually helps the organisers, the exhibitors, and the visitor to achieve better value from an event.

As I noted on the weekend, I was looking forward to hearing Marcus as I’ve long argued that corporate culture and old school face to face communication skills are being pushed aside in the rush to “be social” – so I was keen to hear Marcus’s perspective on what business leaders need to be doing so as to build an engaged workforce in this social age.

Marcus made many excellent points in his presentation – many of them being simple and obvious – yet points we often need to hear again and again.

The first key take home for me was the importance of the leader in terms of how their actions ultimately determine what behaviours and what culture manifests itself inside a company. This is critical. We rush to tell companies to be social, we talk about building tribes, fans, followers, but as Marcus noted, 80-90% of behaviour (of employees) is influenced by three key factors:

1. What the leader attends to, measures, rewards, and controls
2. Leader reaction to critical incidents
3. Leader role modelling, coaching

But How We Communicate is Changing – Don’t We Need to Change How We Lead?

In a nutshell – No!

Recalling what Marcus talked about got me thinking about how General Douglas MacArthur led the Allied troops in World War 2. His actions, his beliefs, his desire to be a leader meant he achieved more from his “team” than anyone expected.

We’ve got all these new ways of communicating in real time, with one or many other parties involved – we’ve got dozens of shiny new mobile devices that allow us to solve the problems of the world via our finger tips.

But…

We’re setting ourselves up to fail if we haven’t got the right leadership and right leadership behaviours on display.

This is one of the core benefits I realise from being a TEC member – learning from other leaders, being able to digest the ideas from global experts like Marcus Child means I can develop and understanding of this and use this to frame my role as a leader.

I’m looking forward to hearing Marcus on this topic as I believe culture and true employee engagement is being lost in the noise, the hype of social media. If you’re a business leader, CEO, SME business owner then I’d recommend registering for the event in your nearest city. Here are the dates

• Perth – Monday September 12
• Brisbane – Wednesday September 14
• Adelaide – Friday September 16
• Melbourne – Monday September 19
• Sydney – Wednesday September 21
• Auckland – Friday September 23

Registration details for All TEC Day are here

What Are We Doing Wrong?

I’ve summarised my frustrations into 5 key categories:

1. Spam – this is a universal problem, not limited to LinkedIn. I often wonder whether the users who jump in and spam a group understand the damage they are doing to their personal brand – or whether they care.
2. Using topics and download offers to harvest email addresses – a lot of legitimate lead generation taking place on LinkedIn, but there’s also those who use a hot topic or a download offer to harvest email addresses. In most cases the content on offer is either very poor or barely related to what was originally offered. If you want to use a topic as a lead generation tool then do it properly – don’t say “if you’d like a copy of the Guide let me know and I’ll email one out to you”
3. Useless Posts – this is very common. A user will post a link or make a statement – and that’s it…no suggestion of what the user is trying to achieve, no call for discussion, nothing. Time and kilobytes we won’t get back
4. Poor Group Management – many groups fall into disarray because the group owner either loses interest in a topic or fails to establish/maintain group discipline. If I look back at the groups I’ve left this year poor group management would account for 90% of the reasons why.
5. The Group is a Personal Promotional Tool – this is an issue around emerging business trends, and regional groups – a group is created around an emerging topic (i.e. cloud computing) and becomes a personal promotional tool for the group owner and close associates.

What Can We Do Better

I spent some time looking through the Groups that I’m a member of and I identified a number of key points that will guide both group managers and those who wish to start discussions towards better, more compelling use of Groups. There are 3 key areas where we can do better:

1. Discussion or topic name
2. Discussion Details and links
3. Expectation management

I Want to Start a Discussion – What should I focus on?

1. Discussion Name

Like the title of a blog post, the discussion name should be compelling. LinkedIn gives you 200 characters to use – use them well

Don’t mislead with the topic name. I find it infuriating when I click into a discussion only to find the topic is a cover for self-promotion or is unrelated to the actual content or intent

2. Discussion Details + using links

This part of the discussion area is where you the creator can outline why you’ve started the discussion, your thoughts etc. LinkedIn gives you 3,950 characters to use – so tell us what you are thinking (please..!)

If you want to link off to external content use the link box. Note that you need to use a native URL, not a shortened link. Note also, once you include a link you then have the option to edit the summary text of the link. By default, LinkedIn will pick up part or all of the first paragraph of the link – if this summary doesn’t communicate the link content well then use edit to change the summary.

3. Expectation Management

As I noted above, tell other members of the Group why you’ve started the discussion.

If you’re going to do a bit of self-promotion – flag it early. I don’t mind others doing this – but I want to know up front

If you want to start a discussion then ask users for feedback or to add to the discussion

If it’s an FYI post then say so – at least then I won’t be offended if I leave a comment on your post only for you to never engage.

4. Finally – Group Owners

Please be diligent in managing a group and communicating its purpose. If you’re struggling to maintain a high standard then ask some of the regular contributors to help out and assign then manager rights.

Summary

I hope these points help all of us realise value from this invaluable resource – lets not kill the golden goose. Groups need creators, contributors, and consumers of the content to be effective.

As always I’m interested in your feedback or any points you feel I may have missed.

The blog post that seemed to end up in my inbox the most was this one from Steve at Connection Agent. It seemed the storm clouds were brewing for LinkedIn

As a keen user of LinkedIn I was aware these changes were coming and once the new features went live I did uncheck this box and was advising friends etc to do the same.

Why?

At the heart of these changes was the use of the company follow feature to indicate some form of endorsement of an advertiser or their product.

I follow 73 companies – but does this mean I endorse them? Absolutely not!

Has LinkedIn Done Wrong?

First of all, I do not believe LinkedIn set out to do anything malicious, nor was trying to slip through a privacy change unannounced – as I noted above I was aware these changes were coming – though my alertness may be due to the fact I’m a keen observer of LinkedIn due to the public workshops I run on the product – I’m seen plenty of comments that indicate these changes caught many by surprise.

Secondly, given how quickly the issue rose up I personally thought LinkedIn would take action, a point I made to fellow TEC member (and leading digital marketing expert) Tim Martin on Friday via email:

I suspect LI will probably change this overnight given how quickly it’s spreading…

And that’s exactly what has happened. LinkedIn reacted and quickly made a number of small but significant changes to social ads.

I suggest you read this update post from LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky

Has this changed my perspective?

Actually Yes.

Based on what I read in Ryan Roslansky’s post I’m comfortable with how this feature is now structured and as such I’ve gone back into settings and checked this box.

What Should You Do?

If you have a conservative position in terms of privacy I’d recommend you review how this option is currently set with a view to ensuring the specific box is unchecked.

I’ve outlined the steps to do this here. This post will explain where to go to review whether social ads participation is checked or unchecked.

Remember:

Privacy is your domain. LinkedIn gives you great flexibility in how you manage your privacy settings.

If you’ve got any follow up questions, feel free to use comments to post them or alternatively – reach out via LinkedIn here