Brent MacKinnon's List: SoMe-Mod 1 Strategy

socialbrite - great post on listening, monitoring

good overview of brands tracking conversations

social brite guide

another socialbrite guide and a good one at that

Process: A Pragmatic Approach to Social Business

A suite of listening tools for non profits

While companies feel compelled join the conversation now to respond to customers, they should not throw out business planning. To avoid this predicament companies should step back and approach social business like any other business program: with a plan.

What Is Community Management?
Previously I wrote examined the different roles for those who work with social media in business.   Among the many roles, the community manager is by far the most important because he or she is on the front lines of communication. Here’s how I define community manager:

My recent post How to Sell Social Media to Cynics, Skeptics and Luddites touched on the topic of metrics, measurement and ROI.  Here I’ve pulled together a collection of valuable resources, tools, & advice specifically on the topics of social media measurement, monitoring and ROI.  You’ll also find a handful of key social media statistics resources to put in your toolkit.

If your organization is participating in social media through blogs, Twitter and other social networks –and even if you’re not — it’s only a matter of time before someone rants, makes a negative comment or expresses criticism about some aspect of what you’ve said or done or stand for.

Gaurav Mishra's 4c's social media framework
My own approach to social media is both tool-agnostic and terminology-agnostic. So, I use the term social media to encompass all the tools and all the practices that are described by the terms I mentioned above.
Instead of getting distracted by the tools and the terminologies, I focus on the four underlying themes in social media, the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes constitute the value system of social media. I believe that the tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 4Cs is here to stay. So, let’s look at these 4Cs in some detail.

Before she showed me the chart, my coworker asked me why I would ‘unlike’ a brand or group on Facebook.  
I told her, “If they flood me with content or have too much ad speak, I will unfollow them.”
Low and behold, those two reasons were at the top of the list.
So stop thinking like a marketer and just be a user.  
What would YOU like to see on a facebook page?  What would get you to take a second glance at something?  Why do you follow the brands you do?

Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook are not a social media strategy. They are merely channels for your content and containers reflecting your presence. Your presence and content mean nothing to others unless you can add value to others.

wiki on social media game and variations for different sector settings etc.

Five years ago I looked at a couple of models (Rogers & Gladwell) in the Dummies Guide to Change and came up with a model on how you might be able to effect a change in a population. It wasn’t tested, it was just an idea. One of the core ideas was the law of the few, or the notion that a few key types of people help to speed social communication. As Charlene Croft puts it [looking at how Twitter is used]:

From social media to social strategy
Corporate marketers by and large struggle with how to use social networking sites to reach potential customers, says Piskorski, who advises companies on this subject. The problem is that execs think of online social networks as social media and treat it as another channel to get people to click through to a site.

great wworkshop approach and visuals

I’ve put together a general version of the social media policy that serves our company (with more than 8,000 employees) well. We make social media channels freely available to employees, but expect them to be accountable for their behavior — and their daily work.

Many companies are still overly wary of social networks when, instead, they could be leveraging their employees’ social engagement power.