Casman Blog

I did a short, informal talk yesterday with a government group interested in finding out more about social media. Should their agency should be taking advantage of social media? I’ve been caught up in how and how often for so long, it was refreshing to re-examine the why. It was a wide-ranging discussion and this post reflects that.

I roughly defined social media as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs. I acknowledge this as clearly over-simplified.

Why should a company utilize social media?

1. “Just doing” social media to look up-to-date is NOT a good enough reason to start. However, creating a corporate social media presence online is so common it is almost required. Almost. Can you imagine a company without a webpage? We’re close to that with social media. One important caveat: My clients are high-tech companies. If you’re in government, agriculture, or other more conservative sectors this obviously varies.

2. “Old PR” (keeping an announcement secret until the last moment, trying to create a big bang of coverage) still works. Suprise! Print is dying, and the traditional press release may go the way of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) at some point. But old PR still drives significant coverage. However, the COMBINATION of old PR and social media has a bigger effect for clients. SourceForge, in a lead-up to its annual Open Source Awards event, released multiple press releases which helped attract news and blog attention. Twitter was used to promote related items like a tattoo giveaway program. And YouTube was leveraged to push out interviews from well-known open source technologists. The result was more than a 10x increase in interest from 2007 to 2008. Do BOTH.

3. Twitter has at least three audiences built in. First, your potential customers. Second, and very important, media that pays attention to your sector. And, third, your current customers who have support issues. It’s rare when you can contact disparate audiences in one place.

4. Twitter, in particular, is “lightweight” and allows a company to have a constant conversation that does not require major research or editing skills.

Part of assessing why is assessing risk. What are the potential problems and pitfalls with creating a corporate social media presence online?

1. If you don’t have something interesting to say, it doesn’t matter how social media-ized you are. No story, no interest. I cannot emphasize this enough.

2. Your young employees will ALL be comfortable being online, sharing information with friends, using Facebook and YouTube. These are valuable skills, but managing a private account is different from running a corporate one. Corporate accounts do best when they are focused around specific activities over a defined time period. Plat’Home, a maker of small, eco-friendly Linux computers, staged a month-long contest to test their hardware in strange and challenging environments. Announcements and a countdown atmosphere helped to stoke interest and coverage.

3. A constant conversation has to be, well, constant. Letting a corporate blog fade — not updating it for extended periods — is painful public proof that your company is not active. Low-level, steady activity is better than long silences.

4. What’s your appropriate “voice”? In other words, how will your company present itself? Stiff, one-way communication is best avoided; open and honest and interactive is expected. If your corporate voice tends towards stiffer, consider utilizing employee accounts to handle more human interactions. SourceForge has used this to great effect on Twitter. The main account put out information and announcements while the community manager responded to complaints or other smaller issues. Extremely positive outcomes from the community manager engagements almost always ended in a positive result. And the official corporate account could focus on being informative.

Let’s say you’ve evaluated the above items and you still think your organization should use social media. How do you gather followers and supporters?

1. Most important, bar none, is having something interesting to say. And I mean interesting to OTHER PEOPLE. Your customers, your investors, heck, even your competitors. Is your organization doing something that someone cares about? Is it unique? Is it helpful? Think about what you will say, how it connects to hot trends, how timely it is, how insightful it is. Get that right and building followers will be much easier.

2. Use “elbow grease.” You need to spend some time actually using the service. You need to find people who share the same interests. Competitors, well-known reporters and bloggers who cover the space, enthusiasts. Start interacting with them. Give them some good info, ask them some real questions. How to find them? Some suggestions on Twitter search tools are here.

3. If you want to be the news you have to read the news. PR companies build Media Lists of contacts appropriate for a certain company or announcement. A big part of the list may come from previous connections. But at least some are brand new. The best PR firms will spend time and effort READING and getting familiar with new reporter and blogger targets. Does it appear that they would even care about your company? Have they written on related trends? Competitors? Send them information on something that they care about and would want to find out more about, and guess what? You might get written up. Send them a template press release without even knowing if it’s something they cover… well, your results will reflect your lack of understanding.

4. Quality is, in most cases, much more important than quantity. For the average Silicon Valley startup, the Media List should have 50 - 70 targets, probably. And you’ll really care about 10 - 15 of them. But those pubs you’ll know a lot about, read often, comment on, maybe, and hopefully you’ll build a relationship with them over time. Do that, and you’ll get coverage and followers.

Thanks very much to the team yesterday in bringing up these topics and asking great questions! Good luck with your social media decisions in 2010 and beyond.