Corporate Social Media Amplified!

One of trends for 2013 will be “Amplification”. The times that companies and people rely on asking others to redistribute their posts and messages is over.  Just like with email, you as a fan are getting too many messages and notifications (many of you are turning them off) and thus ignoring these requests.

As more and more of the employees are becoming active on social media, companies are realizing that they are low hanging fruit when it comes to brand ambassadorship.  They want to enlist them as ambassadors and are setting up awareness sessions in the hope these employees will actually help spread the word.  .

Companies are also looking for new ways to get their messages promoted. Help is on the way in form of Social Media Amplification Applications.  The concept is simple: Leverage employees, partners, customers and fans to share your company’s social media messages on your behalf.  The objective is to drive traffic to websites, campaign or blogs to generate leads.

How does it work?

Step 1: Find amplication application

There are a number of these applications available today.  I predict that there will be more coming in 2013.  GaggleAMP, SocialSeeder, Spread.US and Socialtoaster are in the forefront today.  For more details, see below.

Step 2: Recruit fans

You will invite and recruit fans, influencers and employees to join your distribution community.  You might have to implement some form of gamification (2^nd trends for 2013) in order for them to join your circle of amplifiers.

Step 3: Create Messages

Create the content you want to get distributed through the community. And make it easy for your amplifiers to distribute it in their social networks

Step 4: Amplication Process

The amplification application will inform by email (or other forms) your community there are messages ready for distribution.  The amplifiers then can select which messages they distribute in which social network.

Step 5: Monitor & analyze

As with any campaign, you need to monitor the process, analyze the results and fine-tune your next steps. Continue to engage your community of amplifiers.

Who are some players?

GaggleAMP, US based company, is the social marketing platform that lets companies amplify their social media reach by leveraging individual employees, customers and partners. (source GaggleAMP)

GaggleAMP empowers a company’s stakeholders (both internal and external – employees, customers, constituents etc.) to promote synchronized messages across social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Users can share these messages on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn automatically, by e-mail notification or from the website thus giving the user full control of what is getting shared where.  The gamification option makes this tool more engaging.

In addition to the message amplification, GaggleAMP provides a myriad of unique analytics about how the messages perform in the various social media networks including message reach, clicks, comments, Likes, shares, re-tweets and more.

Pricing starts at $25/month for 50 messages shared.  There is a 7 day free trail period.

More info: http://www.gaggleamp.com

SocialSeeder, a Belgian company, unlocks the power of your true influencers.

As a company tapping into the potential of social media your holy grail is to find and identify super influencers to quickly spread news and create a buzz on new products & services.

SocialSeeder facilitates employees, clients, fans, partners & other influencers to seed the messages you want to bring across via social media and allows to measure the impact in full detail through a personalised dashboard. (Source – SocialSeeder).

SocialSeeder, is focusing on Social Media Campaigns.  You start by creating your list of amplifiers (Influencers & Ambassadors).  You follow this up with the creation of campaign which will result in an email being created where you ask the amplifiers to distribute via the networks of their choice (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or even email). The user has full control of which message gets distributed where.

A comprehensive number of statistics are available to both track each amplifier and message amplification by platform and hits.

Pricing starts at 25€ per campaign/month.

More info: http://www.socialseeder.com

SocialToaster, a US based company, allows an organization to recruit supporters to help automatically create word-of-mouth referrals and traffic through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. (Source – Socialtoaster).

SocialToaster amplifies corporate messaging on brands’ social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn), proving that there is immense value in social media engagement. Loyal fans of a brand called ‘Super Fans’ are mobilized with an email whenever the brand has blog postings, events, articles, or promotions for them to promote. With just one click, Super Fans share the brand’s content with peers across all of their selected social networking sites. The visibility of the message increases exponentially as the content is shared. (Source Socialtoaster)

Socialtoaster allows you to run in the cloud and on your own servers.  Other interesting features are gamification and viral recruitment formulas.

Pricing starts at $399/month.

More info: http://www.socialtoaster.com

Spread.us,, US based company, is a twitter-only tool that allows you to promote campaigns and blog posts. It enables website readers to automatically share and distribute newly published content from their favorite content or blog on Twitter. (source: Spread.us).

First you enlist the support of your supporters by inviting them.  You then create the perfect tweet which will get distributed automatically via their accounts.  Then you track the performance of the post through a number of statistics.  The biggest drawback of this tool is the lack of control on the user’s side.  Opting out is the list only option for the end user to stop tweets being posted through his/her account.

Pricing starts at $0 for up to 5 subscribers.  Between 6 to 25 subscribers (fans) you will pay $4/month with variable pricing if fans increase or decrease.

More info: http://www.spread.us

I am sure there are other programs out there.  So if you know of any please let me know and I will add them in my next review cycle.

What are your thoughts on these applications?  Good thing or not?

I look forward to your reactions, comments, feedback and input.

Participation – Amplification – Gamification

This is the time when everyone creates a list of things that were or things that will be.  Normally, I do not participate in this ritual but this year I  can’t stop myself.  The reason being that the lists I am seeing are so out there in terms of predictions that I want to bring back to pragmatism to 2013.  I see 5 major trends for 2013 and here they are!

Participation - Now that Facebook has reached over 1 billion members, it is fair to assume that in Belgium we will round the cape of 5 million in 2013.  With LinkedIn having 187 million users, we will pass the 1.5 million users in Belgium in 2013.  However, I am predicting a boom of twitter usage in Belgium with thanks to the traditional media. Inspirational is the radio with programs such as #hautekiet or #touché, TV with the hashtag #7dag or #SODD, and traditional magazines such as Flair, Humo and many more.  Slowly they are driving consumers to Twitter and thus comes the explosion of number of users.  I think we could be looking at 2.5 million accounts with 1 million active users by the end of the year.

Amplification – Many companies are setting up company accounts on social media but they are struggling to get the following they would like to have.  However, they are forgetting the “untapped potential” they are sitting on.  A fair amount of their employees is active on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) during and after working hours (survey Vanguard Leadership October 2012).  Unfortunately, they rarely follow, like or support their company on social media.  And these would be the best ambassadors for your company.  Remember the old days when they were motivated to recommend their company to their friends in the real world…

Companies are taking notice and we are seeing that large companies are running “awareness sessions” for their employees with a number of goals in mind: provide information about the general use of social media, explain the social media policy but mostly to ask employees to become social media ambassadors for their companies.  This leads to another trends for 2013, the introduction of social media “amplification software”.  These software packages will allow companies to post messages on the corporate accounts, inform their employees, ambassadors and influencers about these messages and have them re-distributed by their employees, ambassadors and influencers.  Tap into the “untapped potential“.

Gamification = Even though this word has been on the lips of many, I think 2013 is the year when it will become real.  The gaming techniques will find their way in which we use social media, learn, or do business.  Today the emphasis  lies on badges, mayorships, free goods, etc. but the evolution is going to be quick and innovative.  A true revolution in the making.

So the biggest challenge for companies in 2013 is how their are going to use awareness building  to inspire their employees’ participation to social media to become ambassadors and amplify the corporate messages using a number of gamification schemes.

How far on this journey are you today?

Finally, I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas!

The Employee Engagement Index

Companies want to pick the low hanging fruit, but when it comes to social media, it seems they are not seeing the ‘low hanging fruit.  Many companies are creating corporate social media accounts but fail not only to communicate them to their clients but also their employees.  A lot of companies do not mention their social media accounts on their website allthough that is changing.

Companies, especially the marketeers, are struggling to get engaged fans/followers/connections, etc.  A lot of effort is put in creative marketing to be able to attract clients and have them become ambassadors. Through these fans/followers they hope to get their messages amplified.

But what about engaging your employees as ambassadors and amplificators.   During a series of awareness sessions in different companies, i could not help to see that few people were actually following their company on platforms such as twitter, facebook or linkedin. The main reason being a lack of information and awareness. Companies expect their employees to follow these account automatically. There are a few simple solutions to address this situation and could include:

• Social media awareness sessions
• Mention all  accounts in the social media policy
• Training program includes following all company accounts
• Email and intranet campaign to increase account awareness
• Adding links to intranet and website

How do you measure if you are successful? Why not create an Employee Engagement Index.   The number could reflect a ratio such as:

1. # of employees  following corporate accounts divided by total employee count
2. # of employees that follow corporate accounts divided by the employees on social media (or specific platform)

This number by itself is not so important. It serves as a baseline. Tracking the progression as you undertake social media awareness building is more important. It will provide you with insight of how well you are doing.

The next challenge is get corporate messages amplified by these people. Here too there are several scenario’s. The best of all worlds is that your employees take the initiative to share message by themselves but we all know this is the most difficult route.  the WIIFM factor has to big. Alternatively, you could offer tools to re-publish but that is really a bad idea. People want to be in control of what they share with their network.  And then there are some tools available (www.gaggleamp.com) that allow users to select what they forward. In any case, the network of your employees is the first step to client engagement and conversation.

Which innovating techniques and tools are you using to use your employees as amplificators and ambassadors?

The Social Media Alphabet

There was a time when the phonetic alphabet (Cfr. Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet) was used to spell out letters.  Remember the “T for Tango” or “C for Charlie”.

But today we live and work in a world with a whole new generational language and fairly soon there will likely be classes on, “how to speak Social Media”. But any language starts with an alphabet.  So here is my take on how to teach the alphabet.

The benefits of using this alphabet is that many generations can relate to these platforms and the usage of these names increases your “coolness” factor.

Which other platforms would you use?

Have you joined or left Google+?

In July Google announced its newest addition in terms of social media: Google+.  This was Google’s next attempt to make a big splash in the social media world.  At that time I was really questioning the viability of such a new network and I think looking at where we are today, I still stand by my views.

Yes, I ranted and raved about the fact that I was not able to get onto Google+ but with thanks to a few friends I finally succeeded.  The frenzy Google+ was looking for did not miss its target.  The number of users grew to 20 million in no time.

Over the time I have been using Google+, I have not seen any (good) reasons why I would drop my other social media platforms and again I have been proven right.  Today, Google+ might claim to have millions of people but like I many have created an account, seen what the buzz was about and then left account inactive.  My point is that if all my friends are on other platforms, why should I switch…

Even worse, I ran across a post (http://mashable.com/2011/10/12/eric-schmidt-google-plus/) about Google senior management not being on Google+.  It seems that they were not eating their own dog food.  Since the public announcement of this fact, Google management has decided to join.  Now let’s see how their activity levels will be in the next months.

Looking at the stats for Google+, we can see that about 40 million accounts exist but it seems a boy’s network and a lot of them are working the field of social media.  Lately, posts have been showing up that Google+ is declining and/or loosing active users.  The main reason behind this is Facebook and the other social media platforms are taking the “new Google+” functionality on board quickly to re-establish their lead.  So what Google+ is accomplishing is to keep the competition on their toes, which is not bad!

Now that Google+ has opened up to the public, I am wondering if the adoption rate by “real” people that will actively use it, is going to go up.

If you just joined I would love to hear your experiences.  If you left, why?

Van Push naar Pull in Social Media

Push email is in het bedrijfsleven goed doorgedrongen. Met oplossingen als Groupwise (Novell), Lotus (IBM), Exchange (Microsoft) tot zelfs Google Apps kan de actieve professional op een perfecte manier bij blijven met wat er rond zich gebeurt. Belangrijke mails worden verwerkt, contacten en documenten beheerd en kalenderitems worden uitgevoerd. De zogenaamde push functionaliteit, die er voor zorgt dat die dingen nu onmiddellijk in real time onder onze aandacht gebracht worden zonder enige vertraging, is voor de ene een zegen, maar voor de ander echter een gesel. Ongeacht of u nu tot de eerste of de tweede categorie behoort, het bedrijfsleven kan niet meer zonder push omdat de samenwerkingsmodellen binnen bedrijven er grotendeels op gebaseerd zijn.

Ondertussen zijn met Web 2.0 de diverse social media netwerksites sterk opgekomen. LinkedIn en Twitter spelen een belangrijke rol op bedrijfsvlak, maar Facebook is zakelijk zeker ook niet te onderschatten. Daarnaast zijn er ook nog mediasites als Flickr, Picasa en Youtube waarmee bedrijven promotioneel aan de slag kunnen, net zoals met locatie gebaseerde toepassingen zoals Foursquare. En tenslotte nog zijn er ook nog fora, blogs en Slideshare die toelaten gerichte informatie met de doelgroepen te delen. Wat al deze social media gemeen hebben, is dat ook zij met push functionaliteit werken. Gebeurt er ergens iets in een kanaal waarop u geabonneerd bent? Dan kunt u daar onmiddellijk van op de hoogte gesteld worden.

Hoe u die verwittigingen ontvangt hangt van uw eigen voorkeur af, tenminste indien u de moeite neemt de instellingen van elk afzonderlijk platform te bestuderen en aan te passen. Wie dat niet doet of door de bomen het bos niet meer ontwaart kent de gevolgen. Waar push ons vroeger hielp om op de hoogte te blijven van belangrijke berichten, hebben veel mensen nu juist hulp nodig om bij te blijven met de push functionaliteit op zichzelf. We leven in een tijd met een overvloed van informatie vanuit ontzettend veel  sociale webdiensten, die ons via PC en smartphone bereiken. En dat komt op velen over als een bombardement.

Uiteindelijk is dit een probleem dat niet zozeer vanuit een technologisch standpunt dient aangepakt te worden, dan wel vanuit een verandering van de eigen visie op wat sociale media voor u betekenen. De focus ligt uiteindelijk op het sociale, en niet op de media die slechts het vehikel is dat de boodschap draagt. Er is dus vooral een mentale aanpassing nodig. Wat zijn uw verwachtingen eigenlijk van uw deelname aan de diverse netwerken? Laat u alles gewoon op u afkomen (het push bombardement) of probeert u effectief in dialoog te gaan? Indien u naar het laatste neigt zal u vanzelf merken dat u langzaamaan automatisch naar een Pull functionaliteit zal evolueren. Al doende leert men.

Die evolutie naar Pull, om slechts die updates die u echt interesseren en waarmee u aan de slag wilt er uit te pikken, is niet evident. Er bestaan handige tools die u hiermee kunnen helpen en diverse trainingen en workshops zullen u zeker op de juiste weg zetten. Maar vergeet nooit dat de belangrijkste tool zich steeds tussen uw twee oren bevindt.

Joris De Sutter  is Partner bij Vanguard Leadership.

Twitter/LinkedIn

Are you being kept awake by circles, hangouts and sparks

Two weeks ago Google announced it latest effort to get involved with social media, called Google+.  Today, Microsoft leaked its efforts for yet another social media network.  Are these two efforts too late to battle Facebook and Twitter?

Google+ will offer a high degree of integration with its other social media platforms and this will be the USP to fight Facebook and Twitter.  The stream, which looks a lot like the one in Facebook, will be complemented with circles (groups in which you put people), hangouts (your favorite online places) and sparks (bits and pieces of information).  And Google claims this is only the beginning.

Microsoft leaked the story about its social network (Tulatip?) built around the Bing search engine to create a social search.  However, from the limited information available, Microsoft will not be inventing the network but use bits and pieces from Facebook and Twitter which might be a smart idea.

Back to Google+.  As it is fitting for social media platforms, memberships are handed out in small amounts which has lead to a frenzy to get access in the first week or so.  Many people were looking for such an “invite”.  Getting such an invite meant you are someone in social media land or had the right friends (what a good time to test the “give and receive” attitude).  I did not get one till 3 weeks into the process thanks to Roland Legrand from De Tijd.

Though I was disappointed that I did not get an invite, it made me think and ask a number of questions.  First of all, is this not just another gadget which we are not waiting for?  We are already part of so many social media platforms and networks.  Why add another?  After which we will complain that we have a lot of work to keep our social media profiles up to date… How much can we kid ourselves?  It seems we are looking for more work.

Second, all those people that are looking for such a special “invite” will not be the users of tomorrow.  These people are going to “test” Google+ to either break it down to the ground or praise it into the heavens but few will be (active) users in 6 months.  Many profiles will die very quickly even if Google claims they have 100 million profiles in less than a month.  Who wants to rebuild his/her Facebook/Twitter or even LinkedIn  network again on yet another platform.  Not me!

As far as I am concerned I am really waiting to see where Google+ will be making the difference with Facebook and the others before I switch.  The integration with tools such as  Tweetdeck and others will define if and when I switch to Google+.

So I will let Google convince that switching to Google+ will be worth my while and bring VALUE rather than just more work.

Are you checking in into your hospital?

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a Belgian journalist (Peter Backx, editor of the Artsenkrant) asking if I had any data on whether the Belgian hospitals had any presence in social media. I was intrigued by the question and did some research which I will discuss later on in this blog.

The first question that comes to mind when such an inquiry pops up is whether and what hospitals are doing anywhere else in this world. Hospitals are mostly risk and discussion averse which completely opposite of social media. New projects are meticulously planned and kept under good cover. But still it seems that in the USA hospitals are embracing social media big time. From Facebook over Twitter to YouTube! Hospitals are finding their way to applications to increase their customer service, training (both patients and nurses), PR and crisis communication. There are several great examples around (Mayo Clinic, University of Maryland, etc.). A source of information is slideshare where there are some great presentations available on the subject.

Looking closer to home, Lucien Engelen recently noticed a significant increase in the social media presence in Holland. The number shot up from single digits to 30% presence in different types of social media. Similar to the USA, Dutch hospitals are uploading videos on YouTube, tweeting or posting messages on both Facebook and LinkedIn. One reason might be that hospitals are for profit and consider their patients potential clients (instead of just sick people). Another reason is that the effort of joining social media is headed up by HR which hopes to find new employees.

But what about Belgium? It is safe to say that the social movement has not hit our Belgian hospitals. There are some that are starting but a limited amount has social media profiles on LinkedIn (25), Facebook (even less), Twitter (single digits). Most of the social media is driven by individual contributors that are not acting on behalf of the hospital which could in term lead to some confusing and misleading representation and will have to be addressed by a social media policy.

So what is the next step? Since more and more patients are using social media to diagnose themselves before going to any care provider, hospitals should join the movement, know what is being said and actually contribute to the knowledge.

There are 5 steps that must be taken:

• Creation of an overall strategy which includes social media

• Create a social media policy and guidelines to help streamline the social media efforts

• Create the necessary profiles

• Take active part in social media (conversation and not just outward communication)

• Monitor social media

By being proactive they will be able to become a more trusted partner for the patient.

Making your company more visible

The company website is the main point of activity for most companies.  But since this is a somewhat static environment, companies are joining social media in the hope that they will be able to get closer to their customers and create a two-way conversation.

From research done by Vanguard Leadership in Belgium and Wildfire PR in the UK, companies are creating social media profiles but few make them public on their website.  Only 25% have such links on their website and are thus loosing opportunities to direct their customers to their social media sites.

Why do companies not advertize these profiles?  One could say that social media is not part of the company’s strategy; others will say that IT does not want to put this on the website; even more others will just say they do not care but the main reason is that no one thought about doing this!

So once you joined Social Media as company, here are some tips for you:

1. Claim your social media profiles in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others.  Do not let others squat your social media names and pages.
2. Display your social media links on your landing page – highly visible!  Do not hide them somewhere in “Links” or “Contact us”.
3. Why not add social media profiles of your staff (especially when you are in recruitment).  Professionally looking LinkedIn profiles will be great image builders for the person and the company.
4. Give people reasons to sign up and follow you on social media.
5. Add a “Share” button to your website to encourage further sharing
6. Use email signatures to promote your company’s social media profiles.

Increasing your visibility and it will eventually lead to new opportunities and increased sales.

If you have any comments, you can post a comment or contact me by mail at adammic@vanguard-leadership.be

3 more items to add to your social media policy

A few weeks ago, I covered 3 items that could not be missing from a social media policy (Company philosophy towards social media, handling conflict and identity).  In a more recent post, I covered the reading and acceptance of the “terms of service”.  Today, I would like to add 3 more items to the list: disclaimers, ownership and hardware/software usage.

Starting with disclaimers, it sounds obvious but any personal blog should have clear disclaimer stating that the views expressed by the author in the blog is the author’s alone and do not represent the views of the company. Be clear and write in first person. Make your writing clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of the company.

When it comes to ownership, this area of the policy will clarify who owns what in terms of groups, fans, pictures, etc.  It is clear that anything created under the company’s logo and identity (email address included) is company property and should be transferable.

Finally, it is important to add a paragraph on hardware and software since the user will probably use a mix of platforms (work PC, home PC and/or mobile device).  These need to be protected against attacks and intrusions in order to protect the data of the company in profiles and others.  The use of company assets (computers, Internet access, email, etc.) is intended for purposes relevant to the responsibilities assigned to each employee. A clear statement about where what can be used at all time is a must and gives clear direction.

It is also a good idea for the company to provide information on what resources (eg. bandwidth used by YouTube) is taken up by different applications so that people are aware of the limitations and limit themselves the usage of certain platforms.

By implementing these 7 items, you are well on your way to creating a social media policy.  It is by far not all what can or needs to be such in a policy.  In future posts I will expand on more topics.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me.

Email: adammic@vanguard-leadership.be

Mob. +32 478 50 41 35

Website: www.vanguard-leadership.be

Blog: http://micvadam.wordpress.com/

Find me also on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Netlog, etc.