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!

Social Media Policies in Belgium (Part 1) – Only 1 in 5 company has one!

Social Media Policies have found their entrance into large corporation but the small and especially the medium sized companies have not created and implemented  such social media policies.

Earlier this year PayScale released some results about the adoption of Social Media Policies in the USA (http://mashable.com/2012/06/10/employer-social-media/).  The conclusion was that over 50% of the companies had a formal social media policy.  But how do Belgian businesses match up to these numbers?

A recent survey (October 2012) done via Vanguard Leadership has revealed that only 1 company in 5 has a social media policy in Belgium.  And since Belgium is a country of Small and Medium sized business, we can conclude that the 20% of companies that have a social media policy are mainly  the larger companies.

The same survey uncovered that  65% of the employees accessed Facebook, 52% LinkedIn and 53% Twitter daily during work hours.  You would think that social media policies would be more common since employers are worried about their employees wasting time or damaging the reputation of their company on social media.

A first conclusion is that companies are not always aware that their employees are very active on social media.  Though these companies are aware that such a policy is a must they do not create or implement a policy or guidelines until they have an “accident” which leads to reputation loss.  Over the course of the year we have witnessed several of these examples (e.g. Ikea in Belgium – http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=GVB3M9AGE) where a social media policy is created after the reputation damage was detected.

More information to come about the results of this survey in next blog posts.

Notes about the survey:  Over 200 companies were surveyed.  About 50% have less than 50 employees, 30% have less than 250 employees and  and 20% were larger than 500 employees.

Help, where did the conversation go?

One of the first things we learn when we join Linkedin is that we need to participate in groups.  Whether you are a job seeker, marketeer, or a professional, you are told by social media experts and trainers you need to join groups to listen to discussions and contribute content and discussions.  So we go in search of groups that we feel like joining.  I have heard a lot of people complain about the fact that there is a lack of discussion, value and content in many groups.  Thus they bail out and stop looking at these groups.

Here some of us meet our first disappointment. We only look for and join groups that contain peers rather than our target audience.  There seems little conversation going on in these groups since we are looking at what the others (like us) will share and post.  A lot of those posts seem to be self-promotional vs content and discussion driven.

After a while we begin to see that we need to join groups where our target audience is present.  But here too the disappointment is big because conversation is not really happening here either.

I do understand that there a large number of groups and that some are more conversational than others.  However, looking at about 50 groups ranging from a few members to 708.000 members, I find that weekly a few new discussions are started and a few comments are given.  In terms of the new discussions, we all know that only a portion of the information is original and most comes from other places and simply duplicated and shared (which is not wrong).

In order to evaluate a group, I have come up with Conversation Index which is the total amount of average weekly comments/posts divided by the number of members.  The higher the number the more conversational the group is.

Below is a view of some of the groups including the Conversation Index.

A few interesting conclusions:

• Most of the groups have a conversation index below 1%
• Not many groups get in triple digits in terms of new conversations/comments
• Many must parts of groups just to “listen” but it is hard to get a grip on how many

The conclusion continues to confirm to me that LinkedIn is still a pure (very efficient) networking tool rather than a conversational tool or collaboration tool. (And yes, I know I will take some flack for this). On the other hand, I would like to call LinkedIn members to start one discussion and add one comment to a discussion every week to make the conversation come alive.

What other ideas do you have to get the conversation started and going on LinkedIn?  I would love to hear from you.

Your daily Social Media Routine

When you have joined the social media movement, the real work (and fun) starts.  I am always astonished that people ask me how much time they should spend on social media.  We all know this is an impossible question to answer since everyone has a different number of accounts and a different modus operandi.  However, I think we should put the time usage in function of the goal we are trying to achieve using social media.

So, I am beginning to return this question with a few another questions: “How much time do you need to spend on e-mail daily?” or “Does anyone question the time you spend on doing emails to get your job done?”  Not! Well eventually social media should follow the same guidelines.  However, in order to get started it might be good to create an approach, let’s call it a “social media routine”.

Here is a one I want to share with you.  It consists of 3 parts: Reviewing your social media monitoring; reviewing your own accounts and posting content for your target audience; and reading and sharing content from others via your accounts.

Step 1: Review your social media monitoring results

You know people are talking about you in wide sense of the word, so you need to monitor social media.  This is true for both you as an individual and for your company.

This can be done via a number of free tools such as Google Alerts (good for content but bad for Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn) or Socialmention – Addictomatic (more focus on social networks but not always accurate).  However, when you are serious about monitoring (and you should be), you will need to pay a monthly fee for good results from all platforms.  Tracebuzz, Engagor, Attentio, Mentions.net, Meltwater, Radian6 are just a few of the platforms you could use.  It important to test drive them to see if they deliver the results you are looking for.

Your daily routine is to check the messages for sentiment and get back to people.  Simply put this means: thanking them for positive comments and taking actions to address the negative comments.

Step 2: Review own accounts and post content to your accounts

Though you have already looked at your social media monitoring results, it is important to review all your OWN social media accounts for any comments or posts. These are messages addressed to you.  These might or not have shown up in your social media monitoring.  Keep in mind that these are people talking to YOU and thus need an answer.

This is also the ideal moment to post new own content for your target audience.  This is the “valuable” information you want to share with our network. Depending on the platform you will be posting daily (Twitter and Facebook) to monthly (blogs). Content can take many forms: text, images, video or audio.  You can also run polls and post events.  Sharing is fun!

Your daily routine will consist of reading the comments, reacting to those comments and posting new content.

The tools you could use vary from the platforms themselves to social media aggregators such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.

Step 3: Reading and sharing information from others

Social media is full of interesting information waiting to be shared.  As I mentioned before some content is created by you but most is really created by others.  Sharing content from others can help you create visibility and position you as a valuable resource for your network.  This side of social media takes the most time since you will have to do a lot of reading before sharing it with you target audience. This part of social media could take 80% of your time.

There are many ways to share content through your social media accounts.  Many platforms have a “SHARE button” but I have found that Bufferapp is a great application that allows you to share information/websites on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn while you are reading the information.  Even better, Bufferapp will spread your postings during the day.

So your daily routine should be about finding the websites that contain good complementary content for your target audience, read and share it with that audience.

Finally, what I have explained is not only true for you as an individual but also for a company or organization since you are trying to become a valuable partner and resource  for your prospects and clients.  Keep in mind that information that is being distributed via company-owned accounts (fan pages on Facebook, company profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube accounts) can and should be amplified through employee personal accounts.

Any thoughts? Comments?  Best practices you want to share?  Feel free to use the comment fields in this blog.  I look forward to starting the conversation with you.

Who controls the social media policy creation?

We all know that control and social media are contradictory, but that is what people and companies think you achieve through a social media policy.

Where in the past social media was the exclusive playing field of marketing, today HR, sales and other departments are finding great benefits in social media.  These departments are discovering new platforms or uses for existing platforms to benefit their departments.  So with this expanding usage of social media, comes the awareness that a social media policy is needed.

Today I am seeing a new battle arise, namely who will create the social media policy.  A number of departments are trying to pull that creation of such a much needed policy to them.  However, there are 3 clear main drivers: HR, marketing and IT. They do this for different reasons.

But first, the creation of a social media policy is project that is done in a number of different ways today.   Some resort to an automated tool to create a policy.  It goes without saying that this can’t be the full answer.  Others will surf the internet for a policy and do a copy/paste, this is a better approach but the reality is that your social media policy is not the same as the one from any other company and thus requires a personal approach.

In order to reflect all requirements and wishes within the company, a number of departments must be included in the creation of such a policy.  Each department will bring their unique experience, skills and motivation for the policy to the table.  No department alone should be dominating this effort.  Here is some experience from real life why.

Marketing wants to control all messaging by being in charge while having free reign.  They will try to create either a minimalistic policy (“use your common sense” as only rule) or control the usage by a detailed “how to use social media handbook”.

HR wants to limit the risk, liability and time usage.  Though they do bring the skill of creating successful policies to the table, their angle will be focused on “do not …” rather than “do…” or “become…”.

IT will be concerned about bandwidth and IT security and their driver will be shut down as much as possible in terms of access to social media.

Legal will for liability reasons be trying to cross all the t’s and dot all the I’s in terms. Most of the time this achieved through complex wording that no one understands (cfr. Terms of services of most social media platforms).

Employee will either want as much as possible access to social media with nearly no rules or guidelines while others will want nothing to do with it.  The contributors will be giving the social media policy makers the real insight to the use of social media in the company and they should be considered valued contributors.

Unions are a much dreaded group of contributors.  Companies are afraid to involve them in the process.  However, since policies must also be reviewed, approved or endorsed by these unions, who by the way also use social media, they are critical to implementing social media policies successfully.

In my personal experience, creating a 2 page or 20 page social media policy (guideline or handbook), you need to have all these people and departments involved in the project to create a personalized and integrated social media policy for your company.  To make the roll-out process a success you need to accompany this project with social media awareness sessions and/or training.

Do you have different views? I love to hear from you!

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?

Is LinkedIn running out steam for recruiters?

Over the last couple of weeks I have had many recruiters in my social media classes and every time they focus all their attention on LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.  When I come to Facebook, they seem to be shutting down. It seems they do not take Facebook seriously as a recruitment environment.  Maybe, they should think again.

One reason is that there are over 880 million people on Facebook vs the 147 million on LinkedIn.  Secondly, more and more companies are active through a fan pages on Facebook and using it for employer branding.  Fan pages allow much more flexibility and functionality to companies and recruiters than the LinkedIn Company pages.

And then there are several applications that have started to give LinkedIn a run for its money.  They listen to names such as Glassdoor, Beknown, Talent.me and BranchOut.  These apps bring LinkedIn functionality to Facebook making it the next best environment for recruitment.

Glassdoor is a free jobs and career community that offers the world an inside look at jobs and companies. Using the Inside Connection product lets you find companies and what connections inside you might have.  Additionally, you can find interview questions, salary ranges, company reviews, and job openings.  In true social media style the content is generated by the job seekers.

Beknown is a Facebook application by Monster.  There is a lot similarity between Beknown and LinkedIn: create a profile, you connect with people, get recommendations, find jobs, and follow companies. Beknown will let you see the 1st and 2^nd line connections like LinkedIn. As you accept people in your network, you earn badges like in Foursquare.

Talent.me is a professional networking app on Facebook which answers the questions where your friends worked and who your inside connections are at companies.  The goal of Talent.me is to help you leverage your friend network and make it work for your career advancement.  You can also endorse your connections and build communities around specific talents.  This social media network seems to be very US focused.

And finally, there is BranchOut.  On BranchOut, users leverage their Facebook friends to find jobs, find sales leads, recruit talent, and setup relationships with your professional contacts. BranchOut also operates the largest job board on Facebook with over 3 millions jobs in 60 countries.  Recruiters from all over the world are joining BranchOut and taking advantage of lower priced recruitment packages to find and attract new talent.

Of course, LinkedIn is still the standard when it comes to recruitment, but I am convinced that Facebook will take over very soon.  Today, it seems that BranchOut is the forerunner but it is still early days.

Do you know any other tools?  Feel free to share through the comment field.

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

To Be or Not To Be on Social Media?

Many companies and professionals are already using social media to promote their products and services, connect with their clients and prospects and manage their reputation.  However, there are even more skeptical people in this world (working in smaller companies or as freelancers) that think of 1000 reasons why they should not be present.  Let me give 10 reason why they should reconsider.

Looking for new clients and prospects?

1. We live in a knowledge society, so sharing our knowledge is best done through a blog which will increase your visibility.  You will be able to provide your clients and prospects with relevant information and score higher in Google Search (SEO).

2. Your Blog will help you demonstrate your expertise in your field.  You will become a source for information for both your existing clients and your prospective clients.

3. Social Media allows you to be on top of things.  You are able to spot questions in your field of expertise and answer them quickly.

Looking for new contacts?

4. The power of social networking lies in the 2nd degree (the contacts of your contacts).  Social Media allows you to reach out to these 2nd degree contacts easily to establish new connections.

5. Social Media allows you to identify the Influencers in your domain of expertise.  Connecting with these Influencers will allow you to (possibly) use them for introductions, recommendations, and feedback.

6. Storytelling  is very powerful, so you should tell a good story!  Clients and prospects alike will get to know you better and this will lead to more trust.

7. By now you know you can not do everything yourself.  Creating a strong network is thus a must.  Social Media allows you to find Freelancers, Consultants and new business partners quickly and efficiently.

Looking at new products and services?

8. Social Media allows you to creatively promote your Products or Services.  Using video or photo you can lift the customer experience to the next level.

9. You have many good ideas but will they fly?  Crowd sourcing will allow you to test the waters without spending much money.  People love to help and contribute.  But remember, treat them special whether your product or service flies or not.

Finally, the last point (and in my opinion the most important one) is that you should be present in social media to listen what is being said about you, your company, your products and your people.  As is the case in the real world people talk about you in the widest sense of the word (just think when you were at a network meeting and someone was talking about you behind your back… What did you do?). You need to start Monitoring Social Media for mentions (both GOOD and BAD) today!

Have other ideas, concerns, blocking factors, etc., then I look forward to your comments to this post.