#makesocialeasy

[dsprse]

Disconnect your Twitter from your Facebook

Anyone who's tried knows that kicking off a social media campaign can be overwhelming.  After a while, you realize that all of these sites can be made to work together: you can connect your Twitter to your YouTube, your Instagram to your FourSquare, your Facebook to everything.  In other words, if you post from your Twitter, it'll go to your YouTube, and so on.  So, if you can do that, why not?  Why not make your life easier by posting it once and having it go everywhere else instead of logging in to a dozen sites and doing it all manually?  After all, tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck exist to help you do just that, log in to a single place and manage all your social profiles.

The answer is simple: to get good at something, you have to actually do that thing.  To better engage your fans on each one of these social networks, you have to post directly on there (to learn the rules and nuances), you have to check it (to understand performance and reply to comments) and you have to get the full experience (to know what sort of content you need to invest in moving forward).

If you're posting things to Twitter from your Facebook, your Twitter will never grow organically with genuine fans, your Facebook won't necessarily get engaged, because you're posting messages knowing they're going to go on Twitter, and neither social network will deliver for you.  The ideal approach is to focus on just one at a time.  By getting great at one, you'll get the most benefit from it and later be able to focus or put resources on another.  But trying to manage both (or more) when you're an expert of none is a waste of your time and resources.

This advice doesn't necessarily make social easy.  But working with Disperse is.  Contact us to help you understand the basics of social media strategy and implementation.

Image source: Mediabistro.com.

[dsprse]

Launching a new campaign, but your software needs an upgrade? You need a vendor selection and management process

No, stop.  You cannot just do an internet search and start calling the first names that come up on the list.  Chances are there are 1,000 vendors for what you need and you're not about to go through 1,000 sites and make 1,000 calls.  You're going to dig and dig and get tired after going through the first couple of sites.  No.  First, you need a plan.

This plan will include your goals and objectives.  What you want to achieve determines the best software for it.  Not the other way around.  As part of a culture that gets excited over every new app or technology, you cannot let the tech lead your strategy.  After all, you don't even know how to code, so why get starry-eyed now.  And no, having the money doesn't make it OK to spend frivolously.

After you've determined what you want to achieve, you decide what parts of it you'd like to automate: i.e. email for marketing, call center efficiency with better databases, customer support handling.  Then, you need to understand the scale that this software needs to support: a couple of hundred or a few hundred million customers.  Then, you need to understand how much training your staff needs before the software is delivering its promised results. 

Once you've nailed these questions down, then you can begin your search.  Your list will consist of companies that you have reasonable belief will be around in 3 to 5 years, offer products meant for you, not a bigger or smaller enterprise, and which provide the sort of access you're most comfortable with (email vs. 800 numbers).

You need to understand that every single one of these vendors has stakeholders and investors and are looking for long-term relationships with their users.  They'll give you free trials, but won't be satisfied with one-offs. And none of them enjoy being strung along, so you better be ready to commit.  If you state your expectations clearly and transparently (RFPs are not necessary for this, unless you're a procurement officer at a government agency), you're going to get good companies who meet your expectations try to win your business. 

After you've had solid conversations with 20 or more vendors (we often get so overwhelmed after just 4 or 5 conversations that it's not uncommon to end up making million dollar decisions based on scant research), and winnowed your list down to top 3 or 5, you invite them to showcase, with their teams if applicable, and explain how their products can help you meet your goals depending on how many stakeholders are involved.  This is easily a month or longer phase, but crucial because you're going to want to work with people you can reasonably get along with, and this is the point where you figure that out.

After you've picked your vendor, you're now going to negotiate your agreement, which is fraught with the unforeseen.  But, as long as you remember to include a clause requesting ongoing support for a pre-set price, all other needs will work out.  

Now, repeat.  Your agreements with vendors are assets because of the money involved.  Consequently, they need management to make sure your risks are covered.  And your vendors are resources you can utilize to meet your goals, create new revenue streams, or manage costs, and if you take care of your resources, your resources will take care of you.

If you're interested in setting up a social media vendor selection and management process, contact Disperse.  We provide best practice consulting services designed specifically to help you through this tedious, but crucial part of your job.

Image source: Adventures of a GSP Hunting Dog

[dsprse]

A new threat, the non-union union shakedown via social media

You think you're a good employer.  You grew your business the hard way, blood, sweat, and tears.  You hire good people and ask them to do jobs you've done yourself.  You pay fair wages, manage your costs, and pay all your taxes.  And it's paying off - your business is growing.  Sure, every now and then, one of your employees gets a little upset at one of your decisions, but nothing you thought would be a problem.  Until one day, you get a call from a reporter asking for comment about how you're abusing your employees and union-busting!

What just happened?  The reporter claims that conditions at your workplace are intolerable, that workers are trying to unionize, but you've threatened retaliation if they did.  The reporter got it all from a website that uses your company name in its URL and showcases the accusatory employees prominently as underdogs.  And worse yet, they've organized a protest outside one of your locations, where the reporter is apparently calling you from for comment.

What...!?  In 2013 America, any employer that mistreats, abuses, or discriminates their workers will get targeted and spotlighted by activists who speak for employees in ways employees couldn't for themselves.  These sorts of activists are as important today as muckrakers like Ida Tarbell was in hers.  However, for every worthy crusade, you've got individuals who manipulate and push the limits and are willing to target any employer based on any claims from any workers, and thanks to the power of social media, these claims become amplified until they're picked up by the press, who then give it credibility, which these individuals then use to reinforce their message, recruiting more workers to their protests, and incredibly, extorting money from businesses until their demands are met.

The twist is that these individuals function more like modern-day marketers than activists, employing marketing tactics to attack targeted companies until their demands are met.  For example, these individuals are setting up modern websites that utilize the trademarks of targeted companies (usually unawares or smaller companies); then developing a marketing campaign around the demand for better working conditions and higher wages; then paying Twitter spammers to retweet custom hashtags, which subsequently get picked up by reporters.  These reporters then do the job of the attackers by calling up unprepared businesses with questions that appear out of the blue and less-than-friendly.  The reporters get businesses to make comments immediately or see a negative story get published within minutes and retweeted seconds later from their well-known publications without the business's side being taken into account.  These comments made in haste end up doing more harm than good, and are then used by the attackers to justify their attack.  And before you know it, the business caves, contacts the attackers, and asks how much would it cost to make the attackers go away.  Naturally, whatever business conditions were so bad that the business got attacked for remain unchained and workers that previously were making accusations have stopped making them.  The attackers move on to shake down another business.

If you believe your business is being attacked by lone or coordinated individuals in a similar manner, contact Disperse immediately.  We've got an expertise in countering these kinds of attacks and are ready to work for you.

[dsprse]

When your employees get poached because their personal social media brands are better than your company's social media brand

You start out with leverage.  You're considering bringing on a talented employee that you know can do great things inside your organization.  Surely that candidate is entertaining offers from others, but you know your company's got the stature, the resources, and the cash to get this guy.  So you make an offer and it's accepted.  You put your new hire to work, showing him your secrets, getting him in front of clients, and endorsing him every chance you get so he gets the creds he needs to be worth his weight in gold.

A few months pass and your rockstar employee gets poached by your much smaller competitor, possibly for less cash and less prestige.  Your first question is, why would he leave a company like ours for those guys?  But while you were busy basking in the glow of your offline prestige, your employee was busy leveraging your offline prestige to grow his own online prestige.  At some point, his social media reputation and credentials became more impressive than yours, and consequently, more important to that employee than yours. 

As surreal as it sounds, small businesses aren't the only ones capable of using social media to compete with large companies.  Individual employees can now use social media to become more influential than ever, truly making them the "assets that leave the office for their homes every night" that you've always been talking about.  Increasingly unencumbered by the need to work at organizations with prestige for the sake of their careers, but not necessarily ready to leave a cushy, steady paycheck for the misery that is (non-techie) entrepreneurship, employees are leveraging their past-time habits into full-time, wildly lucrative roles at organizations who better know how to use these assets.  And while you're still trying to figure out what happened, your smaller, less prestigious competitor is gearing up to steal your biggest clients, thanks largely in part to their newly hired force of social media savvy employees who you thought were attracted solely to having your company's name on their paystubs. 

Wondering if this is what's happening at your organization?  Interested in stopping it and becoming prestigious on social media as well?  Contact Disperse to stop losing top talent.

[dsprse]

5 answers to the still-great question of "What's Twitter for and why should I be on it?"

Even after one of the largest IPO's in history, one of the questions that is still asked is, "What's the point of Twitter and should I be on it?" And this question is usually followed by, "Everyone I know is using it, but I just don't get it."

This is not an embarrassing or skeptical question by some Luddite.  It is a great question that deserves an equally great answer.  Here's 5 great answers:

5) Twitter, like CNN, isn't for everyone.  Some people prefer Instagram (or ESPN Extreme) or YouTube (Fox).  The point is that if you're not on it, you won't miss much because content is almost always shared across all these social sites, like relevant news.

4) No, everyone does not use Twitter.  Twitter's supposed value comes from the velocity of the information.  But unless you're trained at discerning real info from fake info (like a journalist), or know how to use valuable information (like a Wall Street trader), or care in the slightest about the information in your possession (like an activist), it doesn't matter how quickly you get that information, does it?  You'll eventually get it when you need it, and not sooner.

3) Like your TV channels, your get-togethers, or anything else in life, the more, the merrier.  So, if you're keeping your social profiles in "stealth mode" with less than 100 friends, you're not going to have the same experience as someone with 1,000 friends, prompting the question of what's the point.  Twitter is just a channel through which people communicate.  If none of the communications is good for you, you probably need new friends to follow. 

2) Twitter's original intention was an alternative to long form blogging.  So, if you don't know why you'd want to blog, you wouldn't know why you'd want to tweet.  Blogging, if you're still not sure, is like a personal diary.  You can blog about anything that inspires you, that angers you, that you'd normally want to share with those closest to you.  (And no, if you know how to manage your privacy settings, it actually doesn't have to be public).  But often, a well-written, tightly edited, blog entry that takes a couple of hours to write (ahem, like this one) doesn't quite fit the bill of what you'd like to achieve.  Sometimes, you really just want to ask a single question, or publish a single thought for your friends to enjoy.  And that's what Twitter did.  It was a concept that thrived because of smaller attention spans and cultural preferences for soundbytes.  Adding additional things to your thoughts (like a URL to redirect people to another website or hashtag to add your thought to the broader pool of tweets about the same topic) came later and ultimately changed this original concept into something closer to what users actually wanted.  Like the evolution of P&G's Swiffer to Wet Swiffer, except the evolution happened bottom-up instead of top-down.  And it's still evolving.

...and the best answer to the question of What's Twitter for and why you should be on it:

1) Why would anyone care about what you're doing right now?  Well, they won't if you don't.  So, the question you should really be asking is, do you care what you're doing right now?  And if you've got to ask, you should probably be doing something else.  So, if you don't get it, don't use it and stop worrying so much about the fact that others get it and you don't.  One day, when you're ready, you'll get it and tweet like a pro.

Disperse conducts executive training that makes social media easy.  From these trainings, management is quickly able to come up with big picture strategy, on-the-ground campaigns and tactics that successfully leverage social media, and ways to determine their ROI from social.  Bring Disperse in to your organization to work with your managers on social media. 

Image source: the very creative Mia Tivey.  Visit her site and hire her.

[dsprse]

To control or not to control: how to make the decision to let employees use social media from work

Every time you walk by your assistant, your manager or your VP, they're either staring at puppies on Facebook or chuckling at another jackass on Youtube.  You're positive they're not getting any work done.  Your IT department has been telling you about spikes to social media sites posing a danger to your network.  And your marketing guys keep running into each other at cross-purposes because they all say they know social, but can't tell you why what they're doing is working.

So you opt to shut it down for everyone.  Except IT.  And Marketing.  And Legal.  And HR.  But no one else can access it.

This preferential treatment doesn't create animosity; it broadens disconnect between management and workforce.  Employees know they can bypass corporate blocks to social media with their smartphones.  They don't need your computers anymore.  So, if you block their access from your machines, you're coming off as the big brother employer with your eye off ball because you're spending more time trying to control things you can't control instead of empowering your employees to do more and be innovative with your resources. 

But if you open everything up, you run the risk that your employees will be less productive; that your systems' productivity will slow down or worse, be compromised by some virus; and that your employees might say things via social that are confidential and could get you in trouble with customers and/or regulators.  Or worse, your competitors might poach your talent and steal your secrets. 

So, does it make sense to block them or does it make sense to open up the network?  The answer in this case is to go with the flow.  Since you can't stop it, open it up.  But, control how it gets open.  Change the fight so it's your fight, not theirs.  How does this look in practical terms:

1) First, publish and release guidelines for how you expect employees to behave on and use social media.  You can't control them, but you can certainly tell them what your expectations are.  And don't just stick these guidelines in as part of your employee SOP manual.  They need to live independently of that book so that they receive proper attention.  After a few years, once your culture has incorporated these guidelines into their day-to-day, they can be included in your SOP.

2) Have management deliver and review these new guidelines to their teams, so it's not coming from you, corporate, but from the people your employees work for every day. 

3) Select groups of employees that will receive some social media training and access to social media.  This usage can be used by your IT to spot the weaknesses in your network, improve performance where needed, and upgrade your network against security risks.

4) Set up a timeframe for release to the rest of your organization and announce it.  Ideally, you're granting access to new groups of employees each time, not all at once.

5) Dedicate at least one resource to monitor inappropriate behavior that's counter to your guidelines.  This person functions as the official social media police to catch possible violations and kicks it up to higher management for a decision.  They shouldn't be seen as your personal spy.

If you need to make this decision, and need support, contact Disperse. 

[dsprse]

Should you get a certificate in "Advanced Social Media Strategy" from a prestigious school?

HootSuite, makers of a social media management dashboard, has partnered with Syracuse University and others to offer classroom instruction on "advanced social media strategy".  Setting aside the blatant entrenchment strategy in having universities teach their students on using HootSuite's products in order to get certified in social media, there's something to be said for standardizing what social media strategy is and what can be done with it.  As HootSuite has long-ago recognized, not everyone uses social media as it's supposed to be used.  And they're probably tired of being blamed for entire social campaigns failing when executed via their products.  So, if you can't teach them to use social, let the schools do it (an approach tried and tested by financial institutions, management consulting firms, industrial manufacturers, huge restaurant chains and Disney). 

But should you get a certificate yourself?  Especially if it'll narrowly train you on a single approach using a single tool?  The answer, as we learned through our own training experiences, is no.  Like most of the big-time marketing you'll end up doing in your career, training is on-the-job.  And success, or lack thereof, on social media is similarly achieved, through on-the-job-training.  The biggest problem, as we see it, is the disconnect between what social media professionals think they do and what they actually end up doing. 

Social media professionals overwhelmingly identify themselves as "strategists".  However, when pressed, they have no methodology through which they formulate strategy (assuming they even know what strategy is).  So, because they don't have a consistent, duplicable, and functional approach to "strategizing", and the clients and companies they work for don't always understand that a tweet without strategy won't work, they relegate the "strategist" to the role of Twitterer.  Without a way to explain the role or its ROI, the strategist becomes an underappreciated, disgruntled twitterer, believing that if they were somehow certified, perhaps they could do what they really (think they) love, social media strategizing!  (Never mind that at the end of the day, all "strategy" leads to twittering anyway).

Like any career choice, one has to love everything about it in order to succeed in it.  If you don't, no certification will suddenly make the work better, and you'll find yourself like so many other certified professionals, spending the money you believe you should be making on maintaining certifications you don't really need.  Or maybe you like wearing gowns in the summer and tossing tassels in the air?  If you or your executive team want a more agnostic, less high-falutin', and tried-and-tested approach to formulating social media strategy for your business, contact Disperse.  We promise that we won't charge you anywhere near as much or take anywhere near as much time to train you as HootSuite.

[dsprse]

5 reasons crowdfunding has nothing to do with investing and you don't belong there

One of the most misunderstood niches within social media is social fundraising or crowdfunding.  If you or your organization is looking to enter new markets, looking for innovation, or just looking to make a return on some discretionary investment dollars, crowdfunding looks interesting - especially now that the SEC has ruled on it.  But when you dig deeper, you quickly realize some disturbing things:

there's no guarantee of exiting or controlling anything;

there's no concrete ROI; and

there's no easy way to manage your investments if you want to invest a lot of money.

We're not here to sing the praises of crowdfunding to you as a professional investor.  We're here to help you stay away from crowdfunding because you don't belong there.  Here's why:

1. Any venture using crowdfunding to raise capital to build, launch, grow, or otherwise spend money on things that make no financial sense probably don't make financial sense (whether or not the entity doing the raising has had success in other areas).  That's why they're using crowdfunding - banks, investors, and other assorted lenders have probably said no already, and rather than go to "friends and family", crowdfunding is a way to raise money from "fans and acquaintances".  In other words, investing as part of the crowd is essentially like giving a buck to the pan handler in the subway, you got 2 minutes worth of enjoyable entertainment between train stops, and that's it.

2. Maybe you've noticed how crowdfunded ventures generally ask for "investments" in increments of $5, $25, $100, etc?  If you're looking to invest a million or more in an idea - heck, you tip more than this when you go out - you're going to have a really hard time sifting through the ideas that can handle that kind of investment via crowdfunding sites.  Needle in a haystack time.  Better use your time in more productive ways, like playing the lotto.

3. If you understand the solidarity it takes to give another person a few bucks to help them further an idea you liked; if you're all about that warm feeling in your tummy from helping out a fellow human being do something you wish you could do, but can't or won't; if you love the validation of your humanity, you're ready to be part of the funding crowd.  But if solidarity and validation ain't worth the consonants it takes to spell them out for you, then you're not the sort of person that should be crowdfunding.  And make no mistake, the only rational benefit (if you can call it that) that you're getting from your "investment" are these fuzzy feelings that you cannot balance on a spreadsheet.

4. If you're the sort that gives to charitable causes expecting inanimate objects to be named for you; or gives to politicians expecting them to take your calls before they take their constituents calls; or regularly pulls all-nighters working on mega-mergers and consider that equivalent to an epic adventure, then crowdfunding is definitely not the way to go for you.  It's not even a tax write-off!  Your "investment" in a crowdfunded idea entitles you to essentially squat - no vig, no votes, not even a lousy "Thank You" email. 

5. Finally, if you're prone to freak out if your investment portfolio was underperforming, your company is deferring more of its employee benefits costs down to you, or you don't receive regular paychecks, you'll probably not understand why anyone would put some silly, little idea on a crowdfunding site instead of getting a regular, well-paying job to pay for it all in the first place.  In other words, crowdfunding is not rational and you're a rational person.

That said, if you're still not deterred from jumping head first into this shallow pool, here are 10 things to keep in mind when putting your money into a crowdfunded venture.  Need a little more hand-holding, contact Disperse.

Image Source: Gene De Libero