Dear SoSi

How can I convince my boss to embrace openness and transparency? (signed, anonymous)

Jessica Robinet — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:40:37 +0000

How can I convince my boss to embrace openness and transparency? (signed, anonymous)

Transparency is one of the biggest challenges in social media. It requires communicators to rethink what it means to "control" a message, and asks business leaders to rethink what it means to "own" a brand.

The only thing harder than being transparent is trying to keep things hidden when your customers, employees and competitors are posting all their knowledge and insights online. Social media has made transparency inevitable, essential and increadibly powerful. Embracing openness and transparency is your best path to success on the social web, because it allows you to have meaningful and authentic conversations with your key audiences.

But it isn't easy -- we know. We launched the Open SoSi project to challenge ourselves to live up to standards of openness that we advocate for our clients and recognize in our open source development partners. And as we move towards greater openness about our own knowledge and processes, we're returning to our own resources on the benefits and how-tos of transparency on the social web.

10 ways to maximize your blog's ROI: Part 9, Embracing openness

Change status: Facebooking and Twittering for a new world

Corporations start to recognize importance of monitoring social media for impact to their business

Know the people doing your social media marketing - and their methods and ethics

LexPublica aims to bring open-source principles to the practice of law

Risk and social media: the Canadian Marketing Association's Word of Mouth Marketing Conference

Selectively filtering comments? You may not get away with it for long.

Social Signal open sources its social media consulting practice

How can social media help build social capital and social trust?

Jessica Robinet — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:13:19 +0000

How can social media help build social capital and social trust?

Is social media good or bad for community and social relationships? This has been a hot topic of debate between so-called "cyber-optimists" and "cyber-pessimists". But frankly, we're less absorbed by the debate over whether the Internet is bad or good than we are by the very urgent need to make it as good as possible.

Because the Internet isn't going anywhere. Neither is our need for the social relationships that power organizations, sustain communities and give meaning to our personal lives. That's why we focus on the ways that social media can help nurture social capital and social trust by reconstituting social ties, and helping people connect in new ways.

Read more about how Alex's research into building social capital informs our approach to engaging online participation in social media.

Five ways to shape the soul of the Internet

How social media is turning viewers into value contributors - on a mass scale

How to make friends on social networks

On Civic Minded: Jane Jacobs drew the map on online community

How do we integrate social media with our other marketing and communications channels/activities?

Jessica Robinet — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:49:36 +0000

How do we integrate social media with our other marketing and communications channels/activities?

Look at social media as a place to involve your audience in conversations about the messages you're delivering through other channels. Where those messages and your brand are resonating with your audience, you can use social media to give them tools to take your brand out to their own networks. Yes, they'll transform it and make it their own - but what you lose in control, you'll gain back in the credibility, authenticity and reach that come from peer communication. And if you've found a genuine patch of shared ground around your brand's or message's underlying values, whatever changes your new messengers make to your message won't alter its fundamentals.

Advice to social media mavens...from media pros

Best practices for non-profits using web 2.0

Engagement planning to bring your social media project to life

Giving smarter and more to your cause, through mashing a holiday tradition with online fundraising tools

NetSquared: Online tools changing offline politics

Reflected glory marketing: building brand with Web 2.0

Resurrect your rhetoric: six (re)uses for a speech

How can Twitter fuel our marketing and growth?

Alexandra Samuel — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:29:00 +0000

How can Twitter fuel our marketing and growth?

Twitter is the hottest social network of 2009. At first glance, it's a very limited platform: you make a list of people you want to follow (think of these as your buddies or friends), and post updates of no more than 140 characters to let your followers know what you're doing or thinking about. You can also use Twitter to send direct, private messages to people who are following you (a lot like a chat or SMS message), and you can choose who gets to see your updates....and that's about the extent of Twitter's core features.

But Twitter's simplicity belies its extraordinary power and flexibility. Thanks in part to an API that encourages other applications to plug into Twitter, you can use Twitter to:

automatically announce your latest blog posts
create a mini-blog on any topic
share photos or videos on the fly
keep in touch with family and friends
post to applications like time trackers or project management tools
track what people are saying about you or your brand
fuel peer-to-peer promotion of your brand or product
run a backchannel conversation during a conference or event
post updates to Facebook and other social networks
run contests and promotions
find colleagues with common interests

With so many ways of using Twitter, your most critical decision is how you want to make Twitter work for you and your organization. Start with a clear goal, and err on the side of caution; you may want to create a personal (and pseudonymous) account to play with so you can get used to Twitter's pace and culture, before you put Twitter to work at work. When you are ready to put Twitter to professional use, take a focused approach to your Tweets that supports your goals and provides people with a reason to talk about your products or brand.

14 tips for Twitter contests that build followers and brand visibility

17 tips for using Twitter to grow your business

3 great options for Twitter and delicious integration

3 steps to jumpstart your corporate Twitter account by moving friends and followers from other accounts

5 reasons to send Direct Messages on Twitter

Change status: Facebooking and Twittering for a new world

Ep. 19: the all-a-twitter episode

In praise of uncertainty (I think)

Pew: One in 10 online Americans using Twitter or something like it

Rob's Northern Voice keynote

Status update: Twittering your way to effective (and expressive) communication

Twitter monitoring to strengthen your team

How can my company or organization get started with social media?

Jessica Robinet — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:54:49 +0000

How can my company or organization get started with social media?

If you're leading the charge for social media in your company or organization, you're probably tackling several challenges. How can you strengthen your team's understanding of social media? When and how should you establish a social media presence? And how can you build your own skills?

For many people, the easiest way to get started is through observation: pay attention to what people say about your organization, and the knowledge and understanding you gain will be their own reward. Chances are good that once you hear what people are saying, it will also motivate your company to join the conversation by establishing its own social media voice. And meanwhile, you can hone your readiness to lead by adopting social media tools that expose you to new ways of working and interacting online.

If you're ready to think about the right social media project for your organization, you may want to consider a Concept Jam or Social Media Pilot.

4 questions to answer before you get started (or move forward) with social media

6 essential social media tools for your business or organization

Advice to social media mavens...from media pros

Corporations start to recognize importance of monitoring social media for impact to their business

Does your organization have a Wikipedia entry? Start monitoring it now.

Labour and social media: resources and cases from the CALM workshop

Newbies: your tech unfamiliarity is just a first step on ladder of learning

Risk and social media: the Canadian Marketing Association's Word of Mouth Marketing Conference

Risk and social media: the podcast

Social bookmarks 101

SXSW Session: Going from customers to value creators

Twitter quickstart: Effective twittering in 5 minutes a week

How can we use social media to increase our sales and revenue?

Alexandra Samuel — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:33:01 +0000

How can we use social media to increase our sales and revenue?

For most companies, the bottom line in social media is this: how can I use it to increase sales revenue? There are four ways social media can help you achieve this goal: marketing, traffic, loyalty and innovation.

Marketing: Increase the awareness and cachet of your brand so that more people want to do business with you.
Traffic: Drive traffic to your on- and offline point-of-sales so that you sell more.
Loyalty: Increase your customers' commitment to your brand, products and services so that they buy more often or in larger volume.
Innovation: Use social media to add value to your existing products or services, create new offerings, or sell more effectively, so that you can sell at a higher price and/or higher volume.

The resources in this Dear SoSi offer our best insights on each of these four fronts. You don't have to pursue all four strategies; in fact, you'd be wise to focus on one or two (at least in the first instance).

Dig deeper into our related Dear SoSis on engaging customers, driving traffic and innovating online revenue streams.

10 ways to use numbers in your blog post titles

14 tips for Twitter contests that build followers and brand visibility

4 questions to answer before you get started (or move forward) with social media

4 steps for calculating ROI on social media

Corporations start to recognize importance of monitoring social media for impact to their business

Engagement planning to bring your social media project to life

Helping your community do what they want to online - even outside your website

Inviting positive customer feedback

Reflected glory marketing: building brand with Web 2.0

Tagging tips and strategies that make content easier to find and manage

Targeting your video message to the community you want to reach

Using online contests as a marketing tool

Using social media to drive business innovation: insights from Guy Kawasaki and Target's Michael Axelin

How can we engage our customers in an online conversation if they're not interested in talking about our products or brand?

Jessica Robinet — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:39:35 +0000

How can we engage our customers in an online conversation if they're not interested in talking about our products or brand?

Your brand speaks to an underlying value or values. Maybe it's family and personal belonging. A sense of place. Achievement. Or respect for the natural world. Those are subjects your customers are going to find interesting - because if your brand resonates with them at all, it's because they share those values.

Your goal, then, is to identify those shared values and convene a conversation around them. Create an innovative, compelling social media concept to support that conversation, and you're well on your way to a successful project that reinforces the link between your brand and those values - as well as building a whole new kind of valuable relationship with your customers.

Announcing Vancity's Change Everything: an online community conversation on change

BC Hydro's Green Gifts: harnessing Facebook gift-giving energy for conservation

How focusing on your community's needs leads to success for your brand

Reflected glory marketing versus the heavy hand of the brand

Reflected glory marketing: building brand with Web 2.0

Targeting your video message to the community you want to reach

Vancity launches public wiki on microfinance

How should we handle negative comments and hostile behaviour on our site?

Jessica Robinet — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:09 +0000

How should we handle negative comments and hostile behaviour on our site?

When organizations jump into social media, one of the first questions that comes up is how to handle negative or hostile comments. Open your site up to public contributions and who knows what will appear: torrents of customer complaints, bitter personal rants, pornographic images.

For some organizations working on polarizing issues or with sensitive stakeholders, these concerns need to be paramount. In most cases, the risk of negative feedback pales in comparison to a much more likely -- and much more problematic -- phenomenon: the absence or paucity of feedback, engagement and participation.

And many of the techniques that are most effective in protecting against negativity also reduce levels of participation. Moderate content, hold it for approval, or shut down criticism, and you end up looking like a stage managed community with little room for authentic conversation.

That's why we typically advise establishing the minimum level of intervention needed to address problem behaviour. Set up guidelines that encourage positive use, model constructive contribution, and make sure you have a plan in your back pocket in case trouble does arise. But don't underestimate your community: the most effective way to manage negative participation is to let your enthusiastic participants tackle it themselves -- often drowning it out.

Effective online commenting for media sites

10 ways to maximize your blog's ROI: Part 2, getting high-value feedback

Grow your community by making it easy for newcomers to ask questions... and answer them

Nine (or ten) ways to stumble in social media

Responding to online criticism

Risk and social media: the Canadian Marketing Association's Word of Mouth Marketing Conference

Selectively filtering comments? You may not get away with it for long.

When online communities attack! Keeping your site hate-free

We suspect one of our most trusted operatives has gone rogue. What are our options?

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:14:09 +0000

We suspect one of our most trusted operatives has gone rogue. What are our options?

I think maybe you have us confused with this SOSi. But may we suggest that you try a wiki?

What's the best way to manage my tasks and schedule online?

Jessica Robinet — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:20:46 +0000

What's the best way to manage my tasks and schedule online?

If you're a fan of the social web, you've probably noticed that it has two very different faces: the having fun side: (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and the Getting Things Done side (delicious, Basecamp, Remember The Milk). In fact, the more you spend time on the fun side, the more you need the GTD side to make up for all the time you've spent watching videos of cute, cuddly puppies.

True confession time: for a number of folks on the Social Signal team, trying out GTD applications is the fun side of the web. Let our relentless obsession with task management software and productivity apps save you some time to spend on YouTube. We've rounded up some of our most durable reviews, tricks and insights so that you can get the most out of online calendaring, task management and collaboration.

Podcast: Interview with ManyMoon CEO

How the iPhone can have a big impact on busy lives

ManyMoon offers collaborative task management that project managers can love

Podcast: Online tools and gadgets that keep you current at work and at home

Podcast: Tools and strategies for staying updated and afloat in your busy life

Project management and workflow with Basecamp

Tracking tasks with Remember The Milk: Dairy delight or lactose intolerance?