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  Mobile Media Training – basic questions to think about

  • A day doesn’t go by without someone asking me about mobile media.

  At first glance it sounds like a relatively simple problem and is usually summarized by a question like “what is the best mobile app for us?”

  If only it were that simple for a company.

  The mobile trend is accelerating faster and faster.

  It isn’t a question of if someone is connected,
  but how, why, and when they are connected.

  As a business professional there are dozens of reasons to use different mobile technologies ranging from 3g/4g wireless access, tablet applications, QR codes, GPS services, photo sharing, and content management systems.

  There are also a variety of technical questions revolving around IT infrastructure, HR training, and on-going business integration.

  Some basic questions I would have for any company looking to offer a mobile experience-

  Basic 101
  

  • What areas of our business could benefit?
  • What is the most practical and results oriented project?
  • How will I define, track, and improve my results?
  • Who else has done something like this?

   Who is the audience?

  • Is it internal or external?
  • do they represent revenue or cost savings?
  • do they use iPhone/iPad?
  • do they use WIFI?
  • do they use offline apps?
  • do they need push verification?
  • do they need SEO?
  • do they publish content with high volume storage needs (large video files, etc.)
  • does this audience have active social media channels?
  • does this audience have an active online or offline community?
  • do they utilize GPS or geo-location data?

  Mobile specific questions

  • does the mobile idea support revenue/cost savings?
  • does the mobile idea attrition or undermine current revenue?
  • does the mobile idea use a native or web delivery?
  • what is the overall budget of the entire ‘web experience’?
    (you don’t want to blow your entire web site budget on your app…)
  • what is the overall app marketing/user acquisition strategy?
  • what is the method of deployment and training?
  • what is the method of service and support?
  • what is the product lifetime of the mobile idea?

  The nutshell you need to crack

  The idea around mobile media training isn’t that mobile ideas are either good or bad…. but that most mobile ideas are half-baked.

  Costs, efficiencies, and revenues need to take multiple impact points and coordinate and effective business projects.

  For large businesses this means that multi-disciplinary teams need to work together to distribute costs and maximize a collateral effort. Singular departments looking for singular efficiencies will miss opportunity areas and education savings.

  Smaller businesses need to focus on retaining and growing current revenue using mobile technologies, as this goal is often far easier to accomplish than trying to generate new customers through mobile media.

   

  

  

  11 days on
  123 Social Media
• 

  Social Media Policy & Employee Communication

  Our team has been detailing an on-going list of questions clients at 123 have regarding the functional models of employee communication.

  One of the core elements we continue to discuss is the social media policy frameworks for what is acceptable behavior for different types of industry communications.

  As part of the social media policy goes, there are A LOT of areas that management and workforce personnel should give some thought to.

  It boils down to questions…

  Rather than focus on where we see market trends a going, sometimes the most effective way to figure out where the boat is sailing is by asking the crew what they think. In many cases the messages being sent from ‘the top’ are often misunderstood by the team of people who need to accomplish the tasks at hand.

  This often leads to confusion, lack of focus, and sometimes mutiny. The 10 most common questions employees had about corporate social media policy in 2011 (results from personal client surveys through-out the year)

  • Who do I ask about what is okay?
  • Who owns things I contribute on social media sites?
  • When am I officially ‘off the clock?’
  • Should I friend my boss?
  • Can my boss tell me to friend them?
  • What information should I keep away from my employer?
  • What if I access sites using my personal smart phone?
  • What happens if I quit / get fired?
  • How do I report an employee for bad behavior?
  • Can I contact colleagues and clients?

  The Biggest Employee Question

  A critical and often overlooked component of social media policy is addressing the ‘what is in it for me?’ question.

  Employees are not ignorant of the fact that company policy and internal documents are often written in the best favor of the employer brand.

  Taking the time to craft a valuable set of social media policies and guidelines allows employees to properly consider how they can best work with the company to help them, help the company.

  

  

  24 days on
  123 Social Media
• 

  Social Media Training @ barryhurd.com

  As an impromptu weekend post I wanted to share some additional social media training articles I’ve been posting elsewhere.

  These are some of the most recent social media training articles I’ve written on my personal blog over at BarryHurd.com

  Some of them are a little more casual than articles I write here on 123socialmedia, but they all have some great tidbits you can learn from and apply to your own business challenges.

  So without further wait, here are four articles from this month at BarryHurd.com.

  • 40+ Social Media Dashboard Tools for Tracking Stuff
  • Social Media for Sales (why social intelligence rocks)
  • Competitive Intelligence with Social Media Monitoring
  • Social Media Analytics and Tracking Points of Market Impact

   

  

  

  2 months on
  123 Social Media
• 

  Social Media Training & Weekend Reading

  As my on-going readers know, I’m always in a process of detailing strategies and tactics for different audiences on social media training.

  While our crew is often working on a number of projects, some of the ideas simply don’t make it to this blog. Here is a recap of ideas on BarryHurd.com and TradeShowSocialMedia.com that shed some light on some pretty tactical questions.  Take a few minutes to browse around some of the other topics and put your thinking hat on to ask “how can I apply these tactics to my situation?”

  Social Media Analtics and tracking points of market impact

  One of the most important aspects of using social media revolves around how people use it. To produce valid social media analytics we first have to define social media: Social media is not a simple or clear cut tool. It is a very basic and adaptable cog that fits into personal and professional needs. Read more…

  Why is SEO important?

  The real importance of search engine optimization is not about the technicalities of getting it done. The importance of SEO is about tapping into the addressable market potential for a business who knows how to convert sales. The technical requirements and strategies of ranking high in organic listings is not rocket science… Read more…

  Event Hashtags – a guide to using them

  Hashtags would seem like they aren’t terribly complex, but what if you don’t know what a Hashtag is or have never setup a business strategy using one? This guide covers event hashtags and why it makes sense to define a logical structure for your audiences to engage with you on…. Read more…

  Social Media Security – is your event social and secure?

  If you manage or attend events regularly, this is an important topic to educate your community on. One of my professional niches is understanding new types of security and privacy concerns regarding new media. A common type of question people ask me revolves around exposing where people are located…Read More…

  

  

  3 months on
  123 Social Media
• 

  Disaster Planning and Social Media

  Most corporate professionals don’t like to hear the phrase “disaster planning” for good reason. The idea of having a situation suddenly appear and annihilate your daily process makes anyone cringe.

  On top of the personal reaction to avoid disaster planning, many decision makers face a compounded problem when terms like social media, online conversation, and crisis response are added into the mix.

  It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the two elements create a perfect storm of excuses for professionals to look the other way.

  Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at some specific issues using social media to prepare for, manage, and maneuver through one-time occurrences.

  In some areas we will examine true disasters on a global scale while other events will be unexpected crisis on the individual and local level.

  To help prepare for our conversation,
  ask these questions.

  What would you do…

  • if your office building burned down?
  • if your community was suddenly flooded or shook to the ground?
  • if someone died because of what your business did?

  None of these questions are easy. The answers are even harder.

  As you keep these questions in the top of your mind, take a few minutes to read about the following disasters and how social media played a role in the situation.

  Think about how your network, technology, expertise, and planning can help prepare for your own disaster planning.

  Ask some questions

  After you’ve given some considerations to what happens in a worse case scenario, come back and ask some specific questions about problems you see in your own area of expertise. There are A LOT of overlapping areas of risks and concerns that can only be addressed by communicating with people who know how to create solutions.

  TIME.com – How Social Media Is Changing Disaster Response

  “Halfway around the world in Japan, social media was a primary source of communication following the earthquake and tsunami that struck on March 11. However, unlike the situation in Joplin, citizens were using networks like Twitter, Facebook and Mixi (a Japan-specific social site) to send warnings, ask for help and relay bits of information from the scene as well as to announce that they were safe.”

  Information Week – Social Media Carries Risk At Disaster-Relief Time

  “While the federal government increasingly is using social media in its efforts to improve disaster-preparedness and relief efforts, a new report warns of possible hindrances. For example, people may use social sites it to spread inaccurate information or may find that they can’t access social-media sites when needed.”

  Federal Computer Week – Social Media Travels Faster than Seismic Waves

  “People texted and used social media to keep in contact instead of calling on their cell phones, which overwhelms a network. More than that though, Twitter was the go-to website for breaking news. “It was my primary news source” during the earthquake.”

  

  

  3 months on
  123 Social Media
• 

  5 Enterprise Social Media Questions – Pt II

  As part II of our “40 Enterprise Social Media Questions” whitepaper, here are five core questions that larger organizations need to consider when planning out a social media initiative. At 123 we don’t make the mistake of grouping social media simply into the marketing function and our larger set of questions starts opening conversation about social media policy, internal communication, partner relations, and industry leadership functions.

  Hopefully one of these five questions will lead you to a ‘I hadn’t asked that…” statement.

  The Q and A isn’t meant to be rocket science, merely an prescriptive set of questions to make sure you have your business bases covered.

  Do you have any formalized goals or reports in place?

  Properly charting success or failure in new ventures requires an understanding of where you are and where you need to go. This rule of business does not change in regards to social media. During strategic preparation it is best to perform a review of departmental and process metrics across the entire range of your business and ask the simple yes / no question of “does this have a potential point of impact with new communication trends?”

  If you don’t have these metrics as starting benchmarks, proof of failure or success later down the line is incredibly difficult.

  What is the budgetary support of the new venture?

  In the online space there is an unlimited amount of budgetary range for new projects. When allocating budgets it is best to collect benchmark numbers from other departmental efforts and compare them to likely areas of higher return. It is also important to highlight traditional areas of business that have severe problems, as new tools and insight may be able to correct costly problems that exist in the current operation of the business.

  If I don’t have budget, can I reallocate resources?

  A properly implemented social media project should be able to prove performance and enhance other initiatives. Like all projects however, any specific effort will take time before certain results can be measured and analyzed. Typical areas of budget impact for social media efforts are usually found in marketing, public relations and customer service.

  What section of your online pipeline is causing problems?

  The conversion funnel of moving a prospect into a customer is a long route that has multiple roadblocks in the digital space. There are core elements in technology, adoption, usability, process, and marketplace timing that have major impacts to successful pipeline conversions. By identifying where strengths and weaknesses are in the digital communication chain, you can focus on creating a more efficient process. (Don’t get tunnel vision and focus only on marketing as a core problem area!)

  What groups are responsible for current online media activities?

  Typical businesses are finding more and more usage in public relations, marketing, and customer service. However other external communication uses are highly effective (recruiting, tradeshow promotion, competitive intelligence, investor relations) and internal communication is often a neglected opportunity (project management, process improvement, employee training, executive communication.)

  Any top questions to add?

  

  

  3 months on
  123 Social Media
• 

  Social Media Training and team sharing dashboards

  How much time do you spend researching on the web each week?

  Keeping up to speed with how technology and social trends evolve is a daunting task; even for me!

  The reality is that each person on our team often spends ten to twenty hours researching new solutions and clarifying our ideas.

  To that end, we recommend (and personally use) a variety of tools that help professionals research, collect, and share information with the people they work with.

  This allows businesses to maximize budget and time spent on research by distributing the benefits of the information across everyone in the company who can benefit from it. I realize that many other business professionals don’t spend ten to twenty hours a week researching business solutions; so I went ahead and detailed a business professional that only spends 30 minutes a day working with the web.

  *NOTE: in an internal study of almost 200 corporate professionals
  we found that the average research and planning time was roughly 68 minutes a day.

  Simple math:

  1 = person spending 30 minutes a day researching
  10 = number of people researching different topics (5 hours of daily work)
  $100 = average executives hourly cost

  Total Cost = $500 a day /$2500 a week in lost salary

  If each person learns to aggregate simple and effective  online sharing tools of collected research, everyone in the ten person team can research different topics and benefit from the shared information colleagues have collected on other topics. The efficiency gained by knowledge sharing allows companies to reclaim 60% to 90% of lost salary budget (for an annual savings of $75k to $120k for a ten person team!)

  Two Easy to Use Tools

  Paper.li: allows you to take a series of news streams and combine the into an easy to digest format. It works very well with Twitter lists and keywords to rank articles shared in expert groups to create a one page newspaper of news. This makes it very useful for finding 10+ industry experts on Twitter and creating a tactical topic source for your team. An example is a collection of social media professionals on my Paper.li for The Social Strategist.

  Addictomatic: provides a very simple  search process for scanning a variety of web portals such as Twitter, Bing, Google, Youtube, Metacafe, and more. Each source of information is placed into a widget that can be organized to your preference (if something is irrelevant you can simply delete it) and the URL for that specific collection you have curated can be shared with your team or saved as a bookmark. This allows you to create prospect and client dashboards with ease, and provides a way for your team to keep up to date on very specific topics.

  Suggested Social Media Training & Education Ideas

  Use Paper.li to create a ‘team newspaper’ to keep up to date with each other on the web.
  This can be personal, professional, or both.

  Use Paper.li to create a ‘prospect portfolio’ for your sales team.
  You can include peers, competitive topics, and industry news.

  Use Paper.li to research competitors.
  Follow teams of employees, account managers, and clients.

  Use Addictomatic to share recent news stories with clients.
  Include advanced search phrases to focus on important topics.

  Use Addictomatic to create a news dashboard about you.
  Search for your name, employer, or recent projects.

  Get creative

  The above examples are basic applications of using these free tools for streamlined social media training. By thinking through your current daily and weekly work process you can find multiple ways of collecting information and sharing it with your team (to make faster and better informed decisions!)

   

   

   

  

  

  3 months on
  123 Social Media
• 

  Social Media Policy – Five Essential Questions

  As a communication channel, the digital ‘tidal wave’ of employees using social sites has opened numerous concerns for business owners.

  Business executives often rely on traditional human resource and public relations tactics to manage how they manage the workforce. The problem is that these traditional tactics don’t take into account the numerous laws, regulations, and compliance issues that are found at industry, local, state, and federal levels.

  Your social media policy needs to be ‘revamped’ from the ground up.

  Some core questions you should think about

  Who owns it?

  This is both a legal question and an internal management question.

  Part one: If your employees are allowed to post on social media sites during work hours or are required to post on sites as a function of their job, who really owns it?

  This can be a very important question to resolve in writing with your employees. There are numerous cases were a socially engaged employee networked with hundreds or thousands of high-value contacts on a personal account and then took those assets when they left the company. This error could easily represent a six figure mistake twelve months down the road. (Just think… what would happen if your entire e-mail or client database was on the web and someone else owned it?)

  Part two: do you have the ability to make effective decisions in your online communication?

  In many organizations marketing owns the social media channel.

  As organizations get larger and more complex, decision makers from information technology, public relations, legal, human resources, and executive management also get involved.

  It is critical that a well-defined communication hierarchy is established so that effective actions can be taken when required.

  Do you have access to all your social accounts 24/7?

  Two important ideas to consider:

  • It is Saturday night. Your office catches fire. Several witnesses on Facebook and Twitter comment and it begins to ‘go viral’Can you access all the pertinent social channels at your company to communicate the right story without being delayed?
  • You fire an employee.You thought you owned it. They have the passwords.Have you created a proper human resource and information technology process to retain your social media assets without delay?

  Have you identified mission critical communication paths?

  There are multiple process paths for your social media policy that need specific guidance.

  Some examples include

  • sales / marketing funnel
  • consumer communication
  • crisis escalation
  • hiring/firing
  • security breaches
  • employee/client privacy
  • regulatory concerns
  • executive communications
  • investor relations

  Each of these communication processes have mission critical elements that are accelerated by social media usage. In many cases the most immediate requirement is the management of fast and effective communication for senior managers and executive leadership. In the world of social media policy, many mid-management employees feel they are doing the ‘right thing’ and are unfortunately trying to make decisions in an area of business that they are acting blindly in.

  Are you monitoring your employees for rogue communications?

  This is a very tricky question.

  • What if an employee says something horrible about you or a client?
  • What if it turns out that what they said was not true?
  • What if someone else posted it using their credentials?
  • Have you communicated proper expectations to the employees in question?

  If you have doubts about any of these questions, you open a series of employment headaches.

  On top of the basic questions above, there are also a number of legal and civil rights and liberties that public and private employees have at the industry, local, state, and federal levels.

  Does it influence hire / fire decisions?

  Before you respond to a gut reaction to hire or fire someone based on social media commentary; do some research about local and federal regulations.

  The National Labor Relations Board researched 129 cases that involved social media and the workplace to determine what the precedence for terminating an employee. The general conclusion of the NLRB was that the most common error was an “overbroad policy” that restricted employees from commenting on wages, corrective actions, and complaints about the company or it’s leadership.

  My Biased Bonus Tip:

  Don’t rely on a boilerplate social media policy

  While we work with social media policies and strategic planning, it is critical to understand that your social media policy is not about marketing. It affects dozens of points within corporate business and represents benefits and liability areas that reach into six and seven figure sums.

  From an expert level, most borrowed social media policies and the strategic planning giving to them have extraordinary holes in them.

  Copying social media policy from a competitor or like-minded company risk issues and voids almost all the benefits of having a social media policy in the first place.

  What would you detail in a social media policy?

   

  

  

  4 months on
  123 Social Media
• 

  3 Great Social Media Infographics

  I’ve had the opportunity to have some really great conversations regarding where social media has been, where it is, and where it is going.

  The strategic thought behind this conversation is based on massive volumes of data.

  Billions of Likes, Tweets, Visits, Votes, and Shares.

  All of this data creates a variety of ‘mental static’ that causes decision makers to freeze up and become disoriented.

  The sheer amount of information becomes a new type of obstacle that prevents businesses from moving forward at the right time and location.

  Here are three social media infographics
  that paint a picture with all that data

  

  The Growth of Social Media – This social media infographic is a great place to start. It shows some of the tools that have reached adoption and global appeal.
  Check it out: Social Media Infographics – The Growth of Social

  

  Social TV and the MTV Video Music Awards – this covers what 5.5 million Tweets can show you around a live event (and this visualization doesn’t even cover the tip of the iceberg.)
  Check it out: Social Media Infographics – Social TV with MTV

  

  Adoption of the Mobile Workforce -  we have to keep in mind that social media also covers a range of hardware such as mobile phones and tablets.
  Check it out: Social Media Infographics – Mobile Workforce

   

   Do you have any recommended social media infographics?
  Share them in the comments below!

  

  

  5 months on
  123 Social Media
• 

  Social Media Guidelines and Employee Evangelists

  Unlike the legal tone of a normal social media policy and communication plan, social media guidelines need to be created in a way that encourages your internal supporters and immediate friends/family to grow you business.

  If you let your legal and human resources team scare your employees about touching a keyboard, camera, or conversation in your favor, you’ve completely disabled one of the biggest assets in your organization: the employees who are happy and eager to see your business grow.

  These individuals represent years of goodwill and existing relationships that can support your business goals. Providing a set of social media guidelines that encourages and supports them is the fastest and most reliable way of engaging with social media projects and having a positive business outcome.

  Key Questions to Think About

  • Who are your social media adopters?
  • What percentage of employees are beneficial online?
  • What percentage of employees are hazardous online?
  • How can you enable employees to engage new conversations correctly?
  • How can you manage employees when they engage incorrectly?

  In addition to managing beneficial and hazardous situations, we also need to think about the multiple reasons an employee could engage an audience on behalf of the company.

  Essential Reasons They Could Engage

  • They want a friend to work with them.
  • They really like the product/service the company offers.
  • They want to encourage a team member to excel (both personally and professionally.)
  • They want to help a customer to solve a problem

  Encourage Beneficial Actions

  In addition to thinking about why they want to engage or what the risk/benefits of your social media guidelines cover, remembers that you organization is made of individuals and people. As humans we are formed into communities of supporters and those communities have different ways of thinking about moral, ethical, regional, and demographic issues.

  Corporate leaders need to think about ‘why, when, where’ employees are coming from and treat them as unique assets (not corporate commodities.)

  Step back to management 101
  praise publicly, reprimand privately.

  Don’t stifle employee freedom
  trust your employees to do the right thing (or else get rid of them.)

  Don’t let employees fail as individuals
  share your mistakes and learn quickly.

  Reverse Mentor
  let social media adopters share ideas and support across departments.

  Create benchmarks and paths to success
  highlight victories and challenge employees to reach higher.

  Treat your team like real people
  learn about them and share in what they personally love.

  Provide access to expertise/information
  employees have a lot of questions about this stuff (give them some answers!)

  Highlight talent and expertise through questions
  share some of the obstacles your employees have solved over 5,10, 20 year careers…

  Time spent learning how to do something right isn’t wasted
  the global knowledge of mankind is available through search and social networking
  (learn to use it)

  Make do it ‘the right way’ fun and engaging
  incentives, contests, gamification, and competition can take the ordinary to extraordinary.

  Remember Your Org Chart

  Aside from being individuals and making decisions on a personal level, employees are also driven to take action based upon the responsibilities they have in your organization.

  When you think about your social media guidelines make sure you consider the variations of all the above elements and how they may apply to area of you company’s new media business flow (image below)

   

  

   

   

  

  

  5 months on
  123 Social Media
• 

  Social Media for Events – 5 great articles

  As part of our on-going training curriculum and workshops, many of our projects overlap with real world events (trade shows, conferences, etc.)

  This led to the launch of TradeShowSocialMedia.com, where we’ve been publishing a number of articles covering how to use digital strategies for event based efforts.

  All of these articles tie into marketing and audience engagement; but you should always be asking yourself the root question of- ‘who is my target audience?

  If you keep that question in mind, audiences can range from prospects, employees, investors, journalists, and more.

  Check Them Out

  Trade Show Displays: why the audience demands more

  ” As communicators that are responsible for relaying our brand message at the event floor, event teams need to keep in mind that people do not come to trade shows to find out informational bullet points on a glossy brochure… they come to the event to experience satisfaction, leadership, innovation, and many other ‘feelings’  “

  10 Tips for QR Codes at Trade Show Booths
  

  “If you feel your audience is a tech-friendly group and thus decide to add QR codes to your trade show exhibit graphics, then do these 10 things.”

  Trade Show Strategy – Digital Setup 101

  “It is especially important that you give yourself time for exploration and conversation with your audience. The more time you give yourself, the more options you have for testing different ideas and making sure your event maximizes on low-hanging benefits.”

  Audience Analysis and Educational Event Workshops

  “Before tracking down your audience, you first have to identify you basic starting point and your desired destination. For event managers with on-going strategies, some of this work is done already. As a professional, you need to constantly examine trends and decide where your organization is going to do business.”

  Trade Show Exhibits – Post Checklist 401

  “We have to keep in mind that the fundamental basis for attending an event is to display your best… and have everyone on your team needs to be “game on.”

   

   

  Feel free to share any tips regarding social media for events in the comments below.

  

  

  5 months on
  123 Social Media