If you are a social media strategist, below is social media strategy diagram that you will find extremely useful.  Posted by Marc Campman on the Marketing 2.0 network (but originally developed by David J. Carr), it groups the development and roll out of a social media strategy in four distinct phases.

click diagram to open high res version in new window.

Phase 1: LISTEN. In this phase you have to define your key stakeholders and listen to what they are doing on the web and social arena. Its just like real marketing. Who is your target market, and what do they need. The only difference now is that standard market research won’t do the trick. You now have to find the online places where they are and listen to what they are saying. About you, your product, your service, the market etc.

Phase 2: UNDERSTAND. Again, marketing 101. But with a slight difference. Now that you have identified them and grouped them in what David calls tribes, you have to give them something they belong to. Something they can join. In social media terms this is called joining a community. Just like the real tribes do. And once you’ve done that you then feed the tribes with relevant and interesting objects. This is the content. This can be tools, widgets, apps, videos, photos, ideas, assets or any other content. As long as it is relevant to them.

Phase 3: ENGAGE. This is probably the most important phase of the roll out. Mingle with the tribes. Play their games, have conversations and connected experiences. But make sure you use their preferred platforms, their personalised pages, or the video and photo sharing sites they use. Even simple email can be effective in this stage. Its about enable, encourage and optimise for sharing the social objects created in the previous stage. If this is done properly, the content will be shared on Blogs and niche sites, will be replicated on other social networks and will ultimately drive the creation of communities and forums. In this phase, paid for media (Online ads, promo links or Google Adwords) can be used to stimulate further distribution of the content.

Phase 4: MEASURE, REACT & RESPOND. This phase is critical. This is where you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Whether you achieve the anticipated results. In Webjam we do this in three levels of sophistication. REACH, ENGAGEMENT, BRAND. From very simple traffic analysis, to community engagement and ultimately to brand sentiment analysis. This data can then be used as input to finetune the strategy and this makes it a vicious circle.

Read More: Marketing 2.0 Update 6 – Social Media Campaign Diagram

I have to admit, looking at beautifully crafted social media frameworks makes me feel positively giddy. So imagine my delight when I saw all of the social media framework goodness on Ross Dawson’s Twitter page: @rossdawson. So, for other geeks who get the same cheap thrills as I do, I’ve combined the frameworks created by Ross Dawson and Advanced Human Technologies and Future Exploration Network into one single collection. Some of the frameworks are from a couple of years ago, but they’re still so relevant that I thought I would include them. Don’t be shy… enjoy!!!

Social Media Strategy Beta 2

September 21, 2009

This provides guidance and a frame on how organizations can approach engaging with social media. The left side of the framework outlines the three steps in the process of ENGAGEMENT while the right side shows the three steps in STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT.

Influence Landscape

May 17, 2009

The Influence Landscape framework is launched in a Beta version that will be refined and developed over time, as influence is now one of [Ross Dawson's] major research and content directions.

Trends Map 2009

December 18, 2008

The 2009 trend map moves on from the subway map theme of the last years to show the multi-tentacled hydra that is the year ahead.

Future of Media Lifecycle

July 6, 2008

GENESIS OF THE FRAMEWORK
The core ideas in this framework look at how people would consume media in the future – where they would be, how they would interface with media, and what they would consume. In essence, creating a person-centered view of how we engage with media. Thus the working title of the framework began as ‘Future of Media Participation’, looking not just at our media consumption, but also how we contribute. When the framework was finished it was clear the central aspect was the media lifecycle. As such the diagram has been renamed, however it stems from looking at how and where we consume and participate in media.

Trend Blend 2008

January 21, 2008

While the 2007 map was based on the London tube map, the 2008 map is derived from Shanghai’s underground routes. Limited to just five lines, the map uncovers key trends across Society, Politics, Demographics, Economy, and Technology.

Web 2.0 Framework

May 30, 2007

The intention of the Web 2.0 Framework is to provide a clear, concise view of the nature of Web 2.0, particularly for senior executives or other non-technical people who are trying to grasp the scope of Web 2.0, and the implications and opportunities for their organizations.

Trend Map 2007

December 18, 2006

A map of major trends for 2007 and beyond, across ten segments, as well as the key intersections between the trends: society & culture, government & politics, work & business, media & communications, science & technology, food & drink, medicine & well-being, financial services, retail & leisure, and transport & automotive.

Ross Dawson, founder of Advanced Human Technologies, launched the Beta 2 version of the  Social Media Strategy Framework on September 21 (the original Beta was launched back in July).  This framework provides guidance on how organizations can approach engagement with social media, and illustrates the three steps in the process of ENGAGEMENT (on the left) as well as the three steps in STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT (right).

This is a Beta version. Ross is asking for input on your thoughts on what’s wrong (and right) for this to be taken into account for the next version. I encourage you to do so here!

Click on the image to download pdf

Parker LePla’s branding experts, Briana Marrah and Joe LePla, led a workshop at the Advanced Learning Institute’s Internal Branding Conference. They spoke on how to leverage social media tools to engage your employees and create effective brand champions.

Social media tools have added more visibility to your brand, providing a channel for anyone’s opinions and experiences to be distributed to the world almost instantaneously. If this isn’t enough to make you a little nervous, what about the fact that conversations in social media aren’t limited just to your customers? Your employees are online sharing their opinions about you, too. Your employees’ lives and jobs intersect online where the lines between public and private are blurred at best.

Don’t be deterred by this reality! Your employees, if given the right incentives and tools, can become the biggest champions of your brand. They are the most important audience in any brand effort because they both deliver the brand experience and influence public opinion. If you re-examine your internal social media policy through this lens, your employees look less like a ticking time-bomb and more like message mercenaries.

In this presentation, learn ways to utilize social media tools to help, not hinder, your brand. Specifically, you’ll learn:

• Examples of how social media has enhanced and destroyed brand value
• How social media can be used to drive deeper engagement
• Ways to overcome hurdles to implementation and gain organizational buy-in
• How guidelines can ensure that social media touch points stay true to your brand
• Tactics and strategies to successfully leverage and measure social media effectiveness

Leveraging social media in employee engagement

The Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit is a draft series of checklists to help companies, their employees, and their agencies learn the appropriate and transparent ways to interact with blogs, bloggers, and the people who interact with them.

We believe in the principles of transparency and openness, and this document is a way of making this real on the inside. Our goal is not to create or propose new industry standards or rules. These checklists are open source training tools designed to help educate the hundreds or thousands of employees in any large corporation the appropriate ways to interact with the social media community.

Downloads and Translations

You can download the Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit as a single document (read on to view it online):

• English
• Simplified Chinese

Scenarios Addressed

1. Disclosure of Identity
2. Personal/Unofficial Blogging and Outreach
3. Blogger Relations
4. Compensation and Incentives
5. Agency and Contractor Disclosure
6. Creative Flexibility

Original Source: Definitive Guide to Corporate HR Blogging

Real-time social networking via Twitter, Facebook, etc. is certainly all the rage. But fundamentally, blogging still remains the best way to build brand, authority and thought leadership. Lots of companies blog and more and more are joining the world of blogging on a regular basis. Corporate HR blogging on the other hand has a long way to go.

Ben Yoskovitz and Susan Burns have written a definitive guide for corporate HR blogging — a practical, how-to guide on how to setup a blog, get management approval, write great content and build traffic. The guide is 31 pages long – but it’s broken up into small chunks that are easy to read and digest. There’s a list of Top 10 Corporate HR Blogging Tips near the end, along with a list of great online resources for blogging, HR and recruitment.

What you’ll learn:

• Why blogging is important to your success in HR/recruiting
• How to develop the business case for blogging
• How to get management approval
• How to handle bad news and negative criticism
• How to start a blog – the technology, definitions, and more
• How to write a blog – editorial calendars, story ideas, research
• How to build traffic – linking, social media, commenting, etc.
• How to go beyond blogging – Twitter, social networks

I’m currently in the process of working with our Talent Acquisition team to improve my company’s external Careers site, the front end “static” pages as well as the applicant tracking system (ATS) itself. Some of the challenges that I am currently facing are:

1. Effectively communicating what we do as a business in a fun and interactive manner.
2. Streamlining the user experience so that it is easy for applicants to find and apply for positions.
3. Conveying the company as a great place to work with excellent benefits and programs (and it is!).
4. Aligning the recruiting brand to the corporate enterprise, while also maintaining one that is unique to our business.

We recently deployed a refreshed home page that incorporates social media (links to our newly created Facebook fan page and Twitter pages), and are working to include more interactive features such as employee videos and possibly even a blog. Additionally, we are improving our current ATS to simplify the application process.

In my research for best practices, I came across an article on ERE.net which is contains some great ideas for improving a company career’s site. Check the six ways to create a positive candidate experience below:

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Original source: Using Career Sites to Create a Positive Candidate Experience, by Kevin Wheeler

A positive candidate experience translates directly into more referrals, more hires, and better quality candidates. The experience most candidates have with an organization usually starts in one of two ways: they either receive a call from a recruiter or a friend who tells them about the organization, or they go to the career site for information and to look for open positions.

The recruiter’s opening remarks, telephone or face-to-face style, and assumptions about the candidate forge the initial impression a candidate gets of the organization. And as they say, you can only make a first impression once! If it is a poor one, you will most likely lose the candidates, and perhaps the referrals they could have made.

Rather than relying on a recruiter to create the candidate experience, smart organizations will strive to provide a consistent and constant experience that is independent of any individual, and that experience will be centered on the career site.

Over the next decades it will become a requirement that every organization have an interactive career site that will be the portal for candidates at any stage of the hiring process to provide feedback, information, and to develop and grow their relationship with your organization. Some organizations have started on this journey, including Deloitte, Microsoft, and KPMG. They have put together websites and online events that are targeted at their most desired candidates and create positive impressions. But, most career sites are weak at creating any impression at all and are just fluff.

For most organizations the candidate experience process is weak, broken, and badly in need of being rethought. As more and more candidates are from Gen Y, they expect to see dynamic, interesting, and authentic career sites that provide specific information. They are much less focused on talking directly with a recruiter or with developing a face-to-face relationship. Yet, recruiters are notorious for believing that the only possible way to know people is by “pressing the flesh”: meeting them in person, calling them on the phone, or having lunch or dinner with them. While these are all useful and time-tested, it is also possible to get to know people and build relationships using the Internet. By using technology to extend out from the small number of people it is possible to meet and know face-to-face, a recruiter can become vastly more effective.

Building electronic relationships with no personal contact is not only possible, it may even be desirous. Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric, has said that human relationships are declining in the selling of goods and services. What he means is that telephone and face-to-face connections between corporate buyers and their suppliers is rapidly being supplanted by Internet and email conversations. The same is also true of relationships with customers. Amazon, Dell, Lands’ End, and other retailers have developed sophisticated tools to build and maintain long-term relationships with their customers.

Here are six ways to build a more positive candidate experience into your career site.

1. Move your thinking from a career site to something more like a social network. Turn your career site into a social network by using tools such as Ning to create one, or engaging the services of an organization such as Standout Jobs that specializes in recruiting networks. This will automatically give you many of the features I describe.
2. Have recruiters write blogs. Blogs have become the voice of authenticity and provide the most credible information. Candidates become attached to specific bloggers and keep coming back, which results in them having a relationship and deeper understanding of your organization than they could have gotten in any other way. Even though we have been blogging for years, only a handful of recruiting sites have a blog aimed at candidates. The most well known is Heather Hamilton’s at Microsoft. Most of us have let legal issues and the difficulty to overcome internal bureaucratic processes stifle the use of this potentially excellent communication and relationship-building tool.
3. Make the site adapt to the candidate’s needs. Build in choices so that candidates who are analytical can get data, facts, and charts while those candidates who are more verbal get similar information in text or pictures. Creating various forms of the same content is a clever and effective way of adding what seems to the candidates a personal touch to the website.
4. Hold webinars. Periodic online seminars, or webinars, can be used to build traffic and create some opportunities for people to learn what your organization does and how they might fit into it. There are a number of webinar firms that offer inexpensive software that you could harness for this purpose. These can be recorded and offered later as podcasts.
5. Hold a contest. Promoting contests and games can also be a useful way to generate excitement and build relationships. People respond to trivia games, contests, and online minisurveys. They like the instant feedback and the ability to do something rather than just read. These contests are also a way to get people to come back over and over again to your site. Each time they return is another opportunity to recruit them — or at least to have a conversation with them and keep them excited about your organization.

The point of all this is to give candidates authentic information when they need it in a way they respond to. A good career site is not just a listing of open positions but also a carefully thought out and targeted marketing tool. By spending your budget dollars to develop a dynamic career site, you can lower your overall sourcing costs, increase candidate volume and quality, and build your organization’s reputation.

Original source: Social Networks and Talent Strategies, by Alice Snell

All the chatter around social networking seems apropos considering it is—at its core—a communications media. However, examinations of the demographics, trends, and impact send some mixed messages. For example:

Facebook users get lower grades in college features an Ohio State University study where the 85% of students who are Facebook users get lower grades. Yet Facebook, YouTube at work make better employees: study highlights an Australian study where workers who use the Internet at work are 9% more productive. And opportunities abound as Social Networking jobs are steadily rising.

Meanwhile, the intersection of social networking and recruiting continues to be controversial. Jobseekers are counseled on How to Turn Social Networking Into a Job Offer while Bosses and Workers Disagree on Social Network Privacy.

The Consumer Internet Barometer found 43% of the online community now use social networking sites, up from 27% a year ago. But College Students’ Facebook Use Easing Up Over the Summer, While Parents Logging On in Record Numbers.

The social networking demographic has surely broadened beyond Gen Y along with the applications of the technologies.

Successful organizations are using social technologies to complement their talent strategies. Find out more in the presentation below:

Original source: Social Networks and Talent Strategies, by Alice Snell

Universal McCann’s WAVE research into the phenomenal growth of social media is the most robust data set in the world. Affectionately called “Power to the People,” this annual social media tracker has mapped key changes in consumer uptake and usage of social media platforms for the past four years.

Power to the People provides in-depth understanding into the dramatic changes driven by the uptake of social media, including:

* How consumers use social media and what motivates them to use it
* How social media influences consumers’ purchase decisions
* How social media allows consumers to influence the purchase decisions of people they don’t know
* Which brands are using social media most effectively
* What should be done to maximise the effectiveness of brand communication in these spaces

Wave.4

The latest iteration—WAVE 4—tracked  23,200 active Internet users in 38 countries during Spring 2009, providing an exhaustive study and a wide range of insight. The report is stuffed full of global statistics, with individual country focuses on the USA, UK, Germany, Korea, Brazil, India and China.

The data in Wave 4 juxtaposed with the relatively low ad spend in social media shows that consumers are out in front of marketers. The opportunity for success in the relatively uncluttered landscape will never be higher.

Key statistics include:

• The total estimated global active internet audience is now 625m
• Mobile internet usage has now reached nearly a fifth of all active internet users. Seventeen percent now access internet on the move as well as at home, work or college
• Widgets continue to thrive with 34% of social network users installing them for their own use and 24% installing them to impress visitors to their profile page

Wave.3

The research covers input from 17,000 internet users across 29 countries and was undertaken to understand the rise in consumer generated content and how people are using social media, and was completed in March 2008.

It is certainly the most extensive global report I have seen on the subject of social media adoption.

Key notes from the Power To The People – Wave 3 report include the following statistics:

• 83% of people are watching online video, an increase from 62% at the time of the last study in June 2007
• 78% of people are reading blogs, an increase from 66% in the previous study
• 57% of internet users are members of social networks
• RSS consumption has increased to 39% from 15%
• 48% of the people surveyed listen to podcasts.

Wave.2

The second wave of the ongoing report of “Power to the People”, surveys almost 9500 regular Internet users in 21 markets worldwide, and was conducted in May 2007. The study measures consumer usage, attitudes and interest in adopting the possibilities of the changing and socially orientated Internet.

Key findings:

• Blogging grows to 170m creators worldwide thanks to rapidly expanding Internet universes in the emerging Internet markets
• 21% have uploaded a video clip online
• 46% of all blog readers have started their own blog
• 41% upload and shared photos online
• Watching video clips online has doubled in 9 months; 31% to 62% penetration. Estimated global universe of 330m
• Estimated 340m blog readers worldwide. The largest audience in the world is the USA where 64m read blogs
• Social Networking is used by an estimated 194m 16–54’s worldwide

Wave.1

The first wave of the ongoing report of “Power to the People”, surveys almost 7500 regular Internet users in 15 markets worldwide, and was conducted in May 2006.

>> If you find this presentation somewhere online, please let me know. I’ve been having difficulty finding it! Thanks.

Related articles:

• Universal McCann Wave.4 published
• Final Stop Of The Day: Universal McCann’s Brian Monahan
• Universal McCann International Social Media Research Wave 3
• Social Media Study: Universal McCann Power To The People – Wave 3 Report
• Social media as a global phenomenon – recent discoveries

Original Source: Nonprofits Lead Academia and Corporations in Social Media Adoption, ImpactWatch

For the second year in a row, non-profits have adopted social media at a faster rate than corporations or academic institutions.

A new research study, “Still Setting the Pace in Social Media: The First Longitudinal Study of Usage by the Largest US Charities” compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007 and 2008 by the nation’s top 200 largest charities.

The study was conducted by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc., a Seattle-based research firm.

The study reveals that:

• 57% of charities have blogs, compared to colleges/universities at 41%, Inc 500 corporations at 39% and only 16% of Fortune 500 Co.s blogging.

• 90% of charities feel that their blog is successful.

• Use of at least one form of social media has increased from 75 to 89% of respondents.

• Usage increased for all social media tools studied: 79% of charities are using both social networking and video blogging, up 38 and 47% respectively over a year.

• 66% of charity respondents conduct online media monitoring, compared to 54% of academic institutions and 60% of the Inc 500.

• Over 80 percent feel that social media is at least “somewhat important” to their future strategy; 45 percent responded that social media is very important to their fundraising strategy.

View the full report below or download a full copy of the new research report from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Original Source:  Nonprofits Lead Academia and Corporations in Social Media Adoption, ImpactWatch