When employees already have their hands full with existing work, it can be difficult to add social into that. Sure, someone could be hired to fill that specific role, but there isn’t always budget for that. When businesses get to this point, knowing that this is a method of marketing that they need to be embracing, outsourcing becomes a popular option.

As with anything, though, the decision to outsource may or may not be the right one. And there are certainly pros and cons to each option. While this list is by no means exhaustive, we’ve listed some of the primary pros and cons here to help you begin the decision-making process.

A few reasons to outsource

If you are starting small and don’t have the in-house expertise, outsourcing can be a great way to start. Someone else is taking care of social for you, which frees you and your team to focus on other important matters within your business. If you invest in a well-respected agency, the outsourcing team could be more knowledgeable than your employees when it comes to social, meaning they’ll be more effective at managing and measuring the accounts. A good outsourcing agency can take the time to work with you to establish your brand voice and get a good feel for your company culture so that they can seamlessly engage and interact on your behalf.

A few reasons not to outsource

Think about it: when you outsource, you’re also removing your employees – the blood, sweat, and tears of your business – from the equation. They cease to be unique voices within the company, traded in instead for someone who perhaps only knows of the company and its mission in the most remote sense. Also, if any of your employees have an understanding of social media and a demonstrated interest in growing that skill, you block their opportunity for growth and involvement by outsourcing. If they feel like they can grow somewhere else, they will. Making someone else a middle man between you and your customers or clients can be detrimental, especially when quick decisions regarding such communications need to be made. A lack of response to timely events or questions could be the only reason the customer needs to move on to someone else with more personalized attention. Finally, there is always the unknown quality issue.

The verdict

It depends. You need to determine where you are on the ‘social maturity’ life cycle today. What are your plans for the future? Are you planning to spread social across the enterprise (@Jowyang)? If you are small or just starting out, or don’t see yourself investing in becoming a social business, it probably makes sense to outsource. To truly give your customers the best experience, you need your business to be alive and thriving on social channels. As Esteban Kolsky(@ekolsky) of ThinkJar says “Social + CRM = CRM”. In order to truly achieve that, the voice of the company must be your own – a collective voice created by executives and employees alike. I see the merits of outsourcing and offering a helping hand; however, I believe for organizations to truly evolve to being customer centric they need social to be imbibed in the very fabric of the organization – across sales, marketing and customer support. However, the answers in life are never so cut and dry, are they?

What are your thoughts on social media outsourcing?

In order to know that any action is having a positive effect, you need to be able to link it to positive business outcomes. For example, you might have a lot of Likes on your Facebook page or a lot of followers on Twitter; but if you can’t show how those numbers are helping to boost awareness, applications, and enrollment, nor how it increases retention and involvement from the outside community (parents, donors, and alumni, perhaps), you’re not really able to prove success.

To measure success, first pick a framework. Look at the input and ask yourself what you’ve done with this channel so far. How have you built it out? Next, identify your reach by determining how large an audience you’ve built. Furthermore, how engaged is that audience? Finally, what kind of impact is each channel having? If the audience is large and engaged (the ideal situation), are they doing what you’d like for them to be doing?

Second, focus on use cases. This is a cycle of sorts:

Identify

• Understand the market
• Listen to and monitor conversations
• Identify key influencers

Acquire

• Extent the reach of your programs
• Influence the university’s perception

Retain

• Get to know the community (students, parents, alumni, etc.)
• Manage and engage (respond to comments, answer questions, elicit interaction in the community

Nurture

• Help to make connections (alumni, parents, faculty and staff, students)
• Support that community

Finally, resist analysis paralysis and think progressive disclosure.

There are multiple tools out there that can help universities and other educational institutions provide a useful and enjoyable cross-channel experience for their social communities. With just one integrated platform, it will be easy to analyze, engage, and integrate your social activities with traditional ones.

For some further reading on the subject, check out…

• HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Strategy (via Mashable)
• The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration (via Mashable)
• How Higher Education Uses Social Media [Infographic] (via Mashable)
• How Are Educational Institutions Using Social Media? [Infographic] (via MediaBistro)

Finally, if you’d like to take a look at how some other universities are making social work for them, there are any number of great examples out there. Have a look at the following case studies, which will hopefully help you to start thinking about what similar strategies might work in your own institution.

• Vanderbilt University Social Media Handbook
• University of Oregon Social Media Best Practices
• University of Alabama Social Media Best Practices and Recommendations

These framework questions, along with the key points that accompany them here, should serve to help you get organized in your social media endeavors. They will help you identify why, specifically, you want to use social media at your institution. This knowledge will, in turn, help you to tailor your efforts and see more success. Also have a look at Social Media for Educational Institutions on Slideshare.

It’s safe to assume that your customers and prospects are on social media. This is where they’re doing their research, asking their questions, and getting opinions from those whom they trust: their friends, family, and close networks. They’re making decisions about you and your company based on social media. These are but a few of the reasons why social selling is now imperative for any business.

Of course, social selling emphasizes the ‘social’ more than it does the ‘selling’ aspect. This makes the term a bit misleading, maybe, but it’s really about empowering your customers and prospects to make informed decisions about their purchases. Some of the key components of social selling include:

#1: Providing information to customers and prospects across a variety of channels

In order to be effective at social selling, you should do some research about your target market first. It’s up to you to know where your market is on social. For example, if you’re a B2B, your market might be concentrated more on LinkedIn than they are Facebook. If you’re a B2C, your market might be more active on Facebook.

You must understand your target customer so that you know where to be sharing information and providing answers. If your prospects are asking questions on Twitter but you’re hanging around LinkedIn waiting for them, you’re missing big opportunities.

#2: Using content marketing as a way to show, not sell

Similarly, if you’re waiting to be asked for information, you’re missing more opportunities to engage, empower, and educate through content marketing. This content can be shared all across the social web – anywhere your target market might be – and includes white papers, guides, blog posts, infographics, videos, and other informative content.

The important thing to remember here is that this content doesn’t go for the hard sell. Instead, you use it as a way to establish yourself as a thought leader. In doing so, you gain the customers’ and prospects’ trust – a big plus for business.

#3: Articulating the company brand

What does your brand stand for? What is your brand voice? What’s your vision? These are all important to know if you’re in social selling. Because you’ll be spending so much time interacting across various platforms and channels, it’s important to be always be representing your brand in the best possible light.

At the same time, social selling will benefit from your ability to maintain your brand voice and vision across those channels, as this will create a cohesive experience across the board for customers and prospects.

#4: Establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry

This idea of becoming a thought leader goes back to the principle of showing, not selling. Today’s consumers don’t want to be sold to. They want to be educated and empowered enough to make informed decisions.

Establishing yourself as a thought leader within your industry means a few things. First, it means that you’re not constantly pushing your products and services. That’s an old practice that annoys customers more often than it convinces them to buy. No one wants to listen to a company that can only talk about itself.

Second, it means being able to recognize and share helpful content with your customers and prospects. This means reading a lot of publications, posts, and charts and sharing the best information in an effort to educate your social following.

Third, it also means being able to create some of that content yourself. When you create high quality and engaging content, not only does it provide value to your customers and prospects, but it also gets shared around social channels, meaning it helps to increase your visibility and open the possibility for new leads.

In Conclusion

Social selling is all about making connections that help to increase your brand visibility, retaining your current customers, and gaining new ones. This is done through engaging your target market across various social channels and sharing relevant and useful content with them.

Ultimately, when you’re able to adequately educate your customers and prospects about your industry without making them feel like you’re constantly selling to them, you empower them to make educated decisions about their purchases and gain their trust. And you certainly don’t need to be told how valuable that is.

Let us know: are you practicing social selling? What has been easy for you? What’s been most difficult? We’d love to hear your thoughts about and experiences with this topic in the comments!

To begin, we identified our framing questions:

• How was the overall performance of CeBIT 2013 on Twitter?
• Which were the most visible High Tech companies at CeBIT2013?
• How did the share-of-voice compare between the top brands?
• Who were the most active tweeters?
• What were the key topics driving the conversation?
• What role did influencers play to amplify the messages?

Our analysis looked specifically at the event days March 5 and 6, during which we found that there were:

• 9151 total tweets – 5263 on March 5 and 3888 on March 6.
• 1115 total re-tweets – 325 on March 5 and 790 on March 6.

This indicates a 12% average re-tweet rate total, with a 6% rate on March 5 and a 20% rate on March 6.

From these numbers, we can see that the first two days of CeBIT 2013 were a great success in terms of Twitter. While Day 2 had a higher rate of re-tweets than Day 1, external engagement was high across the board. Overall, the high number of tweets and re-tweets including #Cebit2013 indicates that the event was well received.

You can find a more detailed analysis on Reach, Impact and Engagement metrics on Slideshare and infographics on Pinterest.

Comparing the Top Companies at CeBit2013

In this part of our analysis, we compare the top companies at CeBit2013: SAP, Intel, Microsoft, and IBM. The findings were as follows:

SAP:

• 568 total tweets
• 146 total re-tweets
• 26% re-tweet rate

Intel:

• 428 total tweets
• 8 total re-tweets
• 2% re-tweet rate

Microsoft:

• 223 total tweets
• 30 total re-tweets
• 13% re-tweet rate

IBM:

• 118 total tweets
• 16 total re-tweets
• 14% re-tweet rate

The numbers break down to indicate that …

• SAP had 33% more tweets/mentions than Intel
• Intel had 92% more tweets/mentions than Microsoft
• Microsoft had 89% more tweets/mentions than IBM
• IBM had 381% fewer tweets/mentions than SAP.

Let’s break this down a little further by examining the share-of-voice:

SAP:

• Total number of tweets for Day 1: 336, Day 2: 232
• 69% of tweet share was from external community
• 31% of tweet share was from SAP-owned handles
• Participation: active engagement from SAP

Intel:

• Total number of tweets for Day 1: 300, Day 2: 128
• 100% of tweet share was from external community
• Participation: no engagement by Intel or subsidiaries

Microsoft:

• Total number of tweets for Day 1: 121, Day 2: 102
• 93% of tweet share was from external community
• 7% of tweet share was from Microsoft’s own handles
• Participation: came from Microsoft’s regional subsidiaries

IBM:

• Total number of tweets for Day 1: 77, Day 2: 41
• 70% of tweet share was from external community
• 30% of tweet share was from IBM-owned handles
• Participation: came from regional subsidiaries

Of these four companies, three of them are B2Bs (SAP, Intel, and IBM). SAP really demonstrated social strength and maturity during this event by using a dedicated Twitter handle along with subsidiaries, and dominated the conversation with an overall 46% share-of-voice. Additionally, SAP maintained a balanced engagement. Two-thirds of the conversations were driven by non-SAP employees.

On the other hand, if we look at Microsoft and Intel, almost all of the conversations surrounding those brands came from the external communities. The companies themselves were largely absent from the conversation.

Key Topics by Company

Each company added to the larger CeBIT2013 conversation with the following topics:

SAP:

• sapcebit
• sapcloud
• innojam
• mobile

SAP drove engagement by amplifying their messages.

Intel:

• nuevos
• atom
• synology
• haswell

Intel had these key topics, but without participation from its own handles, failed to amplify.

Microsoft:

• live-stream
• tablet
• pro
• directx

Overall, Microsoft had fewer key topics to amplify, meaning it was more difficult to engage.

IBM:

• ibmcebit
• augmented
• computing
• cebit2go

IBM had good topics that were more specific to CeBi2013 than, say, Microsoft’s. However, because they didn’t have the same level of participation as SAP, for example, they saw a much lower amplification of their messages.

Overall:

Looking at the CeBit2013 Twitter engagement for these top four high tech companies for the first two days of the event showed that there was some very good engagement taking place.

SAP demonstrated a well-orchestrated engagement, in particular. Because they used a dedicated event hashtag (#sapcebit), they were able to see higher engagement and greater amplification across several key topics from their internal and external communities.

Intel had an equally wide set of topics and decent engagement from its external community. However, they lacked participation from their own handles, and so missed a critical opportunity to leverage the event and amplify their messages.

Similarly, Microsoft also had good engagement from its external community, but it lacked key topics and conversations to amplify. Adding to that was a distinct lack of participation from the company’s own handles and subsidiaries.

IBM had a dedicate handle for CeBit2013 and had some good topics to discuss. Unfortunately, their message was not amplified well as there was little participation from their own handle, subsidiaries, and employees.

In all, we can see that having dedicated handles and hashtags, as well as participation from both internal and external communities, can make a huge difference in a brand’s ability to amplify its messages. SAP was the clear front-runner at CeBIT 2013.

You can find a more detailed analysis of the top brands on Slideshare and infographics on Pinterest.

A major problem to date has been the time it takes to generate these insights. Depending on the size of the customer database, retrieving the necessary information could have taken days or even weeks. To couple this with the influx of real-time data, the problem gets compounded multiple times. By the time the data is analyzed, there is a good chance that the analysis is no longer current or the opportunity has passed.

No one will argue the merit of real-time analytics. SAP has changed the way businesses run analytics with SAP HANA, its next generation in-memory database. Where it used to take hours or days to retrieve data, now with SAP HANA, data can be retrieved and analyzed in seconds. Further, with the ability to analyze structured and unstructured data, the derived insights are invaluable.

But why SAP HANA? Steve Lucas, Global GM & Senior Executive, SAP Business Analytics and Technology, offers a practical example of HANA’s power and ability. He says to think of it in terms of retail. SAP HANA can dramatically change the point-of-sale experience. Today, many customers are asked at checkout if they’d like to apply for a credit card. By using SAP HANA, businesses have the ability to process customers’ current purchases and offer them sales or discounts on the spot based on trends in the shopping experience. This would allow the business to go from a very general point-of-sale marketing approach to one that is far more precise. The ability to access this kind of data on the spot and improve the customer experience so entirely is monumental. Until very recently, this caliber of data retrieval has not yet been available.

For companies like NextPrinciples, we recognize that social media channels produce a tsunami of data that might otherwise be difficult to process. Mega events like CES (blog), DreamForce (Oracle Open World vs. DreamForce 2013 on Pinterest), and CeBIT provide brands with an opportunity to understand in real time who their key influencers are, what messages are resonating, or what’s the sentiment based off an announcement. So-Lo-Mo, which is the combination of social, location and mobile data, is another use case that requires crunching of large amounts of real-time data to better understand and engage with customers.

It is not just about what real-time data offers to brands. Customer expectations are also changing. Increasingly, customers are now expecting a seamless cross channel experience. They tweet out their disappointment about a service or product and within a few minutes get on the 1-800 number expecting the call center agent to not only be aware of the problem but to also have resolved it.

Batch updates that run every hour might seem frequent, but when you consider the pace at which social media moves, and changing customer expectations, an hour is too long for stakeholders to wait for a response. SAP’s HANA platform has allowed us at Next Principles to overcome these challenges. Instead of waiting for batch updates to run, we can now analyze and parse social media data in real time and the resulting query processing is 300 times faster.

It is after all about driving customer-centric businesses.

So it only makes sense, then, for universities to develop a strong social presence. Apart from being an excellent way to build campus community and culture, it adds a new dimension to ‘The Great College Search.’ As these secondary students begin the process of researching colleges, they’re almost certainly going to be using social tools to do it (think Facebook’s new Graph Search). They are going to want to get a good feel for what the schools are really like, and interacting with them on social media is a more personal way to do this than by simply reading brochures and static web pages.

Furthermore, it’s not just about the students using social media tools. Parents are on Facebook and Twitter now, too, and being able to receive updates from their children’s schools helps them to feel in the loop.

But how do universities get started with social media?

If you work for a post-secondary institution, then you’ve undoubtedly found yourself asking this question.

To begin in the most fundamental way, ask yourself some key framework questions:

Why do you want your school to be present on social media? What is the purpose? Do you have objectives outlined? Is it for:

• Communication/ marketing
• Student enrollment
• Student retention
• Alumni engagement
• Media outreach
• Donor engagement

What is the goal for your social media involvement?

• Content
• Listen, monitor
• Use cases
• Metrics – define and measure
• Publish
• Campaign and target

Who will manage these social accounts?

• Culture, governance
• Leadership
• Admins, agents
• Availability of people, time
• Expertise, training
• Frequency, volume
• Rules and responsibilities
• Strategy and tactics

When do you launch your accounts?

• Organizational readiness
• Use case finalization
• Tool selection

How do you start using social media within your organization?

• Experiment, learn, launch
• Phased, Big Bang
• Selective / all channels
• Tools, resources
• Analyze, engage, integrate
• Measure results – refine and reiterate

These framework questions, along with the key points that accompany them here, should serve to help you get organized in your social media endeavors. They will help you identify why, specifically, you want to use social media at your institution. This knowledge will, in turn, help you to tailor your efforts and see more success. Also have a look at Social Media for Educational Institutions on Slideshare.

Is your educational institution using social media? What steps did you take to develop your plan of action? If you’re not using social media, what’s holding you back? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Why is this important? Well, it saves you time from asking a lot of repetitive questions that ultimately annoy consumers if they have to answer the same ones too many times. It also gives you the benefit of having a user’s past conversation history in front of you, which can help you to detect important patterns. But it also lets your customers know that you value them and their time to keep such accurate records so that you don’t waste their time asking for information they’ve provided before. This is just the start with multi-channel customer support. Things are progressing fast, from multi-channel to cross-channel, where a customer issue raised on one channel e.g. social, is then addressed and closed on another channel e.g. over the phone or email. Such advances in cross-channel customer care are critical to offer a seamless customer experience.

If you wish to progress from the traditional channel customer care provider to a cross-channel customer experience enabler, you need the technology platform and infrastructure that enables such a process. In most cases, companies have existing CRM solutions that they use to provide support through traditional channels, and the challenge is in identifying and implementing a Social CRM solution with little disruption to business and also a solution that seamlessly integrates with the existing CRM solution.

When technology parity is established to deal seamlessly across social and traditional channels, it also provides your company the ability to leverage your current investments in processes and people skills. You will be able to extend the same business processes and people skills that you already have in place to now include Social channels.

So the most important considerations are people, processes and technology. Technology is just an enabler. The good news is that you now have the ability to extend the above three aspects without major disruptions or investments.

If you’re not making moves to offer integrated customer care services across your channels, both social and traditional, you’re going to start falling behind when it comes to the customer experience race. It’s time to adopt cross-channel customer care initiatives.

How is your business adjusting to social customer service techniques? Are you embracing cross-channel customer care initiatives? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

Using our Insight-to-Action Social Analytics & Engagement Platform, we at NextPrinciples (@NextPrinciples) conducted an analysis of the social media engagement for the event. To do this, we looked at the Reach, Engagement, and Impact metrics across the various social channels used. A small selection of analytics is also provided using our Campaign and Event Analytics module (also a part of Insight-to-Action). All of the analytics were run in real time, and many of the charts were tweeted live.

To begin, we identified a series of questions that would help us to target the metrics we needed for our analysis to be accurate. These questions were:

• How was the overall performance of the Women 2.0 Conference 2013 on social media?
• How was the engagement across different social media channels?
• Who were the key influencers for this event?
• How well was the content leveraged?
• What were the key topics driving the conversation?

We examined some metrics from Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, both on the day of the event, and for the two weeks leading up to it.

Twitter

Let’s take a look at our Twitter findings first. Between February 1 and February 14, a grand total of 5,100 tweets were sent regarding the Women 2.0 conference. Of those, 4,300 were sent on the day of the event itself. @Women2 tweeted more in the weeks leading up to the event (115 tweets), indicating intent to build an audience. The day of the event, they tweeted 85 times, showing their intent to reach the audience they’d built. Of the rest of the tweets sent, 1,400 of them were from the top ten handles for the event, and of those, 1,026 were from the top five handles, constituting 73% of the top ten tweet share, but only 24% of the total conference tweets.

Hashtags & key topics

The top hashtag for the event was the official one: #w2conf. Besides that particular term, all other key topics and top hashtags occurred at a much lower volume. It was also difficult for participants to indicate their business interests – other than #startup, no other top hashtag served as an indicator.

Other top hashtags included:

• #w2pitch
• #livingwage
• #startup
• #women
• #techwomen
• #Scientista
• #ff

#entrepreneur, #investor, and #innovation were all among key agenda topics that didn’t rank among the top hashtags.

Our analysis indicates that Women 2.0 missed an opportunity here to trigger conversations on many key topics. While they showed up during the conference events, they did not make an impact on across the social channels.

Influencers

Some of the top external tweeters included @w2conf, @VCEIPO, @jessmathews, @LeverageaLawyer, and @LeverageLegal. These top five handles helped greatly to amplify the conference.

There was active engagement from both internal and external tweeters who had significant reach within the community, itself. Some of the top tweeters in terms of ‘Betweenness Scores’ shows the connections among different handles through active nodes based on re-tweets. This shows that @byepoleher, @coleratias, @shaherose, and @thisgirlangie were instrumental in promoting a vibrant community.

Tweet volume

With the number of tweets in mind, let’s look at the re-tweets: 2000 re-tweets on the day of the event (out of 4,300 total day-of tweets), and 2,500 re-tweets (out of 5,100 tweets) overall. This gives us a re-tweet rate of 47% the day of the event and 49% overall.

The overall tweet volume is large, but the re-tweet ratios, coming in below 50%, indicate that the community was not so actively engaged. In order to try to drive up the re-tweet ratio, perhaps more useful content could have been created and shared.

Facebook

As we established in the chart above, there were 96 total Facebook posts for this event, with 30 of them posting on the day of the event, itself. There were 791 Likes in all, and 222 of those were garnered the day of the event. This gives us an average of 8 Likes per post total, and 7 Likes per post the day of the event. The total number of Facebook impressions was 1.5 million, with half a million of those impressions made on February 14.

The original Facebook post announcing the event received 107 Likes – the most of all Facebook posts. However, the most-liked post for the event itself was a post announcing “Angaza Design” as the winner of the 2013 PITCH SF Startup Competition. This post received 44 Likes.

In the weeks leading up to the event, 24 posts had more than ten Likes and 12 posts had more than 15 Likes. On the day of the event, 6 posts garnered more than 10 Likes.

Looking at those numbers as a whole, we can deduce that the Women 2.0 Conference team ensured good engagement on Facebook.

Blogs

There were 34 blog posts in total for the Women 2.0 Conference, with 13 of those being published the day of the event.

Of the 34 total, 21 were internal postings, while 13 were external.

Looking at the 13 posts published the day of the event, 8 of them were internal and 5 were external.

This tells us that the official team for this conference did a good job of ensuring ongoing engagement on their own blog channels. The post volume was spaced out well and the peak coincided with the event.

Given the volume of posts contributed by external sources, we can deduce that the event was well received.

Frequent and timely posts help to guarantee good coverage on blogs, and there’s no doubt that these posts played a role in the tweet and re-tweet numbers we saw. Could more or different content on the blogs have helped to increase the Twitter numbers, though?

Summary: How well was the content leveraged?

The top ten URLs for the Women 2.0 conference were tweeted 581 times. Of those ten URLs, seven of them pointed to Women 2.0 conference content and were tweeted 468 times – accounting for 81% of the total top ten.

Many of the URLs pointed to pages like the conference landing page, ticket info, Scholarship information, and the lunchtime mentoring page. It seems that, while these pages are certainly important, Women 2.0 missed an opportunity to amplify links that led to more interesting content that may have elicited more engagement and interaction across channels.

The Twitter, Facebook, and blog numbers show that participation was impressive – especially given that Women 2.0 was a one-day conference. However, the one area where the conference team could have improved is to have amplified more business-relevant content in order to further bolster those numbers.

You can find more detailed analysis and interesting infographics on Slideshare.

What do you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!

We (@NextPrinciples) analyzed the engagement on social channels during this event using our Insight-to-Action Social Analytics & Engagement Platform. The analytics were run in real time and often tweeted during the event. Metrics are important and so we were interested in reach, engagement & impact metrics for the event across several social channels. At the outset, we identified some key questions that we were looking to get answered. These questions were:

• How was the overall performance of Connect 2013 on Social Media?
• How was the engagement across different social channels?
• Who were the key influencers for this event?
• How well was the content leveraged?
• What were the key topics driving the conversation?

Twitter

IBM Connect 2013 had good coverage and engagement over Twitter. Between January 28 and January 31, there were approximately 23,000 tweets. As a point of reference there were 53,000 Tweets at Oracle Open World and 163,000 at Dreamforce last year (Dreamforce vs. Oracle Open World 2012 Social Analytics comparison). The second day at IBMConnect garnered the greatest number of tweets (day 1: 3,800, day 2: 8,300, day 3: 6,700, day 4: 4,200), and created 47 million Twitter impressions.

Of those tweets, 97% were from the external community, while about 640 tweets were sent by IBM-owned handles (specifically @IBMConnect). 2,030 of those tweets came from the top-ten handles (after excluding @IBMConnect). 1,500 of those 2,030 came from IBM employees and teams. While that constitutes 74% of the top ten tweet share and shows that IBM employees helped to amplify Connect 2013, it only accounts for 6.6% of the total tweets for the event. A high re-tweet ratio of 39% indicates active engagement. Indeed, there were extensive conversations around many of the key topics, including cloud, Sugar CRM, gamification, big data, Blackberry, and the IBM Connect official hashtag.

Using our analytics, we could see a network chart that showed numerous active nodes based on re-tweets. This indicates a vibrant community. @sarahactiance, @elliceeuffer, @marciamarcia, @collinstw, and @reynoutvab were the top five handles in terms of ‘Betweenness Scores” – which indicates their propensity to amplify the message within the community.

The metrics for the top ten tweeted URLs were based on relevant keywords for IBM Connect 2013. These ten URLs were tweeted 1,446 times. Out of those ten, five pointed to IBM’s content. When singled out, these five URLs were tweeted 942 times and accounted for 65% of the total top ten URL tweets. As for external content, it included blog posts on Forbes, Bloomberg, Gigaom, and CMS Wire. Ultimately, IBM was successful by using a strong, relevant content strategy that was amplified quite well within Twitter.

Facebook

Over the course of the event, there were 29 Facebook posts averaging 8 ‘Likes’ on average per post, and with 250,000 Facebook impressions. The most ‘Likes’ came in for the Keynote address and for Joseph Gordon-Levitt (this excludes the conference’s Live Stream link). Again, the second day triggered the most activity (day 1: 5 posts, day 2: 9 posts, day 3: 7 posts, day 4: 7 posts).

Blogs

Blogs were an important channel during Connect 2013, as well. Over the four days, external contributors published 344 blog posts published. The second and third days proved to be the most fruitful for this channel.

YouTube

Finally, from the combined internal and external communities, there were 36 YouTube videos with 2,416 views and 32 likes. As with the other social channels, YouTube also saw the most updates on the second day of the event (Jan. 27: 3 videos, Jan. 28: 14 videos, Jan. 29: 6 videos, Jan. 30: 10 videos, Jan. 31: 3 videos).

In Conclusion

Given the ease with which Twitter users can follow conversations there by tracking the hashtags, it is not surprising to see that Twitter was the most active channel and facilitated the most discussions. The channel lends itself well to discussion and quick interactions, whereas a channel like YouTube, though it offers space for comments, is not as well-known for its lively discussion. Facebook and YouTube make it easier for users to passively engage and ‘Like’ a post, while Twitter demands more interaction.

The range of topics and devoted hashtags also helped to drive conversation, and is a point that anyone managing the social aspect of a large-scale event would do well to remember. Too few topics and there isn’t enough conversation. Too many topics, and the conversation is difficult to focus. When you find the sweet spot, it’s easy for users to take part in multiple conversations and feel fulfilled and informed without being under- or over-whelmed. IBM got the mix right.

IBM Connect drove successful and relevant discussions across several social channels, allowing virtual and attending participants from across the world – including customers, prospects, partners, and thought leaders, among others – to discuss a range of specific topics. The one area, where we think IBM could have done better, was to provide better visibility and engagement with analysts and thought leaders on social channels during the event to help further amplify their key messages. Having said that it is a well-known fact that analysts weigh-in post event and so we may see more blog posts from the analysts over the next few days. Overall IBM did a great job engaging with the audience on social channels. This discussion culminated in a better understanding of how to implement social business within the organization. We (@NextPrinciples) congratulate the IBMConnect team on a job well done.

You can find more detailed analysis on Slideshare.

Were you at IBM Connect? Which channels brought you the most valuable interaction and engagement? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Customer care used to be such an arduous task for consumers. And indeed, it was awfully silencing. If you had a problem, concern, or complaint, you had to locate the appropriate 800-number, call during the regular business day when you were probably also at work (how many lunch hours wasted!), memorize long phone menus, make a choice, sit on hold, get transferred, sit on hold some more, and then, by the time you finally got to talk to someone who could supposedly help you, you still hung up feeling like your words fell on deaf ears. If that big, long sentence makes you feel anxious, imagine how the customers felt.

And the situation didn’t get much better when customer care started going to voice automated systems, allowing you to answer yes/no questions for a machine-voice, but making it extremely difficult to actually get answers from a real person.

If you had to call back again for the same problem, the nightmare began anew because you could never be sure the company had records of your last call.

It’s no surprise, then, that customers are flocking to social media in order to avoid the dreaded customer care phone calls.

But social media has a tendency to spark a sense (sometimes a false sense) of immediacy. Things happen quickly and we can watch them in real-time. So it also shouldn’t surprise us that our customers want answers in a timely fashion. The problem becomes this: if you weren’t able to help a customer or provide answers over the phone, they probably complained to a few friends and family members, but it wasn’t terribly detrimental to your business. With “new” customer service expectations, if you don’t answer a Tweet or Facebook message in a timely fashion, you can expect that the customer will still complain, except this time, social will amplify that message.

All it takes is one unhappy customer who is also well connected and influential, and you could end up with a social media crisis on your hands before you know what hit you. Further, customers expect you to be aware of their Tweet or Facebook post when they call into the call center for resolution.

Fortunately, social CRM solutions make the transition to this new world of customer care a lot smoother. Using these solutions, you can monitor all of your traditional and social channels from a single dashboard and offer your customers a seamless experience.

How is your business adjusting to customer care techniques in the social era? Are you embracing Social CRM solutions? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

Social Portfolio Management is still an emerging category. There are a few solutions out there, including one from NextPrinciples, which enable companies to manage corporate wide social properties from a performance, governance and risk perspective. Additionally, these solutions can allow companies to compare and contrast each account’s performance to others across their social portfolios, besides ensuring corporate social properties are brand compliant and follow procedures; thereby meeting Social Risk Management, Governance and Performance Management objectives all from one easy location.

The outcome is that social media managers and others who have a stake in a company’s social performance can better understand how the multiple accounts spread across the enterprise are performing. This allows those involved in social media to learn from best practices and enhance performance of underperforming ones. Doing so and understanding the social properties’ overall performance will lead not only to a stronger social media strategy, but also to a clearer understanding of the ROI, especially through the data and analytics that the module provides.

One of our premier customers, a global leader in enterprise software segment, uses this particular solution to manage over 300 social properties across Twitter and Facebook. For this customer, certain efficiency was brought to the performance management process as a result of using the module. The result is that this company experienced a nearly 100% reduction in manual effort to monitor such a large social portfolio, freeing them up for other tasks. You can read the more detailed case study published by SNCR (Society for New Communications Research).

Establishing transparency and maintaining a large social portfolio can be difficult, but with the right solution, process and executive championship, organizations can become more data-driven and also drive accountability in the organization.

The volume of conversation was high and extremely engaging. You can check out some cool info-graphs including top conversations, top 100 Tweeters, and network of Tweeters on NextPrinciples’ Pinterest site.

Over the course of the four-day event, approximately 885,000 tweets were sent, with more than 2B impressions and 2,2426 impressions per Tweet. In addition to tech sites like CNET and other influencers, this event was widely publicized by the mainstream media, as well, helping it to gain more traction among social communities, particularly on Twitter.

Our analysis showed that there was a very health share of voice competition going on between the top 3 consumer electronic giants – Samsung (49,500 tweets; 11,700 re-tweets), Sony (34,300 tweets; 7,300 re-tweets), and Panasonic (15,100 tweets; 2,700 re-tweets).

In terms of share of voice during the event, Sony came out on top, as they demonstrated the most active balance of social engagement by Sony subsidiaries and external communities alike, whereas Samsung showed more engagement from external communities and Panasonic had a stronger message going out from it’s own subsidiaries. If we take a look at engagement by external communities, Samsung was the clear leader there. Both Sony and Panasonic had more engagement from their own subsidiaries.

It’s difficult to engage a social audience without strong topics to do so, as Panasonic discovered. They had far fewer topics of discussion than Sony or Samsung. Popular topics for Panasonic included Plasma tablets and HDTVs, a waterproof 35x bridget camera, and a 20-inch 4K tablet. Samsung engaged the audience with a broader range of topics including Samsung Galaxy, Bill Clinton, Smart TV, and the Nexus 10 series laptop. In-fact, Bill Clinton was Samsung’s keynote speaker.

But it was Sony that was able to generate better engagement with fewer (and more focused) topics. These topics included the Sony Xperia Z smart phone, an Ultra HD 4K OLED TV, and a waterproof Walkman.

You can see a more in-depth analysis on share of voice between Sony, Samsung and Panasonic on Slideshare.

What’s to be learned from the analytics?

If we were Samsung having a look at these results, we’d probably see that, though we had the highest engagement with external communities, we could have focused our topics a little bit more and had better participation from our corporate/subsidiary accounts, which would have amplified our overall reach, not to mention increased tweets and re-tweets.

If we were Sony looking at these results, we’d see that having a dedicated hashtag and active subsidiary participation really paid off for us. In the future, we may decide to try opening up more topics of conversation to try to amplify our messages.

Finally, if we’re Panasonic having a look at these results, we can be happy about our solid corporate and subsidiary participation. What we can aim to work on in the future is to increase engagement with external communities, as well as to open up more topics of discussion in order to invite more participation.

We’re interested in hearing about your experiences at CES and your social engagements there. Please feel free to leave us a comment!

In a 2011, a study conducted by Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group indicated that the average number of social properties a socially mature organization has is 178. We realize that it is not uncommon for large enterprises to have an upwards of 200 social properties. Take Barnes & Noble for example. While they maintain a primary Twitter account (@bnbooks), a quick search shows that they also operate accounts for the following:

• News (@BNBuzz),
• Book clubs (@BNBookClubs),
• ebooks (@eBooksBN)
• B&N Review (@bnreviewer)
• Nook (@nookBN)

Several other secondary accounts exist today that may or may not be operating by headquarters, and then there are the local accounts store locations in places like Tennessee and Michigan, and numerous others – all using official company logos and branding. Many are creating their handles with the same @BN_____ kind of formatting. These accounts will provide customers with information about specific store events and represent the brand on a more local level, but the company’s headquarters isn’t in charge of them. Ultimately, the Barnes & Noble headquarters has little to no control over what those accounts do and how they contribute to the brand story.

While this variety of accounts helps to increase brand awareness and exposure while providing more efficient assistance to customers and prospects, it also makes social endeavors within an organization very difficult to regulate. Suddenly social media becomes a sizable risk because brand compliance is difficult with so many accounts. Also, no one can easily gauge the overall performance of an enterprise-wide social portfolio.

To try and combat this growing concern, many companies have spent a lot of time creating social media policies. To some extent, such policies can be effective, but the larger the business, the more likely it is that they run into the same problem: it’s simply too difficult to regulate given the size. The accounts are all owned by different people across the country or the world, and those people are almost certainly not interested in keeping in touch with one another to make sure they’re all maintaining the same idea of brand voice. They are only interested in doing what they feel is right for their line of business, portfolio, geography or center.

The result of all of this is that organizations are discovering that they require Social Risk Management, Governance and Performance Management across their social portfolio. Perhaps now more than ever before, there is a need for standardized and transparent metrics. This would allow individual account owners to monitor their accounts against the context of the company’s social portfolio and increase the sense of accountability. The social media team can get a bird’s eye view across the entire portfolio. In turn, the metrics help everyone see the same information and cross pollinate best practices – regardless of location. Charline Li of Altimeter on a recent discussion on LinkedIn (‘big idea for 2013’) suggests getting all your employees on social. We agree. But with social media being pervasive in the organization across sales, marketing and customer care, who is in the best position to lead organizational change and have metrics and policies implemented? Is it the CMO?

#1: Facebook Moves Toward Search

Back in September 2012, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, made it known that, as the site stands now, they’re processing about one billion search queries a day – without even trying. While he then moved on to talk about how Facebook’s future was in mobile (but noted that they would not be developing their own phone), many were left speculating about Facebook’s future in search.

To give that some context, Google does about 5 billion search queries a day.

So if Facebook is already processing that number of queries without even trying, imagine what they’ll be able to do when it becomes an actual effort. This is not an endeavor that’s been lost on search marketers or investors.

While we may not see a Facebook search engine come into being in 2013, we’re almost sure to see the elements coming together.

#2: Communities Breathes a New Life Into Google+

Google+ seems to be one of the most polarizing social platforms out there. People either really like it or they really hate it. While many have declared that “Google+ is dead!” they are, perhaps, a little too quick to hammer nails into the coffin.

In the final weeks of 2012, Google+ revealed ‘Communities’ – its newest feature. Those who have used it know that it’s unlike Facebook’s groups. It’s unlike anything else we’ve got currently, actually, which is why it’s given new life to the social channel.

Additionally, if Communities doesn’t do it for you, keep your eye on Google+ if for no other reason than what it’s doing with search rank. Author Rank is a pretty great thing for SEO, and definitely worth looking into if you haven’t already.

Whether Communities will have staying power or not remains to be seen. But with no other similar alternatives at the moment, Google seems to have carved this particular niche out for itself pretty well with the introduction of Communities. Many have already attributed their decision to return to Google+ and really get involved in it to this particular feature.

#3: Instagram Drama Makes Way for Other Stars to Shine

In 2012, Instagram was purchased by Facebook and “divorced” Twitter. Shortly after that, the social photo platform announced some new terms – including its ability to sell users images for advertising. The response was not positive, with many vowing to terminate their Instagram accounts if it came to that. Instagram backpedaled, said they were listening and that users would always own their photos.

Which brings us to the present. As the new year is fresh, we’re still unsure what’s going to happen with Instagram. Some have said they’re okay with the policies. Others have scaled back their use until they see what Instagram will do. Others still have gone ahead and terminated their accounts.

While all of this is happening, keep your eye on some of the other photo apps and platforms. While it lacks the photo filters (and let’s be realistic here – many of the photo apps can create those same effects now), Flickr, for example, is one of the older social photo platforms, and could see a spike in usage if users become totally disgruntled with Instagram. If the filters are what you’re really after, the app version of Pixlr is now available and offers even more photo editing capabilities than Instagram does.

Competition is close at Instagram’s back. It will be interesting to see whether they step it up or fall behind in 2013.

What are some of your predictions? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

#1: Consider the repercussions of a Twitter hashtag that backfires.

Twitter, as always, is a hotbed of lessons to be learned when it comes to the responsible use of social media. 2012 underscored that. If 2011 was the year of the “Rogue Tweet,” then 2012 has certainly been the year of the runaway hashtag.

Take, for example, McDonald’s. Early in the year, they set out to do brand storytelling on Twitter with the hashtag: #McDStories. The idea seemed harmless enough, but just two hours later, the company pulled the promotion. Why? In addition to sharing some of the more heartwarming stories McDonald’s had hoped for, people were also sharing (far more frequently) terrible stories of food poisoning, disgusting things found in their food and other unsavory tales that were bad for business.

Though McDonald’s went into crisis mode and pulled the campaign after two hours, the tweets continued, proving that you can’t control the social media beast any more than you can control what people say about you on those channels. Today, the #McDStories debacle is an oft-referenced case study on what not to do with Twitter and brand initiatives.

Of course, we can’t force you to learn from the McDonald’s mishap. Starbucks certainly didn’t, and only this month found themselves in a social media crisis of similar proportions.

That mishap also seemed to escape the minds of every brand that took advantage of Hurricane Sandy-related hashtags to spread the word about sales and promotions. American Apparel, Sears, Urban Outfitters, and The Gap, in particular, were widely criticized for “news-jacking” the hurricane and ignoring its severity (especially for those on the east coast) in the name of sales.

The lesson for 2013: Think before you speak. This is basic, yes, but it’s tried and true. Consider how your words might be perceived before you put them out in front of your customers. Bear in mind that the bigger your business is, the more exposure you have. That exposure is generally wonderful, but it can backfire. Always, always think before you tweet. And just to be on the safe side, make sure everyone involved in your social media strategy, end-to-end, knows what your social media crisis plan entails (tip: you have to have one first).

#2: We can’t be sure that Facebook will “always be free.”

Facebook is a business, and, like any other business, it wants to make money. For a while now, Mark Zuckerberg and friends have been finding ways to do that, and advertising has certainly not been the least of them. Businesses recognize that Facebook is becoming more than just a place for old friends to come together and share pictures of their children. It’s become a market and a way for consumers to connect with their favorite brands.

We’ve all heard about Facebook’s EdgeRank – that algorithm that determines what you see in your news feed. It used to be that the more you interacted with a certain person or brand, the more you would see those updates in your feed without having to go directly to that page. This, of course, meant that no one was ever seeing all of a brand’s updates, but brands could rely on this to get their messages out to a large portion of their audience.

But then Facebook introduced Promoted Posts, and, though they said it’s unrelated, it seemed a bit suspicious that, right around the same time, businesses saw views dropping. Suddenly, not as many people were seeing those updates as they had before. If you wanted your message to reach a larger portion of your audience (such as, say, the same people who were seeing those updates before, at least), you were going to have to start shelling out some cash to promote those posts.

This opened up a whole new can of worms and the debates continue today. Some say their numbers are slowly being restored to what they were pre-Promoted Posts. Others say their views continue to be significantly and suspiciously fewer than before.

For some companies, paid promotion makes sense and is a realistic possibility. For other businesses, though, that isn’t always the case. Instead, they’ve begun to weigh Facebook’s importance and worth when it comes to their business.

The lesson for 2013: Could this moneymaking venture backfire on Facebook? Only time will tell. For now, we can say for sure that we’ve learned something important here. Though Facebook operates under the understanding with its users that it will always be free, it’s a business. What we can keep in mind in 2013 is that Facebook, important as it may be to our businesses, might not actually always be free.

#3: Instagram could be trouble.

It’s been an interesting year for the social photo giant Instagram. First Facebook purchased the camera app for $1 Billion. Then, very recently, it had a very public break-up with Twitter.

Now Instagram’s in the process of revising its terms and policies, and it’s left many with a bad taste in their mouths.

When the new policies hit, the general understanding was that Instagram could now sell your photos for ads, and they didn’t require your permission to do so.

Suddenly everyone who spends a lot of time taking retro self-portraits was all in a tizzy, imagining what terrible products or services their photos could end up advertising. The backlash was intense, especially as users threatened to (and did) cancel their Instagram accounts.

Instagram went into crisis mode, posting to their blog that they were hearing users’ concerns and were going to revise the language used in the terms. In the mean time, we were not to fear: our pictures wouldn’t be sold.

Still, this hasn’t calmed all users’ nerves. While some are content with Instagram’s explanation, others maintain that your photos are still at risk. In a time when Instagram marketing was just beginning to come into its own, this could be potentially dangerous territory for the social app.

The Lesson for 2013: Keep a watch on Instagram and this situation, and be careful with the pictures you take. It’s always better to be safe than sorry until we all know how this will play out.

In the meantime, keep your eye on Flickr, which just might be the antidote to your Instagram woes.

What are some important social media lessons you’ve learned this year? What are your predictions for 2013? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

#1: Pick a few channels and get to know them well

One of the biggest rookie mistakes you can make with social media is to fly out of the gate and start trying to tackle everything in your path. If you sign up for 10 or 12 services on the same day and make a vow to blog daily while interacting and engaging across your social channels, you’re heading for Burn-Out City. Instead of spreading yourself too thin and becoming a “jack of all trades, but master of none,” pick a few platforms that are most relevant to you and your needs, and work on learning them. For many businesses, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter will probably be in your top three. If you’re already using these for personal use, you’re ahead of the curve, but you still need to learn how to use them for business!

#2: Listen, listen, and listen

It’s a good idea to spend the first couple of days or even weeks to listen to the conversations happening over social channels. Identify what the key conversations relevant to your business are and who are the key influencers. Don’t underestimate the value of listening. You can get deep insights into customer buying behavior, changing customer preferences, and even identify potential leads.

#3: Branch out and be social

Identify who the key influencers are in your space and start following them. Identify who in turn they are following which could give you ideas. Once you are ready start engaging in conversations. Suggest you start slowly and build your brand from there, one step at time. Reach out to new people and let relationships develop naturally, just as you might in real life. You never know what kinds of great things will grow from them.

Don’t give up

As it is with anything else, social media takes time and patience. You know what they say about Rome. But if you stick with social media and you keep reaching out to new people and trying to engage others in conversation, you’ll find more value and worth. You’ll also find that it’s more fun and enjoyable. And one day, you’ll realize that you’ve broken through to the other side of that wall.

What are your best tips for getting started on social media? Please drop us a comment and let us know!

We’ve seen a significant increase lately in the use of social media for social good. And it makes sense. These organizations need a vehicle to drive engagement and interaction, which, in turn, leads to awareness of and support for their causes. At the same time, the success of social media hinges upon having a message worth spreading. Valuable information needs to be shared, otherwise social media would lack value.

Big nonprofit organizations versus small nonprofit organizations

The conversation happening about small versus large nonprofit organizations when it comes to social media is not entirely unlike the conversation happening with regard to small versus large businesses.

The simple facts remain the same. Yes, as a nationally recognized nonprofit organization, you will enjoy greater visibility. You’ll probably have more followers across your social channels, and more people who actually know what your mission is. At the same time, you might find it difficult to truly connect with everyone who is seeking your attention. There just might simply be too few hours in a day. Your name, however, is already established, and your social presence will help to grow your brand reputation.

As a small or local nonprofit organization, you might not enjoy international recognition. You might not even be nationally known. But your message can certainly gain momentum and make an impact where it’s needed. You also have the added benefit of likely being able to connect with more of your supporters on a much more personal level.

Building and nurture relationships

As it is with business, so it is with nonprofits. The key to being successful when it comes to your nonprofit and social media is to build and nurture relationships. When you’re seeking out influencers, however, you might be looking to connect with those whose lives have been impacted by your mission. Build those relationships and take good care of them. Never underestimate the value of a brand advocate. These people, through the individual stories they can tell and testimonials they can provide, all tell a little piece of your collective brand story. They are all voices for you. They’re grateful for your services and they want to talk about you to others. In short, building relationships with those whose lives your organization has touched can be tremendously beneficial for both of you, and it’s a great way to further your cause. Never before have these relationships been more accessible than they are with social media.

Remember the link between social and content marketing

Social media thrives on great content. Great content thrives on great stories. As a nonprofit, you are some of the most human brands out there because you have so many stories with emotional appeal to tell. Put those stories to good use. Here are some ideas for content you can create and distribute over your social channels to help boost your nonprofit’s message:

• Write blog posts about topics that affect your nonprofit and those whom you serve.
• Invite those who have received your services to contribute guest posts telling their own personal stories.
• Create videos to help bring your message to life.
• Conduct interviews and feature those who have great stories to tell or those who play a pivotal role in your mission.
• Share pictures and video from events that you’ve held.

These are merely a few ways you can use social media to share your nonprofit’s mission and stories.

Are you a nonprofit using social media? What tips can you offer?

“We’re far too small. No one knows us. We’re not one of the big guys. It makes sense for them, but it doesn’t make sense for us.”

That’s the line of thinking that permeates small and mid-sized businesses everywhere.

While it’s true that larger businesses enjoy more widespread visibility, this doesn’t mean that small and mid-sized businesses shouldn’t bother. In fact, just the opposite is true. Customers and prospects are already engaging in a conversation on social channels and it’s your opportunity to engage with them, nurture leads and manage your brand.

What many business executives fail to recognize when making the decision whether or not to truly incorporate a social media strategy into their business plans is that, while the amount of money a small business has to play around with will almost certainly be different from its larger counterparts, the tools will work the same regardless of whether you’re a mom-and-pop operation or a Fortune 500. It’s what you do with them that matters most.

Social media, despite popular belief, is not free. Sure, it’s free to sign up for the accounts and to establish your presence on those platforms. But social media takes time and effort. You can start small with many of the free tools out there and start listening to the conversations. The “freemium” accounts can, in many instances, carry you, though you might still find that upgrading on certain accounts and tools make more sense to help further your reach.

A smaller business with fewer accounts also means that responsibilities can be shared among fewer people, meaning you don’t have to overburden one person with the arduous task of monitoring social accounts 24/7, but you also don’t have to hire an entire team to strategize and manage. In many cases, you can get your current employees on board to help share in the social media strategy and execution. This saves you money and works well for small businesses.

Finally, while it’s tempting to envy large businesses for the number of followers they have, it’s important to remember that big businesses face issues of their own. For example, sometimes they receive so many comments and interactions that they simply can’t keep up with all of them. The result is that, though they might have the best of intentions, they don’t form that connection with their communities that small businesses do so well. As a small business using the same tools, you’re better able to keep up with your followers and those who are communicating with you. In many cases, you’re able to develop actual relationships with them.

Social is important – crucial, really – no matter how big or small your organization is. There’s no excuse for not being involved, and to be truly competitive in this climate, the line dividing those who choose to get on board with social versus those who don’t will ultimately play a pivotal role in a business’s long-term success rates.

Within businesses and organizations, this rings especially true. Social media becomes a job for one or two people. A social media manager, community manager, or maybe even an online marketing specialist take on the arduous task of getting out there into Social Land and making people aware of the organization’s name and mission.

As for the rest of the company, well… they often either have no interest or no say in the matter. It’s after all the job of the Social Media Manager. Isn’t it?

If we want to fully leverage the benefits of social media and truly be ‘customer centric’, we have to make it a company-wide initiative. This means that while social media or community managers might play a big role in execution, social media needs to become pervasive in the organization – some off course will have a bigger role than others.

Getting the Skeptics on Board

In order to maximize the number of people on board with making social media an integral part of any business, the first and most crucial step is educating them. While some employees will know quite a bit about social media, others will know only a little bit and may even be skeptical. Spend some time training your employees on social media. Remember that this isn’t only about social tools – it’s about helping them to understand social media’s importance and the role it will play within your business. Help them to see how implementing such a strategy will be beneficial and align with the company’s goals.

Furthermore, help other employees to see how this shift will ultimately make their jobs richer and more fulfilling.

Social Tools

The next step to achieving social democratization is to teach everyone involved how to use the social platforms in the way that you want them to be used. This goes beyond just how to press “send” or “update.”

When you’re teaching others to use social platforms for business, don’t forget to discuss things like brand image and voice. It means that everyone is on the same page when it comes to knowing what kinds of content will be posted on which social channels and how often.

“Work flow” offered by many of the social platforms allow you to engage with your peers, assign tasks to them and keep a track of open action items across the organization.

Its Not All Posting and Replying

While you will certainly continue to need that one person or group of people who are making the posts, replying to comments, and generally managing your social communities, it’s important to remember that social media goes beyond just posting and replying.

You can involve others by having them contribute regular blog posts or other featured content that all goes into your social channels. Without content, social media lacks substance. There must be content to share.

It may seem overwhelming at first, but don’t be afraid to jump right in and get everyone involved. Allowing everyone to be a part of social means that it’s truly a democratic process instead of decisions that only an elite few can make. You only stand to strengthen your social media strategy and enabling a customer centric organization. It’s about the customer after all.

How successful have you been democratizing social within your organization? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

This is why it’s incredibly important to budget your time when it comes to managing your customer relationships. You can have all of the records in the world that detail those interactions, and you can review them all day long if you want. But the simple truth is that, while those records can help, they aren’t conversions.

In order to turn those records into conversions, you have to take the time to breathe some life into them. Collecting records of conversations and information never did anything for anybody unless those records were brought to life.

The term “social CRM” already indicates that it’s social (or should be). The ‘R’ in CRM stands for relationship, and it gives that sociability a goal. With your social CRM solutions, you should be building and fostering relationships. That is how you will build interest, leads, and conversions.

Reach out. Even if you’re just saying hello and asking if you can answer any questions, you can’t establish a relationship if you never move past the recording stage. Reach out to the person behind the data and make an effort to start building a relationship with them. This helps them to build their trust in you, which is a crucial aspect of making conversions. You want them to know that you are knowledgeable, helpful, and trustworthy.

Check in. There’s no rule that says you have to be in touch with your leads every day. In fact, many would say that every day is a little too often. But you do want to check in from time to time to see how they’re doing, find out if they have any questions, and generally be of as much assistance as you can be. This lets them know that you haven’t forgotten about them and helps to foster and grow that relationship.

Follow up. After you make a sale, it might be tempting to mark that information in your social CRM records and forget all about it. Case closed. But if you want a repeat buyer and/or good referrals, you need to maintain that relationship. Follow up to see how they liked their product or service. Gauge their interest in any future products or services. This helps to keep that relationship alive and well, and thus the possibility for future business remains alive.

While all of the records you keep are most certainly important, it’s more important that you make strides toward taking that data and turning it into a sustainable relationship from which leads and conversions will grow.

Do you place more emphasis on the gathering of data or the building of professional relationships? What are some of your best practices for striking that balance? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Let’s say, though, that you do find yourself caught up in a PR crisis – social media or otherwise. What do you do?

Hopefully you’ve got someone on your PR team who is trained to manage a crisis. That’s certainly a useful and recommended resource, but what about also using social media?

This might seem like a strange idea at first. After all, social media might very well be what got you into trouble in the first place. But keep in mind that social media is also where people will be discussing your business (and, yes, your crisis, as well).

By now, you’re hopefully aware that using social CRM solutions enables you to monitor social conversations happening around your brand. In times of crisis, this ability is incredibly useful.

For example, let’s look at one of the most recent high-profile PR crises. During the first presidential debate in October, an offensive tweet was sent out from @KitchenAidUSA‘s account that made insensitive remarks about President Obama’s late grandmother. The tweet went out to roughly 24,000 followers before it was deleted.

That could have been devastating for the brand. Instead, Cynthia Soledad, head of KitchenAid, took to social media to start doing damage control. Though there was lots of conversation happening about the KitchenAid brand, Soledad began responding to negative comments, offering to speak on-record and, though she wasn’t the person who had sent the rogue tweet, she took full responsibility for what had happened.

While a lot of comments mentioned @KitchenAidUSA, social CRM solutions could help to easily find the ones that didn’t mention by handle – only by brand or topic. In leveraging that ability, anyone who is under duress when it comes to a PR crisis can monitor the entire conversation.

Something else that Soledad did was to target influential blogs, bloggers, and Twitter users from the start. This was a wise move because those in a place of influence have the power to quickly pass their influential messages on to the masses (think Mashable). If they can see that you’re properly handling the situation quickly, that’s going to be a much more impressive message for them to pass on with regard to your brand.

Of course, in the midst of a PR crisis, you don’t have a lot of time to research influencers. Fortunately, social CRM solutions can include features to help you determine how much social influence a user has. For example, if you wrote something about my company, I could run analytics on you right from my dashboard to find out how influential you are and, thus, whether I should get into damage-control mode. I’m going to be less concerned about you if your message is only reaching fifty or a hundred people than I am if it’s reaching 150,000.

One might argue that not having these solutions in place to help manage a PR crisis could cause far-reaching damage to your brand. Companies like Domino’s Pizza have found this out the hard way.

In 2009, a video of two Domino’s employees was uploaded to YouTube and almost instantly went viral – but not in the good way. The video showed the employees doing some rather unsavory and stomach-turning things to a sandwich before it went out for delivery.

It took too long for Domino’s to realize what was going on. Why? They didn’t have a social media strategy in place. They weren’t even using social media. In fact, they had a PR and social media crisis on their hands before they even knew what was going on. Still, once they got their bearings, they jumped to life and saved the company from what could have perhaps been a total downfall.

Had they been using social media and social CRM solutions, they could have seen the talk surrounding the video start to pick up. They could have nipped the crisis in the bud. They could have started to identify influencers and reach out to set the record straight.

This seemingly small detail may have made all the difference in the longevity of the crisis, though. Now, two weeks after the KitchenAid debacle, people haven’t forgotten, but they’ve moved on. The crisis itself didn’t last very long because it was handled in a timely fashion. Domino’s, while no longer in crisis mode, continues to be a prime example of what not to do.

These kinds of PR crises, which increasingly involve social media, are more common than we might think. They are seen by more people when they happen to high-profile businesses, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen to small businesses too. No matter who you are, if you have a business, you’re at risk for a PR crisis.

Pro-tip: Invest in some kind of social CRM solution. Learn to use it, and create a plan for what you will do with it should you ever have to go into crisis mode.

Do you use social CRM for crisis management? What are some of your top tips? Please let us know in the comments!

But social media brought a whole new form of communication to the mix. Suddenly, conversation was no longer just one-on-one between the business and the customer. It became a group discussion, and a whole lot difficult for businesses to monitor.

This shift in the way customers communicate also necessitated a shift in how we use our CRM solutions. While many traditional CRM options allowed for tracking things like emails, they didn’t allow for the kinds of tracking which businesses really needed to have, which now included Facebook and Twitter communications, among others.

The good news is things are now evolving and getting more social. More and more CRM providers are offering solutions with social components now, and new vendors with a strong social component and customer centric view are offerings solutions as well. Using these social CRM solutions, businesses can interact with customers across all channels – both traditional and social, and have a single unified view of the customer.

Sure, you could go through all of the trouble of setting up search parameters in something like Hootsuite or TweetDeck to monitor for mentions and then manually make notes in your CRM system. Sure that is a start, but that would only really help you out in the most limited of ways. You could scour social sites individually, but that would be unnecessarily time-consuming, and time is money.

Using a social CRM solution, you can quickly and easily monitor for mentions of your business name and keywords – or anything else you might want to track – across multiple social platforms. You can see conversations that you might not otherwise have been able to see. Not only will this alert you to unhappy customers or other problems that need to be addressed immediately, but it will also give you deep actionable customer insights.

Furthermore, the social integration with CRM allows you to track communications right from the dashboard. Being active on social sites will help you increase brand awareness, and it will also make it easy for your customers and prospects to find you. After all, that’s where they are spending more of their time. From your social CRM dashboard, you’ll be able to easily interact and engage with your community. After all the Holy Grail is to have one single view of the customer and engage seamlessly via both traditional and social channels.

If you haven’t made the switch yet from traditional CRM to social CRM solutions, now is the time. Your community is too social for you to be missing out on those important conversations.

What most intrigues you about social CRM? What convinced you to make the transition? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!