It’s Open – Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Oxford University research fellow Dr Andrew Currah, who specialises in the digital economy, will be talking live from Los Angeles next Monday 14 December to members of the Social Media Leadership Forum (www.socialmedialeadershipforum.org) .

Dr Currah will be giving a webinar exploring the impact that social media is having on traditional media, the influence of blogs, and how best organisations can adjust to the brave new world of social media.

Here’s an example of a previous piece of work carried out by Dr Andrew Currah.

The Social Media Leadership Forum (www.socialmedialeadershipforum.org) is managed by ItsOpen (itsopen.co.uk). It is designed to help leading organisations collaborate to create successful social media programmes.

Many companies are struggling to decide on the best ways to engage with social media. The November edition of Harvard Business Review, which I have referred to before, has some suggestions.

The mandate for a company’s Social Media team should, the authors argue, cover the development of a social media policy: to include accountability; accuracy and transparency and lawfulness. It should include monitoring online communities: leveraging tools and mobilising internal team members to source information.  The team’s role should also be to engage with online communities; creating a compelling social media voice; and  reaching out to community leaders.

The authors say that a company’s social media team should act as first responders as some issues require immediate action. The team should acknowledge mistakes on behalf of the company, ward off crises by not allowing unfounded rumours to spiral out of control, and  engage selectively.

It is proving difficult for companies to formulate teams, although organisations like Dell have done this successfully by having community managers who watch, listen and act on behalf of the organisation. Another useful model here is video gaming, where you have community managers watching how new product launches are playing out online and reporting any crucial insights back to their senior managers.

As a social media strategy consultancy ItsOpen (itsopen.co.uk) does work with companies helping, supporting and advising them in these areas. However when it comes to actual engagement, there is no substitute for companies talking directly to people themselves through online communities. It is more authentic and carries more weight.

Through the SocialMediaLeadershipForum (www.socialmedialeadershipforum.org) we are looking to tackle these issues.  The world of communications is changing fast; many companies are realising that they could be left behind – and be at a severe competitive disadvantage – if they don’t develop coherent social media policies and strategies for positively nurturing online communities and mitigating the potential negative consequences of social media.

It is also worth reiterating that a strategy involves identifying the most appropriate social media tools to leverage to reach relevant online communities.  But it is crucial to listen to those online communities, seeing what they like and dislike, and what they prefer to read and watch. Simply pushing out content you think they might like could be the equivalent of cold calling someone with an irrelevant proposition which does not match what they are interested in. For a social media strategy to be truly effective, a company needs to spend time educating itself about the culture of social media communications: how stakeholders are using these tools and what constitutes best practice.

The easy accessibility of social media sites/networks does not mean that communicating effectively and successfully through social media is easy for a company. Which is why only a few companies currently standout. These are the ones who have researched this new field and thought carefully about how best to engage.

If anyone is interested in discussing these issues further please give me a call on:

If individuals and businesses can tweet, then why not towns too? Darlington in County Durham has appointed a “tweeter in residence” whose job it will be to alert citizen followers to what’s occurring in the area. Many towns and cities have artists and writers in residence, so why not a Twitterer, says the Darlington Partnership, the organisation behind it.

A non-essential service? A waste of taxpayers money? Perhaps, but this is a job for an enthusiast, and secondary teacher Mike McTimoney, who has taken the role, is only being paid £140 a year for what he clearly sees as a labour of love.

It should be good for local arts, as well as for building crowds at events organised by charities and public organisations. If it takes off perhaps we’ll start seeing other local authorities following suit.

Found a few interesting stories this morning…

The Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has issued a rare tackling privacy issues, but also stating his ambitions for Facebook. He is underlining the importance of creating a more ‘open’ world.

Stephen Fry is being cited as extremely savvy for using Twitter to build his brand in a post traditional media world…A lot more companies could be using Twitter smartly to build their brands but at the moment they are not really sure how to use the tool.

PR types are split on whether or not bloggers should be paid for favourable coverage. What would happen if reporters on the FT were revealed as accepting payments for favourable coverage? There would be an outcry. of course. How can people trust bloggers if they are being paid to write in a certain way? If they accept payments, they should be open about it in my view. Clear sponsorship, etc, is fine.

Twitter has won praise for . Some commentators are saying that it’s about time Twitter showed some personality as a brand. Interesting thought. I think Twitter is quirky and fun as a brand. It is what other people make it.

Twitter has been declared the most popular word in the English language:

But advertisers are being warned to keep out by Twitter users.

Advertisers have to join in Twitter conversations in an appropriate and relevant way and act as individuals to participate. It’s not the usual one way communications traffic that works with TV, radio and newspapers.

As 2009 draws to a close we are likely to see the usual sort of stock-taking with regard to social media, and also prognostications for how it is likely to develop as a marketing channel. It reminds me a lot of what was going on with email marketing at the beginning of the decade. Stand by for a blizzard of studies like this one showing that most businesses plan to increase their social media spend in 2010.

But a more significant step will be the greater ease of access that advancing technology offers for the use of social media in a business context. LinkedIn has just announced that its LinkedIn Platform, previously exclusive to select partners, is now available for developers anywhere to integrate into their business applications and Web sites. This means that users will be able to access all 50 million LinkedIn profiles and contacts directly via an embedded widget.

Experts predict all kinds of exciting developments to flow from this. For instance with regard to events and exhibitions blogger Stephen Hold enthuses about the opportunities for database development. ” Social media marketing will become more robust,” he says. ” Registration solutions will become the purchase opportunity for inbound marketing invitations.  Event organizers will have the opportunity to connect with online communities interested in the event brand.”

Even more exciting, adds Hold, is the integration of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as one common social media web.  TweetDeck, one of the best existing desktop clients, is about to launch the new LinkedIn platform to provide updates along with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Incidentally, the inclusion in this suite of connections of MySpace could stop it being totally overshadowed by Facebook, he suggests.

More companies are using Twitter to promote deals and discounts. And
Twitter users are gathering together to aggregate the best deals and share
them with their friends.

See how it works here.

While some companies cannot decide how to get involved with social media, others are pioneering innovative uses of Facebook.

Take a look at these examples below. Intel is especially interesting where they are attracting fans to promote discounts on new products.

Not enough thought, in my view,  is going into facebook as a brand/business platform. Nor is it being taken seriously enough by brand teams. Millions of people use Facebook, but still brand activity tends to focus on ads or search engine optimisation, rather than on engaging in a strategic way with these new platforms which people are spending most of their time on.

Learn more.

Can Murdoch charge for content? Should he try to remove free News International content from Google? Leading social media commentator, Jeff Jarvis thinks not. Google brings attention and audiences to Murdoch, and Jarvis argues that Murdoch’s failure is not to be capitalising on the search engine traffic coming his way.

It’s well worth a read.

Interesting by DuPont’s E-Marketing Manager, Gary Spangler, explaining the strategy behind  a series of social media video clips. They are pulling in a steady audience  although the series is more than two years old. The videos came from  archives of DuPont product testing videos.

I think this underlines how you need to look to what is within your organisation which would be genuinely interesting to share with others outside. Also, there is plenty of scope for creativity when it comes to using video clips.

Learn .