Embarrassing, #FAIL-worthy tweets from corporate accounts is nothing new. When it does happen, media coverage and case studies ensue. Smart brands respond appropriately. Others make the situation worse. The municipality I live in has become the latest victim of the tweet-gone-bad phenomenon. In this case, an offensive, obscene message was tweeted from the corporate account. It’s possible the account was hacked. It’s more likely this was accidental, and the person responsible thought they were updating their personal account. What made this message so offensive is that the tweet criticized city residents and their inability to handle snow – during the biggest snowstorm we’ve seen in years.

This situation gives those of us who aren’t suffering through a real-time PR nightmare a chance to reflect on four basic ways to protect our own organizations from being tomorrow’s social media case-study.

1. Properly train your employees to use Twitter

You wouldn’t hand the keys to your car to someone who just read an instruction manual, so why would you hand the keys to your most valuable asset (ie. your brand) without proper training and education? Giving employees social media guidelines is a start – but it does bupkiss if they don’t know how to apply them. Proper hands-on training from experienced folks who know how to use social media – in a business context - is the only way to make social media guidelines effective and relevant. This doesn’t mean  you need expensive external consultants either. You’ll gain more trust (and traction) if you use internal people who know how to train people on using social media, and more importantly, how to tie it’s use to the strategy and purpose of the company.

A solid Twitter training curriculum includes:

• Training on your organization’s social strategy and how Twitter supports your goals (hint: having a Twitter account isn’t a strategy).
• Defining the language and tone of your brand (are you colloquial? 3rd-person? Cheeky?)
• What content is appropriate (and isn’t) to share
• What to do when things do go bad. Which brings us to…

2. Have a triage plan in place. 

We all know what happens when things go well. But what do you do when things don’t go as planned? Not every situation needs a public response, but every situation needs to be assessed. Your challenge is reacting appropriately when it does. Assuming you have a decent listening strategy in place, how are you prepared for these situations when they arise?

• Someone complains about your brand, products, employees or customer service
• Someone misappropriates the hashtag you’ve chosen for your big marketing campaign
• An employee tweets confidential information like financial results
• For publicly-held companies like Softchoice, a shareholder tweets their frustrations with stock performance

If you don’t have a plan in triage plan in place, create one. Involve all the departments/resources necessary for appropriate action. HR, Legal, Finance, IR, Corporate Communications, Marketing, IT – all may need to be involved. Determining who does what, when and how during a social media crisis is critical. Check out this post by Jeremiah Owyang for more on the topic of triage readiness in the enterprise space. It includes 10 attributes of successful  social media workflow you are free to use.

3. Isolate your accounts

I’m a big fan of social media tools like Hootsuite. Among their benefits, they make it really easy to manage and broadcast to multiple Twitter accounts at once, from one unified dashboard. The trick with these tools is that a lot of people connect their personal accounts to these platforms too. For their part, HootSuite does prompt users with a special window before they publish to designated, high-profile accounts.

Another really simple way to minimize the chances of sending the wrong tweet from the wrong account is using one tool/platform for personal, and one for work. For example, I only use Hootsuite for corporate Twitter accounts on my PC and iPhone. I isolate my personal accounts, and use other tools for personal tweets. (TweetBot on the iPhone is my fav). While this might seem obvious to some, forcing yourself to think about which app or site you’re using just might be the one thing that prevents you from inadvertently tweeting from the wrong account.

4. React – don’t over react

In response to the “storm” of attention they’ve received, Vaughan has shut down their account. While that’s one reaction, I think it was a mistake. In these situations, organizations should look to brands like Kitchenaid as a role model. During the 2012 Presidential debate, an inappropriate tweet was sent from the @KitchenAidUSA, that was obviously meant to come from a personal account. The brand quickly deleted the tweet, responded by apologizing, and the Brand Manager immediately took responsibility while making herself available to the media. Attention quickly passed, and they turned what could have snowballed into a national outrage into a best-practice example. For a great breakdown and analysis, check out this post.

Did they over-react by shutting the account down? Time will tell. My sense is their account will come back online – once the snow (and media) storm blows over.

Special thanks to @danisonfire for the use of the wicked image, and to @dubzeebass for inspiring the post.

The post 4 ways to avoid a Twitter PR disaster appeared first on TheSocialWhat.com.

Measuring social media marketing is pretty easy- provided you look at one Facebook page, one Twitter profile, or one blog at a time. What’s not easy is reporting on all your social marketing efforts in a meaningful, consolidated way that senior executives appreciate and understand. Likes, shares, downloads, views…while each are valuable measures in their own right, have you ever wondered what happens when you combine them to create actionable insights and results? Enter Popluence – a practical, tactical social marketing scorecard that you can download and use.

Why Social Marketing Measurement Is About More Than Just Numbers.

The benefits of using a scorecard for social marketing measurement go beyond the obvious “let’s track pageviews and followers” mentality. A social marketing scorecard is a bridge to better teamwork, better planning and better recognition for marketing teams. Here are four reasons why using a scorecard was important to our team:

1. Provides the entire team opportunities to learn. With a scorecard, a team has a reason to inspect all of the metrics, and review them together in regular marketing team meetings. Where were the gaps? What performed well? What actions as a team do we need to take to improve performance? These are all good questions that may lead to specific activities for team members. For example, sharing content via Linkedin or Twitter to drive downloads of content. And since using social at work is still relatively new for some, they have a chance to try out some new things.
2. Gives the entire team a reason to perform better. Just like Google tied bonuses to their own social media success in 2011, some teams may decide to follow suit. Why? Including a team-based component to individual incentive plans ensures everyone pitches in and helps out. It also means peers hold each other accountable when numbers fall short – and celebrate madly when they’re crushed.
3. Makes forecasting possible. Once you use a social marketing scorecard for two large blocks of time (ie. quarters or semesters) you can do two critical things: (a) Establish a baseline relative to past performance and (b) start predicting future performance against previous periods.
4. It puts a real number on social marketing activity. By creating a single score that summarizes all our activity, it’s easy for our team to track and remember how well we’re doing.

Popluence Rises.

Social media success is comprised of two elements. Popularity, how many people you’re able to attract to your social profiles, and influence, the behavior you drive through social messages and engagement. With this in mind, we felt the best way to demonstrate our social marketing prowess was by showing strength in both areas – popularity and influence. After a lengthy search trying to find a scorecard model that met our team’s needs, I couldn’t find anything. So I invented one.

Popluence is scored on a 100-point system. The idea is to achieve 100 points (or more) in the time period you’re measuring (ideally, a 6-month period). You score various social marketing goals, and each goal is weighted according to it’s overall value and impact to your business across two categories – popularity and influence. The weighting is key, because it allows you to put more value in areas you’re strong, and minimal value in areas you’re weak, or just testing. For example, if you put a ton of energy into creating video content, you’d weight that higher. If you’re testing Klout out as an influence measure, you might want to give a much lower value, thereby minimizing it’s overall impact on your score. Each category is also weighted based on what’s important.

For us, it was more important to recognize success in influence versus popularity (which we felt was a better indication of marketing impact) so our influence score was worth 60%, and popularity worth 40%, of the total Popluence score. It’s important to note that a 100+ point score is possible without 100% success in each metric. Because it’s a scorecard with relative weighting, overachievement in one area compensates for shortfalls in others. Or vice versa. This is especially relevant in the initial phase, when you might pull goals out of thin air, and you aren’t sure of how well various platforms will perform. This is why chose to insert a cap of 150% for specific goals. While overachievement is good, a cap keeps you honest and realistic. You should start by setting 6-month rather than full-year measures. This allows you to account for the rapidly changing social media landscape (when new profiles or platforms get added to the marketing mix, for example) as well as make some projections for the second half of the year, based on the previous semester. Ready for the really good news? The template does all this math for you! All you need to do is fill in the blanks.

Download The Popluence Scorecard

Here’s a Popluence template you are free to use. Please fill out the short form below and the site will email you a copy of the template. Please use your work email address please. This work is really intended for organizations. You have my word: I’ll never send you anything (unless you email me first – ). I’m just curious to see who wants to try it out. My only ask: Please attribute the work if you use it somewhere.

While there is no shortage of social media scorecards, I still haven’t found anything like Popluence that gives our marketing folks a sense of accomplishment as a team, while also providing a simple way to report material progress back to the business.

Will this help your social marketing efforts? Are you using another social media scorecard already? Please let me know in the comments below!

The post Popluence: A Practical Social Media Scorecard That Works appeared first on TheSocialWhat.com.

While some sellers have started to use Facebook and Twitter in their personal lives, few use it in any meaningful way professionally. I’ll cut to the chase: to stay competitive, you need to become socially savvy because of Google. Here’s why.

Your personal brand is getting damaged- before you’ve had a chance to build it.

When you call a prospect, it’s likely before you even get off the phone, they’re Googling you. In the age of instant information, they’re looking to see if you’re really who you say you are. The question is – what will they find when they do? Will they find information that supports the claims you’ve made about you and your organization? Will they find content that connects you to your organization in obvious ways?

Do your search results match with the professional image you’re looking to convey?

I’m willing to bet for most people, the answer is no. And when a prospect sees something wildly inappropriate about you online, two things happen: they question your maturity as a professional, and your ability to gain earn credibility with them just got a lot harder.

Here’s a few tips to polish your professional personal brand:

• Have work-appropriate profiles. It’s not debatable. Customers are going to search for you. Make an active choice and ensure what they find is how you want to be seen. Curse and make inappropriate comments at your own discretion. That’s not to say you can’t. Just be mindful of the impression that makes.
• Say cheese. Make sure all your social profiles have a proper, business-appropriate portrait. Read: no beer-bong hats. Especially in situations with net-new customers, a smiling face goes a long way.
• Include a proper bio. Specific to Twitter, if you have an account, make sure it includes your full name and a reference to your organization. You don’t need to include your title. Just make it obvious for customers when your profile shows up in a search result.
• Lock your Facebook profile down. It still amazes me how many people have their Facebook profiles open for the world to see. Should your customers really see those pictures from your fraternity/sorority reunion? Probably not. Protect your Facebook profile! Change your privacy settings so that only friends can see your content. And think twice about becoming friends with your customers on Facebook. That might be a line you might regret crossing one day.
• Create Google Alerts. One of the fastest and useful ways of proactively monitoring your personal brand is setting up a google alert for any reference of your name. Once created, Google will send you an email whenever you’re mentioned.

Public vs. private profiles

The natural question people ask me is how should they balance their personal/professional social profiles. After all, for many people (including me) social media is a cathartic outlet. I’ve previously addressed the responsibility employees carry – even with personal profiles – in my post on guidelines.

A simpler answer that seems to satisfy is this: given the public nature of Twitter, LinkedIn and other social profiles, keep those as work-appropriate as possible. Use social networks like Facebook and Google+ – where you can control much more effectively (and reliably) who sees what content- as your chosen places to kvetch.

If you regularly search for yourself, great.You already know what customers are seeing. If you haven’t Googled your name lately, you just might be shocked at what you find. And guess what? Your customers will be too.

How do you make sure customers see only what you want them to see, but still have fun and keep the social in social media? Sound off below in the comments and share!

The post Are Your Search Results A Good Reflection Of Your Professional You? appeared first on TheSocialWhat.com.

In May 2012, I was invited to present at Social Media Camp 2012, the largest social media conference in Western Canada. There’s a growing number of people (like me) who regularly try and balance “doing social” with other full-time responsibilities.

As a result, every social advocate, in any sized organization, faces the danger of diminishing returns without coordinated and sustained help. My session provided a 5-stage framework for business leaders to get find and train the help required – and then keep it going.

My thanks to the many people who attended my session, and then shared what they learned socially.

The goals of my session were:

1. Minimizing risk for your organization by providing guidelines
2. Maximizing the impact of your advocacy and onboarding efforts
3. Mobilizing your newly formed social business army with (social) commanders intent

At Softchoice, we’ve spent the past couple of years building our own small but growing cross-departmental social business army. What follows is the 5-step methodology – and various practical tips – we’ve used to onboard interns and eager employees looking to get involved in actively managing our many social profiles.

How have you inspired others to ge involved with social at work? What would you add to this presentation? Were you in attendance at my session? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

PS. For my session attendees- I’ll be doing a more in-depth post on Popluence in the next few weeks, including a template you can use. Subscribe to email updates to get notified as soon as its published, and follow @thesocialwhat for updates.

The post 5 Ways To Raise, Train And Retain A Social Business Army appeared first on TheSocialWhat.com.

Congratulations. You’ve convinced a senior executive that Twitter is a legitimate business tool and they now want to tweet. From my own experience, that’s quite an achievement.

Your president has created her account. She’s filled out her bio information to accurately reflect her role in the organization. She’s even started following (and unfollowing) people to tune their feed. Now – what to tweet?

Assuming they are ready to start actively tweeting, here are ten things your executives and senior leaders can start tweeting about right now.

1. Current status/plans
“Attending @Widgets Worldwide conference with @johnsmith. What should I ask him?”

2. Replies to mentions
“@schnitzelboy I’m glad you enjoyed the interview. Thanks for sharing that picture!”

3. Opinions on things that matter to the business
“@Widgets announces dividend for first time in 2 years. http://goo.gl/HMrJE Good sign for US #economic recovery.”

4. Links to business-related content
“Just downloaded the @Widgets Advisor iPad app. Nice work team! http://goo.gl/BACJr”

5. Links to articles and websites you think are interesting
“Good article from @HBR on creating a transparent supply chain http://goo.gl/HMrJE”

6. Pictures you take from your mobile device
“Delivering a keynote shortly at @Widgets HQ talking about our brand. Good looking audience! http://goo.gl/HMrJE”

7. Rewards/Results/Recognition that promotes your business
“Very proud of the @Widgets team for winning gold at Channel Impress Awards. http://goo.gl/HMrJE”

8. Messages that show off your personality
“As an avid skiier, this video made my day: http://youtu.be/d232. Would you try this?”

9. Retweeting other corporate account Twitter content
“RT @Widgets Just downloaded the @Widgets iPad app. Nice work team! http://goo.gl/BACJr”

10. Sending welcome messages to other people
“@schnitzelboy Welcome to the @Widgets team! Look forward to seeing you around the office”

When your executives are ready to move past the broadcasting phase (and not everyone is ready to do this at the start) share this post with them for a guaranteed way to create engagement with employees, customers or business partners.

The post 10 Things Executives Can Tweet About Right Now appeared first on TheSocialWhat.com.