Social Media Strategy

The Joint Chiefs of Staff 2010 Social Media Strategy

May 10, 2010 By Justin Levy 16 Comments

One of my areas of interest continues to be how social media is being used by government, at all levels (Federal, State and local), military, and politics. We have seen plenty of examples of how government and politics (sometimes one of the same) are using social media. We have even seen how some branches of the military, such as the Air Force, are using social media. But, what we don’t usually get to learn about is how these groups organize their social media efforts. Following the social accounts is helpful but gaining insight into why and how they’re engaging in social media begins to allow us to shape the way that we can measure their success (or failures) online.

Two main documents will usually provide you with the needed information to begin to form this basis: the organization’s social media policies/guidelines and their social media strategy. The first step is finding out if they even have either of those 2 documents. The next step is exploring the documents to find out what their constraints are, why they’re getting involved with social media and how they hope to benefit from it.

While there are an abundance of social media policies floating around online (check out Coca-Cola’s, for example), it becomes harder to find published social media strategies. That’s why I was surprised and excited to find that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had published the Chairman’s 2010 social media strategy. You can check out the full social media strategy below.

Don’t know who the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Chairman is? Wikipedia defines the Joint Chiefs of Staff as “a group of military leaders in the United States armed forces who advise the civilian government of the United States.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff are the Chiefs of each of the four military branches and are overseen by the Chairman who is appointed by the President of the United States and is, by law, the highest ranking military officer and principal military advisor to the President.

Now that we’ve had our short history lesson, did you know that the Chairman, Admiral Mullen, is actually active on multiple social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube? Not only is Admiral Mullen and his staff active on a variety of social networks, but their involvement is being guided by, according to their strategy, four main goals:

ENGAGE – Begin engaging in interactive conversations with our followers and post more personalized content about the Chairman.

ALIGN – Align the content creation process for social media with Chairman’s Top 3 Priorities, assimilate social media content creation into existing Join Staff processes and products, and involve the entire public affairs shop, speech writers, editors, CAG, and Aides.

DRIVE – Use social media content to get in front of events, trips, and testimony to lead the discussion and focus questions.

EXPAND – Continue to grow the Chairman’s online audience and identify new social media platforms to engage from.

For each of these categories they have identified a list of objectives and, where appropriate, a list of goals to achieve. One of the objectives that caught my eye was under their goal of providing “social media business cards at all events as a source of more information.”

I think it’s great to not only know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have a social media strategy but that they have published it online for all of us to peruse, share and discuss.

What say you about their strategy?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Social Media, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: military, Social Media, Social Media Strategy

Coca-Cola Adopts New Social Media Policies

January 12, 2010 By Justin Levy 28 Comments

Coca-Cola has updated their social media policies (or principles, as Coca-Cola is calling them). Guess what? The policies are only 3 pages in length. Yep, that’s it. 3 pages. One of the largest brands in the world that sells into 200 countries with dozens of products and billions of dollars in revenue has figured out how to boil their social media policies down to only the nitty gritty.

The policy encompasses a total of 20 points that are broken out into 3 key areas:

5 Core Values of the Company in the Online Social Media Community
5 Expectations for Associates’ Personal Behavior in Online Social Media
10 Expectations for Online Spokespeople

Adam Brown, the head of social media at Coca-Cola, explains the framework for these new guidelines in an interview with Andy Sernovitz. If you can’t view this video, you can grab it over on YouTube.

If you want to read Coca-Cola’s new social media policy, you can either read it below or grab it over on Scribd.
Coca-Cola Company’s Online Social Media Principles

At New Marketing Labs I recently had someone from a small to medium company contact me and asked if we could review their social media policy. While we didn’t end up working with the company, their social media policy was 41 pages and 3 slide decks. I think my buddy C.C. Chapman summarized it the best after he tweeted out the link to Conrad Lisco’s post about Coca-Cola’s new policies:

For Coca-Cola, this new policy was updating an older set of guidelines that they had already in place. But, over the course of 2010 we’ll continue to see more brands adopting social media policies. What I found really interesting is how Adam talked about that it was a combination of several teams that came together to boil their social media policy into a 3 page document meant to serve as a set of 5 commitments from the company and 15 guidelines.

Has your company adopted a social media policy yet? What are your thoughts on Coca-Cola’s new policies?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Business, Social Media, Social Media Strategy, Videos Tagged With: cocacola, corporate, policies, Social Media, Social Media Strategy, Videos

Social Media Marketing in the Restaurant Business

December 6, 2009 By Justin Levy 78 Comments

I’m often asked about the story of my little steakhouse, Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, in Northampton, MA. It’s not often that I write about our full story. Well, recently I was asked to contribute a case study to the WOMMA Metrics Guidebook. I thought it may provide for an interesting read for you and may give you some insights or be helpful to you for application into your industry. Once you’re done reading, or even before you start reading, make sure you download the WOMMA Metrics Guidebook.

In general, restaurants have a few main ways that they typically market their business: You can run ads in the local newspapers, buy radio spots, have television commercials produced, and grab prime billboard locations. All of these marketing tools will help gain a restaurant visibility and exposure. They’re part of most restaurants’ marketing toolboxes. But, these marketing tools don’t help when an increasing number of eyeballs are turning to Google as their primary source of information.

When my best friend and now-partner, Joseph Gionfriddo, purchased Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, the extent of the restaurant’s web presence consisted of, essentially, just a copy of the menu. Joe was spending most of the marketing budget on local newspapers and radio spots. The restaurant was struggling to survive even though the food that Joe prepared was some of the best I, and everyone else that came through Caminito’s doors, had ever tried.

Recognizing an opportunity to lower our marketing budget and use the web as the primary tool to drive more bodies through the front door, I approached Joe with the offer of a partnership. My primary responsibility: create the strongest presence, both offline and online, for Caminito, in as short of time as possible.

We immediately sketched out a 12-month strategic marketing plan that included:

A complete revamp of the website.
Developing an online presence through social networks, a blog, and a video blog.
Creating a listening station that allowed us to monitor for conversations across the web about us, our restaurant, our competition and our industry.

Since many of these tactics provide for solid SEO, as part of our goals, it helped us to gain several thousand links in Google and other major search engines. As our online presence became stronger and we developed a more engaged community, we began to rank for prime keywords that we targeted as being important for our restaurant to drive business through search results.

Our take: if prospective customers ran searches for restaurants in the area while making a decision of where to dine and our restaurant dominated the front page of Google, they would be more likely to visit Caminito. Though we had made the decision to decrease our traditional marketing spend by approximately 80% we still continued to run local newspaper and some radio spots. Since not all of our customers use the Internet to do their research, it was important to us to continue to use these avenues to reach our customers. We also contacted each of the newspapers, other print publications, radio and associations to negotiate for digital advertising options, linkbacks on their websites, logo, bio and/or menu publishing.

The first month of this strategy being in play we saw a sales increase of 20% as compared to the same month the previous year. Over the past almost two years we have maintained an increase in sales every single month as compared to the same month the previous year. Additionally, we have finished each year approximately 20-25% up in sales as compared to previous years.

As time has continued, we have tweaked our strategic marketing plan but still maintain the above tactics. This has helped to continue to create conversations, both online and offline. To measure the continued increase in online conversations we use a combination of Google Alerts and Twitter Search. While this does create some duplication, it ensures that we never miss any conversations happening around us, our brand, our competition, or our industry. We monitor offline conversations through anecdotal interactions we have with our community and inferred through the continued increase in new customers and increased sales.

To further guide decision-making we also measure everything from the number of comments we receive on a blog post, to the number of hits on a video, the total number of subscribers, where those subscribers come from, how and where our blog and video posts are shared, who shares them, the level of engagement we have, the number of conversations that are started and tons more. The challenge is keeping up with all of this data flowing in and bringing it all together to analyze our overall online impact.

As a result of the measurement systems we have in place the impact of online and offline conversations is clear to us. Online conversations help to further our online brand, increase conversations, improve search rank for evolving prime keywords, demonstrate and expertise in the food industry, create new opportunities, and increase sales. The offline conversations translate to word of mouth marketing that helps to drive increase and repeat sales.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Business strategy, Caminito, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: Business strategy, Caminito, Social Media, Social Media Strategy

Using Social Media to Manage Adversity

December 3, 2009 By Justin Levy 9 Comments

This was originally posted over on workshifting.com which is a project that New Marketing Labs works with Citrix Online on. David Baeza of the Citrix Online team wrote the following post and I thought you would find it interesting ’round these parts. It showcases how Citrix Online chose to use social media, as opposed to more traditional tactics, to deal with some adversity that their team recently faced. In the comments below let’s discuss your thoughts on using social media to manage adversity.

We have advertised on political talk shows, and with that comes some degree of risk associated with the content. On occasion, a radio host will make outrageous or inflammatory comments that incite a political group. Typically the “group” uses the outrageous comments to promote their agenda, and so the mud slinging begins.

Like many companies today, we use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to listen and engage with customers and the broader community. Several months back something new happened, our web conferencing product became part of a trending topic on Twitter, but not in a positive way.

We started seeing tweets about our brand with comments such as “boycott”, not something you want to wake up to on a Monday. Because of the sheer volume of noise around the controversy we decided to suspend our media. Giving us the opportunity to gather our thoughts and determine next steps.

We decided that instead of using traditional PR tactics to address the controversy, we would release a single tweet from our branded Twitter account, and then listen. The tweet had no links, and it read something to the effect, “…we have suspended our media and we will re-evaluate…”. As expected, the tweet was picked up quickly. Over the next few weeks, we fielded some tweets from our personal and branded Twitter accounts, and eventually the controversy subsided. Even though we carefully crafted our first tweet response, all the subsequent tweets weren’t scripted. Therefore, we didn’t come across as cold and unsympathetic. The communication was genuine and honest, and the community responded positively.

I am not suggesting that using a single tweet to manage adversity is always the best solution. In some cases, public outreach via a press release with relevant links is needed. However, in this case we felt the best solution was to speak to the community in the same voice and using the same tool from which it originated. Speaking for myself, the lesson learned pertained to honesty and transparency, and the power of the tools on the social web.

So what does this have to do with workshifting? The method we used to resolve the conflict didn’t require us to higher a PR firm, a consultant or use an expensive press release distribution tool. The free tools are available to workshifters of any size. The tools are not the exclusive domain of large, well funded companies.

So if you’re starting a company founded upon workshifting, you have the ability to use the social media tools with the same level of scale and effectiveness as a large company can, and in many cases even better.

Have you used the tools to manage adversity? I’d love to hear your stories.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo by: Matt Hamm

Filed Under: Guest Post, Social Media, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: adversity, Guest Post, Social Media, Social Media Strategy

The Audacity to Win Video Review

November 12, 2009 By Justin Levy 9 Comments

Were you as amazed as most of the rest of the country when Barack Obama seemingly came out nowhere to take the 2008 Presidential election by storm? Have you sat back and scratched your head wondering how the Obama campaign did it? Are you amongst the group that wants to understand how they built such a strong community, both online and offline? Need a break from the regular onslaught of business, marketing, and self-help books? If you’re whipping your head up and down, first, stop. We wouldn’t want you to get whip-lash. Now, don’t even bother watching the video below and go buy 5 copies of The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory (Amazon affiliate link) by David Plouffe. Enough said.

Want some more explanation? David Plouffe was the campaign manager and chief architect of the Obama presidential campaign. Over the course of 2 years the campaign raised more than $750 million, had a staff of almost 6,000 people and an army of volunteers that totaled into the millions. The Audacity to Win (Amazon affiliate link) takes you closer than any other account of the Obama campaign has. There are many business, marketing, community development and time management takeaways in addition to the granular level detail of what it takes to run a presidential campaign.

As usual, I shot a quick video with my thoughts on the book. If you can’t view the video, check it out over on my YouTube channel.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.