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:

1. ENGAGE – Begin engaging in interactive conversations with our followers and post more personalized content about the Chairman.
2. 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.
3. DRIVE – Use social media content to get in front of events, trips, and testimony to lead the discussion and focus questions.
4. 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?

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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.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6R161hDAH4[/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?

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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.

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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.

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Photo by: Matt Hamm

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.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EIu0yQBJ_Y[/youtube]

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One of the most inspiring and captivating presentations of the Inbound Marketing Summit was the keynote that Chris Brogan delivered.  Yes, I work with him at New Marketing Labs.  No, that is not why I feel the need to pimp the hell out of this presentation.  I have the distinct opportunity to hear Chris speak often where I see him develop concepts that he then takes on to other cities.  He usually shares his thoughts on where these tools are taking us and how it’s changing the way we work, think and interact.  Usually a few concepts spark conversations and get retweeted and shared around.  But, at the Inbound Marketing Summit, on that day, Chris was in a different zone.

I highly encourage you to take the 20 minutes to watch/listen to the entire presentation.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2732653&dest=-1]

I’m curious to know your thoughts.  What did you think of this presentation?  Did it get you thinking of how you could do your business a little differently?  How are you using these tools that we call social media?

Note: This a post as part of the series of presentations  from the Inbound Marketing Summit that was held at Gillette Stadium on October 7-8, 2009.  You can check out all videos on the Inbound Marketing Summit Blip.tv channel.  Content from all over the interwebs are being aggregated over on Delicious.  All posts on this blog will be tagged ims09 for aggregation purposes.

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A few weeks before the Inbound Marketing Summit took place, Chris Penn and I were discussing what he should speak about.  Of that discussion came the decision to do the presentation on how to determine the ROI of social media.  Figuring out social media ROI continues to be a very hot topic not only for the social media geeks but also for big brands that want to determine success measurements of their investment into the space.

Outside of this conversation I had been bugging Chris to analyze my restaurant, Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, for some time now.  Other case studies have focused on what we’ve done but not tearing apart the metrics.  Chris is a genuis at analysis and analytics.  So, I really wanted him to expand my knowledge and ability Google Analytics and other tools to properly analyze our efforts at the steakhouse and determine our ROI.  For those that don’t know, approximately 1.5 years ago we cut out 80% of our traditional marketing budget and turned our focus to our website, SEO, social media and other digital initiatives as a way to drive sales.  Surprise, surprise, it worked.  Since then we have seen a minimum of 20% increase in sales when comparing the same month the previous year.  But, one thing we never did was break out and track those individual efforts between the website, social media, and other areas we were spending our time online.

As part of his presentation Chris asked if he could use the restaurant as an example and do an analysis of our ROI.  What Chris found, in terms of hard dollars, surprised me and I think it will surprise you too.

You can check out Chris’ presentation, both slides and videos below:

Video

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2725975&dest=-1]

Slides

As I said, I was surprised at the actual dollar values but I wasn’t surprised at the result that Chris found.  For us, our entire focus has been on SEO.  We have used social media as a tool to augment that but not as a primary vehicle to drive revenue for the restaurant.  For instance, we have made a conscious decision to not set up a Twitter account where offer discounts.  It is something we’re considering doing in the future, but right now we aren’t utilizing social media in that way.

While this presentation gives you some information about my brick and mortar and the decisions that we face and have to make, have you taken these steps to determine the ROI of your efforts on your website, blog, or social media profiles?  If you have done this exercise, did you change anything about the way you spend your time post-analysis?

Note: This is the first post of many highlighting videos from the Inbound Marketing Summit that was held at Gillette Stadium on October 7-8, 2009.  All posts will be tagged ims09 for aggregation purposes.

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Yes, you read the title right.  I want to know how naked are you.  Do you prefer to wear a parka, hoodie, t-shirt, undershirt, jeans and everything else possible to cover yourself up? Or do you prefer to run around completely naked?  Maybe you’re somewhere in between.  You’re probably partially confused right now.  I haven’t told you what the weather is like and where you’re going.  Does it really matter?  Would you really ever agree to run around completely naked? (Remember, public blog post…don’t answer that )

One thing everyone deals with as they start signing up for social networks is how transparent (er, naked) they’re going to be.  It is something that you really have to give a lot of thought to.  Who will see the information you post?  What’s the reach of it?  Where do you draw the line between what’s really personal and what’s ok to share?  These are all normal questions that run through a person’s head when they first discover social networking.

With the ability to share so much about yourself comes many concerns.  One of which is a concern for safety.  I am fascinated with BrightKite (though I haven’t done much with it lately), due in part to what fellow pirate Chris Brogan uses it for.  One day someone told me they were scared of it.  Never expected the answer I would get.  That person said they don’t like using location-awareness tools like BrightKite because then people with not such great intentions know where you are….or where you aren’t (like at home).  I didn’t expect that answer because I had never thought of it in that light before.  I can understand where that would be a serious concern.  In my opinion, if someone is set to do harm to you, they will.  They won’t need BrightKite to tell them you’re not home, they’ll see your vehicle is gone.

Another concern that comes up often, even more than safety, is regarding privacy.  Most of these sites require some level of personal information.  Couple that with the type and frequency of the information you choose to share and that gets people worried about their privacy.  It is definitely a real concern but I think similar concerns existed when email, GPS and other forms of technology hit the streets.

So, how much and what should you share?  How naked should you be?

There isn’t one blanket answer.  The feature set of the social network dictates how transparent someone can be.  Everyone has a different comfy level when it comes to sharing aspects of their life.  Also, each users’ community will share and receive information in different ways.  Bottom line is that you need to share what you’re comfortable sharing.  I choose to share a lot about my personal life whether it’s through Twitter updates, photos from my engagement shoot, or sending happy birthday wishes.

I enjoy sharing a lot about myself because it has helped me to find whole niche communities of awesome people to connect with.  I guess that means that I’m that guy running around nearly naked.

I hope that you all continue to enjoy what I share.  Let me know if you want me to share more, it’s just right, or a little less.

How have you addressed how naked you’re willing to be?

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Photo by: Kables

One of the reasons why we all love Twitter is the ability to have instantaneous one-on-one conversations with like-minded folks.  Until recently Twitter was like a closed community to marketing and tech geeks but as more businesses, celebrities and mainstream media pick up on it, Twitter is seeing growth of mind-blowing rates.  Unique visitors grew from 7.9 million in February 2009 to 14 million in March 2009.  So, as Twitter becomes more mainstream, how do you wade through all of the noise and find people to follow and interact with who provide value to you or your business?

First, remember that Twitter is 100% opt-in.  Only those people that you choose to follow will show up in your stream.  If you don’t find value in that interaction, there is no rule saying that you must follow anyone.

Second, use Twellow and Twitter Grader to search the bios of Twitter users.  You can use these services to search for people with similar careers, interests, etc.  Of course, Twitter does not standardize the bio area so it is based on whatever users type in.  Therefore make sure you search different variations, especially if you’re searching job titles.  For instance, a search for “Director of Marketing” will yield different results than a search for “Dir. of Marketing”, “Dir. of Mkt” or any other similar searches.

Third, use Twitter Search to find conversations that are taking place around subjects that interest you.  From there you can see who is talking about those subjects and what else they generally have to say.  Interested?  Follow them and start engaging.  Want to really become a pro?  Try using Advanced Search…

These tools will help you to find those people or businesses that are talking about subjects that are interesting to you.  But remember that it’s up to ensure that you’re engaging in meaningful conversations.

What other ways do you use to find people to follow on Twitter?

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]]> http://justinrlevy.com/2009/05/02/wading-through-the-noise-on-twitter/feed/ 7 http://justinrlevy.com/2009/03/31/using-social-media-to-drive-sales-for-small-business/ http://justinrlevy.com/2009/03/31/using-social-media-to-drive-sales-for-small-business/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:37:35 +0000 Justin Levy http://justinrlevy.com/?p=996

Recently I had the opportunity to speak at Social Media Jungle: Boston hosted by Jeff Pulver.  The topic of my presentation was how brick and mortar businesses can use social media to drive sales.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1919794&dest=-1]

If you run a small business, how do you use new media for your business?  Has it been successful?  What tools do you choose to use?