Lately I seem to be getting into some discussions with mid-sized and SMB type companies that want to use social media and conversational media in their day-to-day operations both internally and with their customers. I’ll define a mid-size company as anyone with over 50 employees.

A lot of the relevance of social media including blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter are not lost on these businesses at all. Many of these mostly privately run companies have been started by their senior executive or perhaps by one of the executive’s relatives (dad/grandfather usually) and current management keeps building on past success. Frequently they are middle-aged and they usually have children often in their teens or even college age. These millennial’s are tech savvy and they might hear about the latest Facebook app from them. Or they might hear how their competitor is using LinkedIn to connect with prospects, etc.

The question that I hear at least once in the conversation is “how do I control it once the genie is let out”? My response is you may not be able to control it 100 percent but you can certainly put some guidelines or policies around it for your employees.

Here are 5 simple and easy-to-implement social media and conversational media policies, guidelines and practices that you should consider for yourself, staff or business:

• Respect yourself and others when writing blogs or posting comments or communicating by Facebook. Consider your language and state of mind when writing. If you disagree with someone’s point of view try being diplomatic rather than pugilistic.
• Don’t curmudgeon your competition. It usually doesn’t result in anything positive for your business.
• Stay away from commenting on legal or financial matters that may affect you, your company or your business partners.
• Don’t try to mask or cover up who you are. It’s too easy to track where and to whom comments actually come from.  Remember the comments posted by John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods. He was eventually uncovered.
• Employ basic common sense and good judgment. Don’t publish items that are not yours. Stick to what you know and ask questions about what you don’t.

Lastly, and this is not a policy exactly, keep everything simple – especially because you are a small or medium size business. Don’t try to tackle all the social networking and conversational media applications at one time. Build your expertise in pieces.

And the above certainly can apply to larger – publicly oriented enterprises as well – it just might be more formalized.

Of course, I thought this was pretty cool.  As I learned more about what they were doing and why, I became intrigued and enlightened. I was not expecting this kind of behavior especially from a bank with the word Royal in it. I guess it seemed like an oxymoron at the time. I was used to hearing this level of modern thinking coming out of the likes of Wells Fargo, who at the time and over the years has been equated with one of the most progressive technological banks in the world. Indeed, Wells Fargo initially had the most Internet banking users and of course one of the best online experiences as the Internet was incorporated into financial services in the 90’s.

As a result of something I’m working on, I had occasion to re-enlighten myself on what RBC was doing. Their latest contest features a “Do-Over” video challenge for the best advice on starting school over again. There were 3 student winners in Canada, each receiving $10,000. OK, the Royal Bank of Canada is quite profitable and managed to escape relatively unscathed from the financial debacle. I believe their total losses were less than $10 billion. So $10,000 is not a lot of cash to give away.

But really, what’s more interesting is the fact that RBC took an active role in using web 2.0 to connect with young people and to get their input into their system. RBC started when the use of these social internet mediums was still in its quite early stages. And they began when there were mixed concerns about how to manage and monitor it in the event of negative backlash or comments directed at or to the bank.

They’ve made it a success. I can’t say that RBC is the de-facto standard when it comes to the use of social media technology, but they’ve come a long way while there has been such negativism and adversity in the banking world. I’ve been equally impressed with their commitment to green and the environment, community service, and a recent revamping of their entire online experience. They now service 3 million online customers. All pretty heady doings from a bank with such a stuffy name.

RBC does operate in the U.S. as Centura Bank and RBC Bank USA and I cannot speak to that aspect of things. I certainly would be interested in hearing your comments on social media in financial services.

In this blog, I’d like to explore a few thoughts on internet search, enterprise search and content management, since last week I attended, for the second time, the Enterprise Search Summit conference in New York City.

Since I also attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) in March, it’s difficult not comparing the two conferences. The attendance and sheer size of SES is an order of magnitude greater than the Enterprise Search conference (2000 attendees vs. 200) and the mega-companies such as Google and Microsoft have a much larger showing at the SES conference.

It is commonly presumed that enterprise search is meant to manage the search for content inside the business firewall, while internet and web search is geared to find content for the general public. In general that is true, although companies such as Microsoft and their FAST and Sharepoint offerings as well as Google and their business search division have blurred some of these distinctions. Since I don’t want to spend an entire blog on differentiating how enterprise search differs from internet search, a decent summary of some of the distinctions can be found from New Idea Engineering (an enterprise search company).

Since I’ve spent time in all 3 areas, in some of my ensuing blogs I will attempt to look more closely at each area separately. But to begin with, and without trying to sound like a Gartner or Forrester analyst, I’d like to offer my 10 predictions and observations:

·  Google and Microsoft will largely control search both from an internet search, as well as to a large degree enterprise search as well.

·  Google will have to purchase or invest in a larger business-side search organization to further penetrate the enterprise area. Its skills, as evident from the Enterprise Search Conference, are clearly quite thin on the business end.

·  Google and Microsoft will buy, invest in or invest organically in more social networking companies and capabilities (Twitter, Facebook, etc) to broaden their offerings and public reach.

·  Microsoft, to maintain a player status, will buy Yahoo to replace MSN and its Live Search search engine which have too little market share. Google still commands 65% +/- marketshare. Microsoft will then have to determine whether they can embed some of the capabilities of FAST into Yahoo.

·  Enterprise search and content management will be constructed on a Microsoft model including Sharepoint and FAST, further marginalizing companies such as IBM, EMC and Open Text

·  Microsoft, through its Sharepoint offering, may eventually own the entire new content management space. Google Apps potentially have a play in this space, but for the present at least is not ready for enterprise prime time at a major corporate level quite yet. I don’t see anything dramatically new from EMC or IBM and I hope Open Text can keep pace to keep everyone honest so to speak. But today’s software industry is based on revenue and market share, and this industry is moving so quickly, only those with the deepest resolve and pockets can keep with it.

·  Business intelligence and analytical ability will become further embedded in the internet search engines (not just enterprise search). As evidence, FAST, originally a focused internet search engine that morphed into an enterprise search platform, has some significant capabilities in the business analytics area (guided navigation for example).

·  Companies such as SAP and SAS who are attempting to move into the search side with their analytical engine will have to form alliances, build API’s or license their technologies via an OEM agreement, or they will be wasting their time.

·  Other enterprise search vendors such as Autonomy, Endeca, Vivisimo and Exalead may to have to focus on certain vertical industries to be a viable play (eDiscovery is an example), or be bought.

·  Finally, search (internet and enterprise) and content management will further converge technologies and provide capabilities to the end user that can locate content – whether structured or unstructured – either in a dimensional way (folders and files) or in a more search friendly way.

In the blogs coming up, I plan on discussing more on these relevant topics as well as share some related work I’m doing in the healthcare and medical area around search, marketing and social networking.

The AIIM organization runs a quality conference with many good keynotes, breakouts and sections to attend. The conference is quite well attended because intelligently they also share the expo hall with the printing and copying (OnDemand) conference. That concept seems to make even more sense in this economy and AIIM has been doing this for a while now.

While I didn’t go to all the sessions this year, the few that I did focused around the social media theme, where it’s headed for the enterprise, and what the content management systems vendors are doing with it and about it.

The keynote that was most interesting to me was Andrew Lippmann from MIT’s Media Lab. He discussed the four or five areas that he characterized as putting things out of whack in our society. Such as Scale – Andrew said that not all things small can scale up. And too often we get caught up trying to make that happen in business and it doesn’t always work. Same thing wth Opaqueness – that is our processes and solutions are so complex that they lack clarity and transparency. Ithought that was quite relevant to our issues in finance and banking today.

I also listened to a panel of IBM, EMC and OpenText executives describe their approaches to both social media and what they see on the competitive landscape. Also quite interesting since these 3 companies control the majority of software sales in content management. I thought Cheryl McKinnon who represented Open Text had the most up-to-date approach, but both IBM and EMC had a good deal to say as well. It seems there will be a lot of continuing efforts to bolster this fastest growing end of the business.

More to come on this and some other interesting topics.