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.

Last week I wrote about what I learned from talking to 25 companies on how social media was being used by them individually, as well as how they used it to enhance their business alliances and partnerships. Mostly I discussed the partnering aspects.

I thought that this week I would back up a little and discuss 5 points to consider when building out a social media program for your business.

• First, with any business initiative, start with a vision, plan, and mission. Sounds like a lot, but this could be a few paragraphs or one-pager. You already have a business plan (I assume), so this is just meant to complement it Not complicate it. Try to answer – “What is my prime purpose in using social media?” Influence customers to buy, provide better customer service and experience, build a new lead channel, etc. Then build your one-pager. Your prime purpose may change or expand in a year, so understand that this is dynamic.
• Second, if you’re not top management, then the above will not be very credible until the owners or senior management buy into it. Social media has the ability to touch and influence almost every area of your business operation, as sales, marketing, HR will all be affected by your strategy. You will need multiple layers of support to get this started – but not necessarily everyone.
• Third, think about how your vision will be turned into policy and action. You will need to establish some policies and guidelines about what’s inbounds and what’s out of bounds in your social media strategy. For instance, what guidelines do you need to establish around talking about new products or internal affairs or finances. These are important areas that can affect you legally, financially, and in your ability to compete.
• Fourth, can you track who’s saying or writing what? And what help or guidance are you providing them? What tools, training and programs might help them help your customers or clients better, or do their job better? There’s a lot of territory to cover on this fourth bullet and my next blog will talk about how to help you get connected to the right resources.
• Fifth, and this is the one I like least, but is necessary. What are the consequences for breaking policy? Even in LinkedIn, some groups have policies that do not allow links in their discussions. Most groups don’t, but those that do will or can expel you from the group. LinkedIn itself has certain policies that will be cause for your expulsion. If you plan to have consequences, then make sure they’re communicated well and backed up with adequate training. This topic alone is worthy of another blog and I would appreciate other thoughts on the subject.

As examples of how to get started or just start your thinking along these lines, take a look at IBM’s guidelines. Or check out Sun Microsystem’s guidelines – one of my former employers – where the CEO has (or had) a highly readable and followable blog. Since Sun is in the midst of being purchased by Oracle, I’m not sure where his future writings will go, but it might be worthy to check out his past material at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ as an example of an executive communication blog.

Look forward to your comments and thoughts.

Over the past 3 months I’ve talked to over 25 companies primarily in the Business-to-Business (B2B) space and mostly technology companies (software and hardware).

 Specifically, I was asking questions including:

• What types of traditional marketing activities are you maintaining (webinars, website development, paper-based sales and marketing collateral, seminars, etc.)?
• What types of digital marketing activities are you engaged in (blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn lead generation, Facebook, partner driven digital marketing, SEO/SEM, etc.)?
• Are you combining the two disciplines and in what ways?

 The types of responses were a little surprising as I thought there would be more push toward exercising these emerging techniques around digital marketing.

 What I found was the following in regards to digital marketing:

1. Most companies were taking a wait-and-see strategy. That is they were waiting to see what their partners or competitors were doing before they invested a lot of time and effort.
2. They were unclear about the ROI from digital marketing activities. Some said that they didn’t see any early returns from looking at how their market was engaged in these activities.
3. They were indeed monitoring digital trends and activities – usually informally – until the time they thought would be appropriate for them to take the plunge.
4. In general, they didn’t see the value in Twitter but did see some value in LinkedIn – as this was a professional community – one that they could have meaningful discussions through. However, even with LinkedIn, almost none of them had anything truly formal going on.
5. There seemed to be an executive gap. Mid-level managers and rank and file employees were more apt to use informal social media communication than senior management. Security and trust were important issues at the senior level.

There were some clear trends that I plan on illustrating in some follow-up blogs and reports, but this is a quick readout of what I found.  Keep in touch or sign up for my future reports.

And please add your comments as I’d appreciate what you’ve found.

Note to above: About 15 of these discussions were formal – that is they followed a prescribed set of questions that lasted approximately one hour. Discussions with the remaining 10 companies were more informal although in general the same types of questions were asked.

And there are always more than a few good articles at B2B Magazine for which I used their logo as an illustration above.

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.

Some of my efforts have come in the form of attending events such as the Search Engine Strategies conference (March, NY), or Federated Media’s Conversational Media Summit (June, NY), or a Mashable meetup, or working with a business client, or business association colleagues such as MENG – Marketing Executives Networking Group and ASAP – the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals.

There’s not too much in the way of resources out there that can be of a lot of value since some of these social media capabilities are relatively new or at least relatively unexplored when it comes to B2B alliances and partnerships and how they can be expanded and improved through the judicious use of social media activities. Where I’ve found resources, I will make them known, as there are a some.

So over the next several blogs I will be putting together a series of what’s going on in this area compiled from input and presentations at conferences by companies including Intel, as well as conversations from alliance, marketing (traditional and digital marketers), and sales professionals and executives in my network. I will attempt to capture Best Practices (where there are some early BP indications) and point you to a half dozen resources and places to look for information or expertise.

I may ask you and my larger network to take a survey on what you think and what you are experiencing.

These upcoming blogs will address the following questions when it comes to social media, web2.0 and alliances:

• What is Social Media and Web 2.0’s impact on the strategic alliance process and partnering?
• How can it be used effectively with channels?
• How does it integrate into the traditional partner marketing and business development process?
• Which social media and Web 2.0 strategies are more partner effective and in what situations?
• What are some case studies and who are the successes in using social media and Web 2.0 to improve partnering?
• Who or what failed and why?
• What is the cost and ROI of using social media and Web 2.0 for partnering and how does one measure it?
• Is there an opportunity (lost) cost of doing nothing?
• How do business partners maintain control and are there specific partner rules of social media engagement?
• Who or where can you turn to for help?

As this progresses, I will put the information into a whitepaper for easier reading. So if you would like, send me an email or sign up for my updates on these findings and a complete whitepaper and I will be happy to forward it to you.

Lastly, and just as importantly, if you are interested in discussing, questioning or being a part of the input, let me know.  Or just comment below if you have thoughts.

To begin with, sound partnering begins with a few basic principles that I’ve turned into the 4 C’s which I believe are crucial to understand:

Collaboration and Cooperation: joint, value-oriented partnerships are dependent on a sound quid-pro-quo. If you start with a one-sided contract, it usually ends up disastrously. There has to be something in it to help both parties grow, financially and otherwise. If you don’t have that, consider walking away.

Coopetition: almost any large company that partners with another company today (large or small) often has overlapping capabilities. In the world of technology, IBM and Microsoft have huge partner ecosystems, yet in many cases overlap some set of technology delivery with their partners. Overcoming and understanding how to deal with this phenomenon is key to working with large multi-dimensional partners.

Chemistry: good partnerships span more than just one individual.  Executives, sales, marketing, finance, legal and engineering all get involved at some point in the partnership continuum. It’s up to the partner managers for both companies to build joint long-term commitment and to help forge multiple relationships with their key counterparts.

Given the above, what elements of partnering 2.0 should you be giving consideration to? Here are a few thoughts on what you can point towards:

Web and SEM: leverage all the key elements of web marketing to elevate your partnership’s value to your customers. Go beyond just building out a partner tab and page on your web site. Cross-link web pages of value from your partner as links on your page and vice-versa. Exploit jointly agreed upon keywords on both sites.

Joint Marketing Collateral: Build multiple pieces of collateral between both companies. Use multi-media where possible such as videos. Make sure joint webcasts and other web collateral are easily accessible from both sites.

Social Media Campaigns: use blogs, Facebook and Twitter to play a role in a joint marketing/branding effort. Keep your joint social media dialogues slightly less glitzy and be prepared for honest criticism – as this is a two-way street that is less controllable from the corporate side. Offer something of value (a Starbuck’s card for $5 as an example) for completing a survey for instance.

Joint digital branding, PR and advertising also play critical roles into your joint efforts. But more on that later. 

One of the companies that you should be looking at include Intel’s latest partner efforts, as well as their new branding campaign. Admittedly not everyone can afford 7 figures, but you can get creative with 5 figures quite easily.

Please feel free to comment on your best partnering ideas as well as the companies that you think are doing it well.

And I collided with a few former and always interestingly-challenging former colleagues of mine via Sun Microsystems, one of whom also lived in SF (lives in NYC today) and another who went to Stanford. It’s funny how this pseudo-diatribe over a little geography can stimulate so much intellectual and geographical fervor.

Although I lived in San Francisco for 7 years – and it’s still my favorite city outside of New York – it was pretty hard to compete with all the goings on around marketing and technology- at least for this week – in NY. 

For me at least, it started with 2 days at the distinguished Hudson Theater  in the Millennium Hotel where Federated Media managed to do it up by having their Summit on Conversational Marketing (aka social media). Quite a few West-Coasters were there including their own CEO from the Bay Area’s Marin County, John Battelle, as well as Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, a VP of Marketing for Intel, etc, etc. It was this kind of bi-coastal digital marketing interaction that made the week that much more stimulating.

Monday night actually ended with me attending my MENG, Marketing Executives Network Group, meeting at the Met Life Building where I listened to the CEO of Crenshaw Communications discuss the latest issues and trends in Public Relations. But more on PR in another blog as it’s worthy of one.

This week is Internet Week NY, so catch some of it if you still can, as it actually ends Monday night the 8^th.  It’s great to be part of an environment that is hi-energy and on point when it comes to the world of media and communications. And I must admit, there is a big piece of me that is still San Francisco. 

Enjoy everyone!