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.

I’ve been in some discussions with a half dozen partners of one of our top technology companies. The purpose of these discussions is to look at best practices and how this partner group can improve in this tough economic climate.

While I have another 6 more discussions to go, here are some early returns in how they are using conversational media techniques and social networking to improve their presence – not only from the perspective of their partnering aspect, but also how they are using it in general.

Two points of clarification – the partner ecosystem that I’ve talked to is primarily focused on business-to-business (B2B) and they include both private (< $100M in revenue) companies and one large public company. All the private companies have been in business 2 or more years and would be considered successful and fast growing in their specific area.

As part of the project that I’m working on, there are another half dozen companies I will talk to that will include more public companies in the mix. So that may alter some of the following conclusions. But here’s what I can tell you so far, at least from the perspective of the non-public companies.

• They all want to use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to a much greater degree, but it must serve their business purpose of course.
• They feel that they are just scratching the surface.
• They are engaging in, acquiring or employing internal resources to learn and explore more of the possibilities in regards to employing some of these social networking techniques.
• They do not have a clear set of goals in mind about which social networking technique is best, under what situation or for what purpose.
• They feel that there is a lot more to accomplish with social media and their common partner, and they will look to their primary common partner for more help, support, guidance and cooperative business social networking in the future.

Whether it’s the current economic atmosphere or not, all of them want to employ these techniques to open up new channels of customer contact and eventual revenue. Customer contact is a primary motivation for everyone.

While I will be sharing more of these general findings in the future, I’d like to summarize this in 3 points:

   -  We are quite early in the cycle of using social networking with a specific business “revenue” goal in mind. But we are closer to using LinkedIn, for instance, to acquire or talk to new prospects and perhaps get professional feedback on our product or service.

  -  There is still minimal hard business evidence to look at which will firmly guide us right now.

  -  And no one wants to be left out of the game!

More to come on this subject soon.

And The Race Is On!

After developing and selling technology for the capital markets and financial services industry, I’ve learned some things about the value of real-time information. The same now seems to hold true for online social information sharing. Let me explain what I mean.

In the world of capital markets which includes brokerages and wirehouses, such as Morgan Stanley, and traditional banks such as Bank of America and Citi, real time information becomes an incredibly valuable commodity (or more precisely necessity). First, the aggregators and distributors of capital markets real time information include the likes of mega-info companies including Thomson-Reuters and Bloomberg. Second, some of the suppliers of this data include stock exchanges such as NYSE. And third, the users of this information include financial traders, mutual fund managers, wealth managers and financial advisors – to name a few. Those users or recipients of this real time information spend a lot of money on purchasing and employing this data to give them an edge about a company or fund that they might invest in (or not).

What is evolving analogously in the world of social media is quite similar. While instant messaging was the early leader in delivering real time interpersonal information, it’s the advent of Twitter that is really making this a potential business phenomenon and necessity. Twitter is the supplier of all this instant opinion information.

Just recently, Microsoft and Facebook announced initiatives to aggregate and promote Twitter information. They are the equivalent to Thomson-Reuters at this point. Of course Facebook, not to be outdone, would also like to be a competitive supplier in this market and is now allowing some real time views (aka status updates) of information posted by its 200 million users to be more publicly accessible. While Microsoft, through its new Bing search engine, is providing an index to the most followed Twitterer’s , bringing Twitter information to its search engine in less than a minute (near enough to real time).

So why is this trend important? It may provide businesses and marketers the ability to look at consumer interests, buying patterns and the effects of new product releases in near instantaneous fashion.

There is one issue that should be important to everyone. In the world of capital markets, real time information is about stocks and investments for the most part – relatively innocuous from a personal standpoint. However, in the world of Twitter and Facebook, the information is about us and our behavior. This type of real time market segmentation information has the potential to infringe on our privacy rights. Many of us have already seen our personal data being used for purposes that go beyond our consent. So while I look forward to the next wave of social media progress, we also need to be vigilant in how this affects our social communities and privacy.

Current Trends for Facebook and Twitter

At one time, SIFMA was the singular top conference in capital markets and I believe in the 1990’s there were as many as 8,000 attendees. In those days, when I was planning and managing this event for companies including Sun Microsystems and Sungard’s Mint division, the goal was to coordinate all the sales, PR and partnership meetings and presentations so that the staff were not overwhelmed and in the right place at the right time.

There was even a time when I had to order up 2 additional suites to augment our busy floor booth. The suites were geared for round the clock meetings including whisper meetings where we discussed our roadmap to certain clients. And over the past 4 or 5 years, I’ve been attending a fun post-SIFMA client-vendor business dinner, which includes an afternoon of fishing held in the Hampton’s and Montauk on Long Island.

After attending a number of other conferences over the course of the past year, I’d like to offer up some ideas for SIFMA to rebuild its once heralded stature. Here’s some food for thought:

• An event like this begins with industry leadership. I attended a banking event a couple of years ago and the speakers included Ben Bernanke (Fed Reserve Chairman), Jack Welch (CEO GE), Sheila Bair (FDIC Chair) and David Gergen (CNN). Even got to talk to Jack and his wife for a while. Sure, few events are likely to get this caliber of speakers, but consider doing a simulcast from Washington to make it easier for some government employees to speak remotely. And from the tech side, how about Larry Ellison of Oracle or Steve Ballmer of Microsoft.
• Content is King and the full conference price of admission does not warrant the expense for this level of information. I paid full fare last year – thank goodness that I didn’t this year as the agenda suffered further deterioration.  SIFMA must get more speakers from the industry to tell their story. Even some recently unemployed industry veterans could work. There’s no substitute for industry speakers. Have a vendor track if you’d like, but don’t let it dominate everything.
• Build interest before the event. Try a pre-conference mini virtual event to test the waters on content. Or survey the industry to find out what they want to hear most.
• Gather followup after the event. Consider a half-day virtual event for those that couldn’t make it featuring highlights from presentations and exhibits. 
• While the Hilton may have become sacrosanct over the years and a move to the Javits facility on the West side is probably over-kill and would undoubtedly sacrifice intimacy, the SIFMA organizers must consider some rearrangement of the current facility which will create enhanced interest and flow in the exhibits. The addition of the TMC Theater was a plus, but it was too small and even having Frank Abagnale, subject of the movie Catch Me If You Can starring Leonardo DiCaprio, did not quite make it. If SIFMA got Leonardo DiCaprio instead – well that would have been something – but of course that’s not realistic.
• One last important comment – use more social marketing including Blogs, LinkedIn and Twitter to network this event.

I could probably come up with a half dozen more, but maybe I can turn it over to you for comment.

In any case, I’m a stalwart and will continue to attend SIFMA if only to keep up with friends and have some interesting conversation. See you next year.

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.

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.