There was a revealing poll put out recently by the Smart Blog on Social
Media. It asked: Does your company
have a formal, written social-media strategy? Here are the main results:

No, but we’re getting around to it 32.73%

No, and we probably won’t write
one anytime soon 27.64%

Yes, and it’s really useful
20.00%

Yes, but it’s not that relevant
to our daily operations 12.36%

 We’re not using social media
5.82%

  We paid a consultant to come up
with one for us, but we’re not sure what it really means 1.45%

I like the honesty of the last one.
However, why would a consultant create a social media strategy for a company
rather than with them. In the latter case, it would be understandable and
perhaps more useful.

More than 60% of the 320 SmartBrief on
Social Media readers who took this poll say their company is using social media
without a strategy.  I read that social media is seen as a fad by many
people and firms. In this case, why would you have a strategy? On the other
hand why would you want to invest time and money in something without making
sure it aligns with your business goals and supports them. I would side with
the latter view.

I have helped a number of firms over the
past few years with their blog strategy and, more recently their Twitter
efforts.  Some come to it with a
strategic outlook. Others start out tactical and become more strategic as the
they reflect on what they are trying to accomplish and the resources required.
A few stubbornly remain tactical.

I think this poll reflects the nagging
immaturity of the social media field. However, like many other efforts, those
with a strategy will win out. I heard a politician on NPR talking about political
passion.  He compared it to fire.
If it is guided and focused, fire can heat your house and cook your food. It
not guided, it can burn your house down. The same holds true for social media
as we have a seen many times. 

Here is another
in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain
links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I
found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since
Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for
the month so they can be easily accessed later. I will repeat this once or
twice a month depending on volume.

The LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies (September 29–October 2 in San Diego) is sure to be one of this year’s best conferences. Now in its 8th year, LavaCon has expanded from its technical communication and training roots to include topics of interest to all professional communication pros. Whether you are a marketing manager trying to develop a plan to manage a social networking campaign, a technical writer trying to get control of your content creation, management and delivery processes, or an business or project manager trying to understand the rapidly-changing content technology landscape, this event is for you.

This year’s theme — How to develop, manage and publish digital content that enhances the customer experience, reduces production costs and promotes your online brand — has broad appeal and should attract a diverse audience of content professionals seeking insight into how they can solve some of today’s most pressing digital media challenges.

Jack Molisani, executive director, lavacon

“To attract and engage the next generation of tech-savvy customers, we must do more than just write content—we must deliver user-optimized content when the customer wants it, where the customer wants it, and in the format the customer wants it,” says LavaCon Executive Director, Jack Molisani.


“But before we can do that, we first have to discover what our customers need and want, estimate cost and ROI, build a business case for securing the needed resources, recruit and manage the right people, select and implement the right tools, assess and manage stakeholder expectations, create and publish the content, translate the content into multiple languages for multiple platforms—and, of course, bring the project in on-time and on-budget while overcoming office politics and resistance to change along the way,” he adds.

Jolynn Atkins

Day one (September 29) starts off with a three-hour Social Media Marketing Bootcamp taught by Jolynn Atkins, Manager of Consulting Solutions, Escoe Bliss Professional Resources.

Later that day, DK of MediaSnackers presents a two-and-a-half hour workshop entitled, Social Media for Executives, Business Owners and Entrepreneurs, which is immediately followed by a two-hour workshop from Social Media Consultant CJ Lucke and Events Marketer Richie Edquid entitled Foursquare Marketing Workshop for Bars, Restaurants and Retail Stores.

That evening the organizers present a welcome reception and offer a walking tour of the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego.

Neal Schaffer

Day two kicks off with an opening presentation from Neal Schaffer, author and president of Windmills Marketing, whose opening session, “The State of Social Media in 2010: Why Every Business Needs a Social Media Strategy…NOW!” looks great.

Ann Rockley

Following Schaffer is a must-attend session on Intelligent Content by Ann Rockley, president of The Rockley Group, and author of Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy and DITA 101: Fundamentals of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture for Authors and Managers.

Fourteen more sessions are offered throughout day two on topics including: documentation in agile environments, branding yourself and your projects, media-rich interactive content, collaboration technology, calculating ROI for social media, online branding strategies. A special lunchtime features session by Crosby Noricks of Red Door Interactive entitled You’re Only As Good As Your Last Tweet promises to offer up some twitterific advice for those still struggling to master to popular microblogging service.

Scott Abel

Day three kicks off with yours truly, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler. My session, Get Ready for Socially-Enabled Everything, will cover the features that make social networks so popular and that help us create better customer experiences. Attendees will discover how socially-enabled eBooks, training materials, mobile phones, product documentation, video games, music, and cable television are changing the way we work, socialize, learn ann interact.

I’m followed by Rahel Bailie of Intentional Design, whose session Creating a Content Strategy will explore the issues, challenges, and tasks involved in creating a content strategy designed to support your business goals.

The remainder of day three is chocked full of 16 presentations covering topics including social media, dynamic content, controlling vocabulary, content reuse, Sharepoint, 3D training and demonstration videos, and minimalism.

Mark Fidelman

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also highlight the luncheon presenter for the day, Mark Fidelman of MindTouch Software whose session Why Content Strategists are the Next Corporate Rock Stars. I’m excited about this presentation as I have called myself a content strategist for 7 years now and I think it’s finally catching on. Mark has great insight into the issues surrounding the importance of content being treated as a business asset worthy of being managed efficiently and effectively, in short, governed by a strategy and implemented by content strategists. Don’t miss this session!

DON’T miss the behind-the-scenes tour of seaworld

The final day of LavaCon includes 20 individual sessions on topics including: effective machine translation, XML authoring and DITA, single-sourcing, mobile content, eLearning, and HTML . A lunchtime presentation from Senior Product Evangelist, RJ Jacquez of Adobe Systems will serve as the closing keynote, although don’t plan on leaving at the end of the day. There’s an off-site event planned that will blow your mind: A behind-the-scenes-tour of Sea World.

Overall, I’d say LavaCon is one of the best conference values around this year. It’s an intimate event that should attract content professionals from a variety of industry sectors. Whether you’re interested in content marketing, content management, social networking, mobile content, technical communication, or digital publishing, this is one event you don’t want to miss.

I have been following the convergence traditional media and social media
for a while and wrote about Jimmy Fallon in this context (see Social
Media is Changing Late Night TV Landscape and Much More). Jimmy has now started his own hashtag:
#whydonttheymakethat and solicited fan submissions, some of which made it on
the air! Here is a link to a Late Night with Jimmy Fallon episode as Jimmy has
some fun with this hashtag. He actually reads some interesting product ideas.
While this has started as a humor stunt, there could be some crowdsouring
potential here.

At a minimum it is another creative link of social media and traditional
broadcast TV. He got thousands of tweets from his audience showing the power of
TV to integrate with social media. The late night hashtag has become a regular
part of the show. Some of these ideas were great and most were funny. Move over
Cisco i-Prize and GE. 

I recently wrote that the convergence of TV and the Web is not waiting
for the single box solution. Many creative efforts, such as this one are
already occurring. I can see many business applications of Jimmy's approach. I would not be surprised if they are not already occurring. Have you seen any? 

As enterprise 2.0
matures, its uses are getting more focused. I have been hearing more about it
use in product development. Here is a timely Forrester report on the topic, Use
Social Computing To Build Differentiated Product Development Processes by Roy C. Wildeman.  As the summary states, “in
recent years, leading product development organizations have proven the value
of greater cross- functional collaboration to harness
contributions from across the business and bring great products to market. With
the rise in Social Computing among consumers and enterprises alike, development
teams are further seeking to transform how they collaborate both internally and
externally in key processes like ideation, requirements management, detailed
development, and aftermarket support.”

It makes the claim
that “succeed in the future, business process professionals must expand their
thinking beyond traditional product development solutions and start
experimenting with new social technologies.” 
I certainly agree. As another Forrester report (The HERO Index: Finding Empowered
Employees by Ted Schadler and Josh
Bernoff) notes,
the more extensive and creative uses of social computing within the enterprise
have often come from marketing. To be really competitive, companies need to
embed social media and enterprise 2.0 throughout the organization and certainly
in the product development area.

Forrester found three main
opportunities exist for development teams to further innovate with enterprise
2.0. Note that Forrester uses the term social computing technologies and I am
converting this to enterprise 2.0 to go beyond technology. The first one is to
enable teams to better collaborate across distance or silos. The second is to
bring in outside communities for product ideas, answers, and feedback. The
third is integrate new services through social computing into traditional product
offerings.

These all make sense.
The second (aka crowdsourcing) as certainly got a big play in the press. I have
a seen a number of R&D teams move from traditional reporting through email
and attachments to blogs and wikis with great productivity increases.  One satellite radio firm had its first
on-time and on-budget development effort when it switched to a social computing
platform for project reporting. One of the reasons attributed to this success
was the increased transparency and its effect on individual and team attention
to quality. The MIT Sloan CIO found that using blogs for project reporting greatly
increased his efficiency in program monitoring and team mentoring. The
Forrester report has a great chart on how social networking expands knowledge
capacity beyond the usual “Go-to” resources for project development teams that
makes explicit some of the possibilities for improvement.

The report also points out some of the
potential obstacles to achieving success in these three areas including concerns
over intellectual property and security, as well as the potential chaos from
too much unstructured information and the need for clear governance. It also
suggests some useful ways to address these issues.  The report concludes with a set of recommendations for
taking advantage of the opportunities within social computing. 

A new study by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson, Social Media and College Admissions: Higher-Ed Beats
Business in Adoption of New Tools for Third Year, suggests that US
colleges are studying the "rules of engagement" in the
online world in order to increase their effectiveness at recruiting prospective
students.  This is the third year
of their data collecting on this topic.

The longitudinal analysis shows that colleges
and universities continue to embrace social media as their adoption of blogging
again outpaces both the Fortune 500 (22% have a corporate blog) and the
fast-growing Inc. 500 (42% have a corporate blog). The latest research shows
51% of colleges and universities have an admissions blog for their school. It
is not limited to blogging. My alma mater, Tufts, has prospective students send
them YouTube videos.

There have been many reports of business looking
through social media to screen out prospective employees.  They should look to schools to learn of
more positive ways to use social media for recruiting.  Colleges are also looking at social
media for screening purposes. There was an increase in social media use for
screening in 2009 while a decrease in the use of search engines for the same
purpose.

Social networking, the
social media that was most familiar to college admissions officers in 2007 and
2008 is still the most familiar. Familiarity with social networking has jumped
from 55% reporting they were very familiar with it in 2007, to 63% in 2008 and
now to 83%. Fifty-five percent of admissions officers report they are very
familiar with Twitter.

This familiarity extends to
usage as 95% of college admissions offices used at least one form of social media
in 2009. Social networking is the most common form with 87% of admissions
departments using it. Fifty-nine percent have a school Twitter account and, as
noted above, 51% have a blog. In addition, more admissions departments feel
that social media is “very important” to their future strategy than Inc. 500
businesses (50% compared to 43%). Good for them.

The colleges are also
looking at social media to see what is being said about them. Fifty-three
percent in 2007 and 54% in 2008 report they monitored the Internet for buzz,
posts, conversations and news about their institution. The latest research
shows an increase of close to 20% with 73% of schools now monitoring their
school name. I wonder how that compares with business.

Barnes and Matteson at the University of
Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research have conducted a number
of studies on social media.  See
for example, Social Media in
the Inc. 500: 2007 – 2009. This one is another useful
addition to their work. 

The German Autobahn is jammed with foreign cars; the Spanish coastline is full of Northern Europeans; it is holiday time! Wherever you decide to switch off and recharge, here some suggestions for interesting summer reading.

We have collected a few reading titles  and tips from members of our community and received some good input on our growing LinkedIn group.

Articles

• How to Build a Footer That Dosen’t Stink – a simple and effective guide
• Medecins Sans Frontieres: Social media lessons from the Haiti crisis – how an NGO used social media in a time of crisis
• Web Site Migration Handbook – migration are complex beasts. Learn how to tame them in this complete guide written by David Hobbs

Books

• Speak Human, Eric Karjaluoto – our Philadelphia 10 and Aarhus 10 conference keynote ask how you speak with your customers
• Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh – pay your employees to quit, let corporate culture be your first priority, try to change the world and oh yes, earn money
• Why Intranets Fail (And How to Fix Them), Luke Tredinnick – how do you meet the needs from both end users and your internal stake holders?
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky – you need to change the way you think about social media. This books tells you why.
• The Lords of Strategy, Walter Kiechell III – strategy as a term has only been around since the 60’s. Learn more about the pioneers behind the term that we use all the time today
• Remote Research, Nate Bolt & Tony Tulathimutte – how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.
• Open Leadership – How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, Charlene L – how you can be open while maintaining control
• Our Iceberg is Melting, John Kotter – a story about penguin colony in Antartica will change your view on organisations

If you like me are way behind with the “ought-to-read” list, you may want to check up on our 2009 recommendations as well.

What have we missed? Feel free to drop a suggestion below.

IT is sometimes portrayed as the bad guy or the
obstacle in the enterprise 2.0 space as some times they attempt to block or
curtail social media activities. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick presents a nice
twist to this view by offering research on how social computing can boost IT
productivity. I saw Nigel at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston so
it is nice to get a review copy of this report.

I really liked the
report’s summary. It concluded that their “survey of social
media users indicates that IT staff increase productivity by adapting Social
Computing to their role. CIOs should enthusiastically embrace social media as a
means for boosting IT productivity while also giving IT staff the experience
needed to support Social Computing initiatives across the enterprise.”

Drilling down they
found that 70% of IT staff respondents were positive about
the productivity gains from social media while the rest were mostly
neutral.  I think that IT has a
great opportunity to get out in front of the enterprise 2.0 wave and play a
leadership role rather than being overrun.  Nigel seem to agree with this as the report suggested that
IT leaders can tap the early social media adopters in their ranks to help
educate the IT team on fitting social media into work.

The survey also found that 80%
of respondents believe social media has a positive impact on innovation, and
78% believe it will also have a positive impact on customer service.  There are many use cases already out
there on both counts. Social media can support c increased collaboration that
fuels innovation. The report suggested that CIOs should actively encourage IT
staff to participate in internal communities to both ask questions and provide
answers.

A recent IBM study
found that employees were more likely to ask questions on internal social media
and use these channels to promote their expertise by answering questions in a
public manner.  The Forrester
reports backs this up as 92% percent of IT employees cite social media as
helpful in getting answers to their questions, and 85% reported that social
media is helpful for letting others know how they can help them.

There is much more detail in the report and I
found it helpful. Amongst the conclusions is the suggestion that CIOs should
encourage their staff to experiment and share their findings with others.