Organizations have a lot to consider once they decide they want to jump into social networks and social media. There are many opportunities to slide off the rails, or worse, to let the effort fall into disarray. Here are some thoughts based on a question I received recently in an e-mail about guidelines, a toolbox, and how to grow a community.
First, know what the intent of your social media and networks will be. Are you hoping to improve awareness and open communication about your organization? Are you looking to reach new markets and open channels for sales or membership or market adoption? Are you hoping to use these tools as collaboration platforms? Are you making informational products? Are you just virtualizing your watercooler?
Knowing your intent drives which path you take.
Companies and organizations are most worried about how blogs and podcasts and wikis will be used. The truth is, most employee codes of conduct cover this related to e-mail use. It's not much different. Don't add another thousand rules about what should go on within the social networks, except insofar as what differences come with the medium. For example, don't bury people in what not to say. If you're a publicly traded company, have your bloggers add a disclaimer (e.g., "strictly my opinion"), remind them about the e-mail policy, and let it go.
If I were launching a social media program at a company, I'd hold a quick meeting in person. I'd mention the following:
We're opening up blogging to the organization. Every one here is now invited to use our new blogging platform. Why do this? Because we think you're creative, intelligent people, and we want to give you a chance to share your ideas with a larger audience, inside and outside the organization.
As this is public, just remember that we can't talk about company secrets, upcoming projects that aren't yet public, or anything that could impact our company's stock value.
Within reason, you can say what you will about our publicly released products and services. If you're critical of something, recommend solutions. Offer examples of improvements. We'd prefer it to be constructive. Use your judgment.
When posting pictures or movies or music, understand that some materials may be copyrighted. For instance, just because you can see a picture on a Google Image Search or find it in Flickr doesn't mean you have the right to post it on your blog. We'll talk more about Creative Commons and some other resources later.
Off-topic posts are fine. We don't expect every single post to be about the organization. We hope you'll talk about us from time to time, as our goal is showing our customers, vendors, and other stakeholders, as well as the community at large, that you are what makes our company amazing.
Mentioning our competitors is fine. The world doesn't revolve around us (okay, we pretend it does!), and we know that some people do some aspects of what we do better. Don't rub our noses in it, but we get it.
Deleting blog posts is considered bad etiquette on the Web. We won't do it here, unless something violates our privacy policies and/or our ethics policies. Posting hotties probably won't fly, but the occasional cute picture of your cat in a cowboy hat is okay. You're a real human, not a robot.
Did we mention it'd be cool if you talked about us once in a while? Great!
It's considered good etiquette to link to other great posts you read, and to comment on other blogs written by people you admire or want to engage in conversation.
As for how often or how much is too much and things like that, around here, we measure you on your results at your primary function. If your work starts suffering on your way to becoming an A-list blogger, we'll have to adjust your expectations a little bit. Otherwise, use your judgment.
Something along those lines would be a good starting point for a blog policy, I think. Have you written a blog policy? What's yours?
People are selling all kinds of technology for blogging, even though there are plenty of free and open-source platforms out there. Simple, hosted opportunities abound. Beyond that, there are some great new collaborative products, and tons of content management software companies make all flavors of solutions. Instead of recommending any specific platform, I'll point out some things to consider:
Operating environments vary: Several content systems work on Linux platforms, using solely open source, and others are built for a Windows environment. If you're building the system in-house, consider what your IT team will be comfortable supporting. Or consider bypassing both camps entirely and build on a hosted environment out on the Web.
Related to the last point, the more arcane or unknown the system, the less likely it will be for you to find support should the vendor and you fall out of love. Be wary of that.
The content system should feature RSS feed support. This means that all the content can be exported via a specific protocol that allows people to view it in a reader or another application of their choice, and not just at the web site as a destination. (For me, systems that don't support RSS are showstoppers. You might have a different opinion.)
The ability to post in a simple, visual manner (that would feel like using a tool like Microsoft Word) as well as the ability to post in HTML format is useful. I like writing in HTML, but others might prefer the comfort of the WYSIWYG tools.
Media support is fairly standard these days, but should be considered. In a world where YouTube is no longer just skateboarding dogs, the ability to embed Flash video, as well as the ability to post MP3 and MOV files (among other types) would be important.
Video has lots of added challenges. I strongly recommend a third-party hosting platform, then embedding a player instead of integrating to your platform. Yes, there are great platforms working inside the firewall, and there are some easy add-on video solutions, but if you're going to go heavy into video and aren't a production or media company, that part is probably best outsourced.
Is mobile a priority? Applications such as Utterli, Tumblr, and others allow for mobile posting. Integrating input from more than one source would thereby also be important and of interest. Pay attention to how easy it is to import feeds and post into your media platform. This is one limitation that can be somewhat vexing later on.
Backing up, exporting, importing, and some administrative functions are important to consider if you're going to put any serious data and effort into the platform. For example, I do full backups of the data on
www.chrisbrogan.comevery week, regardless of the fact that it's posted on a hosting system.Customization is important. If you can't make the platform look and feel like the rest of your presence, what's the point? Most systems accommodate for this rather well, permitting Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) support and other features, but make sure.
Beyond this, there are lots of "your mileage may vary" opinions, but this should be a good start.
I saved the hardest part for last. In that old Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, the tagline/hook of the movie was a ghostly voice in the cornfields saying, "If you build it, they will come." Nothing is farther from the truth.
People's attention spans are frayed to their very edges. Work stresses are equally ramped up. The "shiny new thing" quotient on the Web is at its highest right now. So the odds of making a full, fat, rich, robust community that swells into the hundreds of thousands overnight is fairly slim. For every "overnight" success like Club Penguin for kids or Facebook for everyone else, there are tons of digital ghost towns out there. I'm not about to say that I know what the secret ingredient is, because if I did, I'd make my own network, get Microsoft and Google to bid me up to the billions, and retire to Newfoundland.
Here, instead, are some thoughts.
Communities that have "something to do" do better. Want an example? Amazon. You can go there and review books, write comments, build wikis, and do a million other things around products you love. Another? Flickr. Go there and look at other people's photos, join groups, tag and comment, and make notes. Facebook? You could get lost in all the time-wasting applications or become deeply involved in all the groups there. Make sure there's something to do.
Go outside the borders often. New communities grow by gently encouraging new immigrants. For example, if you're active on Twitter, you can occasionally point to posts on your new community. Not always. That quickly becomes boring. You can comment on other blogs that are similar to your group's intent and where you populate your URL (in most blogs, you enter your name, e-mail, and URL). Folks click on the URL of comments that seem interesting. (Don't spam!)
Encourage more than you stifle. You want to see a community turn on their keepers? When sites go astray of their community-minded goals, bad things happen. Look at what happened[107] when the social news site Digg changed its algorithm a bit. It wasn't pretty. So be wary of how you interact with the community.
Make it worthwhile for the community. If you're going to build a place for people to collaborate and share ideas and build content, be on the lookout for ways to give something to your community members for their efforts.
Administrators are not community managers. Community managers exist out there who know all the great ways to engage people. Connie Bensen,[108] Jake McKee,[109] Jeremiah Owyang,[110] and a host of other great people are community types to their very bones. They know how to energize a community. Seek out a community manager to run the environment and make that his or her primary role. This is worth tons in the long run.
Here is one consideration for when to build your own social network and when to use existing social networks: having an abundance of community members in your organization already versus seeking to grow a community. If it's the first scenario, then build a social network. If you're looking to grow from nothing, consider starting in other people's social networks.
I use both methods for my own interests. I think it's important to be part of the community at large, so I participate on Twitter, to a lesser extent on Facebook, and then in a variety of other places. My personal method is to focus on the people, not the platform, meaning that I'm not on Facebook because it's Facebook. I'm there because some of my friends and business colleagues are there. That's a popular Eric Rice[111] warning to social networks, too. He goes where his crowd is, not just to the new and shiny thing.
For you, it's mostly a question of whether you have the community in place and are looking to target those within your platform, offering them tools and resources to connect and cross-communicate. One of my favorite examples of this is FastCompany.com, which for a while turned its online property into a social network around its magazine's points of business instead of simply a rehash of its magazine. It's a bit more blended these days, but there are still many community features built in. Points go to USAToday.com for its effort, too.
Is there a hybrid model? I think so. You can perhaps build a network and understand that it might be slow to grow, and then grow your community by participating in "outpost" areas like Facebook or Twitter or the other billion networks that are out there.
At the core of this are people. Everything that has come before this doesn't work a lick until you understand the people you intend to reach, the people you hope will contribute, and the people who will share their time with you on all angles. If, for instance, you start a blogging platform at work, then complain that people are using it, they won't use it. If you build a social network dedicated to talking about how great your company or products are, that will get old really fast.
Do you know humankind's greatest need? The need to feel wanted. If you consider the incentives behind most people's actions in a given day (especially mean people), what's at the core of it is to feel that they're doing something important, interesting, and worthwhile. That has to be at the center of your motivations and perspective if you're launching a project like this. Make it worth it for the people, and they will participate.
Analysis paralysis is a terrible thing. Just try something. Even if you launch a really small part of your project's intentions, now is the right time to try. What's holding you back?
If you want advice, or if you want to customize this information for your organization, I'm always available to talk more. I have a contact form at http://chrisbrogan.com/contact. Let me know what you need. I'm always happy to help.