Connecting, collaborating, and engaging with your market holds more benefits than just increased sales – Feedback from your audience is invaluable if you want to create a quality product (or service) that actually appeals to potential customers. In this post I’ll outline a few of the tools that will help you do this:

Google Talk Chatback
Google Talk has a handy little feature called Chatback which will allow visitors of your website to send messages straight to your Google Talk account; all you need to do is install a simple widget on your website. Your visitors don’t even need an account – They can simply start writing messages directly via the widget.

Audiopal
Oddcast introduces AudioPal: an online service to allow individuals and businesses an easy and effective way to add audio to their online message.

BabelWithMe
Communicate with anyone, anywhere in up to 45 languages. BabelWith.me is a simple, free group chat that automatically translates your conversation as you type.

Grapevine
The Grapevine vision is to be the universal choice for online collaboration and voice communications with groups of people – and to allow people to participate when convenient for them individually, not on the groups schedule. Therefore, Grapevine allows people to dip in and out of voice conversations as they individually have time and gives you the presence and feeling of sitting in the same room with a group of people, even if you are thousands of miles apart.

Sparkeo
Sparkeo is a knowledge transfer solution for Infopreneurs professional knowledge entrepreneurs such as lecturers, teachers, bloggers and consultants.Sparkeo provides Infopreneurs with a one-stop-shop for the all the tools necessary to create, communicate, market, monetize and analyze their professional instructional content.

Twingr
With Twingr, you can create a microblogging community and communicate with friends and other people that share your same interests.

Wadja
Wadja is a service that helps you organize and manage your online social presence so you can better communicate and connect with friends, family, and contacts. Wadja is unique a social media and messaging service that is open and transparent, providing all its users with a variety of communication options such as SMS, email and mobile web messaging.

Tagga
Tagga allows anyone to create instant SMS and Mobile Sites so that you can interact, sell to, or simply communicate with mobile users.Promote your band, your house for sale, your business, organize your sports team, club, events and more.

Dabbleboard
Dabbleboard helps people think and communicate visually. Unlike other alternatives, it makes powerful features easily accessible, so that using it feels as natural as using a real whiteboard. Since it’s digital, Dabbleboard allows reuse of old drawings, and since it’s on the web, Dabbleboard enables sharing of drawings with people anywhere in the world.

Tatango
Tatango is a service that offers the simplest, most effective way for groups to communicate through their mobile phone. As an all in one solution, Tatango allows you to collect, manage and mobile message all of your group members both from your computer and mobile phone. Tatango allows any leader to update their members on meeting times, events, and notifications; anytime, anywhere.

Moot
Moot is a piece of social software that brings you together with other people who share the same location – a local service for local people. It works at home,at school or on the move. When Moot is on, new impulses and possibilities will come your way, for example when you’re walking down the street or taking the bus home – new impulses will come your way through interaction with other Mooters.

SnapYap
SnapYap is a video communication tool that allows you to participate in live video calls, record video messages, and send and receive video emails with absolutely no downloads. Designed to be as straightforward as possible, the applications on SnapYap.com make video technology available to anyone with a webcam and an internet connection.

Pipio
Pipio is a social operating system that aims to give people the ability to share and communicate in real-time. You can search what other people are communicating about in real-time based on contextual, geographical, and chronological relevance. As an operating system, Pipio allow full functionality of third party web apps within the Pipio ecosystem.

Lexy
With its Talk, Listen & Share phone service, Lexy totally enriches the way people – you, for example – communicate and collaborate while using their mobile phones. Simple. Lexy gives you all the richness of today’s Internet communications on the voice channel of your mobile phone.

Abobe ConnectNow
Adobe ConnectNow is a personal web meeting service that enables you to instantly communicate and collaborate using your own online meeting room. To start a meeting, just go to your meeting room and invite others to join you at the same URL. As the host, you will need to download a small add-in in order to share your screen. Meeting attendees will not need to download any software unless they will also be sharing their screen. There is no need to schedule meetings in advance.

Badoo
Badoo is a truly worldwide online community that provides its members with the ability to communicate and share their lives with people both locally and around the globe. Its many features include the next generation in photo/video sharing and social networking. More importantly, though, Badoo allows its users to gain an instant mass audience for themselves and their work.

Hikkup
Hikkup is a tool that allows users to communicate with their friends anonymously. Users can send messages via email, MySpace, Facebook, Tagged, hi5, and various instant messengers.

Jott
Jott’s goal is to let you easily save and share thoughts using that unique and powerful tool, your voice. Jott turbo charges your ability to remember and communicate, and thus manage your life.

Google Wave
Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Sync In
When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone’s screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate and conference on text documents, useful for meeting notes, brainstorming, project planning, drafting sessions, training, and more.

Zbang
Zbang integrates all your online activity into a single place, allowing you to seemingly work across different platforms, without having to flip from one site to the other. By using Zbang’s interface, you can share your digital content with your friends via social media venues and collaborate with colleagues.

Evoca
Evoca will change the way we communicate by empowering voices in ways never imagined before. We envision people everywhere speaking their minds, sharing their ideas, and storing their memories on Evoca. We see voice becoming the next tool for publishing and communicating online and through your telephone

BrightCove
Brightcove lets you realize the potential of online video with the most comprehensive Internet TV service available today. Brightcove empowers content owners from independent producers to major broadcast networks to reach their audiences directly through the Internet. At the same time they help web publishers enrich their sites with syndicated video programming, and give marketers more ways to communicate and engage with their consumers.

Meebo
Meebo is designed for anyone with a home on the web. If you’ve got a web page where you’d like to communicate with your visitors, meebo me allows you to see the people who are visiting your web page and chat with them.

SixApart
Six Apart, provider of the blogging software and services chosen most often by individuals, organizations and corporations worldwide, has partnered with Bokee, the leading blog hosting company in China, to make it easy for Chinese businesses to communicate with their customers and for employees to communicate internally through blogging.

SayNow
SayNow’s voice services are being used for marketing, entertainment, and educational purposes by a broad spectrum of users, including musicians, actors, actresses, sports teams, politicians, inspirational figures, and high school students. Anyone with an audience can use our broadcasting service to communicate with fans, get instant feedback, and sell merchandise. Fans are using SayNow to send voice messages and to hear from their favorite people in a way that’s easy, personal, and direct.

Mindjet
Capture, collaborate and communicate. Mindjet visual mapping makes it easy to capture and share your ideas, manage the flow of information and share your vision.

By now we all know how to start a Facebook Page, dress it, and fill it up with fans. We have sorted out how to grow, engage, and reward your followers on Twitter. It has taken a while, but we’ve all sorted out best practices and transparency when it comes to messaging on forums and reaching out to A-list bloggers. We at Abraham Harrison are there with you; however, it was not giving us the impact we needed for our advocacy and issue-oriented clientele. Reaching out to only the top-25 blogs via a bespoke blogger outreach might result in a real punch – if we really crush it. Sadly, if you limit your outreach to only 25 highly-influential bloggers, even a little failure can be devastating.

In order to maximize impact, we have added massively-targeted long-tail “b-z-list” blogger outreach to our tool set and it has become our bread and butter with over 80% of our active client service work.

What we do, effectively, is take the framework of traditional news release-based PR and adapt it completely to the unique culture of the Internet. In short, we have learned to treat thousands of bloggers with as much attention and responsiveness as most PR shops reserve for only national magazines, newspapers, blogs, radio, and television stations.

Before we begin any messaging, we quickly work with the client to get an idea of who they want to reach. All recipients must be bloggers and possess their own platform for citizen journalism. We don’t do direct marketing, we do PR. We only engage people who can repeat or carry our client’s message. We come up with a fantasy list of bloggers our client would like to reach. Some are fantasy and some exist. Our researchers will generally come up with a list of 5,000 blogs and then hunker down to discover their name and email. I am a computer geek originally so I know how to find the names and emails of bloggers; however, we have discovered that if you dig too deep to find someone’s email, such as into historical Whois records, then bloggers get pissed. If my team can’t find the person’s contact info in 5 minutes then they don’t really want to be contacted. Things move a lot smoother when there is awareness. By the time we collect all the contact info, we’ve generally winnowed the 5k to about 2,000.

We spend a lot of time, generally and per-campaign, breaking down what the client wants from a blogger outreach (buzz, traffic, sales, registrations, memberships, fund raising, etc) and what they have to give (books to review, information, exclusive content, lots of love, good-karma, or just content – a gift most certainly should never be an Amazon gift certificate).

After we sort this out, we then develop the message model that will eventually become an email. We ask our clients for any and all assets they have to share – video, copy, text, chapters, audio, images, photos, news – and roll them all into a Social Media News Release.

* image sourced from flickr by andyp uk

Here’s the genius part. Have you ever received a pitch from a PR shop? Isn’t there always some generally lame salutation like “Hello fellow blogger,” or “Dear Abraham” or “Dear new media blogger?” Lame. Also, isn’t there always either an attachment or an inline rich text press release? How is a blogger going to copy that image and that copy with those links over to their blog? It doesn’t work like that. And, why all the inline graphics and the tracking code in the email? They almost always get the email spam-boxed.

What we do is strip it all down to a simple email, all plain text, no tracking code, with a first name and the name of the blog in the email. We don’t attach anything, we place one link as a URL, to an SMNR, and that’s it. We tell the blogger exactly who we are, what we have to give, and explicitly what we want. If the email message plus the SMNR takes longer than 5-minutes to get through and post about, then we’ve failed. Maybe we’ll get a tweet, but a blogger doesn’t have ten to twenty minutes for posting for us for free, right? Longer than 5, at best a tweet or maybe something on Facebook. The money’s in the blog post and that’s what you want because most bloggers automatically cross-post to Twitter and Facebook anyway.

Here’s another trick. If a blogger receives an email and hits reply, he or she gets a reply from one of our staff within the hour. Too many PR shops work 9-6 and aren’t there in the INBOX. If a blogger’s pissed off, he’ll be more pissed by morning. We’re 24/7 and virtual. We’ll also never be snarky – never be snarky! Also, if a blogger wants to be removed, we remove them immediately. Sometimes for just that campaign but mostly forever, banished into our mailer, where we have a permanent “no fly” list, making it impossible to email them even if they make it onto the email list.

Finally, we always reach out twice more to bloggers who don’t reply at all. Two follow-up emails. The second email outreach always garners the most posts. If we receive 200 earned media mentions (blog posts) during the course of the campaign, we’ll get 50 posts from the first outreach, 100 from the second, and maybe another 50 from the last. By the second email, folks recognize our email and take a little more time to look through it.

It is essential to our success to make sure we treat every single blogger with as much time, attention, kindness generally – and wrongfully – reserved for mainstream media and celebrity blogs and bloggers.

And it works, too. In the last 12-months we have helped the Fresh Air Fund earn 1,800 blog and social media mentions. 269 media mentions for Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Day, 109 for Survivor Corps’s Operation Survivor, 190 for International Medical Corp’ 2009 Member’s Project bid, 173 for Snuggle Crème, 294 for US Olympic Committee, 401 for BrandsClub, 295 for Kimberly Clark Healthcare HAI Watch, 180 for the MLK Memorial Foundation, 83 for Motionbox, and others… Now, that’s a lot of punch, both in terms of volume, buzz, coverage, to say nothing of the powerful SEO impact of having hundreds of blogs linking to your clients’ sites. Imagine that!

While long tail blogger outreach is a very powerful method on its own, if you’re able to make part of a larger, integrated, social media marketing campaign to include Facebook, Twitter, celebrity blogs, message boards, forums, a wiki strategy, a reputation management campaign and a crisis plan, you’re golden.

Over 3 million iPads have been sold in just the first two and a half months since Apple released its sleek tablet, and everyone wants to know how this new device will affect their marketing plans. Whether you’re interested in this platform as its own revenue stream or just as a tool to keep your brand top-of-mind, the key to developing a solid strategy for this Multi-Touch battleground is to understand the lay of the land. Here are some examples and insights to help you slide, pinch, press, drag and rotate your way to success.

Size Matters

An iPad is just an oversized iPhone, right? Well, think about it this way. A swimming pool is an oversized bathtub. They are both simply different sized versions of the same object. Each is a basin filled with water. But we know that doesn’t mean they are used the same way. The simple fact is that size does matter, and the scale of an item can have major implications on the way it is used, and its strategic value.

The iPad’s bigger screen is much better for viewing and a nice big Multi-Touch is much better for doing. At the same time, with its size and heft, it isn’t going to be as much of a constant mobile companion as an iPhone is. The larger, more luscious interface is also better with a faster Wi-Fi network connection. It IS a mobile device, but you should expect people to use it primarily at home or at work, travel with it and take it to meetings, but not to walk around with it while shopping, clubbing, attending events, etc. In developing your own strategy to leverage the iPad for your brand, make sure you respect these usage patterns.

Rethink Interface and Rethink Interaction

The most groundbreaking aspect of the iPad isn’t any of its hardware features, but what they allow. The Multi-Touch screen, new operating system and its heritage evolving from iPhone apps has allowed developers to break free of the “standard” interfaces that have evolved over the years (menu here, floating window there, scrollbars, etc.). This opens the door to incredible new user interfaces and interactions. It’s important to remember that the popularity of an interface isn’t just based on its raw power or utility, but it also springs from how enjoyable and novel it is.

One of the first branded iPad apps, revealed even before the iPad was commercially available, is a great example. It’s the NBA’s Game Time Courtside app. Released in time for the NBA Playoffs, the app gives fans a viewing companion via an innovative interface that brings all of the game stats, details and player information to life. The app enhances the experience of watching the games and fits perfectly with the time-and-place usage pattern of the iPad. This concept of iPad-enhanced-viewing will definitely become more popular in the next 12 months.

Repurpose, Extend and Expand

A new platform and new usage patterns offers a chance to pull new value from old parts of your brand (and even resurrect parts that you thought were completely dead). Hearst Publishing recently announced that it will be reviving its shutttered “Gourmet” magazine brand as an iPad app, repurposing classic cooking content in a new format. If they do it right, they could create a valuable new, low-cost media channel that can strengthen their other publications.

Hasbro has taken this approach a step further, bringing some of its most popular board games to life on the iPad as paid apps. At $9.99, Scrabble for the iPad is no freebie, but it’s well polished and incredibly fun, so its enjoying a lengthy run on Apple’s “Top Grossing iPad Apps” chart. In addition to opening up a nice new revenue stream, Hasbro is also ensuring that a very large audience remains familiar and enamored with its products, even as the options for entertainment multiply around it.

Another spectacular example is Disney’s interactive storybooks. Delivered in app form, they enhance familiar Disney movie stories with activities, hidden surprises and even the capability for a parent to record their own narration, taking advantage of the iPad’s built-in microphone and speakers. Rather than making the digital version just a copy of the physical one, Disney has risen to the occasion and made their digital version something much greater.

Sell It or Give It Away?

The debate is the same whether you’re dealing with an iPad optimized website or an iPad app (and its the same debate people have been having with iPhone apps and the websites of traditional publications for the last few years): do you try to make your money by selling the app/content or do you give it away for free and make money from advertising? There is even that third position of “sell it for a token amount so that it’s not a free app and seems more valuable”.

Right from the start, the iPad app store seems to have many more paid apps with higher prices, and fewer free apps than the iPhone store did. This probably reflects a belief that an app with four times the screen area just inherently feels like its worth more. It also probably reflects an early stage in the app store lifecycle. The first apps make a big splash, then come cheaper copycat apps which deliver similar functionality, or free apps. It’s a natural aspect of the free market that we live in.

The other part of the evolution is the dual-release, where a free “lite” version is released alongside a paid “deluxe”. It’s a try-before-you-buy approach that consumers really appreciate. I’ve been led right into a number of paid upgrades by becoming hooked on the free versions. If your application and content plans support this type of split, I would definitely recommend it.

One of the most interesting things though, is the fact that several of the apps on Apple’s “Top Grossing iPad Apps” chart are “FREE” apps. How? Because the apps are free but they promote in-app purchases of upgrades like more levels for games, new issues of digital comic books, etc. This is a great model for a continued revenue stream that doesn’t even require another visit to the app store.

Don’t Forget the Web

A new Apple device means a whole new round of App-mania, but one of Apple’s big points is that this device is great for consuming web content (with some adjustments for Flash and video support). Right out of the box, it’s ready to serve up most of the web in a very capable way. That said, there’s plenty of room for improvement if the ROI makes sense, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see iPad-optimized (or even iPad-only) websites start popping up. Expect very well-designed layouts and interfaces without a lot of clutter. A nice example of this is the “Suzuki 50 Years” website.

If you’re not sure whether an iPad optimized site would make sense for your brand, look at your website’s analytics and see what type of traffic you are already getting from iPads, along with the rate of growth.

Just the Beginning

Just as “iPhone killers” continue to expand the smartphone market, other touchscreen tablets will appear in the next year as well. Beyond that, we will see some of these same new user interface paradigms cross over into other computing devices. The main takeaway from all of this is that Apple has helped usher in an age of computing that doesn’t really feel technical, and that’s great for brands and publishers alike. It means that the mainstream consumer will become more and more engaged with technology that is friendlier to them. Less of their attention will have to go towards figuring out how it works, and more can be focused on what we as marketers give them. Respect the user, respect the medium, and most of all respect the character of your brand and the iPad will be a great asset for you.

On the first post in this five-part series, we took a look at using LinkedIn to market your company and talked about the basics – completing your profile, creating a company profile – and how to prospect for customers by making connections and joining LinkedIn groups.  In part 2, we took a look at how to find business partners using LinkedIn. In this third post, we address talent search using LinkedIn.

Using LinkedIn to Search for Talent

If you’re recruiting in the current economic downturn, you’re well aware of the perils of posting a job requisition on even just one online job board. The result is likely to be dozens or hundreds of resumes, many of which not only not in the ballpark, but not even the same solar system as your requirements.

This growing deluge of eager jobseekers has accelerated an already growing trend in talent acquisition (AKA finding people to hire). More and more organizations are de-emphasizing offline and online job posting and turning to social media sourcing, using social media sites such as LinkedIn to locate top candidates and invite them to apply, for free.

This new emphasis is akin to a fisherman changing from casting a wide net in hopes of catching a single prize fish to using sophisticated mapping and sonar to fish where the fish are.

LinkedIn is an ideal environment for finding those trophy fish.

If you’re a business of some size and you’re serious about recruiting on LinkedIn, you can sign up for a LinkedIn Recruiter account. This type of account drastically improves your ability to search on LinkedIn, adds the ability to create alerts, gives you 50 InMails (ability to email anyone on LinkedIn) per month, and allows you to check references instantly. As part of their Talent Advantage program, LinkedIn also offers features such as employment ads, annual subscriptions for job listings, and customizable company profiles you can use to display different job information to LinkedIn members based on their profiles.

Be prepared to shell out some money for these features, however. Although details on cost are sketchy, it’s been reported that $29,800 is the minimum investment for the LinkedIn Talent Advantage Starter Package. You can go a bit cheaper by upgrading to one of LinkedIn’s paid accounts, which range from $24.95/month to $499.95/month, with discounts for buying a full year.

If you’re not that flush with cash, here are some less-expensive ideas for finding that perfect hire:

Advertise in Your Profile

If you’re looking for talent, say so in your LinkedIn profile. Adding a simple line such as, “Looking for an outreach manager” or “Need a policy researcher,” or even simply adding, “hiring” to your professional headline can attract interest. Of course, I assume you’ve already described your business in other sections of your profile, so prospective applicants can learn more about your organization. This is often more effective than blind job postings, and is more likely to attract passive candidates – those who are not actively looking for a job.

Ask Your Network for Help

If you’re trying to fill a position, let your connections know. One good way is to change your LinkedIn status, indicating what kind of candidate you’re looking for. Another good technique is to contact your connections, either through LinkedIn or via email, let them know about your talent search, and ask them to recommend people in their networks.

List Your Job in a LinkedIn Group



Most groups have an active Jobs section, where members post jobs and find jobs. It’s free for group members to list a job in these sections.

Use LinkedIn Answers

The LinkedIn Answers feature lets you ask a public question. Any LinkedIn member can answer the question, plus, you can directly message those who answer. So your question could be, “Who’d like to be my next Project Manager?”

Post Your Job on LinkedIn

You may have noticed there’s a Jobs link on the LinkedIn toolbar. You can post jobs on LinkedIn, but it will cost you $195.00 for a 30-day posting, or you can save up to 40% with a multi-job pack.

All of these ideas, however, share one thing in common: They’re very similar to the post-your-job-and-hope model of talent acquisition by casting a wide net.

One of the advantages of LinkedIn is that you can find out lots about other members from their public profiles. So to find those passive candidates, or to avoid getting inundated with resumes due to public job posts, use the techniques I discussed in the previous post about finding business partners to find candidates to invite to apply for your openings.
In fact, you may find a passive candidate works out better if hired. LinkedIn did a poll in which 60 percent of employers said that passive candidates made better employees. If you believe, as many do, that the best talent always employed, then you can understand these poll results.

One final tip: use Google to search for people with a particular number of LinkedIn  recommendations (you can substitute your own number). The following search produces a list of 89 highly recommended candidates:

site:linkedin.com +”7 Recommendations ” +”project manager” +minnesota These 89 folks are likely to be not only highly experienced but, ahem, come highly recommended. Good luck finding the talent you need!

Previous Post : Finding Business Partners

Next up: Building Your Brand on LinkedIn

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We are starting to see many organizations of all shapes and sizes adopt social media…great, now what?  Are these organizations still going to be tweeting in the next year?  What about in the next 3 years?  Are these organizations still going to be offering the same coupons and discount offers on their Facebook pages?  

The reality is that we have reached a point in the social media space where we need to start thinking about long-term sustainable value for both the customer and the company.  We have heard about all the great case studies and examples ranging from how issues were solved on twitter to how Facebook brand pages were hijacked, my question is who cares?

In the history of the social media world there are perhaps only a handful of mid and large companies that have been negatively impacted financially as a direct result of social media (that have been proven or correlated).  Two of these companies are United Airlines with the famous “United Breaks Guitars” and Dell with “Dell Hell.”  Before going forward I should point out that social media has and always will be a channel just like any other which requires its own set of rules, guidelines, and processes.  Social media isn’t an extraneous or additional piece of anything, it should be integrated into an existing strategy designed to solve a specific business need.  So what’s next or beyond social media?  Social CRM.

*Click to view larger image

Social CRM is a strategy which unlike traditional CRM has an outside-in focus and which makes the customer a focus of how the organization does business.  Social CRM is not just about Twitter and Facebook and instead looks at both online and offline channels in an attempt to build advocacy amongst social customers while also being able to improve their experiences (in interactions they have with you).  At the end of the day you can offer as many discount offers, coupons, deals and contests that your little corporate heart desires.  But, if your customers don’t like you then they aren’t going to be customers for very long.

The real value of Social CRM is not in being able to respond to every Tweet or blog post, nor is it about appeasing customers with a “we’re sorry here’s a discount for your next purchase.”  The real value of Social CRM is about being able to collaborate and innovate with your customers to give them what they want.  I had a horrific experience with American Airlines that pretty much destroyed the experience of a trip I took to Hawaii.  One of their flights was late so they had to re-book me on another flight.  Since I missed my original flight American Airlines canceled the rest of my itinerary.  Cleary there is a process issue on their end which needs to be fixed.  So what did American Airlines do with the feedback I gave them?  They gave me a $200 voucher to fly with them again; meanwhile this flaw still exists.  The point is that American Airlines treated a business process issue as a PR issue (which is what it became).  It is still important that American Airlines to apologize and try to compensate flyers for their frustration.  However, the real value for American Airlines would be to FIX this issue so that it doesn’t happen again.

I do encourage organizations interested in social media to experiment and play around; there is nothing wrong with that.  However long term scalable value is not going to come from a Twitter account or a Facebook fanpage.  It’s going to come from Social CRM and from being able to empower and encourage your customers to become advocates.

With more people utilising social media technologies such as Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook, it makes sense that established and emerging businesses are looking to leverage these technologies to reach and communicate with their target audiences.

In this post we take a look at the adoption of these social tools by Fortune 100 companies. From micro blogging to video syndication – we dive into the key statistics of these global companies and reveal how they are engaging with their customers using these social platforms. Data is provided by Burson-Marsteller.

Fortune 100 Social Media Statistics: key takeaways

• 79% of the Fortune 100 are present and listening, using at least of one of the main social platforms to communicate with their customers.
• 20% of Companies are using all four of the main social technologies (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Blogs)
• 82% of the Fortune 100 update and engage with customers on their Twitter account per week.
• Fortune 100 Companies on average post 3.6 wall posts to their Facebook page per week
• 50% of the Fortune 100 have a YouTube account and upload 10 videos on average a month

The above infographic and stats shows that the Fortune 100 are actively using these platforms to engage with their target demographics. The next step to engagement for these companies Location Based?

People are more comfortable knowing the rules

I’ve encountered staff on many occasions who were simply terrified of social media. Where to start? What to say? How to use the tools and would they get in trouble? A little guidance and training and they were just fine. Use your social media engagement policy as a way to show them the ropes and give them models to follow.

Three good reasons for a social media corporate policy.

1) Set branding standards for communication

Clearly you can’t have people making up their own logos and color schemes for your company. If your marketing department has a style guide, put the best bits in your corporate policy document. It saves everybody a lot of headaches if they can create a profile with a company approved logo and a color scheme that reflects the company with outguessing. Make the resources they need available and they’ll be more likely to dive in and you won’t have to assign a hall monitor.

2) Educate your team

What terms do you use to describe your product? Are there particular industry or work related terms you need to have associated with the product? Are there terms you NEVER want used with your product? Here’s where you educate the team. Somebody from production may have no idea of the carefully worded press release you just sent out in which you said the margin for error in your product was .006 % but he may know the last test results he saw were .02%. Make sure they both have the facts so they can put your best foot forward.

3) Set expectations for behavior

Again, if people know the rules and what is expected from them they are less likely to make mistakes. State clearly what standards of performance you expect. A little personal responsibility and some common sense goes a long way. This also sets the corporate nay-sayers a bit more at ease.

Now I’m not saying you should strangle your team in what they can and cannot say. This is very hard to understand for many larger corporations where the legal department approves every press release and the PR department approves every statement on the web site before it can go live.

Social media doesn’t work like this. If your statements appear to be canned or professionally produced it’s bound to fall flat. Let the team know the facts when a new product comes out or you reach a noteworthy milestone. Then let them put it into their own words.

What goes into a typical corporate social media policy doc?

Rather than blather on, here are some examples to learn from. Scan a few and you’ll get the idea. Then adapt to fit your own needs.

• Intel did a fabulous job with their social media guidelines. It’s clear what they expect and the whole thing is in clear easy to understand language.
• Sun’s “Guidelines on Public Disclosure” are much like Intel’s. Simple, to the point and all about transparency.
• Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center blogging guidelines clearly state the goals of the Walker’s blogs, with advice on finding images, responding to comments and refers to the EFF’s legal guide for bloggers.
• The BBC has a hands-off approach to personal blogs as long as the writer does not identify themselves with the BBC on their personal blog. Staff are allowed to talk about programmes, etc, but are required to include a disclaimer for personal editorial comments on blogs.

As you can see from what these organizations have done, a policy document can simply set rules for engagement so your team can go forth and be productive!

Here are 10 tips for Bing optimization:

1. Get rid of broken links.

Bing specifies in its Webmaster Center that it may not be able to index websites with broken links effectively. If it can’t index your site effectively, then your content might not appear in the Bing results for your SEO keywords. (Check out this recent post for tips on finding and fixing broken links.)

2. Keep your URLs simple.

You might also have trouble getting your site indexed in Bing if your pages’ URLs are complicated. Make sure your domain and subdomains are relatively straightforward, and that your blog post permalinks concisely describe your posts’ content.

3. Make sure your content is original and engaging.

According to this recent Bing Webmaster blog post, “rich informative content written for people is what the search bot looks for and values the most.” So listen to Bing, and bolster your website with such content as helpful top 10 lists, timely blog posts, and relevant images. The more good information you have, the more people will link to your site, which will also boost your Bing rankings.

4. Make your website text-based.

While you can certainly incorporate rich Internet applications like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash into your site, know that they can hurt your Bing rankings. These applications keep Bing and many of its users from detecting your content, which Bing doesn’t like. So keep your website simple with information that everyone can easily access.

5. Cover one topic per webpage.

Bing recommends that you keep your webpages to a “reasonable size,” and that each webpage addresses just one topic. This way Bing has a better idea of what a particular page is about, and can be more confident about including your pages in search results for relevant queries. Categorizing your pages helps ensure that each one ranks fairly well in search results.

6. Fill your pages with the appropriate keywords.

Create lists of keywords that accurately describe each page on your site. Then narrow down each list to the few best keywords (per Bing’s advice). Use the keywords in your pages’ body text, headline and title tag. Also, practice keyword optimization and make sure to include your keywords in the anchor text of links from other pages of your site.

7. Design your site with a flat hierarchy.

Make sure that none of your website’s pages are more than three clicks away from your homepage. If you make it difficult for users to return to your homepage, they will become frustrated. Bing doesn’t want users to become frustrated, and it will thus penalize you for poor navigation.

8. Seek out links from high-quality websites.

Bing states that the more links you have from high-quality, related websites, the better your site will be indexed and ranked by Bing. It provides seven tips for attracting these types of links, including putting our press releases, joining a reputable industry association, and asking your business partners and suppliers to link to your site on their site.

9. Keep tabs on your Page Scores.

Page Score is a measurement from one to five of how authoritative a particular webpage is in Bing’s view. The more authoritative a page, the higher it will rank in search results. By paying attention to this metric, you can know which of your pages are optimized as they are, and which need more work.

10. Check out Bing’s Webmaster Center for SEO tips.

This resource includes technical advice for optimizing your website, a blog devoted to Bing SEO, and a tool for submitting sitemaps. By reading this site regularly for updates, you will have a competitive advantage over your fellow webmasters. If you ever have any questions about Bing SEO, you can always post your inquiry in the active “Indexing and Ranking Discussion” Bing forum.