Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

1. Differentiate, but be consistent

Although this sounds like an oxymoron, defining a consistent social media analytics framework can help create a common vocabulary and allow you to learn by being able to consistently compare across your various campaigns.  There are three key dimensions as shown on the chart above:

• Use case: It starts with understanding what you are trying to accomplish, and then driving your strategy and results based on those objectives.  Are you trying to build awareness with an audience not necessarily familiar with your brand and offerings, or are you trying to generate demand running a social media campaign?  These are two very different things and the way you measure success needs to vary based on these objectives.

Read the rest of the post here…

Almost one year ago, the Altimeter Group published this report, titled: The Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist.  In it, they outlined the most commonly used social media organizational models in corporations.  As you can see on the image on the left, for more than 80% of the companies of the 140 social strategists interviewed, the social strategist has to rely on an extended group of colleagues to drive most of the change in the organization, since they are not under her direct control.  NOTE: Based on my interactions with my peers at other companies, I believe this figure is under-represented in the survey, and I only expect it to significantly increase as we mature (does anyone remember the dedicated email marketing teams of the early 2000s?)

Read the full post here…

In the last few years, teams across SAP began experimenting in social media. SAP is not a small company. The business management solutions provider offers 47 products and services in more than 20 global industries with 53,000 employees. With such a broad organization, it was not easy to ensure each team followed a proven game plan.

“It was very enthusiastic, but somewhat undirected. Kind of a buckshot approach,” says Todd Wilms, Senior Director, Social Media Audience Marketing, SAP.

Some of these experiments successfully built an online audience, but many struggled to gain traction. SAP’s executives wanted to replicate the successes and formed a team, with Wilms as a founding member, to find out how. Having completed its research, the team now travels the world teaching SAP’s employees how to launch successful social media strategies.

Learn more  . . .  MarketingSherpa: Social Media Marketing: How SAP identifies and replicates successful tactics across a global company.

While, I believe these three key salient points are spot on…

• Plan: Just like you would never run a marathon without proper planning (up to a year in advance), you should never kick-off any social media activity before you have identified your overall objectives and target audience.  You know when this not happening, when the first question is: ‘How do I set-up my Twitter handle?’ followed by the answer to your ‘why’ question by ‘because I need to get [pick your number] followers’.
• Practice: Most experienced runners will tell you that they will start off by practicing brisk walks before they even start to run when preparing for a marathon.  I would argue that when it comes to social media, we are not even able to crawl yet.  Next time you get the question above, ask the person to engage in an existing external community first (whether it is a blog, LinkedIn group, etc.), or even better yet, an internal community if you happen to have those in your company.
• Prepare for the long-haul: As any experienced runner will tell you, pacing yourself, especially during the first half of a marathon is key, both mentally and physically.  Similarly, when you are starting off with social media, you need to be mentally prepared and focused on a few activities and succeed with those before attempting to do more.  This will not only help you learn and showcase your accomplishments (which could be handy when you have to go to your manager asking for more budget), but will also teach you the discipline to be patient and consistent.

…I also believe there are at least two very fundamental differences, and hence the title of this post…

Continue reading here…

 Recently, the following (common) question(s) landed in my inbox:

“Lately, I am confronted with certain challenges…the difficulty to keep private and work related issues apart (especially on Fb). In my work environment the offerings exploded and I don’t really know which one of them actually helps me doing my job. If I choose to get active in every offering that we now promote, I can spend my whole day just reading work-related Fb posts, tweets, microblogs, community discussions etc. Honestly I feel overwhelmed by this, as on some days I struggle to get through my inbox, then I don’t even think about other sources. And whats next? Work Tumblr, Work Google+….? Is there a comprehensive overview of which Social Network offerings are available for which purpose?”

Here my Thoughts on the Topic:

The question is a bit like saying, “how much time should I spend being on the phone, having informal conversations in the hall way, on email and in meetings? And how many hours should I put in before I switch off the PC and work phone?”

The answer is: it depends. 

 As high-tech <or fill in your industry here> workers, we are entrusted with the responsibility to figure these things out for ourselves based on our overall objectives for our jobs. But just like with time management in general, of course, it makes sense to discuss this topic with others and see if there are people who have cracked the code better than we have. Begin by asking yourself:

• What social media channels support me in achieving my goals? Which ones suck up my time and have little impact? (This will likely require some research and experimentation.)

Read the full blog here.

• You participated in a Twitter discussion or event, using a hashtag
• Because there was so much great content in the discussion, you planned to go back to it later to use it as a basis for your next blog.
• You go to search.twitter.com, put in the hashtag and the search comes up blank.

If this rings true to you, here some simple steps to archive your Tweets and quickly create blogs with them.

1. Why are all your Tweets gone?

Sara Perez already said it so well in her own blog on ReadWriteWeb, that I am quoting:

“Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this “date limit” has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter’s search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is “around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow.”

2. Is there anything I can do?

Read the full blog here to get the answer.

For a panel discussion at the quarterly Silicon Valley Enterprise Social Media Council this June, I received the following request:

“Identify some of the major problems that you face as a leader of social media within your organization. I thought it’d be great for each of us to email our top 5 problems to see if there are consistent issues across our teams. It’s OK if you don’t have all of the solutions, that’s why we come together, right? Be honest!” (thanks, Alex Plant from NetApp )

After some thought, and reading what some of my peers had already listed, I sent the following response:

• Myth #1: Social media is free
• Myth #2: “2,000 Twitter followers” is a meaningful business goal
• Myth #3: Social media is global
• Myth #4: It’s easy to find content for social media
• Myth #5: Marketing people have integrated social media into their tool kit

I could write a blog on each of these myths but let me give you the short rational behind each one:

Myth #1: Social Media is Free

• It takes significant resources and time to develop social media objectives, find your target audience/build a community for your target audience, to engage, and measure your impact.
• You always read that “content is king” in social media and that is true. You need subject matter experts who can write and communicate, as well as social media-ready content.

Read the full post here.

I then decided to cross-reference these results with those of a 2009 Altimeter Group study that evaluated the overall ‘social’ score of the world’s top 100 brands, and this confirmed my suspicions.  Besides the fact that 8 of the 20 companies in the Fortune100 CMO study did not appear at all in the Altimeter Group study, the correlation of leadership in social business and whether your CMO is active on Twitter between the remaining 12 is quite low.  The most glaring outlier was Microsoft which ranked fifth (out of 100) in the Altimeter Group study, although their CMO appears to be dead last in the Fortune100 study.

Continue reading here

Many of my consulting engagements start with the sentence “My team wants to have a Twitter handle” or “I need to increase the number of fans for our Facebook page“.

 To that, there is only one answer: “Why”? And ,”Let’s take a step back”.

Before you get engaged in any kind of social media project, please ask yourself the following questions:

 Read the full blog here.