Begin a Dialogue with Your Employees
Don’t just lock everyone out of everything! This reactionary approach will make your firm look like a dinosaur to your team as well as your customers. I’ve seen this implemented at large publicly held construction companies and I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot by locking out everyone with URL filtering. Determine which employees and social media applications can contribute to your company brand, market reach and customer relationships. Ask your marketing, communications and sales people including anyone involved with customer relationship management or customer support for their input. Check out your competitor’s website to see what social media applications and tools they are using. Often you’ll see a few icons listed somewhere on their site, an invitation to connect in the sidebar of a blog or perhaps an RSS feed of their social activity.

Establish a Social Media Policy
Start with defining what is acceptable and unacceptable when using social media sites as you do for email and cell phone usage. Yes, your Legal and Information technology teams will probably influence (scare) you enough that risk tolerance decisions will need to be made. My favorite book for addressing social media policy is The e-Policy Handbook by Nancy Flynn. You may have already decided that “we only allow LinkedIn”, period. Think again. The most popular Business to Business (B2B) network by far in the United States is LinkedIn and they’ve just added the ability to display Twitter feeds and blog posts on the Company Profile. Since blog posts often have videos embedded in articles, you may have just policed yourself into not being able to view your own marketing materials.

Get the IT Department on Board
With budget cuts across the board, IT is trying to do everything without spending money and often takes the “lock down” approach as the only thing they can do with the tools they currently have. Perhaps you should consider budgeting for new equipment, particularly firewalls that address social media. It’s not good enough anymore to rely on old technology. Traditional firewalls rely on port and protocol to classify traffic, allowing tech-savvy applications and users to bypass them with ease; hopping ports, using
SSL, sneaking across port 80, or using non-standard ports. It may be time to have your network traffic analyzed for applications, users and content, you need to know what bandwidth is used by social media and have a way to monitor and enforce your policies effectively. The Interface2010 Technology Symposium has this topic covered and while I attended the Scottsdale, AZ event last week, you can still catch them in a few other US cities this year.

We’re in the process of scheduling a webinar to help educate business owners and their IT departments on social media policy, monitoring and network security. If you’d like to receive a webinar invitation, be interested in a network audit or have questions, please ask us by posting a comment. Please share this with your business partners, IT friends, and customers.

The post Social Media Policy or Police? appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

The premise is if you had to take a 1-minute internet safety lesson before being allowed access to the Internet your employees would recognize just how important it is to protect their identity and the electronic information contained within the company. The article mentions many of the popular social media sites but doesn’t give you 10 lessons to kick start the idea. So why not make this blog post a place for everyone to share their ideas…and build a 100 or more “lessons”? I’m extending this to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter too (as I believe a 140 character tip will ensure the time constraint of keeping it to one minute).

Safety Tips

To get us started, here are a few of my one minute safety tips:

• Know your company’s policy on Social Media use (Write a corporate policy on Social Media)
• Make all your passwords more than one word in length and include at least one number
• Never write (post) anything you wouldn’t want your mom or your boss to read (or see)
• Text Messages from your Blackberry are “discoverable” so think of them as business emails
• If you blog independently of work, make sure it is understood the contents are not the opinions of a past, current or future employer, but only that of the blogger’s
• If you post while at work to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn make sure it is work or industry related (see corporate policy)
• Never open attachments or click hyperlinks from people you don’t know and trust

Now that you get the idea, let’s hear your one minute (or less) lessons and Tips. I promise to share them with you all!

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1. Claim your brand (your company name, and your own name).  Your brand should be focused on your customers needs and as much as possible be controlled by you.  Now I use the word control loosely as this is not the corporate tower mentality of press releases and case studies from your Public Relations Department.  But your  brand conversations and those happening on the internet should be in your possession.  How do you do this?  Use Namechk.com to find if your preferred brand username is available.  Namechck.com will search what’s been taken in the social media realm.  Grab your names in the major social media sites now or they will be gone later!
2. Listen.  You must know what’s already going on in your business niche.  Not so much what social media tools everyone is using, but listening to the conversation.  The majority are out creating facebook pages as extensions of their website, but forget that social media is a participation sport.  What are we listening for?  What is being said about our firm, our industry and our competitors?   What are our potential customers asking for? Careful consideration should be focused on who is participating.  Start your listening with a few searches on google about your company name…look for reviews, see  if you’re listed on the first  page of search results, etc.  Then move to some listening technologies like Google Alerts,  TweetDeck  and Social Mention.
3. Begin participating.  Perhaps you are a B2B so you start with LinkedIn.  I see more people who start here and never really get it.  They get a dozen friends in their network and nothing happens.  Here are three things you will all do today: Change your title under your name to more of what you do.  For instance if you are in sales say customer relationship and business development for the XYZ industry.  You want people to find you.  Add a few applications to your profile… Reading List by Amazon and Bloglink.   The reading list is for sharing, the Bloglink is for listening and sharing.  You can automatically see the blogs that your LinkedIn connections have and get to know what they are passionate about.  And join a few groups so at least you look connected and interested.  After all the do call this “Social Networking”. Post comments to their blogs, ask and answer questions in the group discussions and get your feet wet!
4. Decide what the purpose of your social media participation is.  Perhaps you want to help a friend get a job.  Maybe you want to promote your philanthropic and community causes.  I bet you all want to market your products and services.  This strategy meeting is not just the owner, unless you are a sole proprietor.  Even then I’d say talk with a mentor, social media strategist, branding, marketing or PR firm.  Involve business development and sales then prioritize.  A few hours a planning will save weeks of effort.  Read a few good books like Putting the Public back In Public Relations,  The Long Tail, Trust Agents and Groundswell as they will  help you understand the social media craze and how to leverage it.
5. Consider  a Blog.  I believe that a Blog is the most underutilized social media tool.  It can convey your passion, relay your expertise, reach into the emotions of your potential clients and start a conversation.  Oh, and it will help you climb the search engine rankings easily if done right.  There are two schools of thought for beginners.  One is I am afraid to jump all in, so they start a blog using Write4.net if they want it to be super easy, or wordpress.com if they are halfway convinced that this blogging thing is right for them.  Write4.net will tweet your blog post and give you a blog with a few nice features like the Retweet button.  Neither of these will ideally optimize search engine ranking but can help with website traffic.  I have to admit, I’m wishing I had just started with WordPress.org but hindsight is 20/20.  Problogger tried to convince me too but it looked like to much work to start.  He also has some many fabulous suggestions on copy, writing headlines, creating compelling calls to action, etc.  With your strategy in hand write a few posts that keep the focus on the customer and help them out (for free).  Write good headlines as they will determine whether anyone reads your blog.
6. Maximize your reach.  The best way to expand reach for most firms is with a combo attack.  Blogs, Twitter, newsletters, Facebook don’t only use one method – as you limit your reach.  If you are afraid to start writing a blog or concerned about the expense there are many free and easy choices.  The professional blogger will lean toward WordPress.org and rightfully so.

Recognize everything you participate in can help you in search engine rankings, positions you as an expert or interested learner and improves your reach for authority.  Stay focused on the customer and building their trust.  I believe it was Chris Brogan who said social media is “two parts helping, two parts connecting and one part selling”.

If you attended the luncheon, would you please add comments to this blog on what you learned and what your have planned as your next social media step.

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Source: Business.com’s 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study (http://www.business.com/info/b2b-social-media-benchmark-study) 

The post Social Media Use in Real Estate and Construction Industry appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

Once you have that done, you can add your own LinkedIn column based upon your preferences.  From TweetDeck click on the add column button and select the LinkedIn icon.  You can decide what items to include like recommendations, connections, status updates, etc.  Here are your choices so you can be a smarter, more efficient listener:

Now that you are listening, have you tried out the Twitter options on LinkedIn?  I blogged about it a few weeks back.  Read it here if you missed it.  Now have you all considered using Twitter (or some other microblogging application) for your company press releases?

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Here are a few suggestions to all those developers that want to make millions and really do have some great ideas that I just gleaned from the book Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application by Jason Fried:

• Design smart by drawing out a few screen shots and then making them HTML before you start to program
• Create a buzz before release with a few snippets and ask for email addresses to get early adapters enabled
• Be passionate and create a blog for your adopters and keep your readers updated
• Don’t wait til everything is perfect to launch…get a beta out for people to try
• Keep it simple and streamlined so no one needs training to use your app
• Offer a free version that’s easy to signup for
• Focus…not every app is for everyone.  Keep your eye on your target audience!

I thought this would get you all to read the whole book.  What’s in it for me?  Better designed, useful apps for me as a LinkedIn user of course!  I’m ready to try out new Web 2.0 apps for LinkedIn (especially for those focused in the construction, architectural & engineering industries) and hope to hear about all your successes soon.

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This gives the viewer of your blog feed or site an opportunity to pass it along, make it more popular with Digg and spread your message.  Once you choose FeedFlare, select the options you want for your feed or site and it will show you what it will look like to your readers:

You can reorder the choices you selected by dragging the Share on Facebook or Digg it hyperlinks using drag-n-drop. You’re done when you hit SAVE.

The next time your feed goes out, all your subscribers will have these choices to share and you will reap the rewards!

There is also a FeedFlare catalog of other choices to add including english to spanish translations, adding links to your favorite charity, event promotions and Map It
(to Link to a web mapping service display for feed items that have location context associated with them).

Go ahead and experiment. Try out FeedFlare and let me know about your success.  We love your comments.

Oh, and since you read the whole blog post, you can add a follow me on twitter flare with these instructions from HyveUp

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I think Twitter got this one right.  If I want to know what my followers are really interested in, it should be their retweets.  After all it is a call to action for their own followers and represents the groundswell of our followers reach too.  What better way to understand the value of content than from our followers.  This is a keeper as far as I’m concerned.  Now will this feature be incorporated into some of the popular aggregators like TweetDeck?  How do you decide when to retweet?

The post I’ve been Beta’d by Twitter appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

1. First Sign-up for Google Feedburner and enter your blog’s information (title, original address and new feedburner address). and save your feed details.  Don’t worry, this is free.
2. Click on the Publicize tab.
3. Select the Headline Animator.
4. Select email signature.
5. From the dropdown, choose email signature and click next
6. Follow the instructions in the pop-up based upon your email service.  It’s available for Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook Express, Outlook 2003, Yahoo Mail and has workarounds for Gmail and Apple Mail too.

There’s plenty of other great features to help you with optimization and publicizing your blog with Feedburner.  I’ll make this a series of how to’s for the next few weeks.  If the construction industry starts using collaboration 2.0 (aka social media) for marketing and communication, for sure they will want to learn all these blog tips.

Share your success with us.  We like to hear from our readers!

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From a Robert Half Technology Survey and mentioned in Stowe Boyd’s blog post Enterprises Block Social Networks, 54% of US companies with over 100 employees have completely blocked sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  At the same time, analysts at Gartner are telling IT managers, Loosen up on social networks, security.   These opposing views remind me of the early years of the Internet.  You could walk into a business in the early 1980’s with a dozen PCs and one of them was not connected to the network.  That lone PC was connected to the internet, but it wasn’t safe to have the entire office on-line.  The reasoning was that some hacker could break in and steal all your accounting data and the employees would spend all their time surfing the net rather than working.

This battlecry has reared it’s head in the business world with Social Media as “someone might say something negative about us.  We don’t trust our employees to work during working hours.  Lock it down.  Turn it off!”   The control must be kept by the CIO or communications director, and our lawyer and HR department are ready to reprimand any employee that crosses the line.  Oops, only 30% of business have a social media policy.   You can get help with social media and email policy from my earlier blog post Email Records retention Can Be Tricky.

This fear of social networking will handcuff the enterprise while competitors will leapfrog ahead.  If you don’t trust your employees with some responsibility, why did you hire them?  As Paul Proctor, a VP at Gartner says, “You cannot protect yourself from everything. You must learn to balance risk and performance.”  AIIM has gathered a number of statistics from surveys and research that help to explain the current state and where we are heading.   Here’s just a snippet to share:

Over half of organizations consider Enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and success.  Only 25% are actually doing anything about it, but this is up from 13% in 2008.  Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers.  Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments.

Let’s look at this from the perspective of the business leader.  They hear the word social and think of twittering “I’ll meet you at the pub after work”.  The word social needs to be replaced with business  collaboration when you bring the discussion from the IT department to the Board of Directors.    The real questions that business should be focusing on are:

• How can we harness “collaborative” networks to improve communications, knowlege sharing, marketing efforts, etc?
• Should our deployments be internal or external?
• Have we developed our business strategy to include these technologies?

There are numerous business reasons to embrace Social Media including public relations, brand building, lead generation, crisis management and search engine optimization.  Now that Twitter has deals with Bing and Google, to crawl the twitterverse,  I suspect a few more firms will be appointing a “corporate twitterer”.    You want to be planning now as I read in the Social Computing Journal , Nielsen Norman Group estimates “a timeline of approximately three to five years for most organizations to successfully adopt and integrate social technologies into their intranets.”  Better shake a leg.

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