As the calendar turns over to our last summer month, I figure it’s time for me to put down the ipad (after I finished the quick great read of “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran”) and start getting my thoughts down on paper.  Over the past two months, I have spent a lot of time listening, reading, and learning.  In the past several years, social media space has been full speed ahead on the concord.  Remember when we were poking friends on Facebook? Now we are cheering for groundbreaking campaigns such as Procter and Gamble’s Old Spice Guy Yet I felt like I was losing touch of what social media was meant to be, social. I had to stop myself, unbuckle the seat belt and relax in the back yard with my two Jacks as I grounded myself.  In this process, I came up with 5 tips that seemed to gel with me.

1. Fire Your Marketing Manager…and Hire a Community Manager

This was a recent Harvard Business Review(HBR) hot title of a blog post.  No they didn’t mean it, but it makes a very good point to have internal qualified staff to help manage the company’s social media.  As companies grapple with how to incorporate social media into their business strategy, they may also be struggling with an existing team who may not be fit to play the social media role or assume that all this work can be done externally through the consultant and or agency alone.  Larger companies are slowly recognizing the importance and investing in a hierarchy of internal staff from Director to Analyst level that owns social media with a designated person who plays a champion role. The consultant therefore has an internal dedicated team to work with who executes campaigns and moderates the networks as part of their daily routine.

2. Have a Strategy in Place

As mentioned above,  in any discipline within a business, there should be a strategy and implementation process in place. This is no different for social media.  Step one in building a strategy is listening to your followers and customers. An organization needs to know what the general sentiment about itself is in the social media community, which may take time.  But this is your foundation; make sure it’s a sturdy framework before you start to build a village.

3. Deliver Happiness!

If you have not read the new book Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, then stop right now and go ahead and order it for delivery or ebook reader (Just come back here when you’re done). It’s a must read. OK, now that you are done with that, your premise for adding social media should be so that your followers and friends feel good about your company/brand. Tony has examples of customer service that may seem extreme, as his team is encouraged to even field a call asking “where can I find a local pizzeria”. His staff was selected very carefully and was even given a choice to take $3,000 to leave if they wanted to before they were hired. He wanted to make sure that he built a business empire that was true to his beliefs with people that can carry the message in their daily responsibilities and lives. Tony is very well respected by his team and is well known to be just as personable on twitter.  The brand is fun and the company consistently generates great stories with different perspectives from its employees, customers and loyal followers. The company continues to operate successfully and is able to keep its unique culture even after its acquisition by Amazon.

4. Have a Response Team and Plan in Place if Something Should Go Wrong

This goes back to the concept of having a strategy.  Reputation management in companies has been closely controlled as marketing and PR teams deployed traditional one way messages. This means that promotions were typically sent to customers and prospects via traditional marketing channels leaving a small window of opportunity for a disgruntled customer to express his/her comments publicly and potentially leading to a damaging groundswell . Entering social media space opens the avenue both ways. The public’s response and opinion of your brand can now be seen very easily and response to your promotions as well as business practices can be seen almost instantaneously.    The downside of this is an increased risk for a situation that can spiral out of control very quickly if not monitored. This is why having strategies, policies and processes with a proper team in place to manage and maintain your reputation are keys to minimizing this risk.

5. Provide Educational Content Which Represents Your Brand Well

A blog shouldn’t be cumbersome. As in any thriving company, news should be happening every day. These stories can be explained through pictures, video and in print.  Even Old Spice educated us as they took an old stodgy brand and revitalized it. They schooled us by letting us know that this isn’t your father’s Old Spice anymore.

BONUS—Turn That Frown Upside Down

Set good intentions for your followers and friends.  CEO of Twitter @Ev recently tweeted a great example of setting the tone for your followers “Sign in pediatric office: URGENT: Smile until 5:01pm.” Make sure your networks are bright, light and joyful. Visuals usually do this trick, so talk to your creative director and get the creative team involved in how to jazz up the networks.

What do you think? Share your story with us in the comments.

Thanks to Jonathan Tafarella for editing this post.

UPS delivering the iPad

This morning all I could think about was UPS don’t fail me now.  Nervous with anticipation I left the house to my two jacks and husband with instructions to give the UPS man 15 minutes of fame.  Took off to my usual Saturday morning yoga class where shavasana was truly a mental test. Your not supposed to think about anything but your breath. Well sorry folks, it was inhale, iPad, exhale, iPad…

Walked into the house and there was the brown box sitting on the kitchen table with a big grin on my husband’s face. Woohoo! UPS delivers!

I was a late adopter to the iPhone, using my Razr as long as I could before I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I was a Verizon gal, so the jump was a cautious one. But as soon as I had the experience of my very own iPhone, I understood what I was missing all that time. I made sure that it wasn’t going to happen again. So when Mashable posted that preorder was March 12^th for the iPad, I marked it on the calendar .

Now I have to admit I was one of those who initially had that “iPad”? reaction to its name.  Certainly I was not alone as itampon started to trend on twitter.  I am over it now, however , the great news is that the hullabaloo over the name increased awareness of a charity for young women in Uganda. I donated yesterday as  I encourage you to.. (check out the full story here with details how to donate on Blogher)

“So what does it do?” is a big question from my friends.  My short time of playing with it allows me to say it’s a beautiful e-reader, a gorgeous picture to watch Netflix video on demand and a large screen for tweeting using Tweetdeck. The biggest disappointment comes from facebook, as other apps made it to the deadline, we are forced to use the iPhone or web browser version.

As you can imagine, iPad madness consumed Twitter over the past 24 hours. Martha Stewart tweeted “Look what the Easter Bunny brought over today! Begins with an “IP” showing us a picture of her iPad.  Robert Scoble tweeted and shot live video from a California apple store line. One of his many interesting tweets…

@Scobleizer: Why would Apple co-founder @stevewoz need to stand in line? I talked w/ Woz earlier and he says “Cause the line is fun.”

And tweets all morning long included painfully waiting for the UPS truck to glorious iPad thoughts dancing in people’s heads…

@cc_chapman: Today is iPadurday….

@justin: Already awake. It really is nerd Christmas.

In a nutshell, it is magical. Steve Jobs got that right. What are your thoughts?  Are you a second generation person or did you convert like me, as they say, the early adopter?

Jackie giving the iPad a test drive reading the WSJ

Image from the Norwegian Olympic Curling Team's Pants Facebook fan page

Once again we are shown that it is IMPOSSIBLE to predict what will go viral, what will be popular and it certainly doesn’t take a big fat budget to get there. But monitoring your brand in social media can lead to unplanned yet successful business opportunities.

As the 2010 Winter Olympics comes to an end, we can reflect on many surprises: The US Bobsled team won a gold medal, the US hockey team made it into the finals, as well as the fact that there was not enough snow in Vancouver Canada with 50 degree temperatures delaying certain events.

The Olympics and its vendors planned their online and mobile experiences well. The Olympics made it onto the iphone with their own app and NBC had their own dedicated website where once logged in, one can view exclusive video and highlights. They even had the Olympic pulse tweets which included updates from competitors such as Apolo Anton Ono and Rachel Flatt.

While the official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Facebook Fan page has well over 1 million fans, the Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants fan page, has a little over a half a million fans with most of their wall updates consisting of hundreds of comments. Who would have thought? Loudmouth Golf, the makers of the pants monitored this page that was started by Tony D’Orazio, a 37-year-old curler from Rochester, N.Y.  Once the page reached 100,000 fans, Loudmouth Golf approached D’Orazio asking to post their website on the fan page in exchange for a portion of the proceeds sold. D’Orazio accepted but decided to donate the money to charity. Great story for the crazy pants, for the charity, for the Olympics, for curling, and for Facebook.  But no one could have predicted such success. Monitoring is the key, you never know where your brand, and the story, may end up.

The full story of the pants page evolution as well as the information on the charity can be viewed here from Omaha.com:

http://www.omaha.com/article/20100228/NEWS01/702289903

Image from The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants Facebook fan page.

DMA

Just when I thought the Tweet Me and Text Me Sweethearts were the big story of the day, I see this…

From Twitter: @DMA_USA Tue 19 Jan 16:31 DMA announces search for new President & CEO – http://bit.ly/5h51Y8

…“As we enter into the new decade and are anticipating an economic resurgence, it’s more important than ever to ensure that both traditional and digital multichannel direct marketing is at the forefront of that recovery,” said Eugene Raitt, Chairman of the DMA Board of Directors.  “Bringing in new leadership to the management team focusing on the areas we intend to grow will be part of that process.  The committee will conduct an aggressive search and I’m confident that we will find an exceptionally qualified individual to fulfil the DMA’s vision and goals.”

I wonder what the new DMA will be like? Any thoughts?