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.

I had so many titles for this blog post, “Will You Be Late to the Party?”, “Accident Waiting To Happen”, “Being the Number One Viral Marketing Video Does Not Equal Success”, “How Much Worse Can It Be For Dominos? Employees Contaminating Food and one was a Sex Offender” . But I had to choose, and I chose to address Tom Davenport, Blogger of “Is Twitter For Serious Marketers.”

It was a busy week for viral messages, but ones that companies would never want to happen.

1) Dominos. Just created their very own twitter account, April 15th, TWO DAYS after the debacle involving two employees sharing a rather grotesque video of how they handle food at work. Dominos’ first posting can be found at: “#dominos video.- The pair was fired & criminal complaints filed. There are warrants for their arrest. http://bit.ly/12MX3n – please RT!”

Spokesman Tim McIntyre of Domino’s provided a statement on the situation, “Any idiot with a webcam and an internet connection can attempt to undo all that’s right about the brand,” Hmmm? Perhaps this is why smart companies are joining the social media conversation early and empowering their staff to positively represent their company to prevent occurrences like this from happening. After the fact statements like the President of Dominos on YouTube, have comments posted below such as:

“Sorry Mr. Dominos President. After that video it will be hard to eat out ANYWHERE but I will always think of Dominoes and my cheese being up someone’s nose.”

“I used to eat Dominos at least once a week. Not anymore. I can’t even look at a Dominos corporate logo without feeling queasy.”

Addressing the incident on the Today Show isn’t enough damage control for this one. Viral messages on Twitter such as “I don’t care what dominos does…never eating it again” seem to prevail.

2) Amazon or shall I say, #Amazonfail From Advertising Age: “By far the biggest issue most of the angry Twitterers had was that Amazon didn’t respond until late Sunday and, when it did, the vague answer it offered to CNet referred to the problem as a “glitch in the system” that was being fixed. This didn’t satisfy the masses who had already spent the better part of Easter getting fired up. The next response from Amazon came Monday night, when it issued a statement calling the incident an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error.”

Almost 24 hours later came the response. Why so late? They are one of, if not the biggest ecommerce e-tail stores out there. I just quickly looked up Amazon and I have no idea if they have an authentic Twitter account to this date. @amazondeals is listed in twibs, but all they do is list discounted items.

Social Media is not to be ignored, nor should you think that your company or persona is immune. Reputation Management and Social Media Strategy will be on the top of many company’s lists to implement in the near future if it has not been done so already. We learn from mistakes, Dominos will go down in the history books as “The Consequences of Not Taking Social Media Seriously”. Companies like Zappos, where they clearly take employee management and customer service to the next level will be the winners. “Happy Employees=Happy Customers is their motto. Whole Foods is another company that I would say stands out from the crowd and is doing a great job of listening to their customer chatter and responding quickly. I have seen them reply immediately to customer complaints, questions and suggestions such as “@laurenoboy Let your store know directly what you’d like to see. Every store decides its offerings in large part b/c of local demand.” They are a Twitterolemodels!