Not to worry, there is no blue moon on the horizon nor is Hell freezing over – social media policy, read guidelines, may not be a bad thing after all as they’ll help expand the organization’s efforts in truly becoming a social enterprise.  Now at the sake of sounding like a broken record – repeat after me – by implementing social business practices can the brand give itself an authentic brand identity.

And here’s the fine print, an authentic identity relegated to not just one social media manager but potentially to every employee within the brand.  The goal of social media is engagement and one tactic is to engage with senior taste-makers  and influencers even negative naysayers to win them over to become staunch brand loyalists – but what about your own employees within the organization – are they not your brand’s advocates as well?

The New York Times social media strategy, fodder for every journalist having reached near mythic proportions in terms of all-time best one liners, can be boiled down to simply ‘Don’t Be Stupid’. Bold, yes, given that journalists might not respond all too well to a list of 20 do not violate or else rules.

Granted, investigative reporting on a story is one thing, and effectively getting your brand preferred over the competition is another ball of wax all together, but this is where social media can have the most impact by training and providing clear guidelines to your employees on how to engage with customers and create advocacy can have the most impact. Just have a look at Dell’s SMaC training to realize that social media as a tool can be used to create long lasting and meaningful relationships with customers and equally bolster internal collaboration and knowledge management. It becomes a Venn diagram of sorts – the internal cooperation builds external customer advocacy and vice-versa.

Have you ever signed a NDA? You’ll appreciate the fact that much like entering into a legally binding agreement, social media done wrong can and should have repercussions, which is why the Dell SMaC training is such a good example to follow… Want to get involved in social media as a Dell brand ambassador? You’ll first need to complete their certification course. Once certified you’ll then be embedded as part of Dell’s social media team within the greater social media team matrix with clear guidance on what to discuss, promote and most important of all – how to engage with customers, advocates and naysayers online.

Let me be clear and I’m not being pedantic here, simply reinforcing that without a clear and present social media policy or guideline for the organization – the brand opens itself up to the very real danger of becoming ensnared in social risk management. Yes, no one ever said “being social” was easy, another subset of social media….social risk management is an emerging field and one that becomes critical to managing the brand.

How? The Altimeter Group’s report in August, Guarding The Gates: The Imperative for Social Media Risk Management identifies the biggest risk social media, read social media engagement by one or many employees, poses is towards a brand’s reputation (remember the infamous tweet by Chrysler’s official twitter account dropping the F-bomb in an tweet from the automaker’s PR agency?), followed by the release of confidential company information, with the loss of intellectual property (IP) and legal / regulatory / compliance issues coming in third and fourth respectively and to round out the top five threats being disclosure of personal data (remember, there’s a fine line in representing the brand and you being the spokesperson for the brand).

Train your staff to be able to engage within social media channels but also have them extend that approach and have them further the internal collaboration and knowledge management – put disparate individuals together within the same social media team. Pair up R&D with Finance, Legal with HR – I’m no Pied Piper but do not rely on just the Marketing Dept to engage with social media.

This may be difficult since “brand”, that is a VP of Brand can easily come in and nix any focus on social engagement that falls out of marcom so make sure you have Executive buy-in before tackling this organizational, bring in legal too, make all the executive decision makers comfortable with the notion that it takes a village to raise a social media brand – you need different employees social media enabled to represent your brand and engage with the social customer on their terms and their platforms whether it’s Instagram, Pinterest, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube. Bring your company together by holding an un-Conference to focus on the in-house talent and collaborative participation from your employees to bring out expertise and re-target that knowledge and experience into tangible lessons-learned.

Once you have the exec buy-in and training in place do then focus on ways to safeguard the brand’s reputation and confidential information and IP – create a IAME feedback loop for your social media teams and matrix:

Identify social media risks with the lens of possible information leaks / brand reputation damage

Assess and prioritize those risks with the understanding of the company’s limited resources

Mitigate and manage those risks to reduce the impact of brand damage, IP loss, compliance issues

Evaluate your efforts and analyse emerging risk against your mitigation efforts

The IAME loop is not meant to take the fun nor originality of your social media efforts, voice or employee participation – it makes the real the fact that social media is a means of engagement – that engagement, at least coming from the brand should not divulge company intellectual property or ever, hopefully hurt the brand.

Social Media is about relationships – much like dating – how much of yourself do you share with your date before crossing over to long-term relationship status – the build-up is slow, exciting, heart-wrenching at times yet all the while, to keep relationships going there needs to be an element of trust – so for brands: trust your employees and employees – be cognizant that you should not do anything purposefully to hurt the reputation of your company. Mistakes will be made, if made move on, forgive and forget and don’t forget to try new things to keep the relationship fresh.

Engaging with customers / brand advocates, social media highjacking, the battle for SEO even – all the seemingly appropriate hallmarks of a solid social network contender to Facebook most Google diehards would say. But then again, maybe not…

A high-ranking Google Engineer, the head of Engineering, no less posited a searing critique of Google admitted that Google+ is NOT a social network, rather it is a “Social Layer.” Later Google’s top “social” executive, Vic Gundotra retorted and if anything, verified the dissenting Engineer’s point of view that Google will bring a social layer to each of its services, including YouTube, so that the social graph of families and friends can be put into effect, more so than they can right now in terms of engagement.

So how does social layer differ from say a social ecosystem as in Facebook’s model of having the total social experience contained within the site – analogous to a Las Vegas casino – just replace the words of the saying ‘casino with Facebook and the mantra still stays the same – what happens in Facebook stays in Facebook.

The social layer it seems is meant to be an overlay of interconnectedness for the social customer  a user experience path which allows users to seamlessly hop around within the Google network (YouTube, Google+, Google News and its various other channels)  all the while feeding into the Google mothership of Google the search engine in an effort to move away from semantic search to the holy grail of contextual search.

Courtesy of: Online Schools

Still surprises me, the number of conversations I’ve had from major companies and brands alike that their social media efforts are being handled centrally by head office either in Europe or the United States.  OK, so here comes a bit of a tangent and a full disclosure statement: I am a huge comic book geek. So let me borrow from an often unsung, understated hero: Captain Marvel.  ”It doesn’t take the Wisdom of Solomon to figure out” as Captain Marvel would say, to figure out that many brands are still missing the point when it comes to the regionalization of their social media engagement efforts.

The unsung heroes are the regional offices in Mumbai, Montreal, South Africa and Sydney.  Many brands are feeling the sting of not being represented on the corporate Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube channel or even LinkedIn company profile.  These orphaned regional offices seem almost invisible to the social world unless you perhaps do a Google Maps search first.

Of course Montreal has its own Fashion Week much like New York, of course the store in Dubai has a phenomenal trunk show, of course the Brazilian corporate gala in support of the local charity is happening – however to use the cliche “if a tree falls and no one is around to hear it…”  OK, so you get the picture now – a “country switch” feature baked into your Facebook page (Starbucks and BlackBerry are two great examples) or YouTube Channel (Cisco is an outstanding adherent to this) would add that much needed regionalized social layer to your customer engagement efforts.

Now comes the hard part: Making sure your social media team is collaborating with the lead team at head office. Though seemingly intuitive, many organizations find collaboration amongst satellite offices and branches difficult and daunting.

Let’s look at this challenge through the lens of social media process best practices, that is how do you internally get disparate teams working against different time zones different cultures, different languages event to collaborate? Aren’t you all part of the same company, the same brand? Successful collaborative innovation requires a non-adversarial mind-set, a multilevel and multifunctional organizational approach, the ability to learn to speak “another language” that of trust, new metrics, and the willingness to share intellectual property.

What many companies fail to realize is that before they commit to a collaborative framework across separate branch offices, they must be certain that their own office is structured to collaborate. A clearly formulated innovation strategy that focuses on the core tenets of Social Business: organizational behavior, processes, and capabilities is the key to success.

Collaboration Guidelines, Processes & the Power of a Content Calendar

Process guidelines should be used to encourage collaboration amongst the different offices within the corporate fold with the goal being setting up clear rules of engagement and expectations on regional content that will be pushed to the country specific version of your Social Media platforms or at the very least featured via the country switch feature. OK, here are the guidelines:

(1) Plan to hold a conference call regularly and to host one occasionally to set the agenda on a collaborative effort to share information and content across offices and more importantly to the outline the importance of such an effort in serving the social customer globally and if need be move beyond the focus on metrics to one of engagement

(2) Plan technical resources to allow for actual sharing capabilities

(3) Host the kickoff meeting to establish an organizational structure and leadership positions across offices. Define commitment from each of the group members

(4) Establish a content calendar – this is valuable content that will be the heart of the collaboration amongst the group – a clearly defined calendar will make it easier for each office to keep track of potential content and future content

Remember content can take many forms and from different departments: use your imagination, be original, witty and bold – think of what your customer would want to know about the brand and what’s happening behind the brand or people related to the brand’s lifestyle or those who aspire to be part of the brand.  When you think of content in this context it simply becomes a matter of now capturing the content via video, photo, audio, the written word.

Out of sheer curiosity I typed the term ‘Social Search’ into Google and interestingly enough, a Wikipedia entry was the first result. Here’s a quick snippet of the entry: “Social search … is a type of web search that takes into account the Social Graph of the person initiating the search query. When applied to web search this Social-Graph approach to relevance is in contrast to established algorithmic or machine-based approaches where relevance is determined by analyzing the text of each document or the link structure of the documents.Search results produced by social search engine give more visibility to content created or touched by users in the Social Graph.”

Would it be fair to say that Google and Facebook are careening towards a head-on collision? No. Rather the goal from a social media perspective should not be to pit one against the other in terms of a death-match style showdown based upon which site has greater social appeal. Instead, the way to look at this interesting development of Facebook’s prowess and loyalty of its fans vs. Google’s might and depth of it’s undeniable search stranglehold on the masses is to ultimately look at the concept of the social customer and how social business practices within an organization can capitalize on these two seemingly opposing unstoppable forces.

Social Media Team Building

Yes, I am willing to say this till I’m blue in the face, for effect, say it with me – pretend you’re on the phone with me and just like that classic Jerry Maguire movie moment where Cuba Gooding Jr. wants Tom Cruise to yell “Show Me The Money” I want you to instead say “Show Me The Team!” Why? Far too many times social media is a singular exercise, an army of one – that student, or person within marketing that may have some familiarity with Twitter or has a Facebook account whom has been given the corporate responsibility of representing the company’s social media efforts and in effect be that social media face or behind the scenes voice to the world.

Social Media needs to have a full complement of differing points of view representing different facets of the organization,  go over to the engineering dept and ask them to join the Social Media team. The same goes for product managers, HR, customer service and heck even legal – why? Each dept represents a unique understanding of your customer, that is your social customer who is buying based not on impulse but cold hard facts in the form of social signals from within search results (Google’s Search plus Your World) as trusted sources of information plus the feedback from your Facebook social graph via the Open Graph.

SEO, yes, that perhaps pesky thing to keep your organization’s website visible and top-of-mind for Google and the social customer means having now to ensure your organization caters to Google’s way of indexing content: Google has taken a “content marketing” type approach to it’s SERPs – haven’t you noticed that social recommendations, YouTube video, maps, instant answers, authors and  bloggers are all above the fold in many instances preceding the start of a single highlight of your standard homepage abstract?

Content – the same content that is fueling engagement on Facebook and Google+ is now being factored into SEO – how’s that for a kick in the pants – so why not ensure that your organization’s SEO person or team is part of the Social Media team. I can see it now: deck the office with posters of that iconic Uncle Sam “We Want You” poster and recruit from within for your Social Media team – this is how you realize the potential of rising to the occasion to re-write the social customer handbook. Look to your employees to help you understand the customer and engage with them on their terms whether they use Google, Google+, Facebook individually or a combination of all three, the social customer just wants the facts on their path to purchase.

From Internal Social Media Team to External Champions

Now that you’ve gathered your team members, assembled your crew – make sure they understand the value of being a customer advocate: an advocate for the customer and an advocate of your organization when engaging with the social customer.  This is really about cultural business transformation – something most M&A folks will tell you is not something easy to do or overcome overnight, it is fraught with tensions, anxieties and misconceptions – in essence building a full social media team is very much like an internal merger & acquisition.

Look at this merger of disparate teams into your social media team through the lens of collaborative innovation. What many companies fail to realize is that before they commit to a collaborative framework, they must be certain that their own office is structured to collaborate. A clearly formulated strategy that focuses on organizational behavior, processes, and capabilities is the key to success.This requires a non-adversarial mind-set, a multi-level and multi-functional organizational approach, the ability to learn to speak “another language,” new metrics, and the willingness to share intellectual property.

Hold an un-conference or an event to bring together your team in an energizing and relatively inexpensive way as a means share past experiences with social media and customer engagement. The goal here should be focused on identifying strengths and empowering your team to realize the value and benefit of engaging with the customer to bring about social media as another definitive mode of customer interaction. One this has been evangelized, shared and with the directive of a common goal moving forward actualized – soon enough your team and the executives funding your group will realize the potential of strengthening the bond between the brand and customer with the introduction of the next phase of social business such as social care or social CRM

Bringing together a cohesive team ain’t easy – the best coaches from the likes of John Wooden, Vince Lombardi to Phil Jackson – all had one common attribute to them: the ability to inspire with a clear goal and vision in mind and in practice. Winning ain’t easy it takes a lot of preparation – now, go get ‘em!

Which brings me full circle to my earlier point – social media is a bit like Confessions of a Shopaholic in that being social is in a very real way much like a confessional – you as the consumer are telling brands what you’re watching, what you’re listening to, which park you’re using for the morning jog, which recipes you’re about to try out for a dinner party all of this is leading to the  explosion of “big data” and in turn the challenge for brands is to understand the individuality of these emerging tastemakers within a users social graph.

The heart of social media is about sharing  whether we’re sharing a check-in or an image via Instagram or a video via YouTube Slam – the very action of sharing places the consumer at the heart of the action and the center of their universe making each individual a potential tastemaker to someone else which is why every social network of any sort utilizes the principle of following and followers.

To borrow from a familiar saying and to give it a social media twist – let’s all say it together now: Behind every good social consumer is a good social brand. So how can brands focus on the social consumer and make sure they are seen as the guide to tastemaker, the personal concierge, the muse to the tastemaker – focus on being relevant and engaging to the social consumer.

Easy as it sounds right?  Absolutely, let’s just give it some context. For brands to truly connect with the social consumer – put the brand in their head, understand the psyche of the social consumer – let’s go back to Psych 101 in first year university and revisit the needs hierarchy analysis.  As a human being we have needs and wants. The social customer also has needs and wants.  The need might come in the form of customer care via social networks (the most established channels being Facebook and Twitter). The want might come from our desire to purchase a new pair of shoes and in the process we turn to our social network for recommendations and advice.

Advice and recommendations – the fashion industry has been doing this well before the Netflix algorithm became F8 developer conference water cooler talk and well before Facebook even came on the scene with it’s people you may know suggestions.  The fashion industry via look-books, style guides and all around tips has become such an ingrained part of life that it’s hard to imagine life without the likes of spring collections and beauty tips.

Great brands that are the muses to the rise of the tastemakers will time and time again resonate with their audience by reinforcing three simple values throughput their social media channels:

• Purpose – what the brand rallies around (hint: put your customer at the center of this point)
• Value – what is important to your brand (hint: is there a customer care channel via Twitter or a special cause the brand supports or a specific form of engagement such as a f-commerce exclusive for fans)
• Personality – your brand’s unique voice (hint: are you reflecting the brands heritage within your social media content, are you experimenting to keep the approach fresh and engaging? Of equal if not greater importance is your brand speaking the language of your customers?)

After an interesting exchange of ideas and further debate on how to best use social media in the way of the social consumer, the conversion of the negative naysayer to the loyal brand advocate to aligning business objectives with social media objectives so that you’re not doing social media for the sake of being social (and hence missing the impending road signs on your road to social media engagement) – I was struck by the common thread of our discussion over french croissants and coffee – the overriding concern from my table was “how do you empower your employees to use social media properly and to align it with business objectives?”

Empowering employees? Business Objectives? Yes, Social Media needs to address both to work efficiently and more importantly to the best interests of the consumer (read social consumer). Consumers nowadays are leaving digital breadcrumbs strewn across their path to purchase intent via the content they consume, SEO results, reviews and social interactions – therefor it is more pressing than ever that company employees understand the value of the social customer, their customer.

Employees, given the right training and governance / policy structures (be in tin the form of a social media guide book or a one line premise, such at the New York Times which instructs staff to “Don’t be stupid”) provides the framework / foundation to allow employees to externally advocate the company’s message, leadership and mission via the social network.

Once a social media policy framework has been set, facilitate an ARM approach (act, re-act and manage) approach: engage with the audience, experiment, let your brand’s personality shine via the organizations talent of specialists, engineers, stylists and evangelists. Now that each employee or a group of employees (the social media response team, taken from various departments) has been enabled to interact via the social network, you’ve accomplished step one: the implementation of the internal training and policy needed to form the basis of a social business.

Step two: review with business leaders and every department that touches upon the customer (marcom, legal, HR, customer care, product development, etc.) to understand and align a social media strategy to recognize social media as an integrated approach to interacting with the customer measured by business metrics.

Let’s start with the grassroots engagement level – the employees that have been empowered to interact with the social customer – this layer aligns engagement data with the firms business objectives, set and chart a course to gain fans, followers, check-ins and overall interactions.

Next level up, business stakeholders, the business unit leaders – map out how to integrate and implement social media into customer service responsiveness and share of conversation.

The final level that needs to be addressed is the ever important business executive cluster, the ones funding and signing your social media team’s cheques – make sure the social media activities are aligned with CSAT and revenue – this is where the increasing importance of the concept of “social care” comes into play.

To enable and empower your organization to use social media with the right training and policies to engage with customers is the first crucial step in overcoming your fears as to how your organization can use social media in the first place. Secondly, make sure each social media activity is aligned with business goals and objectives.

These two elements are critical factors to success for any business starting down the path towards the social media highway. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.

Last month Australia-based Qantas Airways was embroiled in a social media crisis. With flights being cancelled the stranded Twitter-equipped passengers quickly took to social media aka Twitter to express their discontent with the impersonal “corporate” like responses via Qantas’ Twitter accounts towards the passengers dilemma.

The very nature of any social media channel is to amplify whether blowing up discontent and complaints or parlaying an expression of enthusiasm and loyalty into a crowdsourced “Facebook-built Volkswagon.” The social network provides the flash point underpinnings to any scenario should the brand not be handled adequately up front and in a timely fashion.

The Qantas scenario represents an emerging field within social media, potentially one which is an offshoot or adjunct of Social Business – the operational models, governance and policies which make up internal infrastructure – the customer support group equally plays a central role in managing customer complaints, and this has created the growing practice of Social Care.

With organizations already tracking conversations and sentiment along with engaging via Facebook and Twitter, the Customer Service department or even the brand’s customers themselves have an active and powerful role to play here in using Social Media to care for the customer.

In effect complaints become an opportunity to resolve  customer service issues. Furthermore, the greater opportunity is in making those very unhappy stakeholders into your brand’s ambassador.

Such an approach is beyond a posting response assessment, as outlined by the US Air Force – it is a dramatic departure from the current operational model of the Social Media team being made up of marketers and PR managers.

By including the Customer Service department and agents themselves: providing them with the right training, tools and its own governance structure and policies, companies at large have an unparalleled opportunity to transition from a Social Business, with all the inner workings to represent and portray the Social Brand which represents the external communication and heritage of the brand.

Social Care is the bridge between both worlds, since at the end of the day we ourselves need to understand that share of conversation does equal share of wallet and vice versa.