Who needs to be on your team?

by caker on June 23, 2010

When your company decides its time dip its toes into the social media waters it is important that you’ve assembled the right team. Depending on the size of your company, an entire team may not be necessary, but if it is, here are some people you should consider including.

1. IT Department: There are many reasons to bring the IT department into the fold. For instance, if you want a blog and want it to link to your current site you’ll need the help of you IT Department. If your company doesn’t have an IT Department then you may want to consult with the company that hosts your website. They can probably help you with this.

2. Legal Council: For most businesses this is probably very unnecessary, but better safe than sorry. You may want someone to at least review any policy you are considering enacting regarding social media.

3. Risk Management: Again, for most businesses you won’t need Risk Management on the team and really many, businesses don’t even have such a department. However, if you do have a Risk Management department you may want to loop them in at some point. They’re job after all is to figure out where you may have problems and to help prevent them.

4. Public Affairs: For many companies, marketing and public affairs are the same, but consider including your public affairs team in the process if they do work separately.

You will need to look at your business specifically to see if there are any other key stakeholders that should be included in the initial planning of a social media strategy. Depending on the size of your business you may not need a whole team to get things going, but do consider who might have a vested interest in your company’s social media efforts and go from there.

Above all you want to have people on your team who are excited about communicating through social media.

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Non-profits and Social Media

by caker on June 15, 2010

With so many non-profits, it is tough to stand out and even more difficult to secure the funds, particularly in this economy. There are ways that non-profits can effectively use social media to further their cause. It is fine line though between asking for funds and informing the public about what you do to gain support.

A couple of easy tools that a non-profit can employ to make their use of social media more targeted and effective.

  1. Determine the types of messages you want to communicate. Which means figure out a few key topics that messages can fall under. Some suggested topics are, success stories, needs, impact of public policy, news and general information. If you find a few key topics that most of your information can fit into then you have a place to start. You don’t want all the information you’re sending out to sound the same or to always be an ask for funds. You want to give people a reason to listen to you.
  2. Keep an list of messages organized by your predetermined topics. Using a tool such as Google docs will help your team to store communications ideas in one easy to access place. If you keep the document updated then you’ll always have something to say in your various social media forums.
  3. Encourage a conversation. This means you need to participate in the social media forum you’re posting in. You can’t be all about one-way communication. You must listen and respond. Building these online relationships will strengthen the dedication your followers and friends have towards your non-profit.

There are many things you can do to build your social media presence as a non-profit, but you need to follow just a few steps to get going. By starting small and just doing a few things the staff will become more comfortable about communicating via social media. Making social media a part of your non-profit’s communications plan will be second nature in no time.

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Protecting your brand by listening

June 10, 2010

Social media is not just about putting the information out there. You need to hear what people are saying. Social media is a two-way conversation. So, even though it is an electronically based conversation is important that you don’t do all the talking.
There are several ways you can monitor what is being said about your [...]

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Patient Privacy & Other Confidential Information in the Age of Social Media

January 18, 2010

So since in my day job I spend time tweeting for a health care organization I thought I would touch base on the questions I’m getting from administration and risk management about HIPPA and other potentially legal sticking points for the conservative health care industry.  I have been reading a white paper called “Risk Management in the [...]

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Who Should you Follow?

December 1, 2009

When it comes to Twitter it is important to know what you are trying to accomplish not only because it helps you determine what you should tweet about, but it also can help you determine who you want to follow and who you want to have follow you. If you aren’t sure who you should [...]

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Getting everyone on board

November 30, 2009

Okay, so you’re on board with Social Media, but others aren’t seeing it as a priority. What’s the best way to engage them and get them excited about what they can create using Social Media? There are several ways to do it. The least effective way to do it is to demand it. The trick [...]

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Does Your Company Need Multiple Twitter Pages?

July 5, 2009

With Twitter now up and running, what is the best way to spread the wealth? If you have a small company it may not be important to you or even necessary to look at who else in your company could make use of Twitter, but for those in larger companies with several departments, this will [...]

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Stylized Tweeting

June 25, 2009

So you’re tweeting away these days and you’re getting pretty comfortable with it, but now others from your company want to get in the tweet game too. So, what would be the reason not to let them? If you have a very small company it may not be necessary, but the larger your company the [...]

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So What’s the Tweet?

June 8, 2009

Well, be careful what you wish for. We’ve launched our Twitter page and now we have to feed the beast. So comes the next step in your company’s Twitter page. You’ve taken the time to answer the five simple questions that will help you strategize your Twitter efforts. You’ve launched your [...]

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Let the Tweet Begin…

June 2, 2009

So today we did it.  We launched a Twitter page at our company.  In my industry, which is fairly conservative, this is a pretty big step.  In a world that is predetermined and needs to have a great deal of well thought out strategy attached, this move to the Twitterverse is enormous.

The arguments not to [...]

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