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.

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.

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 brand on the internet. You need to find a few tools that you feel comfortable with and then employ them as part of your social media strategy. Yes, listening is part of the strategy.

The best listening tools are platforms that allow you to manage all or most of your social media efforts from one location. You need to decide which tool you feel comfortable with and which platform will best meet your needs for posting and listening.

Here are some tools you can consider:

Hootsuite-

Overview:

Hootsuite is a tool that allows multiple users to post on behalf of your company. This platform also lets you post to multiple social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, ping.fm and Facebook. Plus you can have multiple accounts on each site all of which can be managed from this one platform.  You can plan ahead to schedule tweets, which is great if you are going into a busy business season or on vacation. You can also short urls from Hootsuite. If you use a shortened url from this platform you will have the ability to track some of the statistics on your posts like the number of clicks on the link and where they came from. You can have a few different feeds on your dashboard, including search terms so that you can see what people are saying about your brand.

 Cost:  $0

 CoTweet-

Overview:

CoTweet is great for customer service driven businesses because you can have multiple users managing this platform and make assignments so that people you have the right people responding to the incoming tweets.  CoTweet will allow you to manage up to five Twitter accounts from this site, but you cannot manage any other social media accounts, like Facebook, from CoTweet. You can search keywords on Twitter from CoTweet, but you won’t have a search term feed on your dashboard.

Cost: $0

 Tweetdeck-

 Overview:

Tweetdeck is a tool that you download to your computer and will use from your desktop. Tweetdeck allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts as well as you Facebook profile. The only downside to Tweetdeck is that there you won’t have the ability to have multiple users on the same Tweetdeck platform. You do have access to post to various social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as Twitter. You can have several different feeds on your desktop application at one time which includes keyword searches that you set up on Twitter.

Cost:  $0

These platforms are a great place to start because they allow you to post and listen all from one place. You can easily see what people are saying about your brand and using a platform that you’re comfortable with will help you be nimble in your response. Other things you should consider doing are setting up Google Alertsfor keywords about your brand and your industry. Google Alerts is passive in that it will search the internet, including blog posts, for mentions on your key words. The alerts are sent to you daily, as they happen or once a week.

Knowing what people are saying about your brand will help shape your next steps. You may not always want to or need to respond to things you hear, but there are opportunities for your brand to benefit if you are paying attention to what is being said.

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 Age of Twitter” from the ECRI Institute and have found it to be rather interesting.

For my part, I think that there needs to be a bit of common sense applied to what you do in Social Media when it comes to protecting a patient’s right to privacy or even just in terms of keeping important company information confidential.  This protection must also extend outside of the hospital or the work place.  Just as health care workers know that they can’t speak about a patient’s condition or identify a patient outside of work and should only discuss the patient with other health care workers who have a need to know about the patient the same holds true with Social Media.

At this point we are applying the use of good judgement for our Social Media policy, but because all good health care companies must develop a policy I am helping to shape that. Some key things that it should and should not do are:

• The policy should NOT discourage people from using Social Media.
• The policy should allow your organization to be nimble, you can’t wait for all comments and posts to be approved by legal.
• The policy should be a simple extension of existing personal conduct policies.
• The policy should NOT try to police all conversations. Some things just have to happen in order to be true to the medium.

The bottom line is that you probably already have existing policies that can be modified to include social media. Just make sure that your modifications don’t discourage people from using these powerful communications tools to help spread your company’s message.

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 be following there are at least four categories that you should consider following as a way to increase the quantity and the quality of followers.

The four categories are:

1. Follow the people you would like to do business with. Determine your target customer and then follow them. Most likely they will follow you too.

2. Follow people in your industry. You never know what you will learn.

3. Follow people who support your business. That could be vendors or customers.

4. Follow people in your community. Knowing what is happening with other entities in your community or region (individuals, companies or other groups) will help you understand the climate you are operating in.

Don’t discount following people and companies in industries that are not directly tied to your industry. Spreading your net wide can only serve to increase your total audience and the opportunities that the larger audience presents.

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 is to find a person or a few people who are willing to learn  and to explain how social media can be beneficial to them.

I have found that with my team it is an ongoing process and really getting everyone into the habit of using the new tool. It can’t be expected that everyone will just grab hold and run with it. If that is your expectation you will be disappointed. What you can do find ways to help your team make it a part of their process. Give them the tools to incorporate this Social Media into their workload.

Here are some great steps you can take:

1. Education- The easiest way to get people excited about the possibilities of Social Media is through education. There are some great videos out there like the Social Media Revolution that can really get a group motivated to be a part of the Social Media movement just simply using statistics. In a way Social Media is a bit like the wild west right now. There is still time and room for people and companies to blaze their own trail. Get the creative juices flowing and help your team imagine all the possibilities. When you educate people about what exists already they may surprise you with a “Why not this?” idea that could be outstanding.
2. Use the tools that are already available- Hootsuite, CoTweet and Tweetdeck are all easy-to-use tools that can help your team organize their Twitter activities.
3. Communication- continuing the discussion about Social Media lets the team be a part of the solution for implementation. Everyone wants ownership of a successful program.

I have found that more people are willing to get on board as they become more comfortable with the idea of Social Media. This means education is a primary tool.  Not all industries will have such a hill to climb, but other industries that are more conservative and have more traditional management in place may be slow to adopt Social Media strategies.

Continuing to educate while showing compelling facts can help get a company on board and by being an encouraging team member who is willing to teach and listen to new ideas you can help get the rest of the team on board. That seems to be working with my team. How have you accomplished the Social Media teamwork that is necessary for success in your business?

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 become necessary. It may become necessary far faster than you would expect too.

Such is the case with my current company. We were slow to get on board, but now that we are tweeting away, there are more and more departments who want to get their own Twitter page. It is important that you don’t just let every department create their own page. Twitter, while easily accessible, is still a marketing communications medium that you must use strategically.

This brings us back to the Twitter style guide, which if you began to create your style guide, you may have realized that it could easily be turned into a social media or Twitter policy. Until you have this in place, don’t even think about spreading out to other departments. It will just open a can of worms that you don’t want to deal with, not to mention that you don’t have time for.

Once you have your style guide or policy in place then it is important to control the role out to other departments. Look at all the departments who are requesting that they have their own Twitter page and determine which department should be next to create their page. This determination and prioritization of departments should be made based on your company’s strategic initiatives.

When you decide which departments to role out Twitter to first, then you must also educate those who will manage Twitter for the chosen departments. It is important you don’t just give them the green light without proper training. You must also remember that you are still managing the effort overall. So don’t let more departments participate than you can effectively oversee.

It is also important to note, that the Twitter style guide and policy you’ve created may need tweaking and exceptions may be necessary for some departments in order for their tweeting to be effective. Be flexible where you can, but don’t throw the rules out completely. You need to make sure your company’s brand is well represented.

Basically, you need to make sure you take the time to carefully and strategically start other Twitter pages, just as you did with your first one. Be prepared to involve other departments, but also, it isn’t necessary that all departments have a Twitter page even if they request one. It isn’t the right medium for every need.

Here are the three key ways to determine if another department needs its own Twitter page:

1. Does the department have a very specific niche audience that is fundamentally different from your company’s general audience? An example of this is a hospital that uses Twitter to speak to patients and potential patients, but the recruiting department wants to user Twitter to speak to potential new physicians.
2. Does the department have its own strategic goals that are separate of the larger company? An example of this is an accounting firm using twitter to communicate with existing clients, but one division of the firm would like to grow their niche area. The audiences could use information from either Twitter page, but one page will be more narrow in scope.
3. Does having an additional Twitter page for one of your departments serve a strategic purpose such as expanding your reach? Having one Twitter page may not attract all the people who would follow you if you had other Twitter pages. A great example is the New York Times, which has a news Twitter page, a theatre Twitter page, a New York Times sports Twitter page and a business Twitter page among others. People may follow the sports Twitter page, but then also begin to follow some of their other pages.

Overall, be strategic. You don’t want to dilute your brand or message by having too many Twitter pages to be effective.

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 more beneficial it can be to have others tweeting too. The question then, how do you make sure all that there is consistent tweeting in terms of message and tone?

Well, the good news is that you only have 140 characters, so there isn’t too much that can be done to ruin your brand or for people to vary too widely in the way the write their tweets. However, you should develop a Twitter style guide to ensure consistent tweeting.Here are the things to think about when creating your Twitter style guide.

1. If there are any acronyms that your company uses internally, think about whether or not you want to start using them publicly. Acronyms are a great shorthand and since you only have 140 characters this can be very useful. However, often internal acronyms have no public meaning, which can pose an issue in the terms of clear communication.

2. What are the topics you will discuss? Consistency in message is huge. Make sure that your Twitter style guide accounts for the types of messages that will be tweeted.

3. Include checks and balances. While this could be more appropriate for a social media policy, its not a bad idea to include it in your Twitter style guide too. This means who do you double check your tweets with prior to posting, what are the rules around including phone numbers or other contact info, etc.

4. Decide how you plan to use links. Do you only link to your own site? Do you link to other sites?

5. Your style guide should also include rules and suggestions on frequency of tweets for events. For example if you tweet about something coming up in a week, remember that it should be tweeted again at least a day in advance. If you want people to come to the event, then it might be worth tweeting right up until the event starts.

As you are creating your guide there will be other things that come up which are specific to your company. To make sure that you have a complete Twitter style guide that will work for your company make sure you go back and look at why you’re tweeting in the first place. Remember who your audience is and what you want to accomplish with Twitter.

Above all remember that your Twitter style guide is subject to change. Just as social media is a fluid medium, you need to be willing to make adjustments in your social media policies and your Twitter style guide. Nothing is set in stone, but it is important to have guide to work from

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 page. Now, what to Tweet?