10 Ideas to Help Business Navigate Social Media

Almost a year ago I wrote a post called 5 Reasons Social Media is Like Sailing that was well-perceived. It’s time to update that post.

Since then I’ve come up with more reasons sailors might just have the right approach to social media for business. Even if you aren’t into sailing you might try these approaches to see if they don’t make your time in social media more positive and more productive.

Here then are 10 Ideas to Keep Biz Sailing Smoothly in Social Media:

1. Pick your boat carefully: Not every craft is right for every sailor just as in social media not every platform is right for every individual. Pick a platform that suits you. Work with one at a time and see what works.

2. Start slowly: Nobody goes from pond sailing to open-ocean sailing in a day, weeks or even years. Learn your own capabilities, learn from others and be willing to get dunked a few times along the way.

3. Find an old-salt/mentor: Every top sailor was at some point helped along by an experience hand. So it should be in social media: Find someone who literally knows the ropes and can help you navigate your early days. They’ll also be there to stop you from drowning when you inevitably get wet a few times.

4. Learn to be ease in the environment: Just as being on the water can be a somewhat unnatural state for many beginning sailors, so can a newbie feel that their first days, weeks and months in social media can be slightly uncomfortable. Relax. Once you realize that the very worst that can happen is you may get a little wet once in a while then you’ll soon be loving every moment in social media.

5. The quickest route is NOT always a straight line: Like sailing, businesses in the social media space must navigate all kinds of challenges to get to their goals. Along the way there are likely to be winds (customer feedback) and currents (the business climate) that challenge a business trying to get to its port (goals). The best-laid social media plans include contingencies to deal with these. Although the course may be less than perfectly straight, the well-planned business will reach its goals ahead of its competitors.

6. You can’t control the wind: But you can control the trim of your sails and heading of your boat. The winds at the intersection of social media and business can be unpredictable and are constantly swirling. As a business you need to monitor the breezes of public opinion so that if they should suddenly turn into a squall of bad publicity you can react appropriately.

7. When bad weather hits: You, your vessel and your crew had better be prepared. Having a well-trained crew/staff and a solid social media plan will help a business react in its best interests. The plan allows the captain/boss to sleep well at night knowing that his boat is ready for anything.

8. An efficient sailboat is the sum of its working parts: A combination of hull shape, sails, masts and rigging keep a sailboat moving forward. A business operating in social media is also about the right combination of components to keep it moving forward. A social media plan will assess existing strengths, competitive threats and business goals to come up with the correct combination to keep you moving forward.

9. You WILL find yourself becalmed: It’s not something to fear. A thorough social media plan includes a list of “To Do” items that are not pressing, but certainly help make the enterprise if not stronger at least better able to make the most of the next breeze (opportunity). Remember that the “calm usually comes right before the storm.” Using it to get your business ready is just smart sailing!

10. Sail away from the safe harbor: You should take a few chances. This great quote from Mark Twain (sent to me by the helpful and smart Marita Roebkes) says it best: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

So, are you and your business ready to sail off and explore social media? I hope so. What other tips would you recommend for social media sailors?

Image is of The Man at the Wheel – the Gloucester Fishermen's Memorial Cenotaph, a tribute to local fishermen who have died at sea, in Gloucester, Mass. From FreePhoto

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The Social Media Release

Best Practices and Some Examples

The Social Media Release – also called the Social Media Press Release and Social Media News Release – has rapidly become the way for anyone trying to “get the word out” to provide all the resources necessary for anyone from citizen-customer to journalist to find the information they want (in the format they like it).

So, what is a Social Media Release? In a nutshell it is a page, usually a Web page, that collects words, images, audio, video, links, social bookmarks and more around the topic you care about. And by “you” we mean both the person spreading the word and the person looking for information.

Background: In a 2006 post titled Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die! blogger Tom Foremski tapped into a broad media sentiment that the days of the standard old-school press release needed to end. His main points: Cut out the spin and provide information in many different formats

It was then that Todd Defren of Boston’s Shift Communications suggested a better way: the Social Media Press Release – a more conversational and useful collection of information and supporting materials. He offered up a Social Media Press Release template

This was followed on the blog Conversation Marketing by Ian Lurie wondering about the lack of an HTML version and so he made one. You can preview Lurie’s Social Media Release or download the HTML as a Zip file.

10 Must-Haves in a Social Media Release

Contacts: Information – front and center – on how to reach the author of the release, the key person quoted in the release and the online newsroom of the releasing organization.

Words: A brief description of the point you are trying to make (with no spin) and why any reader might care to check out all of your wonderful, related content. Aim for 250 to 750 words – no more. Be sure to optimize for the search engines by including one or more of your keyword phrases.

Images:That are linked to from Flickr or some other online resource where the entire album is available.

Audio: Saved as a podcast on iTunes or saved on your server/Web site as a common-format audio file that is linked to from the release.

Video: Which is hosted at YouTube allowing consumers to watch it directly and journalists to grab the embed code for possible inclusion on their own web sites.

Print It/Email It buttons: These are no longer “nice touches,” but are absolutely expected.

”Share This Page” buttons: These invite visitors to share your content with others through social bookmarking and social media sites … and makes it very easy to do. For example clicking on the Twitter button opens a Twitter window asking the user to sign in to their account and pre-fills the Status Box with a short message about your content and shortened URL leading right to it. Other buttons should cover the major Social Media information sharing sites likely to be used by your target audiences.

Links: Be sure to include links everywhere. The more links you have to targeted and relevant information, the company’s principals and the company home page the more interaction you encourage. This also doesn’t hurt your Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, efforts either.

Comments box: Make it easy for anyone to talk back to you. No-registration-needed comments fields are best as even a simple registration process will deter many from taking the time to leave a comment. And you do want to hear from everybody and anybody. A name and an email address is all you need ask for.

Invitation to sign up for notifications: Invite anyone to share their email to be alerted to future Social Media Releases.


Some examples of good Social Media Releases (SMR):

- Ford’s 2008 Ford Focus release

- Coca-Cola’s Virtual Thirst competition for Second Life release

- Cincom’s announcement that its Smalltalk software programming language had won the Dynamic Language Shootout competition



Related Content:
Social Media and Public Relations

10 things to watch out for in Social Media

With Social Media being the “it” thing for businesses to “do” these days perhaps it’s a good time to look at 10 things any organization should be wary of:

1. Jumping in for the sake of it: Social Media is like a huge swimming pool. If your only goal is to get wet, by all means jump in. But if you want to get somewhere or to achieve something you need a plan. Work with a trusted Social Media consultant to get measurable results.

2. Being pushy: When you’re new to Social Media people will give you a chance and be forgiving. Get too “it’s all about me” or “you need to buy something from me” and just watch that goodwill evaporate faster than a drop of sweat on hot summer asphalt.

3. Being too talkative: Social Media, at the very least, means communications is a two-way street. The best in this industry are the best listeners.

4. Not sharing: The very best at sharing get more friends, fans and followers in the social world because of their generosity. The more they give the more they get.

5. Not being grateful: People help others in Social Media all the time. Your social capital goes up when you publicly acknowledge that help.

6. Not being honest: The expected in Social Media is total honesty. Be dishonest and you will be publicly humiliated (at the very least). The self-governing social world is littered with the wreckage of people flamed to a crisp by those who were incensed by duplicity.

7. Being just “the spokesperson”: If you’re not perceived as being human then you might as well be a computer. Social Media’s stars have found away to make all their communication have a personality and be hyper-human.

8. Being boring. To avoid it, say something original and from the heart (and keep in brief).

9. Living in TMI-land: Yes Social Media can seem awfully intimate when you update your status and think you’re telling just a few friends about you diarrhea. For the rest of us that is just too much information (TMI).

10. Taking it too seriously: Come on. We’re talking about social platforms like Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and YouTube. These are all dominated by humorous writing, pictures, audio and video. If you can have some fun, others will too.

The online reputation you end up with is everyone else’s sense of how you handle all of the above.

Most of all? Your mother was right: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a good basis for all of life (including Social Media).


Related posts:
10 Commandments for Social Media
5 strategies to get the Boss into Social Media

10 Social Media No-Nos

Things that will (at least) earn you a bad rep or (at worst) get you fired

Social Media can both be a very forgiving and a very unforgiving environment for a newbie.

It can be forgiving when users are genuine in their interactions and confess their sins, own up to their errors and behave politely. Under these circumstances it is likely their community will understand and forgive them.

Social Media can also be unforgiving when it senses someone is behaving in an “anti-social” way. While many of the acceptable norms in Social Media are obvious, some may be less so.

Therefore here are 10 Social Media No-Nos. Commit any of these sins and watch your reputation slide, or worse if you are publicly representing a business, you may get fired:

1. Not Listening: This happens a lot in life and Social Media is no different. If you want to get more out of your interactions with others you need to be a good listener. For a great take on this see Five Levels Of Social Media Responses


2. Not Responding: Just as in life it can be rude to not answer someone who is talking to you. There are rare exceptions: When someone is being rude to you, they do not always deserve a response.

3. Not Responding Appropriately: You should always respond in kind (or better yet take the high road). If someone says something you disagree with privately question them. “Flaming” someone (engaging in an ugly public debate) will leave everyone charred.

4. Not Being Genuine: Social Media lives on the Web so if you choose to be less than “real” you will be discovered. Fakes do not survive long in the ultra-connected world of SoMedia.

5. Not Being Humble: Your life may be the best and your successes too numerous to count, but nobody likes a public braggart. Your ego may fight you on this, but you need to remember Social Media is about everyone else and a certain equality of ideas and opinions.

6. Not Being Responsible: Social Media can be a powerful tool. With power comes responsibility. Be a jerk, slander someone or be hurtful online and it will come back to haunt you.

7. Being Rude: Manners cost you nothing but some forethought and consideration of others. If you truly don’t know the right thing to do in a given situation you can always try the searchable database at The Emily Post Institute.

8. Not Being Sympathetic: Life is hard. People make mistakes and suffer misfortune. Being seen as unsympathetic will earn you a bad rep in life – online that rep will spread even faster and further.

9. Not Sharing: If you are fortunate enough to have expertise or access to resources that can help others please share them. Social Media rewards those who share with good Karma points. Many of today’s online superstars got there by being good at sharing themselves and their resources.


10. Sharing Too Much: Conversely, there are those who share too much detail, too much noise and too much irrelevancy. Know your communities and understand what it is about you they most want to hear.

Related posts
10 Commandments for Social Media
Twetiquette: 10 basics for Twitter politeness
Social Media disasters

Twetiquette: 10 basics for Twitter politeness

1. Add value to others’ lives. This is the Golden Rule of Twitter.

2. Don’t ask for anything. Or at least don’t ask 99.9 percent of the time.

3. Use RT (Re Tweet) label. Taking someone else’s tweet and then tweeting it as though it were your information, in a sense, is stealing. Be original. There is no shame in a RT. Without people doing this some content would not get very far.

4. Thank people … often. Thank them for following you. Thank them for RT-ing you. Thank them for including you on a #FollowFriday list. Thank them for a great tweet.

5. If you reply, mention what you are replying to. “Great tweet” is meaningless response if the person you are getting back to has had more than a single tweet in the past week.

6. Use Direct Message for anything that is less than positive.

7. Only use Reply if you think your followers will care about your reply.

8. Do not use an auto responder or an auto follow bot. It sends the message that your fellow Twitterers are just numbers and not that important to you.

9. Play nice. It seems so obvious, but if you anything you say on Twitter can be misconstrued (where a lot of visual clues are missing) – it will be.

10. Be you. Being genuine in all your Twitter dealings will, over time, set you apart from those who are these just to get an audience, just to sell something or just to be annoying.

Further reading:
10 Commandments for Social Media
Social Media disasters