It can be daunting (and expensive) to determine which employees should be allowed to engage the public, speak candidly or answer questions.  And explaining which kinds of employee behaviors and proprietary information are strictly off-limits can be downright awkward.

Fortunately, there’s a solution that helps ease the friction: PolicyTool.

Simply enter your company’s name and some relevant information, and PolicyTool will generate your very own customizable social media policy in twelve short clicks!

Although PolicyTool’s service is not intended as legal advice, the policy it generates does provide a good starting point for your company’s continued embellishment.  Your HR department, tech experts and legal team can add or revise sections as desired, or you can simply opt to implement the generated policy as-is.

Here at Creative Concepts, we instituted our own social media policy prior to the creation of PolicyTool.  But if we’d had a useful template to start from, it would have helped shape our own internal discussions about best practices.

And really, that’s the whole point: PolicyTool may not solve every problem, but if it gets your company talking about the best ways to govern and maximize your social media channels, it’s worth every penny.  (Oh, and it’s free.)

Image by Gregory James Walsh via Flickr.

If you enjoy our weekly blog, subscribe now and you’ll never miss a tip!

Wrong.

As much as we love the idea of a client being willing to think on their feet and adapt on the fly, there are a number of steps we’d advise any company to invest in before they ever post a blog or send a tweet.

And you might be even more surprised to learn that most of these steps don’t involve a computer; they involve understanding goals, language and intentions.

8 Questions to Ask Before You “Dive Into” Social Media

1. What’s the end goal? Do you want to increase sales?  Improve public opinion?  Raise awareness?  Gauge customer sentiment?  Too many companies create social media outposts and then ask, “now what?”  Unless everyone involved in planning and executing your social media campaign is working toward the same goal(s), you’ll never be able to direct your efforts effectively.

2. How will success be measured? Are you focusing primarily on sales data?  Traffic?  Click-throughs?  Positive press?  Consumer mentions?  As with step #1, if you’re not all looking at the same metrics, you won’t all be able to agree on what’s working — or why.

3. Who needs approval? Will every blog post you write and every tweet you send require approval from multiple layers of management?  In the event of an emergency, is there a streamlined version of that chain of command that first responders can utilize to circumvent a red tape quagmire?

4.  What’s the official voice of our brand? Some companies thrive on being personal.  Others demand professionalism and objectivity in all forms.  Anyone who’s acting as “the voice of the company” needs to understand the range of that voice, in order to avoid statements and phrasing that feel “out of character” for the brand.

5.  How often will data be collected? If you don’t know how your efforts are being perceived and acted upon by the recipients of your messaging, you won’t know what’s working and what needs to be tweaked.  But if all you do is analyze data, you’ll slip into the strategy trap.  Agreeing on an acceptable frequency for data analysis helps keep everyone sane and focused.

6.  How often will we reconsider our process? Some of your ideas will work better than others.  Sometimes you’ll have lucky breaks; other times, you’ll be outshined by someone else’s better story.  Taking the “long view” in analyzing your goals and data will allow you to base your future adjustments on better-contextualized results, rather than your own knee-jerk reactions.

7.  How elastic is the budget? Social media is an ever-changing field.  What works today may not work tomorrow, and the tools you’ve invested in may become outclassed or obsolete.  Likewise, areas in which you’re minimally invested may turn out to bear more fruit than you initially expected.  How much elasticity and discretion will your team have to adapt your plan on the move, or are the decisions you’re making now expected to last until your next budget analysis?

8.  Where do we start? You can’t wake up tomorrow with a fully-functional presence on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, WordPress and Delicious.  Every channel you’re investing in takes time to establish, grow and curate.  Which tools are the most important for achieving your immediate goals, and in which order do you need to get them up to speed?  Because if you spread yourself too thin, nothing works.

Got all that?  Great; now you can start making plans.

Have questions?  Email us; we make our living providing answers.

If you enjoy our weekly blog, subscribe now and you’ll never miss a tip!

1. Let’s make this more effective.
2. Let’s make this more entertaining.
3. Let’s make this easier to understand.
4. Let’s solve someone’s problem.
5. Let’s eliminate our redundancies.
6. Let’s thank someone who deserves it.
7. Let’s learn more about our customers.
8. Let’s learn more about ourselves.
9. Let’s ask “why?”
10. Let’s listen.

Photo attribution:

Case in point: Michael Werch wondered how long it would take the average corporation to realize that someone was pretending to be them online.  To find out, he began masquerading as the HJ Heinz Corporation on Twitter, mostly as an experiment to test the reflexes of modern business.  The result? Heinz noticed — two weeks later — and Twitter renamed Werch’s account to divest it of any connection to the company.

Werch’s confession in Ad Age has generated an interesting array of (mostly predictable) responses, including:

• The obvious lesson: Businesses must control and protect their online images, even if it means squatting on their own company names across multiple platforms (so enterprising individuals don’t beat them to it).
• The obvious question: Why did Heinz squash Werch’s account, rather than taking it over (or collaborating with him) and building upon the brand goodwill he’d already launched on their behalf?
• The counterpoint: Heinz is the kind of industry leader that “doesn’t need to use Twitter” and other web tools because their perceived impact is so negligible that doing so would be a waste of Heinz’s marketing dollars.
• The counter-counterpoint: Heinz may not need to use Twitter, but imagine the PR headache they’d be facing now if Werch hadn’t been a fan of the brand, but a whistleblower intent on divulging company secrets, questioning their business practices, etc.

Does every company need to use social media?  Of course not.  But just because your company doesn’t use social media, that doesn’t prevent someone else from adopting your company’s name — and, potentially, from damaging your brand.

If your company still isn’t sure about its own intentions toward Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and beyond, here’s a tip: someone in your corporate office should register your company’s name (and all its common derivatives) on all currently-relevant platforms, just in case.  You never have to use them, but you might sleep a little easier knowing that no one else can, either.

(If that tip sounds familiar, it’s probably because someone was telling you the same thing 15 years ago, only the topic was websites, not Twitter accounts.  Same logic, different era, and that logic never stops making sense.)

And, of course, a caveat: if someone really doesn’t like your company, nothing’s stopping them from ranting about you online.  But that kind of vitriol should be spewing from something other than your company’s “official” web presence.  (Plus, if you’ve registered your official presence on Twitter, etc., but your company just hasn’t found a reason to make use of it, there’s nothing like a PR catastrophe to get the engines running — and you don’t want to lose time playing catch-up then, do you?)

On one hand, maybe you’re convinced that influencing the influencers is your best bet.  Rather than spending money to reach an audience that isn’t prepared to act on your message, you’d rather focus on the tastemakers, innovators and icons whose behaviors create culture.  And if a person whom that culture trusts is willing to vouch for your product or service, that person’s own audience is more likely to believe your message than if it came from you personally.

On the other hand, some people don’t believe influencers actually exist.  They advocate a more fluid approach, in which your message (or your very product) is released in multiple versions.  Then, by tracking your audience’s responses, you can continually zero in on the version(s) that work best.

Which approach is the right approach?  The one that works for you.

Certain brands perform exceedingly well simply by targeting the tastemakers in the markets they’d like to penetrate.  But those influencers (if they exist) are highly sought-after by all brands, which means you need to stand far above the pack before they’ll ever notice you.

Other companies are experts at casting a wide net and refining their message based on which of its aspects are most resonant.  Yet this approach requires rigorous reporting and analysis of incoming data in order to clarify your own understanding of the public’s perception, as well as a willingness among your team to repeatedly tinker with what they feel may already be working well enough.

Neither method is “right” or “wrong,” but one of them is probably a better fit for you at the moment.  But before you can decide on the direction of your marketing, you need to understand two key facets of your own company:

• Are you more interested in appealing to the tastemakers or the masses?
• Which methodology is your team best-equipped to process and execute?

Once you know who you are, you’re much better prepared to communicate your assets to the people who most need to appreciate them: your customers.

According to Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey, no one trusts anyone!

(Which is ironic, considering Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents was a bestseller during the same year this survey was conducted.  But I digress…)

Here’s what happened:

Last year, 47 percent of respondents to the survey claimed to trust information from their peers (aka “people like me”), fueling the tendencies of social media gurus to target peers (and especially “influencers”) as a way to gain visibility for the brands they represent.  This year?  Only 27 percent made that same claim.

So much for social media, right?

Wrong.

According to Edelman, trust in TV is down 20 points as well.  Radio and newspapers also dropped.  Across the U.S., faith in media as a whole is in the basement.  Media and insurance were tied as the two least-trusted industries in America.

(Ironically, of the sources mentioned above, newspapers actually ranked highest in terms of respondents’ trust, at a scant 32 percent.  Surely that’ll make hundreds of downsized reporters feel better this winter…)

So… so much for media itself, right?

Still wrong.

Keep in mind that we’ve just survived one of the most tempestuous political years in American history, one in which our ruling parties have become ever more ideologically opposed.  Town halls and tea parties have proven that we’re increasingly incapable of having rational debates about even the most basic elements of our social fabric.  No wonder trust in “people like me” is down — trust in everyone, across all facets of the system, is down.  The only people we seem comfortable trusting anymore are ourselves.

And that explains why a book like Trust Agents can find an audience: because people are desperate to connect.  People want to trust each other, and they want to be able to trust the media that feeds them their information.  They’re just skeptical of everyone’s motives and transparencies, including that of their peers, whom (we’ve all finally realized) have access to the same unreliable media as everyone else.

Instead of seeing this report as a death blow to the legitimacy of the media empires, those same empires should be taking this study as an opportunity to refocus on what their audience actually wants: clear, unbiased, reliable information.

As for the social media campaigns of the world, congratulations: now you don’t have to worry about “going viral” or targeting those pesky influencers anymore.  Now you just have to appeal to every human being, one at a time, and treat them like valuable individuals.  Now you have to earn their trust.

And in that case, maybe there’s a silver lining to all this skepticism after all.

Eileen O’Brien has an excellent summary of Johnson & Johnson’s recent use of social media to help manage the information flow surrounding their recall of Tylenol and other medications.  And while Twitter and blogs aren’t the only resources a company should turn to in times of crisis, savvy communicators realize that their customers sometimes rely on social media for real-time news.

Consider Wyclef Jean’s response to doubts about the financial clarity of his charity, YELE, after an article in The Smoking Gun called its accounting practices into question.  Instead of ignoring the mounting firestorm, Wyclef issued an official statement at a formal press conference (which may not necessarily have helped alleviate concerns).  But he also posted a video to YouTube regarding his feelings about the situation, which, at the time of this post, has been viewed over 300,00 times — and that’s not counting the numerous duplicates spread around the web.

The lesson?  People love to share information, and in times of crisis, you’d like that information to be coming from you.

These days, being able to deliver pertinent, accurate information to people when and where they expect to see it is safer than expecting them to be herded to a single focal point.  Twitter moves at the speed of misinformation, and the last thing your company needs during a potential crisis is to lose control of the facts due to rapidly spreading inaccuracies.  Better to have a contingency plan in place to mitigate misinformation in advance than to cobble together a response after the story’s already been told.

No business is immune to mistakes, because businesses are made of people, and human beings are notoriously imperfect.  Disasters strike.  Accidents happen.  But not being prepared for the unknown is no one’s idea of a smart business plan.

But social media is public media, which means new successes and failures happen every day, out in the open, and anyone who’s paying attention can follow along in real time.  Lauren Litwinka has done such a thing, compiling an insightful (and acid-tongued) list of companies who are “doing it wrong” on Twitter.

In Lauren’s case, “wrong” means “not making conversation a two-way street.”  She believes social media provides companies with valuable access to their customers’ desires and opinions, and squandering that two-way invitation with one-way marketing will alienate the very people you’re trying to reach.

How did these companies lose their way?

• Misunderstanding the way customers use these media channels.
• Failing to discern what kinds of information people consider valuable.
• Setting low or unreasonable expectations.
• Ignoring customer feedback (or lack thereof).
• Not implementing lessons to adjust their approach mid-stream.

But that doesn’t mean each of the companies Lauren cites are lost causes.  On the contrary, now that they’ve been told their execution could improve, they have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.  And that makes the time and effort they’ve invested up ’til now every bit as valuable as it would be if it had led them to automatic success — and maybe moreso, since they now know for certain what won’t work.

Remember: there’s always value in making mistakes.  Just make sure you’re learning from them (before your competition does).

A spear is a distance weapon.  You refine the tip until it’s razor sharp and guaranteed to cut through anything in its way.  Then you attach that point to a long, sturdy staff that’ll hold up under stress.

A spear is designed to be thrown.  It allows you to maintain a safe distance from your target, penetrate its defenses, and then drag your prized kill home to be devoured.

That’s traditional marketing.

A hook is an invitation.  It’s frequently adorned with something eye-catching, to help lure the attention of a passing target.  It can float in the current for a long time before it loses its edge.  And when a target does take an interest in the hook, then you’re able to reel it in.

That’s social marketing.

Both tools work.  Just make sure you know whether you’re hunting or fishing, because that spear might get lost in the river.

I’d love to see a survey of how many of the 91 percent of companies using social media are failing miserably because they still just don’t get the fact that every employee is an ambassador, whether at the supermarket, a cocktail party, the kids soccer match or when active on a social media site. They trust their salesmen to represent the company unsupervised, but can’t trust their employees to use social media responsibly. Seems like there’s still a lot of growing up to be done in 2010.

Social media agencies have lamented clients’ unrealistic focus on “controlling the message” for years now.  (We’ve even chimed in on the topic ourselves, including a quote from Scott Monty that puts it all in appropriately absurd perspective.)  But no matter how many times companies are told that a free-flowing discussion about their business is the best thing that could happen to them, they still seem more comfortable spending money on ad campaigns designed to plant specific messages in the audience’s mind, rather than allowing their customers (and employees) to speak freely.

But what are companies so afraid of?

What could possibly be divulged by your employees that could give the public a worse impression of your business than the knowledge that you refuse to grant your employees the freedom to discuss your company?

On the other hand, when the public sees that you, the employer, value your team’s insights and trust them to behave responsibly, you set a standard that consumers (and other companies) appreciate.  The world is comprised of people, not facades.  And people like doing business with people, not images.

This year, why not grant your customers — and your employees — the freedom to speak openly about your brand?  At worst, you’ll discover some flaws worth correcting.  At best, you’ll learn what you really are doing right — and where to build for the future.