Hence, I have not kept up with this blog since learning social media best practices and trends is completely on my own free time — which is very limited as a new dad

I hope to be back to share more in the future!

Scott used Twitter to announce his steps during the process of responding to a crisis, tweeting things like, “I’m checking with legal right now”… etc. so people didn’t think he was just saying “no comment” and getting upset, thinking he wasn’t doing anything.

Tweeting should be your first response during public relations crisis management – It is the “low-hanging fruit” — immediate and widespread. But it only helps once you’ve already built up a community.

Monitor and respond to social media mentions of your organization where appropriate. When you have people complaining against your organization, invite them into the process to better understand then help address their issues, if it’s not terribly detrimental.

Sometimes a key to crisis management is actually calling someone to talk (gasp!). He combined online (twitter/blogs/forums) methods with offline (personal phone calls) to combat a crisis where one of Ford’s big supporters felt mistreated and was letting people on his website know how upset he was at the company.

Companies need to have their own “digital hub” – an anchor where they can post updates/comments/videos/etc. in addition to the typical sites (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.).

There are only so many social media sites you can realistically get to. You need to decide where your customers are and stay actively engaged in those limited digital outposts. You can’t be authentic with customers if you just do “fly-bys” on the sites.

But on the other hand, organizations need to pay more attention to the people around them and less to Twitter. Don’t neglect your internal employees – they are the key audience invested in your organization’s future.

• Ford has 200,000 employees worldwide, so Scott postulated that if he could get just 1% willing to talk about Ford on line, that would be 2,000 people on these digital outposts (e.g., Facebook/Twitter).

The tools are irrelevant – they will always change. By giving employees broad guidelines on social media, we’re creating a culture of people who can speak on behalf of the company.

Some of these basic guidelines include:

• Tell the truth
• Write with accuracy
• Include all points of view
• Never delete people’s comments

The goal is to humanize Ford as a brand. There’s nothing personal or inspirational about the “blue oval.” Scott wants to put faces to the brand and connect employees with the public.

Social media is just part of the mix. It’s not a panacea. Ford still communicates with customers through surveys/phone calls/mailers/etc. The company realizes it has millions of customers and they don’t all communicate in the same way.

Not every comment/post requires a response. Many times people write something factually incorrect that is derogatory toward Ford. Scott said he wanted to jump in and respond, but then chose to stand back. What happened? Someone from the community would often correct the record for him, since the company had built up a big fan base.

When you do need to respond, match the tools used against you. If someone is putting you down in a video, respond with a video. In a blog post, respond with a comment. But that’s just the starting point.

Scott asked, “Does your ‘C suite’ vet your phone calls or your emails? If not, why do they insist on vetting your blogs, tweets, etc.?”

He related social media to when the telephone first came out and then later when email came out where there was all kinds of corporate guidance about not saying certain things. The technology doesn’t matter. This is about culture change.

Social media is not going away. It’s going to be more and more integrated into our daily lives.

The Legal Department

Legal will often be like, “Don’t say anything so no one can use it against us in court.” Communicators can often say, “Let’s put everything out in the public.” There’s space in between.”

If legal says “no,” that’s only one lawyer’s opinion. Use statistics to convince other lawyers that the risks of social media are outweighed by the risks of not having a social media presence.

Shel quoted a study where in times of crisis, organizations that acknowledged the crisis, and spoke to their problems publicly and openly saw a bigger drop in their stock prices at the outset than organizations that kept silent. But months into the crisis, the tables turned; and only those organizations who engaged their communities (rather than solely issuing sterile press releases) were able to see their stock prices rise back up to above pre-crisis levels. Those who didn’t…never recovered.

Ownership of Social Media (SM)

Many organizations have disputes between IT and public affairs/marketing/PR regarding who “owns” SM. The organization’s leadership needs to coordinate the effort so everyone plays where they can bring the most value.

Don’t get into the trap of simply giving this responsibility to the employees who are most adept at SM. Just because they’re good at Twitter or Facebook doesn’t mean they know how to implement a company’s communications strategy.

Identify the Return on Investment (ROI)

You need to speak the language of CEOs or they won’t pay attention to you. Translate SM to the goals they’re responsible for when they go before their board of directors to report out.

Regulations

Don’t violate any regulations. Reinforce that the rules that apply everywhere else (e.g., state and federal regulations) also apply in SM.

Resources

It’s imperative to baseline how much effort you’re spending to do communications. Then when you implement an SM strategy, you can show people how much time it takes to do communications campaigns to reach people, and how you can now reach more people faster, easier and cheaper with SM tools. This is essential to justify the resources required to engage customers online.

Speaking with One Voice

Leadership wants the organization to “speak with one voice.” However, while it’s important for everyone in an organization to know the organization’s story, everyone has their own voices. And your employees are talking about your organization anyway.

People are afraid to release control of the message since they’re afraid of losing power. But releasing control of the message can actually make you more powerful since you can get better results and say your decision made that happen. “I see my role as making my client/boss look good.”

Other Insightful Thoughts from Shel

“Every organization should have at least one blog. The strategic motivation for this is rapid response – in a more authoritative, archived type of fashion.” When crises hit, the public and journalists should go to your blog as the primary source. Twitter, Facebook, etc. are important but secondary – they should drive traffic to your blog.

“There can be stand-alone SM campaigns. For example, the new Transformers movie has a tool that allows people to create Transformers avatars, Twitter wallpaper, etc.”

“Every employee is a front-line public relations representative. I believe Public Affairs/Public Relations needs to assume responsibility for customer call centers since this is the front line of the organization interacting with the customers. Companies can rise or fall on these folks.”

abrandnewway.com had an article I liked that lists 5 Tips for Corporate Blogging. Some highlights are below:

• Be the expert
  Be the expert on tangible topics that people can understand
• Establish a social crossroads
  Take advantage of other social tools out there and link them back to your blog
• Don’t forget your archives
  Find a way to link back to older posts when creating new ones
• Get into a routine
  Whatever routine you decide to do (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly), stick to it so people condition themselves to return to your site when new content will be there
• Stand for something
  Don’t remain unbiased; make sure you’re not afraid to take a position

As a bonus this week, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the 3 minutes it takes you to check out Mark Drapeau’s post on “The A to Z of New Media” (adapted from a Marriott handout at a Washington, D.C. event called “New & Social Media: Leading the Way”)

I usually try not to complain, but last night I felt like venting because it took WMATA an hour and a half each way for me to travel from the Vienna Metro Station to the Navy Yard Metro Station to attend a Washington Nationals game (and, yes, the Cubbies did win – so life was good).

When I got home, I made a vow that I would rather have to fight DC traffic and pay for parking than ever have an experience like that again. I logged into Twitter a little before midnight and tweeted, “I’m NEVER taking the Metro to a Washington Nationals game again. 1.5 hours each way from Vienna metro station to game.”

Then this morning I was really surprised to see that the Washington Nationals’ Twitter account had automatically retweeted my post an hour afterward…

Nats Twitter

At first – for about half a second – I was afraid some underpaid, bloody-eyed Nats marketing guy was up at 1am Sunday morning looking for people referring to his employer so he could retweet them. I thought to myself, “Wow – the Nats sure are committed to engaging their stakeholders through social media. And they’re so transparent that they’re even willing to retweet complaints about how hard it is to get to one of their games.” Then I started thinking they might have the evil ulterior motive of stealing WMATA’s customers in order to sell more parking spaces.

But, no, they had definitely automatically retweeted my complaint to their 750 followers (much less than the 12,000 following my Cubbies!). In fact, on the Nats’ Twitter page, they even retweeted one user who noticed this trend as well, who wrote, “If you need to build your RT file, just mention Washington Nationals!”

Is this a good business practice?

While this is transparent, is it worth the risk?

What if I said something really bad – like trying to start a Nats boycott?

Have you seen any other examples of this – or other strange Twitter business practices?

This is some powerful advice on resume writing…

I was recently consulted by the communications director of one of the most powerful members of the Senate because his job search wasn’t producing pay dirt. A quick scan of his résumé identified the likely cause: Reading it was about as impressive as reading a stranger’s ho-hum “to do” list. If I hadn’t already known what a skilled, productive and creative power-broker he is, I never would have known it from his résumé.

Here are questions to ask yourself, to help you define your achievements in compelling terms:

• Why is my work important?
• How have I improved my organization’s reputation to internal and external stakeholders?
  
• How have I saved time or money, or streamlined processes?
  
• Which of my achievements am I most proud of, worked mightily to accomplish or earned recognition for, such as awards to me or my organization, promotions, bonuses or praise?
  
• How do I do my work better or differently from peers or more junior professionals? What do I offer that no one else does?
  
• How would my organization’s services, resources or morale suffer if I had never worked there?
  
• How have I shown initiative and gone the extra mile?
  
• How have I wisely used my judgment, discretion or creativity?
  
• What am I an expert in?
  
• When have I contributed to high-pressure, high-profile, high-dollar or high-priority projects?
  
• Which of my accomplishments warrant superlatives like the first, the only, the best, the fastest, the highest rated, the most or the strongest?
  

You don’t have to be the first climber up Mount Everest to have an important superlative under your belt. Automating a process, creating a new Web site, developing new training, creating a document or completing a project in record time warrant superlatives.

When writing assessments or resumes, remember to focus on RESULTS more than roles, responsibilities and processes!

What questions would you add to this list?

The author, Mitch Wagner, concludes his blog by saying:

Social media allows government to take its message directly to the people, bypassing journalists. Much of journalism has always consisted of “he said she said” reporting. The journalist goes to a government official to get a statement, dutifully transcribes it, runs to an opponent to get an opposing statement, and then brings both those statements to the readers. Social media helps put he-said-she-said journalists out of a job, because the government official — and his opponent — can get their message directly to the people themselves. That means journalists need to concentrate on going beyond the public record and provide analysis and investigation.

Is he right? Do you see Twitter — or other social media tools — eventually changing the face of journalism (and, hence, media relations) as we now know it?

The subject of the story eventually created two Facebook pages — one for friends and family and another for work contacts.

I’ve actually done the same, creating my “Chris Ryno Hemrick” Facebook page to keep in touch with people I know through my client work — whether Booz Allen coworkers or the network I’ve built through my client work. This way we can stay in contact and share social media best practices. I linked the page to my Twitter account so my tweets automatically become my status update on the page. I don’t think this group needs to see photos of me with spit-up down my shirt while holding my five-month-old daughter (just to clarify — it’s her spit-up).

The way I see it, there are three types of people: 1) People whose work and social networks are completely separate; 2) people whose work and social networks are partially intertwined; and 3) people whose work and social networks are basically the same. Group 3 tends to be the 20-somethings who go to all the happy hours on weeknights in DC

Which type are you? How does this affect the overlapping of your work and personal social networking onine?

Jason writes:

“I anticipated I would have a really nice case study to write about relative to targeted outreach. For a restaurant to target 20-30 influential bloggers, filmmakers or musicians in Austin for SXSW and invite them in to try the food, is pretty smart. Even if only five or six take them up on the offer, they’re going to post Twitter messages, invite some fellow attendees who will do the same and so on. If the restaurant were able to land someone with a vast network, they could literally have lines wrapped around the building to get in just to eat with a cewebrity.”

But it turns out this wasn’t a marketing gimmick. The marketer was buying Jason lunch because she genuinely wanted to.

“She said she thought to herself, ‘I know that I guy. I follow his tweets every day.” So she invited me. That’s it. There was no real strategy behind. She was just being nice to someone whose blog she reads and Tweets she follows.’”

From this experience, Jason said,

“The learning we can take from this is that when a business communicates like human being, connects with a customer and treats them like they would treat a friend, even the smallest gestures can reap the biggest rewards. Deborah’s outreach wasn’t a carefully planned strategic effort orchestrated to drive buzz. There was no market research involved. Deborah took off her marketing hat for a minute and provided a social gesture of thanks to someone whose blog she read and Twitter stream she followed. Even though the gesture ended in someone trying her product, she did it out of basic generosity.”

So my question is this… How can we genuinely reach out to people on a human level without them feeling like they’re one of our “targeted stakeholders?” It’s time to bring back face-to-face (F2F) communication where possible. What are some ways we can do this without making people into metrics for our clients?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!