Listen to your compass, not your clock – When Andrea Jung was passed over for CEO of Avon in 19997, it made headlines.  She was offered 2 other CEO positions at other companies.  It would have been easy to feel slighted or embarrassed and hop companies to earn the next checkmark on her resume.  But Avon’s mission of economically empowering women inspires and connects with her.  And staying true to that compass is what laid the ground work for a more meaningful, long term success to flourish.

You can’t reinvent your company if you can’t reinvent yourself -After missing earnings and falling out of favor with Wall Street, Andrea knew she was at risk of being fired in a quarter or 2.  a coach advised her to “fire herself” and walk in the next day as if it was her first day at a new job.  She could then approach and assess the company’s situation with fresh eyes and energy and start anew.

Proceed ethically – As Thomas Jefferson, “In matters of style, swim with the current.  In matters of principle, stand like a rock.”  So many business leaders have found themselves at the core of corporate scandal.  They tend to be shorter lived and their shareholder value returned far lower.

“Communities have never needed companies more” – Choosing to be in the private sector does not mean you are opting out of a live of service.  The public sector can not meet the needs of our country or the world – and it is up to corporate citizens to stand up and do their part for the benefit of all.

Prioritize, and be present – So many working parents are constantly making micro daily tradeoffs about family and work.  They are difficult and constant.  Prioritize, make your decisions and then drop the guilt.  Once you are in the most important place for you to be present, you owe it to your companions to fully be there.

So much of this has direct applicability to our little social media corner of the world:

• Because we’re moving so quickly, career focus often is on quick hops and ticking title boxes instead of finding a company, team, mentor, client, mission or purpose that gives you passion.  Once you’ve found that the rest will follow.
• The WOMMA ethics code is just one incarnation of a way to make sure you are swimming on the straight and narrow of the social media current.
• Social media has brought with it a massive case of divided attention syndrome.  The temptation to live tweet/Facebook/document your life instead of focusing on the humans around you is very strong!  Be present and see what happens…

This being cross-posted from Ogilvy’s Fresh Influence blog.

Silos have long been bemoaned as preventing the optimization of everything from enterprise resource planning to cohesive customer experience.  If Phase 1 of corporate social media development is scattered maverick experimentation and Phase 2 is creating integrated strategy, chances are Phase 3 is likely defining silo-based roles & responsibilities.  For example, Corp Comm could own Facebook, Consumer Marketing owns Twitter,  Care runs branded communities, and Recruiting runs LinkedIn (although we often see platform ownership split by business unit focus in marketing as well) .  There is a very real reason for doing this.  Clear ownership assures great responsiveness and allow for organizations to get appropriate social staffing and funding approved.  It is also true that the different social platforms have different audiences and dynamics (what & how you share) that are likely more appropriate for one part of your org than another.  It is safe to assume that this is not going away…so let’s make it work.

Whenever you get to the point of splitting platform responsibility between different departments, you run the risk of creating a new set of silos.  6 months in, you may find your boss praising what you’re doing in LinkedIn and questioning the way Facebook is being run.  You may read something posted on Twitter and realize it would have been perfect for you to capture video around for the YouTube & Facebook audience if only you’d known!  Here are 5 suggestions to systematize collaboration and prevent those silo walls from re-growing around you:

1) Group Governance – If you are not installing a hierarchical leader over your distributed channel plan, we do recommend that governance over decisions like adding channels, brand voice, changing policies, or cross-platform initiatives be discussed at a cross functional steering committee.  This can successfully be done in a somewhat informal manner or highly formal group with a charter, etc.  But the discussion that these decisions will spark can create trust and shared understanding among the partners.  It is likely that your friends from legal and HR should be a part of this as well.

2) Share Measurement - As a platform manager, it is easy to dive a mile deep on your own metrics and have only a glancing understanding of anyone else’s.  Because metrics are guideposts to measure progress on a strategy, they are a great way to re-ground your colleagues in exactly the role your platform plays in your company’s success.  A monthly measurement snapshot that you put together with the rest of your council is a great way to share learnings, troubleshoot issues, and will create a great artifact to be circulated around the company or management team.

3) Collaborative Content Plannng - Managing a social platform means taming the beast’s insatiable hunger for content.  Content is gold and chances are, it is often appropriate across multiple channels.  By sharing conversation calendars – not just at the top of every month but as news happens and circumstances change will be the ultimate show of respect for your colleagues and the customer experience and will futher support the trust you are building.

4) Fight Social Silos with Internal Social Media - Beth Kanter wrote a great post on how silos impact non-profit social media where she expresses the social media mandate to be able to “Work Wikily“.  You may not be able to change your whole organization, but sharing your planning docs and measurement documents on a wiki, discussing ad hoc opportunities on Yammer, or even using a shared document platform to edit the next version of your employee policess help bake collaboration into your working group.

5) Evolve Together – The plan that you created in 2009 or 2010 may no longer be working or at the very least may have room for optimization.  Instead of firing suggestions over the wall, institutionalize evolution around your plan.  Quarterly meetings of your working group that are either offsite to at least lengthier will help you review progress and ask the tough questions about what needs to change and when.  Going through that process together can foster strategic discussion and veer away from channel analysis or criticism becoming a land grab.

Go forth and bust those silos for the good of your customer and your own career!  If you have other tools that you  have seen successfully work, please add in the comments.

Where’s all that stress?  Where’s my to do list with 25 urgent things for to attend to that allow me to NOT think about which are important or not.  The absence of the adrenaline-fueled fever pitch of activity can often create its own type of stress.

The opportunity is to not to absorb this time for regrouping as stress.  With some rest under your belt and a fresh outlook, take time to make a list of what is important to you – creating long term goals for a client project, capturing that experience you had as a training for colleagues, writing an abstract for an upcoming speaking opportunity, or a list of blog posts you’d like to research and write – and keep it next to your desk to attend to at any time you have a moment that is undirected.  If you have goals that those can ladder up to – so much the better.

This may help keep you on track and feel even more accomplished the next time the annual look back/look forward ritual takes place, but at the very least could reduce some of the anxiety around turning this particular calendar page.

The folks at Whale Shark Media were kind enough to invite me to join the esteemed Dr. Kate Niederhoffer in engaging some of their partners around how to get the most out of social media.  This sounds like an average assignment right up until the moment that I tell you Whale Shark Media is “rollup” of affiliate sites like CheapStingyBargains, Deals.com and CouponShare and that everyone in the room was an affiliate channel manager in many cases not on their brand’s “social team”.   Not your typical day at the office, but who doesn’t love a challenge?

When I last touched affiliate marketing (providing special, limited time deals to coupon aggregators), it was a 100% siloed channel that the brand never pointed to for fear of cannibalizing their own channels.  This is actually very similar brick & mortar strategies of forcing outlet malls 20+ miles out of cities to not hurt the sales of their full-priced stalwarts.  Additionally, it was 100% transactional – no conversation or insights beyond what triggered transactions.

In preparation for today, I learned that social media has forever changed what it means to build a relationships with a brands deal seekers (who are not necessarily the same as your brand fans).   While there is a whole spectrum of approaches, Kate & I summed them up as follows:

Branded, but Separate: Some brands choose to host separate, branded presences laser-focused on deals.  Dell hosts both a separate “Dell Deals” Facebook fan page for limited-time deals on new systems and  @delloutlet for deals on refurbished equipment that rarely interact with the rest of their social footprint.  Similarly Gap has set up a separate @gapoutlet handle and Facebook fan page for the Gap Outlet brand.  These have the opportunity to not just spew deals, but create content about what their brands deal-seekers potentially care about – “promotions, ideas from our stylists and budget-wise tips” – even if that differs from the motivations of the rest of their buying audience.

Integrated with Primary Brand Presence: Retailer Best Buy has both @BestBuy and @BestBuy_Deals.  The Deals flavor hosts straight deals and no engagement (correctly stated in bio), but the difference  here is that @BestBuy will intermittently point to and promote what is happening in the Deals handle.  This only works if you are comfortable shining a light on your sweetest deals and nodding to the fact that we are all “deal-seekers” in the right context.

Deals Shared by Third Party Voices: The deal sites themselves also have a personality and a knowledge of their users to bring to the table.  Brands who create offers for deal sites and trust in the site’s ability to cultivate their community have much to gain in uptake on their deals.   Who wouldn’t want to chow down on this?

Stuff your face with greatness tonight! Print a coupon for free chips and queso from Chili’s here: http://bit.ly/bvrtrt (@cheapstingy)

As brands go farther and farther into social media and presences proliferate, the need for clear missions, roles and responsibilities will continue to heighten.  The fact that there is no sole “best practice” should be a call to experimentation and optimization for all.  Hopefully the challenge of mixing media aimed at different parts of the funnel will not hold it back.

There was an active debate around having a separate TED conference on women – largely sparked by some awkward text that was used to introduce the notion of the event which is now resolved.  I was torn less by the existence of such a conference and more by whether or not I would actually enjoy attending.  God help me for admitting this, but I reacted very negatively to Eve Ensler’s performance at TED 2010.  The work felt like it was directly pandering to the guilt of the powerful and largely male audience (who gave her an instant standing ovation).  I sat and clapped politely.  It was similar to the cringey feeling I had when watching the I am Woman karaoke scene in Sex and the City 2 and wanted to yell at the screen “I am NOT like you”. Meanwhile, lots of woman at TED 2010 inspired me greatly – including games researcher Jane McGonigal , the unique perspectives of Temple Grandin, and grand dame ocean-pioneer Sylvia Earle.   Gender had nothing to do with their work or what they spoke about.  So, am I uncomfortable with women who use their femaleness as a “hook” for work, artistic expression, or popularity?  For whom it is their “shtick”?  Am I a self-hater who wants to be a man deep down?  No, indeed.

Being a woman in the workplace comes with its own unique set of opportunities and challenges.  I am now of the mind that not discussing it or attempting to ignore its differentness is fruitless and is not going to help me or anyone else excel.  From the trivialities of navigating the minefields of workplace dress to gracefully handling assumptions and double standards of others, it is just different.  Whenever I get the at-least-weekly well meaning comment “it must be hard to be away from your son so much”, it takes every ounce of decorum I have to maintain a normal tone of voice and reply that while it is, it is also difficult for my male colleagues who have similar schedules and families, but we love what we do and are lucky have strong support at home.

It is this minor epiphany that sparked me to apply.  Could I do a better job of understanding, coaching and growing those around me?  Could I do more to give back to other women in my community at large and in other cultures?  And could I do that more adeptly with more knowledge and ideas?  Without a doubt.  Regardless of whether or not I make the grade on attendance for this event, the process has certainly made me a bit more thoughtful about who I am as a woman in business and how I choose to handle myself and invest in those around me.  I firmly believe there is an authentic path that is neither Devil Wears Prada nor Mary Poppins and, while I am bound to stumble upon it innumerable times, it is a path worth travelling.

1. Employee Social Media Guidelines – You’ll have to keep revising them and they’ll never be complete, but without them, employees won’t know what they’re allowed to do, whether they’re a spokesperson for your company, etc.  These are not one size fits all, but for a template or inspiration, check out Social Media Governance.
2. Corporate Social Media Strategy – You may remember a (small sample) report from earlier in the summer stating that more than half of companies actively engaging in social media had no strategy and no agreed upon success metrics.  While you might be able to pull that off with a couple of voices online, it will not scale.  A strategy will create the justification for future guardrails of what activities are in an out of bounds, roles and responsibilities, and success metrics.  This is where you should also define what adding more voices online will accomplish for the company so that everyone knows why they’re getting involved
3. Cross-Functional SM Working Group – Whether you call yourselves a committee, task force, or the Bay City Rollers, you will need a cross functional internal working group to create and socialize strategy and policy as it evolves and to handle anything that pops up.  For bonus points, don’t just include product, marketing, care and communications – you will benefit from talent acquisition, HR, and legal being consistently at the table as well.
4. Documentation of Goals, Roles, Responsibilities, Response Guidelines  – Knowing them is not enough.  As your organization grows and as customers find you in social spaces, you’ll want to have crisp external definitions of your mission in social places and the type of service or responses that customers can expect.  Internally, you’ll need to know who is responsible for what spaces and have a documented, agreed upon way to handle inquiries or comments from customers and escalation paths for things that could potentially go wrong.
5. Process for Initiating NEW SM Projects – If you are fighting the tide of proliferation of handles and pages using your brand, create a way for marketers in your organization interested in starting another social project to think through all the necessary elements of adding a new project to the ecosystem and ask them to explain why their needs can’t be met through existing social channels.  Letting growth happen totally organically could lead to a maze that makes it difficult for customers to find the “real” you.
6. Training on All of the Above – Figure out how you can train and engage your organization on the elements above.  Maybe some can be done in person, but for items impacting all employees, you may want to look to on demand video training to make sure everyone has full access.
7. Regular Communications of Performance to Metrics – Once your expanded organization is up and running, close the loop with communication with how you are performing to the metrics in your strategy.  Honoring standouts and accomplishment can keep your expanded social media crew rowing hard in the right direction.

This is formulated based on my experience in house and on the agency side helping multiple organizations with this transition.  What did I miss?  What’s your checklist?

Today, I blogged about marketing lessons from the Man in Black over on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence Fresh Influence blog.  Give it a visit or go straight to The Johnny Cash Project to let your inner artist loose!

For a while, I was one of “those” Foursquare people.  You know… rushing to document each and every place I visited, interrupting conversations with real life people to look down at my phone and find the appropriate check-in location, and generally Type-A about becoming the Mayor of SOMETHING for goodness sake.  I truly felt sadness at my recent ousting from the Mayorship of the Hotel Triton in SF earlier this week.

I liked Foursquare because it was turning my nomadic life into a real life video game.  On top of my Kimpton stays and frequent flier miles, I was getting electronic cred for criss-crossing the country every week and I liked it.  Now, I’m approaching done.  3 reasons why:

1) Frustration – The quick proliferation of users has taken the definition of “location” from geo to nano.  As the user-define locations on Foursquare have gotten smaller and smaller, the user is overwhelmed with options for where to check in – none of which may seem “legit” or correct.  I won’t pore through 50 different options figuring out where to check in.  The only plus is that this allows for more “Mayors”.

2) Loss of Utility – The “nano” problem above also reduces the utility of the tool.  I’m interested in seeing who else is at the Austin airport – not who is at gate 18 or at the Auntie Anne’s pretzels by Delta in Concourse B.  This means I can really only look at where my current friends are and that’s it.

3) Now What? Once you’ve opened all the badges for your normal activity, whither thou goest your Foursquare experience?  This phenomenon is relatively well documented – quite amusingly as “Apathy” in this “From Addiction to Apathy” post from Fast Company (h/t @KaiMac).

I hope there is a plan – a deeper level of engagement?, maybe “verified” locations a la Twitter?  I hope so, but I may have to read about it in Mashable because I’m not sure I’ll still be a user when they figure it out.

Cross posted on the 360 Digital Influence blog

Yesterday I ran into an old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen IRL (in real life) since 2005.  He had, however, recently reached out through social networks to ask me to become a fan of a band I had never heard of – Coventry Road.  The fortuitous in-person encounter allowed me to ask about the motivation for the “become a fan of” request.  He told me that the first question club owners now ask is not “where’s your demo” but “how many Facebook fans do you have”?  Far from the upstart organizing tool of 4-5 years ago, building a digital audience is now a requirement for a band starting out – not a nice to have or an advantage.  Questions this raises:

1) Where is your local music loyalty? Venue owners are passing the buck of responsibility of cultivating loyalty through to the “talent”.   Venues like the DC’s 9:30 Club or even the 100 seat Cactus Cafe (under threat of closing) on the

UT Austin campus have amassed thousands of fans and are successfully booking the types of bands that their community wants to hear.  I still remember the closing of the Flood Zone in Richmond 12 years ago like a death in the family.  Venue matters big time and owners have a chance to double dip on loyalty – attracting 2 sets of fans (Note – big announcement about the future of “fan” vs. “like”ing brands).

2) Is Facebook “Fans” a proxy for audience? I don’t really think its that relevant for local, IRL music.  If venue owners are trying to attract new venue loyalists by bringing in fans of bands that don’t currently patronize their venue, the question is not how many fans do you have, but how many live here?

3) Is there a better way? The opportunity to crowdsource your band lineup awaits.  What if the venue actually tested competing tracks with the venue’s loyal facebook fans?  Or asked them to suggest new bands to bring in or the bands they like enough to stray from their favorite venue?  Great opportunities that we’re just starting to see develop.

Content Creators Must Get Paid – If you braved the distraction of a fire alarm and came back into the building, you were privy to an educated man’s verbal smackdown the likes of which I had not previously seen in public – Marc Cuban vs. Boxee’s Avner Ronen. Cuban artfully beat the drum that pay tv is going to continue to dominate (and that cash is king –  jabbing at Boxee’s “revenue free” model again and again). Avner had a bit of a “home audience” advantage being surrounded by self-admitted geeks who don’t like paying for anything. But if stolen internet content wins – who will pay for great content to still be created? TV shows do not have the same tour-for-cash out that music artists have used to weather the a la carte iTunes model. Later speaker Ze Frank also mused this same dilemma – being unable to monetize his awesome web content, but unable to break into the Hollywood revenue model in a meaningful way. I have no idea what the future holds, but someone needs to get paid or the only shows being made will be for the least common denominator.

Publicizing Public Information is a Violation of Privacy – If you followed the tweetstream from Austin this weekend, you probably saw that the most substantive traffic from any session seemed to come from the very meaty presentation from MSFT-based social network researcher danah boyd (@zephoria). This is a talk that will be worth watching in its entirety (read the transcript here), but if I was struck by one takeaway it is the difference between “public” information – information that can be obtained in some way – and information that we want publicized. danah boyd strongly believes that taking something that someone has written on a public site – say a forum about travel – and using it an ad or republishing it on an aggregator – is a violation of the author’s privacy because it violates the social norms and reasonable assumptions under which the author originally shared. It was a great reminder to begin all digital strategies with the purpose of adding value to all audiences – readers and content creators alike.

QR Codes are Coming – Previously categorized as “big in Asia”, SXSW badges boasted QR codes that, with the addition of an “app for that”, allowed users to share their information with the capture of an encoded 2D barcode. The advent of this technology is just another reason to think about danahboyd’s talk and what you decide to keep private, public, or publicize in social media.

Geolocation is a Foregone Conclusion – While pre-SXSW discussion seemed to be dominated by “geolocation is the new Twitter” discussion, by the time we got to the event, it was simply accepted as a given and everyone was on to the next topic. The only discussion I did hear was a bit of debate between hometown fave Gowalla and Foursquare.