Getting Your Feet Wet In Social Media & Community

There are a ton of great blog posts, presentations, people, books on social media and community out there. It is really hard to find an aggregated list that is worth looking at when you are just starting to get your feet wet. We’ve put together some of the things we’ve found most useful and categorized them:

• Why Should I Care?
• Understanding the Basics
• How Does this Apply to Organizations?
• Examples Please?
• How Do I Get Started?
• Taking It A Step Further: Community Management

Why Should I Care?

The short answer here is because everyone is doing it and while that is NOT a strategy, it means the people you would like to be communicating with are likely using social media tools so you should be too. You still need to figure out why you should (i.e. are your constituents using these tools) and how you should (i.e. what are you hoping to accomplish by doing so and how is the best way to do that).

This is a great video of how the social web and new information channels are changing the world:

This presentation offers a brief intro into what social media is and how it is being used:

While this presentation seems very consumer-oriented, a big part of that large online crowd are people working in organizations that interact with other organizations. Now that we’ve established this is an increasingly important communications channel, lets get to the specifics.

Understanding the Basics

Are you starting from ground zero and feel like a better definition of Twitter, blogging, RSS feeds, and other terms would be useful? CommonCraft does some phenomenal short videos explaining a lot of these concepts. Here is their video on Twitter:

Other Plain English videos we like are Blogs, Social Networking, Twitter Search, Wikis, RSS, Podcasting, & Social Media

Shift Communications has put together a fantastic resource regarding how to use all of these different tools called PR2.0 – Shift Communications Reference Guide. Regardless of the PR approach this is a great resource for anyone and since it is a PDF – download it and print it out for a good plane read.

How Does this Apply to Organizations?

Organizations are using social media tools in many, many ways – from internal collaboration to communications/PR to marketing to knowledge management to co-innovation to customer support to supplier management to recruiting so it’s not possible to share the specifics of all the ways organizations are using social media and community strategies (and best practices are still evolving rapidly – that’s why The Community Roundtable exists).  However, these two presentations give an overview of how to think about using these social tools in a business environment.

Examples Please?

One of the best ways to learn is to watch and listen to what other organizations are doing. There are a few good resources for this:

• The Social Organization – Examples
• Peter Kim’s Wiki of Social Marketing Examples
• WOMMA’s Marketing Case Study Library
• Beth Kanter’s Examples of Non-Profits Using Social Media
• SocialText’s Fortune 500 Blogging Examples and Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies

How Do I Get Started?

There are two things you should do to start: Absorb and Listen

Absorb – Resources to read, listen, and watch

• Chris Brogan’s Blog
• Beth Kanter’s Blog
• Jeremiah Owyang’s Blog
• Quick & Dirty Podcast with Aaron Strout and Jennifer Leggio
• Mashable
• Janet Fouts’ Blog
• My Post: Social Media is Not Community
• See our blog roll for more

Listen – Ways to understand what’s happening already

1. Create a manageable list of keywords – brand names, industry terms, executive names, influencer names and search for those terms on the most common search engines and social networks (this is where tools can help).

2. Search – I like a new search engine called Yauba for finding and segregating search results by websites, blogs, Twitter, etc. and by content type. However, when you are first starting out take a spin around Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, etc. or your own intranet to see what you can find (typically you do not need an account) – I bet it will surprise you.

Taking It A Step Further: Community Management

Community management is the discipline of managing your constituent community – wherever they happen to be hanging out. It’s a role that has been around in some places for years but is just now becoming a well understood role for the majority of organizations. We blog about it here but there are also some other fantastic resources that our members publish (yes, we are going to brag and give them a lot of credit – we think they are some of the most advanced thinkers in this space out there):

• Amber Naslund’s Altitude Branding Blog
• Connie Bensen’s Community Strategist Blog
• Tom Humbarger’s Social Media Musings
• Heather Stout’s Social Media Building Blocks, in particular her series “Community Implementation Strategic Plan“
• Mike Pascucci’s Online Moderation & Management Musings
• Ken Burbery’s Web Business

And, if you are still with us, we’ve put a presentation together on the Eight Competencies to Socializing your Organization which talks about what community management is responsible for:

Thanks for visiting us – we hope you found this useful. If you would like more information about what we do, please stop by here.