Someone asked me yesterday in a meeting: how many times a day should my people be tweeting?  He has been asked to provide his team’s plan for social media. He was having a hard time wrapping his head around what that meant as far as actual deliverables to expect from his reports, and what outcomes were actually expected of his team.

So he asked me: how many times a day should my reports tweet? How often should they blog?

He admitted that he didn’t get social media, but he knew he had to include an element of social media in his planning. In all fairness, he was looking out for his team. They are already oversubscribed on the content they need to produce – technical solutions marketing materials. In his mind, he’s trying to keep from adding another time consuming task to his team’s plate.

So we had a discussion, which I think was a little frustrating to someone who wanted to come out of the meeting with a simple checklist.

How do you “do” social media?

Is it possible to make a checklist? What activities should be on that checklist?

I think many times people equate social media with a set of tools. So they may have a checkbox on a marketing plan for social media, and to them that means they will send some tweets, add a post to Facebook and maybe a LinkedIn group, and write a blog. To me, this is not “doing” social media. This is using social media tools for corporate communication.

To me, doing social media is using all of the cool social media tools to build community. If you are using social media for marketing, the beauty of social media is that you can find your audiences and interact with directly with them. You audience is already engaged, perhaps even in a community about your product, on the social media tools we commonly think of using (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, etc). You can use these tools to find your audience, to deliver content, and to invite them to a different online meeting place, etc. You can get to know them as real people, and they will trust you enough to tell you what they really think about your services and products. The interaction part is what doing social media is all about.

What is the profile of the people on your team

This team is made up of customer facing SMEs. One of the goals is to make sure their expertise is known to our customers and partners. The individuals on this team really do need a social presence, but how can we get them there when their boss is already concerned about their available bandwidth?

This was easy to explain from a thought leadership perspective. I suggested that everyone on the team become Dell SMAC certified. Then they should follow a list of thought leaders on Twitter, and see how those folks engage and use social media tools to talk about storage topics. Spending a little time listening and interacting with the storage community with the goal of becoming part of that community is what should dictate how the individuals on the team use that tool.

I also suggested thinking of ways of integrating social media tasks into the normal work flow for his team. For instance, if a new solutions paper is released, that person also should tweet the link, write a blog post, work with my team to organize a Google Plus hangout or Twitter chat, etc. There should be a predictable pattern of events that happen with every project, so that the individuals can guarantee a slow drip-feed of good content to our external communities. This should be the bare minimum of involvement from his team members, the goal would be to find a few individuals who want to do even more.

So how many times a day should I tweet?

Even though the person I was meeting with is a solutions marketer, he still didn’t like it when I said “it depends”. Since he was making a list and metrics for his team, any number I gave to appease him would have been too high (you aren’t tweeting enough) or too low (why are you tweeting so much!!). He wanted to know to recognize tweeting success. Someone else on the call said “when they are having discussions with other well-known storage SMEs on Twitter”. I said, when other people tweet questions to your team members, you will know you they are successful.

I think in the end, he decided 2 tweets a week was a good number. Sigh. I guess #FF could count for one, right?

I offered my help to mentor and hand-hold the members of his team, and to introduce them online. I also reminded him that none of this is set in stone, and I’m looking forward to working with his team and seeing what ideas everyone else has.

How would you have answered this question – how many times a day should I tweet?

Since I do social media in an Enterprise company, many times my friends, family, and owners of the small businesses I frequent ask me for help getting started in social media. Most times I don’t have the time to really help them out. Once I win the lottery maybe I will spend all of my time helping smaller businesses harness the power of the network…..but for now I still have to do my day job.

I thought I’d put together a quick primer so my friends and families could have a place to start when it comes to social media. Comments with more helpful links and advice are most welcome!

Before we get started – you need to have a plan

If you want to use social media for your biz, you need to incorporate it into your business plan. You can most likely adopt a very broad strategy other companies use, and customize it for your product or service.

In my organization, our broad strategy is listen –> message –> engage.

• You have to listen to find your audiences, understand trends, understand terminology, scope out the competitive landscape. We use a combination of RSS feeds fed into Google Reader, Hootsuite, and an eRoom database I built, but there are tons of other tools. Check out the comments in this thread for lots of other advice on listening tools.
• Next is messaging. The content you add to social media spaces should be crafted in line with your other marketing efforts. You may be able to attract people to your social spaces based on name recognition, but they won’t stay long if you don’t provide them with current, compelling, interesting content that is useful and interesting to THEM.
  Our strategy is to post the majority of our content in our Proven Professional community on the EMC Community network. We want to have all of our really in-depth conversations there, so we post content there and make sure to link to it from other social media locations.
• The last step is to engage. This is the part people find scary, because you actually have to talk with your audience in a open, unpredictable arena. Will they be nice to you? Will they mock you? Will they drag out some flaw in your product so everyone knows about it? OMG SCARY! You have to be ready for this. But this is where the goodness of social media comes from…actually being real and talking to people.
  You may want to check out the social media engagement report from the Altimeter group to get an idea of how enterprises are using social media to engage with their customers.
• OK I lied, that is not the last step. Now you go back to listening – this time adding listening for how people are interacting with your messaging. It’s like the circle of social media life!!

The Social Applications

I’m going to go over three applications I get asked about the most. The best way to learn more is to try these apps out in your personal space, and determine from there if they will fit into your business plan.

Facebook

• You want to be on Facebook because more than 500 million people are on Facebook, so there is a good chance your audience is there. Facebook is also easy to use, so that is a plus.
• You want a Fan page. This is important – don’t make a Facebook user for your business. Create a Fan page. This allows your users to connect with you, and depending on their privacy settings your updates will be posted to your fans’ timeline. This means your fans’ friends will potentially see your updates, and connect with you.
  Here’s an older Mashable article about the 5 things a successful fan page will have.
  Check out our fan pages (Proven Professional and Academic Alliance). We’ve connected our fan pages with our Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts as well. We’re using apps from a company called Involver for that (and they are free!). We use Facebook to connect to our audiences, and to invite them to our community (where we do the bulk of our messaging/content creation). But if you don’t have the resources to maintain both, maybe a Facebook fan page is enough for you!

Twitter

• Twitter is a micro messaging tool. Users have 140 characters to get their message across. With Twitter, your customers can have a direct line to you! You can access Twitter using a web browser, a client you install on your computer or your smart phone, and even by using text messaging on your phone.
• If you are new to Twitter, you may want to use it to listen first. Do searches for your competition, set up a tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to continually search for mentions of your business or important industry terms.
• Looking for help? I’ve written two Twitter cheat sheets. One of the best places to look for help is Pistachio Consulting’s oneforty web site.
• Just remember – Twitter is very “in the stream”. Its a powerful way to connect with influencers, but it should just be one of many tools in your social media infrastructure.

FourSquare

• You may remember it as an enjoyable playground game, but in social media terms Foursquare is a geo-location mobile application. You install it on a smart phone, and then if you have your GPS enabled you can “check-in” to the businesses you frequent. You get points for checking in, and you also are awarded badges. If you check-in to a locale more than anyone else, you become the mayor!
• Why use it? First of all your customers may be using it. They check in when they get to your shop, and they can also leave tips for others who visit. This morning I left a tip about the diner where we had breakfast. If you are eating at a popular place, sometimes the tips have good advice on what to order.
• Whether you use FourSquare or not, your customers are using it, and they are advising prospective customers if your place of business is a good place to spend money. Or if your place sucks. Because of this, at the very least Foursquare is probably someplace you want to monitor.
• You can also use FourSquare to reward your customers for using FourSquare to advertise your business. Recently I checked into a Marriott and got extra Marriott rewards points for showing the check-in to the front desk staff. That was cool and made me happy to be there!
• Foursquare can also be tied to Twitter and Facebook. This will give your business more visibility every time one of your customers checks-in.

That’s my overview of social media for business – the short version. I hope it is helpful. The most important thing to remember – talk to your audiences. If you are into just controlling your image, you probably want to stay away from social media. Because once you go social, you have to commit to be real.

Here’s a question for you: if you are on Facebook (and over 500 million of us are), do you consider yourself to be one of Facebook’s customers?

(I’ll give you a second to ponder this question……………………)

If you said yes, I am a Facebook customer – well I hate to break this to you but you aren’t. Facebook’s customers are the businesses that pay for those targeted ads we see in the right-hand column of the Facebook interface. How is Facebook so good at targeting those ads?

Because Facebook users are actually the real Facebook product. The more Facebook can convince (or trick) its users to give up even more personal details, the better product they have. In fact, when they offer new features like location or the email feature they’ll announce soon – those are actually new versions of their product.

They depend on our personal information, and our interactions with people and companies, to continue to improve their offering for their real customers.

Is this a bad thing? It all depends how you feel about it. Jane Bozarth has a nice post about this same idea where she talks about privacy and Facebook. But with a service that has 500 million users that is now part of the social fabric in most countries, gaining control of your privacy isn’t as easy as just quitting Facebook.

Here are some of the things I think we have to start thinking about:

• The privacy issue goes far, far beyond pictures we share online being leaked to a 3rd party, or our emails being harvested. What Facebook is doing is mapping your online activities, who you like, who you talk to, what you play, what you read……and building applications to predict what you *should* want to see. We know that they have algorithms to show us news updates, what happens if someone decides to use this same technology to start shaping public worldview?
• What if you work for a company that expects you to be on Facebook for work? As someone who leads the social media charge for an organization, this is a real fear people have. I think we have a responsibility to listen to those fears and to find an acceptable solution (esp if we want people to “do” social at work).
• What societal implications are there if 500 million people use a product that you are reluctant to use because of privacy fears? Do you become an outsider?

I don’t think Facebook is bad, I use it A LOT. I do think people should be more aware of what Facebook is doing and act accordingly. Here are some safeguards I’ve seen people using:

• Some things are NSFFB – not safe for Facebook. Your updates are being recorded and analyzed, even if you are only sharing them with one or two people. You don’t have to put everything in Facebook – maybe a phone call or a lunch date would be a better way to share the info.
• Some parents I know do not allow pictures of their kids on FB. Others allow pics, but don’t allow their kids to be identified. If you are a parent, decide what is right for you and your family and let others know
• This is my most radical idea – but maybe we should try to find ways to mess with the data collection system. You don’t have to have correct info in your profile – lie about your age, your location. When grocery stores first started using the frequent buyer cards, I was part of a group who would change cards every few months. The goal was to find someone completely different from you, and switch with them, so the store couldn’t get a correct profile on you based on what you bought. Do we need something like that for FB?

What do you think? Do you think the harvesting of our personal connections, likes and dislikes presents a societal shift? Do you think people who understand the mechanics of this shift have a responsibility to start sounding the warning bell on this issue? Or do you have suggestions on how to protect this information? Share ‘em in the comments!

This book review is about Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Extending Learning by Jane Bozarth.

The first thing I want to say is that in my opinion, this book is not just for trainers. If you are trying to move from using social media for marketing to using social media to engage with your audiences, you should read this book.

You should also read this book if you are a trainer (or you develop training). The book starts by defining social media terms. Then each chapter covers a specific social media tool: Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Wikis, and a catch-all chapter for other tools (such as Google docs, YouTube, social bookmarking, SlideShare, Skype, and UStream). The final chapter discusses social learning. Basically, if you need a primer on what all of these things are, you want to pick up this book.

This book is designed to help you situate your understanding of these tools to your own environment. Each chapter defines the tool, gives disadvantages and advantages of the tool in training situations, explains when the tool can be used instead of other things, or when it should be used in addition to other tools. Each chapter has a getting started page, and then a large section of practical examples.

For example, the Facebook and other communities chapter provides many examples of how to engage with learners, and how to draw them out into conversations. One suggestion was to “show that you are reading others’ posts by referring to them in your own posts; construct an argument, offering evidence and supporting resources, remember that a good post is one that gets people thinking and makes them want to reply”. Also the section on Intersession Work has two pages of suggestions on how to use Facebook group to extend a formal learning experience. But if you manage a community, you should check out some of the suggestions (don’t be surprised if you see some in the Proven Professional community soon!).

So yes, this is yet another post about education. If you deliver or create content for training, get this book. Or is this post more than just another education post? If you want to move to social media engagement, not just social media marketing, you should get this book too!

This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network.

This week’s Roundup is going to be a short one, we should be back to our normal schedule next week!

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Next Knowledge Sharing eSeminar is next week!

If you a Proven Professional, and you are interested in learning more about reclamation of SAN storage, sign up for the Knowledge Sharing eSeminar scheduled for Sept 14. More details here.

Were you at the Toronto EMC Forum?

Candace was, and she has posted pictures to the Proven Professional Facebook Fan page. You can find more pictures on the EMC Forums page. Next up: New York. Who’s going?

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Roy Mikes shares this year’s book of Knowledge Sharing abstracts – his Knowledge Sharing article was published in it!
• From Jas Dhalliwal (from EMC Consulting): ITIL and the Private Cloud

What were you up to this week?

We are at the end of Q3. Who is studying?

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

This post has been cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network.

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven Professional Community:

University Spotlight

The University Spotlight highlights one of the universites involved in the EMC Academic Alliance program. This month, the spotlight is on Georgia Southern University.There is a VMware IT Academy Center at GSU! Go read about professor (and Proven Professional) Dr. Timur Mirzoev, and listen to the recorded webinar that was held by EMC Education Services and Dr. Mirzoev on Digital Universe in the Cloud : Preparing Your Students for Careers in IT.

IDC cites impact of Proven certification. How does it impact you?

Speaking of being prepared for careers in IT…..the IDC white paper The Proven Professional Certification – Proving Certification Can Profit cited the impact of the Proven Professional certification program on the storage indutry skill gap. How does this impact you? We need your stories! Please add your Proven Professional story here!

Proven Benefit: Participate in Exam Building Workshops

If you have a Proven Professional certification, you are eligible to help write new Proven Professional exams. The schedule of exams the team needs participants for is located in this document in the Proven Professionals ONLY community. More information on eligibility for the exam building program, see this discussion.

If you are a Proven Professional, and are have problems accessing the exam building links, please use this troubleshooting document.

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Steve Todd is going to be a manager, and is expecting his new reports to become Proven Professionals!
• VMware
  • Here’s a list of all the VMware Twitter accounts
  • Gregg’s Blog (of EMC Consulting) has a great virtual round-up for all your VMware social media information needs.
  • Roy Mikes posted how to connect your iPad to VMware View
  • Techhead posted that vChat episode 3 is up, and its about vSphere home labs
• Alexander Holt (of EMC Consulting) talks about troubleshooting scripts (and the importance of remember the basics)
• Jas Dhalliwal (of EMC Consulting) explains the basics of an attack on a cloud, and mechanisms available to protect against that.
• Did you know there are two new SCSI commands? Barry Burke blogs about them here, and explains what they have to do with storage reclamation.

Did everyone survive Friday the 13th? I know from the post on the Proven Professional Facebook Fan page wall that lots of people are studying for Proven Professional certification exams, make sure to ask questions in the community if you need clarification on anything. We are a community of experts, we should be helping each other close that storage skills gap!

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

Today there are stories everyplace about social media sites such as Facebook. Everyone I know is on it – my kids, my mom, workmates, classmates, and old friends from college & high school. I love reconnecting with old friends, and playing Mafia Wars (I am not going to deny it).

So is Facebook just for fun and games? Can you really use Facebook to do anything related to work (or learning)?

Absolutely YES. I’ll explain with a story.

As may you know I work at EMC developing training for our Network management products. Our internal audience is small compared to the internal audiences that support our storage products, so once you are in this space it doesn’t take long to meet everyone. I met Mark when I first started in the space, and we connected right away because he’s from south of Atlanta and knows exactly where my hometown is. He was also in school like I am.

Unfortunately, Mark was a victim of our cost saving efforts. But we were already friends on Facebook, so we would comment every once in a while about our status. Last week he made a comment about being busy with school (lots of those comments during midterms!) and we started up a conversation on Facebook.

I found out from that conversation that Mark is now at NetQoS. Which is pretty interesting, since EMC Smarts can now be connected to NetQoS. And that connection is sorta/kinda related to some training I just started working on.

So Facebook has kept me related to my GA friend Mark. Because of our common connections (school and the South) we were able to unearth another connection, one that may come in handy for upcoming projects.

I’m connected to other field guys on Facebook as well. Seeing pictures of their families, their hobbies, even seeing their answers to those infamous notes help connect with them as real people, not just an audience that consumes the training I write. My friend Dave Spencer wrote about this a while back when he asked if you should friend your boss on Facebook.

So I can’t really do work on Facebook, but getting work done is enabled because of the social connections I have strengthend on Facebook.

Now having said all this, you have to remember that all of these sites are tools. You have to understand how to manage them, and even if you want to be involved with them at all. But that is going to have to be a post for another day.