Lots of articles (like this one) describe the duties of community manager as strengthening the responsiveness of the business to the customer, creating content and analyzing fans’ response to this content, and telling the company story through customers’ stories. These are very worthwhile goals, and building a better relationship between the brand and its customers is something a social business must do — it’s not an option, it’s just how business is. Your community will revolve around content — content that’s created, iterated, discussed by the community and content that originates from the community. But are responsiveness and content community management? I don’t think so, because it mentions nothing of building deep relationships with your customers and helping your customers create these relationships with each other. It mentions nothing of the difficult work of actually increasing intimacy between a group of people driven by passion — warts and all. Social media professionals and community managers are like Venn diagrams — they are hugely overlapping (and the amount of overlap depends on your context), but they aren’t the same or mutually exclusive. Social tools help community managers scale and be more effective, build better communities and even provide conduits between communities. However, you don’t need social media to have a community.

“Would you define a farmer by the tools he uses? No.  A farmer is someone who cultivates a farm,” Maddie Rudd said in the comments below, and I think she nailed it.

Here’s how I view the different roles and the tools they use:

1) Social media marketing is using social channels to amplify the marketing message, and smart social media marketers know how to tell a brand story through customer stories. If you have done your work of becoming a more social business —  on the inside and outside — you will have an easier time rallying customers to tell their stories. They may even do it without you prompting That being said, you won’t go very far in your marketing efforts if what your customers are actually saying doesn’t resonate with the message you are trying to cultivate. The brilliant social media marketers aren’t heavy-handed; rather, they are facilitators. You need to give your customers an experience worthy of sharing, and help them share it.

2) Social business is about making social a process and building it into various parts of the business (this is the hardest, I think, because it really challenges existing processes and existing culture). You can’t become a social business over night, and the process is truly evolutionary. The object of a social business is to optimize around creating better customer experiences across all the different touchpoints: product itself, marketing, service, sales. It’s about listening first, creating insights with data, acting upon those insights and inviting the customer “into the fold” to figure out the future. It’s also about making your business more nimble and able to move at the speed of business, to become more proactive instead of reactive.

3) Community management is about creating collaboration spaces where various groups come together to create something greater than themselves and greater than they would create on their own. It’s about the depth of relationship that you can’t develop through casual interchanges, and it’s grounded in passion and vision. You can certainly create a community by using social tools, and it’s not about the tool as much as it is about its dynamics, its ability to solve problems for its constituents, and the amount of value created together.

From the standpoint of a company-hosted customer community.. At times, I’ve seen conflict between social media marketers and community managers, arising from the messiness that a community brings with it. Communities are made of passion, and passion is unpredictable (that last bit is homage to something I heard John Hagel say once). That doesn’t mean that a community is synonymous with lawlessness. Community management (the term with which I take issue also) is the difficult and exciting work of figuring out who the members of the community are, what their needs are and what jobs they’ve come to do, and helping the community form and evolve its norms. In the end, a healthy community will generate solutions that will drive all of its members forward — including the company that hosts the customer community. It will also result in great customer stories which can be used for social media marketing, and it will help the company become a social business through listening and working through problems together. See how it all ties together?

4) Social media itself is not really a job, it’s a set of tools — a pathway for person-to-person communications, which can be for any of the jobs listed above. Saying you are a social media manager is like saying you are a phone or email manager. Ok great, but for what purpose? Personal aside: I want to strike the word media from describing what’s now known as social media. It’s not media at all, and as long as we keep thinking of it as a broadcast, we’ll keep not meeting its full potential.

I didn’t write this post to split hairs about definitions — anyone who knows me knows that I don’t care what you call something, as long as you actually do it. But words have meaning, and we need to be deliberate in how we use them and transfer this meaning to others. Neither job is better or worse, but they are different, and so are the skills necessary for them. It’s entirely possible that in some companies, social and community are performed by the same person. In my job, I used to do both, and have since transitioned the day-to-day social activities to another employee (although I still oversee processes and internal training and education). I now focus on creating better processes, designing better communities and making sure that all stakeholders — employees and customers — are well supported when they tell their stories.

Photo credit: D Sharon Pruitt

Last week I participated in a #CMGR tweet chat (a tweet chat for community management professionals). When I do find time to participate, it’s always a real treat, and so it’s one of my top tweetchats that I try to attend. Last week we talked about influencer programs. As a community “purist”, I’ve always felt a little torn about influencer programs, and a little uneasy about the term “influencer”. When I think of what an influencer is in social media circles (vs. what an influencer really is), my mind conjures at times unsavory images. Here are my feelings on the subject of influence and influencer campaigns.

What’s influence anyway? Here’s where I could take a cheap shot at current measures of online influence, which would get me some traffic and clicks. I’m not going to do that because that would make me a social media d-bag. All I’m going to say is that what we see online is only one teeny-tiny part of actual influence. Actual influence is a composite and complex notion that has to include online, offline and everything in between. In the context of online influence, what we should be concerned about is driving either awareness or action (click, participation, engagement, purchase). The ability to link these in a meaningful way still does not exist; or maybe I just don’t know it — if so, just leave me a comment here. The analytics market is still in its infancy, and I’m pretty confident in making that statement.

Let’s say you were able to identify your influencers — hopefully you looked at qualitative and quantitative measures, across several tools (one of which should be your “gut” and your knowledge of your own industry). Here are some thoughts to keep in mind…

Your customers are your influencers: I  know, I know, online influence and advocacy are totally different concepts. But are they really? At the end of the day, those are the people who vote with their wallet or their behavior. Those are the people who tell their peers, colleagues (for B2B products) and friends and family (for B2C products) about your product. Those are the people who will tweet and blog about you, fill out review sites. As such, it’s probably a good idea to listen to them. Bloggers and members of the press are also influencers, but your relationship with them is going to be different. While bloggers, press and analysts move the needle for awareness and trial, your customers will move other customers to action, purchase and renewal. It’s imperative that you have a solid relationship with this group of influencers, and the best way to do so is to have a solid product, send them impactful news and early previews of the product, and again – shocker! – ask them what they think and take their feedback seriously. I’ll tell you this: if you have made advocates out of your customers, “industry” will follow.

The only influencer program you will need: If your customers are your influencers, then you should ask yourself what they want from you and delight them by giving it to them in spades. They want to get their job done, and it’s your ability to help them do that that will determine their affinity and championship. The second thing that will strengthen brand championship is having direct input int your business. Obviously, you aren’t going to include every suggestion in your roadmap, and you should set expectations appropriately. However, it makes sense to institutionalize how you listen to your customers and their underlying problems (if your product isn’t solving a problem, you have bigger problems). At Yammer, for example, we have a private customer community and an advisory board, who have a direct line to company executives in structured and unstructured ways for feedback and collaboration. And yes, investing in transparent and collaborative relationships with your customer community can be a competitive advantage — you just have to be ready to invest in it. Pardon me as I get on my little soapbox for a few minutes, but I love what our customer champion Diane Gaines said about our customer community (quoting with her permission of course):

“…my point is about the unique way in which availability and transparency are created using the [Yammer Customer Community] as a medium. I can’t think of any other vendors I hang out with all day—that might not be perceived as “value” from business leaders, but it creates a loyalty I don’t have to anyone else; thus, a competitive advantage for Yammer.”

Fix your fundamentals first, send gifts second: Your customers don’t want stickers or shiny objects if you aren’t meeting the bare basics from above. But if your customers derive value from your product in solving actual problems they have — sure, you can send your key customers gifts. In fact, for those customers who go above and beyond in their contributions in the community, you should have some kind of recognition program. If you have a customer community, you can easily observe extraordinary contributions.

When’s the right time? If you define an influencer program as the one giving your customers the best customer experience, the best time to start an influencer program is on Day One To connect with the press and bloggers, make sure your product is ready for big-time; otherwise you will blow your trust with that important group of people.

To conclude…

Although it may seem this way, I’m not cynical towards traditional influencer programs; there is a ton of value in them. You may use social analytics to help you find people who have an impact on others in a certain topic — people who get others to act — to seed your product to spread awareness and gather feedback. You may share something special with them, due to their expertise in a certain area. However, to truly capture their attention and move them to advocacy, make sure you spend the time listening and internalizing that feedback. To throw free stuff at people and not care about what they say will surely sabotage your efforts. To really have an enduring relationship of mutual influence takes time and effort, and a real commitment to listening and learning. Influencer programs may capture initial attention, but it takes true advocacy to keep it.

Photo credit: Sean MacEntee

Can you really separate? In this transparent social world, it’s getting harder and harder to separate the professional and personal. Since social emphasizes relationships, how can you expect to build professional relationship without transcending into personal? You will always have a stronger business relationship if you can relate to people as a human being.

Let passion drive you: In an ever-competitive professional world, the notion of passion is more important today than it’s ever been. People who are passionate about their jobs will win over those who aren’t. If your personal and professional passion don’t collide, then you should probably do something else. If you are passionate about all these parts of your life, why siphon them into separate accounts? That way, they won’t be nearly as impactful. In a channel that values conversation, true passion is obvious, and lack thereof makes you come off disingenuous and uninteresting.

Plan serendipity: Some of the best connections I’ve made have been because of another interest. It’s this serendipity that allows you to discover mutually beneficial relationships. Imagine meeting a future partner or customer at your child’s soccer game or at the dog park. Social media is no different. You may be talking to someone about something else entirely, get to know each  other and discover you want to work on something else together. Become open to these encounters — online and offline — and put as much about yourself upfront so that your “loose” connections can get to know you. I’m reading a great book right now, “The Power of Pull” by John Hagel and John Seely Brown lately; it explores the ability to attract and retain the resources you need to solve problems, and doing so “at the edge” of your networks, in places you don’t expect. Serendipity happens, but you do have to plan it.

Help people know you: People you work with (colleagues, customers, partners) will want to see a tasteful glimpse into who you are and what moves you. It will help them get to know you, and tidbits they share will help you get to know them. If you have multiple interests, great! Talk about them. Let others see what a multidimensional person you are. After all a future client may share your interest for knitting.

The logistics: Finally, do you really want to upkeep all these accounts? Personally, I don’t have the time or brain capacity to remember to update all these places. The more you fracture your presence, the less meaningful each presence in each account will be, because there’s just not enough time. Would you rather do one thing well or many things “half-ass”?

“Oh but I don’t feel comfortable sharing personal in a professional setting,” you may say. This is where balance comes in, I’d say. If you are trying to build a professional career, you probably should mind your tweets in the first place, no matter what account you are posting to. Everything you tweet and blog will get archived and indexed by Google anyway (and also everything said about you, for that matter) — so you should probably get into the habit of not tweeting every random thing that comes into your head (and please never tweet that you are going to the bathroom!). At the same time, you do want to add personal views and details, and share what you are doing — as long as it’s tasteful, relevant and passes the “New York Times front page” test. Think about it this way… Before social media, you engaged in small talk to get to know the people you are doing business with anyway. You were sharing some personal detail, adding personal commentary, without oversharing. Do the same thing in social media.

You can still send different messages to different groups of people, by platform. For example, my Facebook is for friends only — or at least people I know personally. My Twitter is wide-open and can be found by anyone. I share there more often, keeping it a mixture of personal and professional, always keeping in mind that any of it can be Googled. In Google+, you can share to discreet groups of friends. If you want to vary your content, I’d recommend doing it across networks vs. across several profiles in one network.

Photo credit: Stebaneze

I actually didn’t come up with this title to get clicks. I was feeling genuinely bored of “How to set up your Google+ Circles” and “Whom to follow on Google+” blogposts. I was counting down the days until we have lists of top 10 people to put in your circle. And then Netflixgate happened, at the best possible time. What the heck is Netflixgate? Have a look at this lovely blogpost — apparently our beloved Netflix decided that it loves us so much it will give us the “lowest priced plan ever”.. For streaming.. Double that price for a DVD plan. Needless to say, there are several thousand comments across the blog commenting system and Facebook. Add to that the Twitter avalanche… Yikes, I’d hate to be their social media person right now — trust me, I emphasize as someone who works in this space. However, my pity and understanding only goes so far, since Netflix committed some pretty obvious faux-pas, at least to a trained eye.

Before I go into an obligatory list of “what went wrong”, I’d like to explain the title of this blog. I do think that how businesses act in a situation like Netflixgate is actually much more impactful to the future of this whole social thing. Google+ is a tool. Tools are operated by people. When people from a company tweet and blog, they engage with people, regardless of the tools they use. As a social business, your job is to build an organization-wide process that allows and empowers these people to act in a way that adds value all around. This kind of business wouldn’t let Netflixgate happen. It is painfully obvious to a trained eye that social isn’t part of the business fabric at Netflix. It’s an afterthought and a silo that happily tweets at people.

Ok, now time for the obligatory list of what went wrong:

No crisis response:

Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit. It’s very clear that Netflix wasn’t prepared to handle what just happened. Unfortunately, things like these happen time and time again to companies large and small. Fortunately, things like these happen, so the next companies can watch and learn and think through a crisis response. For some reason, Netflix did not learn from the likes of Nestle, BP, Marc Jacobs and others that came before it. A crisis response doesn’t mean that the poor social media person is running around crying and dusting off the good ole’ resume. A crisis response  plan has to be truly cross-functional, where the right people are alerted, and up to the highest ranks. Then they get together and think through a response — and a fast one! As of the time of this writing, the last tweet from @netflix and @netflixhelps is from 6 hours ago and happens to be the actual announcement of the price hike.

I’m sorry, Netflix, but did you not expect this? Did you think you were going to send your tidy little tweet about how awesome your prices are and that everyone was going to cheer you on? You should’ve known this was going to be contentious. The old adage still holds “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.

Basically, what Netflix says to us is that they like Twitter as a one-way broadcast mechanism, but if someone says something back, they will not engage. I understand that the volume of things to respond to is staggering, and it would be pure insanity to expect this poor social media person to respond to each one. What could work very well, though, is a tweet saying “We hear your feedback loud and clear and will be in touch with next steps”. What comes after this tweet really depends on what your business intends to do: if you intend to make changes, say you are sorry and say you will be backtracking or making new decisions. If you don’t plan to take critique into account, still say you are sorry, but you are sticking to your guns because X, Y and Z. Whatever you plan to do, don’t bullshit. Opaque PR spin serves no one. This brings me to my next point…

Don’t spin and don’t insult your customers:

I’ve been watching Twitter and Facebook reactions for a few hours, and one thing is clear: more people are offended by the smug blogpost full of PR spin than by the actual price hike. I know I am. Hey, we get it — business is tough. Many of us, consumers, have lost or are losing jobs, and our dollar is getting squeezed everywhere. We get it, you have to raise prices.But please don’t insult our intelligence by saying “here’s the lowest price ever!” only to find out in the next paragraph that we are actually paying twice now. We are smarter than you think, and spin doesn’t work in social. Just don’t do it. I’d rather you not tweet or blog if you can’t be at least somewhat honest. Ah, yes, everyone’s favorite topic of transparency. I’m not saying you should publish your financials or proprietary / competitive info, but treating us like we can’t do math is insulting.

Please see the screenshot below for verbiage of the blogpost:

Please note how different the voice in the blogpost is different from email. In the email, Netflix is honest about raising prices due to costs. Nice and honest, and to the point!

Raising prices is fine, with caveats:

See above: we get that you have to raise prices. However, there are a few caveats:

1. Find a way to grandfather in your existing customers. A gripe that I have with many businesses is that they value new customers more than existing ones. I get it: customer acquisition, blah blah blah. But because an existing customer has been giving you money for years, doesn’t make him / her less valuable than new customers. If you expect loyalty, you need to learn how to give it.
2. Stagger your increases. It’s much easier to swallow when you increase prices little by little. Personally, I’m not very price sensitive; I can afford this increase. But what about those who can’t? What about the hardworking blue-collar family that’s scraping by to survive with skyrocketing medical costs? Do you really want to spring a 40% increase on them? Unless that’s the customer segment you are trying to eliminate. Then go right ahead.
3. Offer a bundle price. Here’s the biggest gripe about this development: because the streaming service has a vastly inferior movie selection, people have to get both services. I like the convenience of streaming, but it’s hard for me to cancel DVD, because I like movies that came out in the past 5  years. If through your product, you make me buy two, please also allow me to bundle the price.
4. Improve your service so people don’t mind paying more. Enough said I wouldn’t mind paying Netflix more for streaming or for streaming-only plans if I was getting a decent product. The way it stands right now, I have to also get DVDs. Improve the product, then tell me how awesome it is and ask for more money. I’ll give it to you.

Don’t treat social as an afterthought:

I know the blogger / social media person is usually just relaying the message from the company to the customers. And here’s the kicker: social should have a seat at the table and not be an afterthought in a company’s operations. Rather than making product decisions and thinking through a PR plan, only to loop in social after the fact, why not make social part of the conversation from the beginning? Hey, we are thinking of raising our prices by 40%? What do you think will happen on Facebook? Or should we not even say anything and just “surprise” people? You need to think these things through and make social a part of every conversation that will impact the external audience from the beginning. Clearly, folks at Neflix didn’t work together to hatch this plan. Personally, I know I’d never approve a blogpost that took this tone. How you say something matters. See above point about spin.

And this is why I think it’s a far more important and complex conversation to talk about the processes that govern our use of tools than features of tools themselves. This is why this fascinates me more than Circles on G+ (which are really cool by the way!)

1) It’s a social media job; use social media channels

Ideally, you would find this opportunity via social media. Whenever there is a social media job available, please be assured that it will be tweeted, Facebooked, blogged, etc. The best way to demonstrate that you are the right person is to act like you are. Your ability to simply find the job opening signals that you: know how to keyword search and are plugged into the community by following the right people. If the job is worthwhile, it will get amplified by individuals whom you should probably be following. Even if you didn’t find the job in a social channel, you should still try to connect with that company online. Send us a tweet, leave us a blog comment — show us you know how to use the tools, not just know what they are.

2) Demonstrate interest and passion for the space

How do you know whom to follow? If you are truly interested in the space, you should be able to figure this out. Start with keyword searches first, and soon you will discover who the doers and the thinkers are. It may take you a little while to figure out, but if you are truly committed to the space, you will follow breadcrumbs to great people and great content. Follow Twitter lists, follow people whom your networks read and follow, join communities for practitioners. Listen first, then start participating. Keep up with news, try services and apps, while honing your eye to understand which platforms and services have longevity built in.

3) Know the industry and the company

In addition to being interested in the craft of social media, you should also know the industry your target company is in. Passion is paramount when you are in such a public role; your community will be able to tell insincerity and lack of passion. If you want to move people to action, you have to be credible; you need to live and breathe your industry. Recently, I saw @climbergirl speak about how she came to represent REI in social media. She grew her presence organically by being there and connecting with others around her passion: climbing. If you aren’t passionate about social in the workplace, you probably shouldn’t apply for Yammer; if you don’t care about helping young parents and babies, you probably shouldn’t work for Huggies. There are several ways to show that you are serious about the industry –steps you can take in the long term and in the short term. In the long term, if you wait until the day you apply, it’s too late — you should’ve been developing your presence and your voice already. In the short term, please say something about the company and the industry in your application materials. We, the hiring managers, know that you are applying to other jobs (duh!), but if you can’t take the few minutes to replace your canned letters with something more personalized and relevant, why should we take the time to read your resume? True story: someone called Yammer a gaming company in their cover letter. They got discarded immediately.

4) Don’t waste time on a cover letter — keep it short

Speaking of cover letters (and  this applies to all jobs, not just social media), please keep them short. We, the hiring managers, are reviewing resumes on top of our jobs, which are often rather busy, which is why we are looking for help in the first place. If we can’t get through your letter in 30 seconds and understand who you are — enough to move on at least — you are going to get tossed or put in the “maybe” pile. If you do write a cover letter, cut the length and cut the B.S. We don’t really care why you are really awesome at spreadsheets; we are looking at raw talent, communication skills, passion for the space and a general interest and facility with social tools. We also want you to capture our attention quickly, as you have to do in tweets and blogposts. We don’t want big words, we don’t care how you optimized a synergy in a holistic approach. We do care if you bleed this stuff — yes, if you want to be on the cutting edge, you do have to bleed. One guy captured me by giving a link to his blog and saying how he blogged when he couldn’t sleep. That gave me chills. Be careful though of exaggeration, though; to an experienced practitioner, it’s very obvious when you mean it and when you don’t. Botton line: beware of B.S.

5) Be human

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you have to write a cover letter, you are probably doing it wrong. If you are applying for a social media job, spend less time on job sites applying and writing cover letters, and more time trying to find the hiring manager through your personal networks. I understand that you are young and don’t have big networks, but we are out there and available. Using myself as an example: I’m everywhere and easy to find — you can ping me on @themaria, @yammer, leave a comment on this blog, leave a comment on the Yammer blog, Yammer FB page or LinkedIn group, come spin some records at Turntable.fm (yep, someone did that!). You can find us at a public conference or event; we social media people are often at in-person events. Check us out on Plancast, but please don’t stalk; walk the line between letting people know you are there and being annoying.

Do anything, do something! Just by doing that, you will put yourself in the 90th percentile of applicants (as the applicant pool stands today). Please don’t just throw your cover letters into an abyss. Social media is about being human, so please be human. I find that a personal email with bullet points introducing your resume works better than a formal letter. When you find us online, please take a few moments and figure out what we are all about in our jobs. If you are applying for a job and haven’t read the company’s blog / slides on Slideshare / etc, you probably won’t get picked. Make sure to work that into the conversation. Bonus points if you comment on the blog

6) Show, don’t tell

We don’t care about long drawn-out laundry list of irrelevant experiences and self-proclaimed awesomeness. Let your digital profile speak for itself. You probably don’t have a huge digital profile to speak of, but if drunken pictures are the only thing that comes up when I google you, that’s not good.  You need to show that you are deliberate and conscientious about what you put out there. If you are passionate about a subject, start a blog or a Twitter account. You don’t have to post 1500-word posts; you can opt for a shorter, more casual format like Posterous.

7) Follow instructions

Speaking of your digital presence.. Make sure you enclose links to your work in your short letter / introductory paragraph. If the job description specifically asks for links to your profiles and says that applications without links won’t be considered, you better believe it! Sure, we could Google your blog, but if you make it easier to find yourself, you score bonus points.

Be interesting and relevant

See #5: be human. To really make an impact and stand out from the crowd, be interesting. I read over a hundred resumes, but I only remember 5 or so off the top of my head. The “awake at night” guy, the people who tweeted, the people who talked about our blog content, and the guy who came to hang out in the Yammer Turntable room

Although this post was inspired by what I saw and experienced recently, while looking for an intern, this advice actually goes for all job levels. The biggest mistake you could make when looking for an internship is to treat it as “less than a job”. Many internships end up in full-time offers (if you bring the awesome), and even if they don’t, it’s job experience that can help you land a full-time job. In case you are wondering, the Internet is a big place, but this is a “small world”; word of awesomeness travels fast via the backchannel, as well as publicly.

Photo source: Tambako the Jaguar

I think social has done a lot for community building as it’s lowered some barriers to entry; communities are more participatory as structure can melt away quickly. They come together and disband to support ad-hoc models of conversation and collaboration. In some ways, communities are multi-platform, as well as platform-agnostic. At the same time, the lowering of barriers has weakened the ties and the loyalty that community members feel towards each other. For example, coming together for a tweetchat or a hashtagged conversation is usually a wonderful experience by which you can build real and lasting relationships with people. However, sometimes these events fall victim to unscrupulous users “hijacking” a hashtag and using it for blatant self-promotion without much concern for the community. Of course, looser connections are partially to blame, as is the fleeting nature of some social channels. As a result, lack of forethought going into tweets generates a consequence-free environment. This consequence-free environment is, of course, erroneous for several reasons ranging from personal branding to professional reputation.

I also think there’s another factor at play in addition to looseness of connections and the fleeting nature. I think that each person getting the virtual microphone is feeding into our sense of entitlement. Entitlement is one of those complex constructs that’s as good as it is bad. Entitlement helps us be the individualistic society that we are today, and for better or worse, that’s the kind of society we are (here in the U.S.). Sense of entitlement helps kids do better in society and career-wise, as evidenced by examples from “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. Entitlement helps feed the attitude “Why not me? I’m just as good as anyone else and my ideas are awesome”. This attitude is what helps entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground, and push forward in face of great adversity. It’s the fabric of the “can do” attitude that makes the world go ’round.

However, a sense of entitlement is not without faults. It breeds contempt and the “I’m more important than you” attitude that allows for behaviors like hijacking and shameless self promotion. Can we also talk about the practice of self-validation stemming from the number of followers and expectation of better service and free stuff based on such metrics. Sometimes, I feel like a lot of these behaviors are there to feed egos and create “house of cards” careers (ahem.. drive-by-jobs).

I also think we as a community ecosystem perpetuate these behaviors and are all to blame for that kind of behavior, which is focused on the wrong results, wrong behaviors and wrong metrics. We will continue down that path if we:

1. Continue to give free stuff to people who have done nothing to deserve it;
2. Continue to give far better service to people with more followers and higher Klout scores than people without. I’ll go on the record again to state that I love Klout for some business use cases, and service is not one of them;
3. Continue to expect (1) and (2) by yelling, screaming and intimidation. On the other end of any Twitter account – business or personal – is a human being. That person is someone’s mother and someone’s brother;
4. Continue to expect retweets and follows and pestering others to get them. A follow and a retweet is a privilege, and it has to be earned first;
5. Continue collecting followers;
6. Validate ourselves and others by the number of followers and friends we’ve collected like human trophies.

Before you start huffing and puffing that you have so many followers, ask yourself if Twitter (or social network X) went away tomorrow, would you be able to rebuild your “following” on another network. Because that’s really what matters. Well, the answer is, if you are an entitled jacka%$, probably not.

So my challenge to you is to channel your sense of entitlement towards something positive — that indomitable thirst for achievement, innovation, idea exchange.  Add value every day, and if you feel entitled to something — whether it’s free goods, better service, retweets or follows — make sure it’s because you add value to the ecosystem. If you build up the community, it will build you up in turn.

Photo credit: Chris Blakeley

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and throughout my experiences I’ve come to the realization that Corporate America is driven by the short term thinking. This is not exactly an astounding revelation, but I think it’s worth exploring vis-a-vis its impact on how businesses are run and the impact of that thinking on companies’ social media health. Here’s how I see it… Due to the influence of Wall Street and quarterly earnings, the Western economy seems to live and die by what happens in the next 3 months. Of course, having measurable short-term goals is very important — how else would you reach your big goals if you don’t break them up into chunks? However, you can’t focus on the short-term without a very disciplined commitment to the long-term. And this is where things fall apart.

I believe that over the past decades, companies have tried to squeeze out every dollar for the sake of being more profitable in the short term, and where they squeezed from was often critical areas of customer support, investing in customer experience. Customer service is a short-term expense that won’t always materialize until the longer term horizon, because time passes, as repurchases and peer recommendations happen. However, in the long term bad customer experience erodes revenues. Why does this matter now more than ever before? Well, I think it should’ve always mattered, but I also think that social media exposes these bad practices. Customers are now free to talk about you, and inadequate service experience is no longer between just the company and the customer.

Case in point: I just went through a horrible experience with TD Bank, who failed to close my account when I asked them to (last August). Since I was under the impression it was closed, I never thought to follow-up, especially since I work and travel all the time, just got married, was gone for a long time, and never even use this account anymore. Since the account was kept open, each month I got pinged with a service charge until most of the money was gone. I discovered this and called them up, had to talk to several different departments, each of which refused to give me the $ back, neither of which could close the account for me on the phone (I was informed I had to call a branch during office hours), and neither of which had any record of me ever calling! After months of this, I took to Twitter (I only take to Twitter angrily when I’ve exhausted all other options). Within a number of hours, I got a call from the Office of The President, where one (!!!) person was able to close my account, refund me the money, and FedEx me the check. He also had access to my entire history somehow. It was like magic. Was it magic? No, not really. I was finally talking to someone who was empowered to take action in the interests of the customer and provide a customized solution. He also had the systems necessary in place to look up customer history and take the necessary action. Unfortunately this empowerment, training and resourcing don’t happen in other parts of the organization, and support in channels other than Twitter tends to be very different than in social media.

Wall Street isn’t going to change its modus operandi anytime soon, but there’s nothing that’s stopping us as companies and representatives of those companies from investing in the long term.

• It all starts with culture: Having the right culture can make or break any of the recommendations that follow below. It’s also the toughest one. It’s something that takes senior management commitment, as well as commitment of all levels of organization. It’s also something that takes the longest time to implement, because culture isn’t something you do; rather, it’s something you are. To really invest in the long-term, you have to commit to doing the right thing for your customers and know that it will pay off revenue-wise, and reward investors and other stakeholders.

• Invest resources: You have to put your money where your mouth is. You will need to invest some money in hiring employees who are the right fit with the culture of focus on service and customer experience. You will also need to invest money in training employees, and not only in the hard skills that they need to have, but also in adhering to the company values. Empower your employees to act in the interests of the customer.

• Invest in the  process: No training or empowerment is going to work if you don’t have the right business processes supporting employees. For example, when a customer calls with a non-standard problem, does your employee know where to go to solve this problem and whom to talk to.

• Internal collaboration: Collaboration and knowledge management tools can help a great deal in keeping all the necessary information within reach. Personally, I’ve seen this come to life in the past couple of weeks, as I’m getting up to speed at Yammer. I’m talking to customers and prospects all the time, but I don’t always have the answer. Because we are such die-hard users of Yammer at Yammer (also known as drinking our own champagne), I’ve been more effective at getting what I need faster so I can serve our community better.

• Fix your systems: One of the worst experiences is data fragmentation. How often do you call somewhere only to find that the person you talked to last time is in a different department, and the person you are talking to now doesn’t have access to it? It makes me want to tear my hair out: as a customer and as a business practitioner, obsessed with process and systems. You need to make sure your systems are talking to each other.

• Measure the right things: Yes, you need to hold your departments for quarterly earnings goals, but you also need to measure the investment in the long-term. Make sure that all the right people are responsible for customer-centric metrics. Remember: what gets measured, gets done.

• Provide a consistent experience: The above recommendations, as long as you invest in all customer touchpoints, should give you the tools you need to provide a consistent experience, regardless of channel.

All of the above takes time and money. There’s not going to be an overnight fix, but if you commit to the long-term as a business, you should see the results you want in the future. Although the above recommendations are mostly for businesses and business leaders, any person can take some ownership of his / her area of influence and enact change. You never know, it could inspire the rest of the organization.

Photo credit: WanderingtheWorld

Evangelists and social media, community and PR professionals are often hired for their connections. Social media, if used right, really accelerates the speed with which relationships can be built online and offline. A lot of us come to jobs with strong existing networks, and we continue to build them as a result of being on the job. A truly social business understands that to truly fulfill the “social employee” and get best results, there must be a symbiotic relationship between building the personal brand and the company brand simultaneously. For the social media practitioner, it is very important to keep developing his / her voice while developing the voice for the company, and deepening professional and personal relationships. Social media has really blurred the lines between personal and professional relationships, which only further obfuscates the issue of who owns what, and how you “split up the goods” when you split up. Just like with marriage, most people don’t think about their exit when they start working, but here are some things you should think through:

1) Understand intellectual property. Examine the labor laws in your state with regards to prior inventions and intellectual property. Then examine your employment / consulting agreement. How is your prior intellectual property treated? In most cases, no one can claim what you have done prior to joining the company. What you do during — that’s a different story. You need to understand what work you have done before your contract with your company begins, and what relationships you created before starting work there. If you create relationships as a result of doing work there (if a company sends you to a conference and you network there on behalf of the company, those leads are technically the company’s. However, the relationships are still yours. You will probably still have them after you leave, but you still have to be careful about respecting your NDA. By the same token, if you were to do business for your company with someone you knew from before, that part of the conversation is definitely part of the company’s record and should be transitioned to the next employee when and if you leave. Make sure you and your employer are on the same page about this.

2) Understand the contact management software completely. Your company most likely uses some system to manage its contacts. It could be a CRM, a Social CRM, or whatever you want to call it. Before importing contacts into that database, it is imperative that you understand what happens during and after that process. If you are doing a batch upload from your social network or a database file, make sure you are partitioning and loading only the relevant business contacts. For example, while loading your Facebook friends may be a fine and dandy idea while you are at the company, it may not be such a great idea after you leave, as your high school girlfriends get “stranded” in this business database. If you are importing from a social network, you need to understand if you will pull your list in its entirety or select a list / group / section. Don’t make the assumption that you can take this data away later, because any database can be rolled back. It’s better to work within boundaries that are comfortable to you from the beginning – if you don’t want your high school girlfriends in there, don’t put them in in the first place.

3) Understand how contact and messaging data is pulled in and used. If you are using a system that automatically fetches groups of contacts, you need to understand what data gets fetched. This is even more important for more closed networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, where you have to be friends with someone to get their contact data. Imagine a scenario where you are pulling in a friend’s contact numbers, email and physical addresses via an API, and this API can fetch data because you are friends. This is not data that would be seen by others in your company, because they don’t have a Facebook realationship with that person. Then you are exposing these people’s private information to others — do you really wanna do that? Does your friend want you to do that? You should also understand the same about messaging accounts. For example, if you import from LinkedIn, are you getting just the contact info, or are you also associating all past and present communications? Is this what you feel comfortable with now? What about 1 year from now? What about in perpetuity?

4) Understand who sees what. Going along with #2, you need to understand how your contact database shows information to others. Is it just you and your team? Or the whole company? What data is shared with whom? Make sure that you feel comfortable sharing anything that’s automatically pulled in via an OAuth. Just as importantly, will your contacts whom you import be OK with you sharing their conversations with your team in their entirety? Are you violating your contacts’ privacy?

5) Understand how to revoke access of your system to your social and professional networks. If you do create a link to LinkedIn with the purpose of importing contacts, but then decide that you don’t want it anymore, you need to make sure that you know how to do that. Each social network has its own permissions page, where you can manage the apps that have access to your accounts. This is something that most people don’t realize: just because you kill access on the side of the app by deleting that account, does not always mean that access was revoked. It’s imperative that you check out your permissions pages of the actual social accounts (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook). I have a detailed how-to post coming on this.

6) Establish a dialogue. As you are preparing for your exit from the company, make sure that you keep the dialogue going with your employer. Access to your accounts should remain active until the last day, and you should have a full understanding of how the company intends to message your contacts after you are gone. If you do have personal contacts that got imported, with whom you have never done business on behalf of the company, you should have an opportunity to remove them. However, if you have done business on behalf of the company with certain contacts whom you brought to the table, they need to remain — fair is fair. The key to underscore here is that you need to have an open and honest dialogue and work something out that woks for all parties.

I don’t have any answers, and I certainly am not dispensing any kind of legal advice. These are just tips to help you deal with the new paradigm of relationships that go along with being a social business and a social employee. In some respects, things are no different from the “olden days” where you came in with a rolodex, which you also took with you when you left. In some respects, things are very different with all this new technology that automatically lifts and fetches things from your social networks. Whatever you do, make sure you feel comfortable and know what happens to your contacts during and after your employment. I’d imagine employment contracts and NDAs will have to be updated over time to include these cases.

In the unfortunate event that your contacts sail away, don’t take your eye off the prize. At the end of the day, someone can have your data, but they can’t take your relationships. Even if someone misuses emails that you once loaded, sending them uninvited communications, they are subject to anti-SPAM laws, and may not even get past the email filter. Besides, even if the email got through, any communication that occurs would not be as powerful as it is when you have a true relationship with this person. It’s up to you to protect your relationships, and the only way to do that is to be someone with whom people want to have relationships.

Photo credit: Robert Nilsson

To me, this is not just another job. In many ways, I feel like everything I’ve done up until this point was to give me the tools and skills to do this job effectively. Also, all of my prior work has helped me appreciate the importance of internal collaboration and communication, in order to deal with the demands of today’s business.

Here is why I’m really excited for this opportunity:

• Enterprises face challenges I can sink my teeth into. I led social media at Attensity, where my focus was on enterprise customers, their needs and processes. It was one of the best learning experiences of my career so far. I learned a ton about the challenges of a large organization with regards to becoming a more social business. On the one side, you have the ocean of social and traditional communication data – emails, tweets, forums, blogposts – that you have to find, listen to, analyze, interpret and then take action on. Whew, that’s a lot! That last part, taking action, is the true sticking point. That’s why at Attensity we developed Respond for Social Media that takes all these social media messages, understands them and routes them to the right person in the organization for action. But what happens next? What if the person who got routed to doesn’t have all the answers?
• Enter collaboration and knowledge transfer. Because no one in the organization knows everything, tools exist that search knowledge bases for the right information and activate knowledge sharing and collaboration inside the organization. Yammer is just such a platform. It helps employees share pertinent events, milestones, as well as ask and answer questions, building a true internal community and knowledge base. It’s more than just a stream of people’s updates — Yammer helps you create employee communities, some of which may be permanent (“I work here, and all employees are in this community with me”) or more transient (“I’m working on this deal, let’s the five of us collaborate on it”).
• I love the social employee. A social employee, in my mind, is anyone who uses social tools in their work or personal life, who consumes, exchanges and looks for information curated by their networks and other people like them. A social employee is not always someone explicitly managing social media efforts on behalf of the company, but may become a spokesperson at any time. Customers are people, and they want to connect to people on the other end of the tweet, blogpost, whitepaper, video and Facebook post. Social employees exist in every department and are the engine that makes the company’s social media efforts run. Whether your job is outward facing or not, you are still a social employee, because the barriers between the company and the outside world have broken down. An engineer can be at an industry mixer or meetup, and give a quick interview on a digital camera or an iPhone, which later appears on YouTube and gets a bunch of hits. Because this can happen to anyone at any time, being on the same page is paramount, and Yammer gives you the up-to-the-minute insight into everyone else’s work world without having to send and read 50 emails and visit 50 cubicles.
• Team cohesiveness, engagement and job satisfaction. When your team is fully functional and on the same page, you can do your job better, faster and remain happier in the process. Yammer did a study pointing to the benefits of microblogging and collaboration, with key improvements around communication, productivity, knowledge sharing, onboarding, engagement and even making the culture better (even though I’d say that for a company to use a service like that, their culture has to at least have the beginnings of collaboration and empowerment). I wrote here about my views on empowering employees in today’s organization, and this is something I care about deeply.
• Consumerization of business apps. This is a movement I’ve been watching with joy in my heart for the past couple of years. Proliferation of platforms like Twitter and Facebook has changed we talk to each other as individuals and has started to change the way business software looks and feels. Over time, the notion of B2B and B2C will start to erode into a more appropriate P2P (peer-to-peer) paradigm — not from a file-sharing perspective, but rather a realization that workers inside a business are consumers too and should be treated that way. Yammer is a great example of such a business platform, which is easy and comfortable to use, and doesn’t have to be mandated from the top. I plan to dig into this more when I start work, but I’d be curious to learn more about the adoption path within an organization. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about this a lot.
• Lifestyle. And of course, I can’t underscore the importance of living 4 blocks away from the job. Lately, I’ve been feeling extremely grateful (at times with tears in my eyes) to be part of this community. Living in San Francisco and being part of this “carbon-based” community of innovation blows me away. This is the strongest offline community I’ve ever been a part of, and I feel so lucky to be here, even though I moved here from the East Coast kicking and screaming a couple of years ago. Whereas my online and offline ties always reinforce each other, there’s an undeniable magic in being there.

I am very excited to join Yammer, which seems to have the best of both worlds: an innovative startup culture, quickly evolving product, with the footing of a larger organization. I am also head over heels excited to start working with the passionate and engaged community of Yammer users. We can make beautiful music together!

At Yammer, I will continue to do many of the things I’ve done before:

• Tap into the active user base and bring you case studies, analysis and thought leadership around enterprise collaboration.
• Establish social media and community programs externally and internally.
• Align the organizational processes in listening and response, become a resource for best practices and organizational policy, work cross-functionally to execute, empower and build the best possible user experience for the community.
• Continue to be the chief content producer, specializing in blogs, microblogs, webinars, presentation, video and photo content. I will keep contributing content to Yammer’s blog and external publications, while encouraging and nurturing blogging from the super-smart Yammer employees.
• Continue to build relationships and work with thought leaders, researchers, analysts and bloggers to drive education and thought leadership.
• Act as front-line social support and innovation conduit between the community and the product team.

I will always be there to connect with the community online and in person. You all know where to find me!