Mike O’Toole and I talked about the practical aspects of running social for a public company. I really like the way we came up with a top five list of “rules” for helping an organization be more social.

1. Find people who are willing to speak in the first person and aren’t afraid to have a personal point of view. You need people who are passionate about a given topic and have the domain expertise to add value to the conversation.
2. Be ruthless. Help your team find time for social marketing activities. What will they stop doing to make time to join the emerging conversations?  Find the bottom 10% of activities and stop doing them – life is a zero sum game and something has to give.
3. Think small and simple. Social media can be overwhelming so people need to get started in simple ways and scale from there.
4. Use agile project management. Social media is still quite speculative and you will need to test things before making bigger investments. Agile provides an adaptive approach that helps accelerate learning.
5. Need to create an open, principle-based policy to provide guidance to the team. It is impossible to create rules for every possible scenario so you need to give people baseline behavioral guidance.

There is much more to the conversation if you have the time to listen.

Are there any other things we should add to the list?

One last ask: I could also use your support for my panel on Agile for Social Media at the SXSW conference.  Vote early and vote often my friends.  And as always, thanks for your support.

Identify your top influencers and/or sources of information – If you are like most people, you know your top 5 to 10 off the top of your head.  What are the sites you visit everyday?  What sites do you feel guilty about not visiting more frequently?  What does your boss read daily? You get the idea.  My suggestion is find 30-40 sources.  I know that sounds like alot but we’ll talk more later about how to deal with the deluge of content.
Setup a Google Reader account - I know there are many ways to read RSS feeds but I like the Reader’s ability to share feeds and connect with people on Google.  I also regularly use my feed reader as a convenient time waster on my new HTC Incredible. Just scrape the RSS feeds from your source and add to the reader.
Create Google Alerts – In my world, there are granular things that I want to watch daily.  I know it is vain but I watch my own name and “personal brand”.  Some other obvious things include your company, brand, or competitors.  You can decide on a comprehensive vs. blog search depending on traffic – one approach is starting with comprehensive and then refine if necessary.  I also suggest setting it up for immediate notification by RSS rather than email.   If it has more than 10 alerts per day then you are either too popular (yeah, right) or need to refine your search.  You can track these through your Google Reader like any other feed.
Setup a Twitter search – I think this is the hidden gem of Twitter’s offerings.  Just go to search.twitter.com and create searches on your keywords (use the same keywords from your Google Alerts if you want).  The best part is you can create RSS feeds for these search and then dump them into your Reader.  More advanced tweeters can add a search column in Tweetdeck.
Create lists on Twitter – I “follow” over 1,000 people on Twitter.  In reality, I probably care about 150 of them (sorry).  The best way to keep your signal-to-noise ratio high is to build a list important friends.  For example, I have on two lists on my personal Twitter account – Fresh Followers for new followers I’d like to get to “know” better and Friends of the Slice for people I really know or have met.  On the corporate Novell account, I created lists by our focus areas to reflect our most important press and analysts.  You can also easily find all of our Novell people on Twitter through a list.
Facebook - What to do about Facebook? I don’t have any simple answers here other than log in to read or get the Facebook app for your mobile device.  You can change your notifications but there aren’t many things you can do here.
Add an appointment to your calendar daily – This is where I often fall down.  I try for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes after lunch.  This is your social time – no excuses.  If you don’t dedicate time to being social, you are not going to be social.

By now you probably noticed that I didn’t mention “go out and drop a few grand a month on a commercial social media monitoring tool”.  There are plenty of posts about these products and if I had a dollar for every cold call I get from someone trying to sell me one, I’d have enough money for a Main Event buy-in at the World Series of Poker.  I have tested a few and am about to pull the trigger on one but am not still ready for an endorsement.  The fact is that very few people need the power of these tools and the dominant design just hasn’t emerged.  Also, as I have often tweeted, I am holding out for Google Analytics adding social media monitoring.

Did I miss any other obvious ones?  What is your listening strategy?  Any tips for streamlining things?

Wake up everybody. The age of plentiful bandwidth is here. This means a streaming radio show can sound like the host is sitting right next to you. Last summer I blogged about my learning from producing a couple of online radio shows.  I created this post as a follow roadmap to help you create your own show.

My guess is that this is a new venture so I am a big advocate of testing new media programs in no-cost or low cost ways to prove the concept before “going big”. So how can we get from idea to fresh online radio show in an agile way? Here is my road map I used twice last summer and am currently employing as I produce a new show here at Novell.

Strategy:

• Write a short creative brief – This should be no more than 3 pages. Remember that the show is the product not the document.

• Sell the idea to the most important stakeholders – You need buy-in but don’t try to sell everyone. The first show (ie “the pilot”) will be your best tool for convincing people to do more.

• Find an executive sponsor – This person can advise the team and protect the idea from the corporate T-cell types that challenge anything new or different. Your sponsor could also be a possibly be one of your first guests.

Operational details

• Decide on a format – Will it be a panel? Will it be a one-on-one interview? Or a combination?

• Pick dates for your first three shows – Without a first show date, all you have is an idea. This creates a sense of urgency and catalyzes the team.

• Decide on frequency – My bias is towards weekly. Unless you have enough content, more than once a week is tough. On the other hand, less than once a week doesn’t give you the chance to develop a rhythm.

• Identify potential guests for your first three shows – The first shows won’t be perfect so you don’t need to call in all your markers to get  superstar guests. Save that for when you have worked out the kinks.

• Get all your technology straightened out. You don’t need much equipment these days to do radio but you do need someone who can plug it in and make sure it works seamlessly. TV/video has even more moving parts so plan accordingly.

• Figure out the streaming/hosting – Where will the show reside? There are a number of Internet radio stations to consider. You can also buy some bandwidth from a CDN and stay independent.

Content

• Find a strong host – I find this the most challenging part. Many people think they can do this themselves but in reality this is a specialized skillset. While I have a hairline for radio and charming demeanor, I know that make a better guest than host. Try to find someone who is a good interviewer and can control the conversation. This can be a difference maker.

• Pick a working title and theme – Don’t worry about perfection. This can be changed easily. In many cases you will learn from your first few shows and make adjustments.

• Have a pre-production meeting – Two days before the show, meet with the host and guests to make sure everyone knows what the theme is and how the program will flow. Also let people identify their role or position on an issue. This can help generate more controversy and a better overall program.

• I prefer a soft launch for the first show – This means emailing people you know will listen and provide honest feedback. Begin promoting the show through social media about 24 hours before airtime. Remember, this is a pilot and will not be measured by audience size for the first show.

The show

• Get everyone together an hour before the show – Like a sporting event, people need to warm-up and get ready.

• Give your team a pep talk – I know we are adults but chances are your guests and host will be a little nervous. Anything you can do to break the ice will make for a better show.

• Take care of your talent – Make sure they all have a beverage and are comfortable.  No brown m&ms in the green room is crucial.

• Double check with your engineer that you are recording the show.

After the show

• Publish the recording – Think MP3. That is the only format that matters for radio. There are a bunch of options for video (Youtube or Vimeo).

• Decide on your discussion hub – This is where you will engage your audience between shows, test topics and publish recordings. Options include a Facebook fan page, LinkedIn group or blog.

If you are looking for an example show, I particularly like what PJA Advertising has done with their “This Week in Social Media” show.

Full disclosure: I was involved in the development of the show but they have done all the heavy lifting and have built a pretty big audience.

Anyone else dabbling in online media want to chime in? Did I miss anything? Any risks in this format?

• The number followers doesn’t mean as much as quality of interactions and conversations.  This is an obvious point that gets lost in Ashton and Britney’s battle for supremacy.  I thank Ivan at Tipjoy for changing my mind on this.
• Twitter has helped me connect with really interesting people I never would have met in my World 1.0 circles (folks like @jeffcutler, @matthew_t_grant, @robertcollins).
• A milliscoble of social media infamy is no substitute for my longstanding professional relationships when it comes to new business development.
• Twitter is a bit like Vegas.  Some thing are larger than life on Twitter.  Also many things that happen on Twitter stay on Twitter.
• People can become in social media “experts” very quickly.  You can find a ton of great info on Mashable and Techcrunch not to mention the blogosphere about social media channels.  FOTS (Friends of the ‘Slice) have heard my regular rants that social media are just media that need to be tested like any other channel making “expertise” less important.
• I’ve met Chris Brogan three times (but I’m not sure he remembers my name).  I want to dislike the whole “social media rockstar” schtick but he is a genuinely nice guy who blogs with a clarity that I admire.  I also really like his dad’s poker blog.
• The credentials that give someone status in the business world (ie Harvard MBA, worked for Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, etc) are not always a big deal on Twitter.  I guess you could argue that Twitter is more egalitarian than the real world.
• Twitter can be a powerful promotional tool.  The Skeptical CMO team signed up 100 people for our first radio show back in May almost completely through Twitter.

Did I miss anything?  There are too many great people and conversations to highlight in one small post.

Shameless self promotion: I’ll be on PermissionTV today discussion all thing marketing, social media and tangy.  I hope you can join the conversation.

Stay tangy my friends…

Advertising based business models are weak: Regular readers of the ‘slice know about the poor response rates of Facebook ads.  Without a strong ROI from this advertising, companies will eventually steer clear of this medium or prices will be driven down to a level reflecting its effectiveness.

Where are the doctors, lawyers and other “regular” business people? I can see them wanting a presence in the social media world but until these media can improve service delivery, increase sales or cut costs, it will be a nice to have experiment for some guy in marketing.

Customer conversations are great: Engaging them online is valuable but it is challenging to measure the impact.  We’ll see in the long run if customer satisfaction or retention rates improve from these online interactions.

Someone’s gonna pay: In many cases, however, we just don’t know who that will be.  I love what people like TipJoy are doing in the micropayments space but we still don’t have strong revenue models for many of these sites.

Call me old fashioned: One of the things that helped Web 1.0 explode was when business people realized they could sell more stuff by having an ecommerce site.  I’m still waiting to hear more of these B2B stories from the social media world.

So what does this mean?

We need to keep innovating and testing.  There is a great deal of option value in being a part of the conversations.  They are happening out there whether you like it or not.  Also,  I know this isn’t a very web 2.0 idea but repurposing and syndicating your content through these channels can have a positive impact on your search engine marketing and help you reach prospective customers. Just be don’t be an idiot, be relevant, and add value to the conversation.

What?  Mr. Tangyslice is going to recommend investing in a program with limited direct measurement?   The answer is yes and here is my logic.

• Old media is not dead (yet). I know that the prognosis isn’t great for old media but the national TV nightly news still has millions of viewers and depending on your product or service, you may need all of those eyeballs.
• Traditional press still has online outlets to syndicate your content.
• PR is about telling your story.  Without editorial outreach you are missing a powerful way to get a third party to validate your message.
• It isn’t just about traditional media.  Social media is an important part of any integrated PR plan.
• Content is still king. A well formulated PR plan will generate fresh content for  all of your channels.  I know this is a very “push” view of the world, but sharing is one part of joining the social media discussions and there just isn’t that much new content out there these days.
• There are still many opinion makers in “old media”. Have you checked out the number of followers the “old media” reporters and news anchors have on Twitter?
• They still writing about you. Whether you formally participate or not, the press is still writing or talking about your space.  It is pretty much always better to be involved.
• If you have news.  If you have a new product or service, PR and word of mouth remain really powerful and leveraged ways to get the word out.
• PR is cost effective.  On a pure cost per impression basis, PR can be a really cheap way to get your message out.  The bigger question is whether or not you reach the right people with you message.

So how do you avoid falling into the accountability trap?

In a perfect world, we would all have spare budget to measure awareness before and after our campaigns.  Absent that, you can start with clear and measurable goals.  You probably have a sense of your baseline sales,  traffic and lead flow and can look at your lift from those levels.   Your referrer logs can tell you alot about your traffic sources.  And finally, look for those rare times when you get a big press hit and nothing else is going on.

OK, this is your chance to blast me.  Take your best shot.  Mr Accountable Marketing has let his guard down.  Anyone want to take the other side of this argument?

• Shiny new object: It is where the action is today even with the bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble
• My favorite four letter word: Most of the channels are free (or almost free)
• Good listeners: There is always someone you can talk with since the conversations are going 24/7
• Easy to try: There are low-cost/no-cost ways to test most media
• Accountable: It is easy to track referrers from these media
• (Almost) Famous: With so many sites, you can be a legend somewhere (besides your own mind)
• Branding building: You can enhance your personal brand as you do your day job
• Accessible tools: A quick trip to Mashable.com shows the hundreds of free, easy-to-use tools to make you look like a social media rockstar.
• Agile marketing: You don’t need to wait for your agency to make changes to your blog or Facebook page.

Why do you use social media?

Special thanks to Adam Zand.

2. I’ve seen a couple of recent articles about Twitter jumping the shark.  I can’t quantify it but it feels like oversharing is down within my cohort.

3. Are we starting to see signs of the social media bubble bursting on the west coast?

4. Don’t forget about Myspace.  With all the buzz surrounding Facebook these days it is easy to forget who has more search traffic.

2. Join Twitter and start following the cool people.

3. Start reading Valleywag.

4. Get a new haircut and dark rimmed glasses. This is one of those rare moments in your professional life when a receding hairline plays to your advantage. Go ahead. You can do it.

5. Use Facebook to make fun of your boss’ inability to put his cellphone on vibrate (and see if he notices (sorry Mark)).

6. Dream up unproven, speculative social media promotions and pester your Marketing Director to drop everything because “the future is now”.

7. Attend a Mzinga lunchtime BBQ – again this is where you can meet really cool people.

8. Hire a new PR firm – Despite my recent poking at some of the “old school” firms, these guys are really up on what works and what doesn’t (sorry about the old school label Shift Communications, I let my past experiences cloud the fact you have some of the top social media people in Boston).

9. Get a new PDA/iPhone. I went with the stylish Blackberry Pearl as it works like a PDA yet feels like a phone.

10. Sign up for HelloTxt or Ping.fm so you can look like a hero by posting your status updates everywhere with one click.

11. Find a couple of friends for regular Twitter banter and inside jokes (OK, enough with the duck jokes).

12. Bore your suburban neighbors by endlessly babbling about how social media will change their lives.

13. Sign up for every social media site you can find to see if there really is something different out there.

Social media coolness is a few clicks away. What are you waiting for…