We received approximately 59 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community building activities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, interactive marketing firms and independent consultants.

Several key issues pertaining to social media strategy and monitoring surfaced during this report, including:

• Two thirds of the respondents, 66% (39), indicated that their organization has either fully or partially written social media guidelines.
• The three most commonly reported policies that respondents said were important for staff participation in social media were:
  • Follow All Existing Employee Guidelines (23)
  • Be Transparent (20)
  • Respect Audience and Coworkers (20)
• Over three quarters of the respondents rated Facebook, 75% (44) and Twitter, 73% (43) as a 1st or 2nd highest priority social media site in which their organization participates.
• Almost a third of participants, 29% (17), indicated that their organization uses paid tools or services to monitor social media sites, with Radian6 (7) being the most commonly reported.

Size of Organization
Over a third of the respondents, 34% (20), have less than 50 people employed in their organization and only 12% (7) respondents reported having more than 5,000 employees.

• 34% (20) belong to an organization that has less than 50 employees
• 30% (18) belong to an organization that has between 50-499 employees
• 7% (4) belong to an organization that has between 500-999 employees
• 10% (6) belong to an organization that has between 1,000-4,999 employees
• 7% (4) belong to an organization that has between 5,000-9,999 employees
• 12% (7) belong to an organization that has more than 10,000 employees

Key Policies for Staff Participation
The three most commonly reported policies that respondents said were important for staff participation in social media was to Follow All Existing Employee Guidelines (23), Transparency (20) and to Respect Audience and Coworkers (20).

A third of the respondents also indicated that Adding Value (19), Being Polite and Courteous (18), Protecting Confidential Company Information (18) and Using Your Best Judgment (18) were considered key policies for staff participation in Social Media within their organization.

Social Media Business Goals
Most respondents rated all of the business goals as having some importance within their organization’s social media ecosystem.

The most important business goal reported was Driving traffic to the main organization web site, with almost three quarters of the participants, 73% (43), indicating that this was considered a very important goal for their organization.

The second highest rated social media business goal was Branding, 71% (42). Only 10% (6) participants said that Branding had no significance to their organization.

The next four most important business goals according to the respondent’s ratings were Retaining customers / loyalty, peer-to-peer evangelism, Educations, and Evangelism. These had similar ratings with at least half of the respondents rating them as very important business goals for their organization’s social media ecosystem.

Even though Peer-to-peer customer service and Recruiting had the lowest ratings, more than two thirds of those that rated the importance of these business goals said that they had some importance to their organization.

Measuring Success
We received a wide variety of responses to this question. The most common metrics measured on social media sites is the Traffic Generated (25) including: General Traffic Generated (10), Number of Clicks (7), Number of Page Views (4), Number of Returns (2) and Number of Site Visits (2). One participant commented, “We use Google Analytics to measure clicks to the company website, clicks to other social networking sites, duration of time spent, and direction of traffic”.

The second most common metric that respondents said they used to measure success on social media sites was related to user participation in the site content, such as, comments, posts and discussions (22), The amount and quality of content posted was said to be important for many participants. One participant said that, they track the percentage of positive comments versus the percentage of negative comments. Several other participants said that they monitored the Amount of Engagement (5) that was happening on social media sites.

Several participants indicated that they measure the Number of Brand Mentions (8) within user content posted on their company site and also in mainstream media content, with one response comment as follows: “We measure the percentage of participation within discussion related specifically to our company and market, the number of Brand Mentions versus Competitors and topic and sentiment tracking related to our company and competitors”.

Other commonly reported metrics that participants said they measure are the Number of Fans / Followers (16) on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as website follower friends and fans. Tracking the Number of Members / Registrations (8) such as website registrations and other social media membership sites such as LinkedIn group membership was also said by some to be used to measure success within their organization.

Tracking the Number of Leads / Referrals (14) was also mentioned by many participants to be useful in measuring success on social media sites, with participants commenting that they monitor referrals from social networking sites, as well as goal specific metrics such as revenue, sales and leads.

Number of Retweets (7), Number of likes’ (5), Ratings (2), Number of Video Plays (2) and Number of Unique Users (2) were among the other metrics that participants said their organization used to measure social media success.

The Complete Social Media Strategy & Monitoring Report

The full 31 page report may be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/somestmo.html and includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:

• Job title and industry
• Online community destination
• Social media guidelines
• Social media sites
• Paid services and tools
• Comments and advice from survey respondents

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The intention of the study is to explore how organizations are managing their social media strategies and what tools they are using to monitor their social media presence.

If you are involved in the development of your organizations’ Social Media and Community strategy and monitoring, I would encourage you to participate in a short survey here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/socmedmon

The topics we are exploring in this project include:

• Key policies for staff participation in social media;
• Highest priority social media sites;
• Organizational business goals for participating in the social media ecosystem;
• Metrics and tools used to measure success on social media sites;
• The biggest challenges that executives and teams are facing

I would ask that you please complete the survey by next Friday, 7/16. All participants will get a copy of the results.

The tag for this research project is: #socmedmon

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1) What is IdeaScale? How do you describe the sector you are in?

We have been building online market research tools since 2003. Throughout this time, we’ve found that traditional online research methods were not effective in fostering a sense of community among customers. In addition, we found that our client’s customers are talking about their organization all over the social web (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc.) Our goal is to help channel these discussions to both increase engagement and provide focused, effective feedback for your organization.

IdeaScale is used by all types of organizations ranging from government agencies to non-profits to companies of all sizes. Some of the worlds most recognizable brands such as Xerox, RedHat, Microsoft, the Veterans Administration, and even The White House have used IdeaScale as their crowdsourcing platform. Our parent company, Survey Analytics, has made Inc. magazine’s list of the fastest-growing private companies, ranking 172nd overall and 25th among business-service providers. Puget Sound Business Journal recognized Survey Analytics as one of the 50 fastest-growing private companies in Washington State.

2) What are the three or four main motivations a company or non-profit has for using an idea management platform?

1) Increase employee (or customer) engagement.
2) Sense of involvement/ownership.
3) Build a sense of community around a specific idea.

3) I see a number of federal agencies just launched feedback sites on your platform. It looks like information is rolled up here: http://opengovtracker.com/. What is this initiative trying to achieve?

OpenGovTracker was built during the big snow storm in DC last winter by two developers with a lot of time on their hands . They were aware of our API, and were able to use it to build a very helpful dashboard. They key lesson is platform and APIs – there are just some things you’ll never dream up on your own. The only viable approach is to build a rich set of APIs and plugins to allow anyone to mashup the data to build cool and interesting applications. We’ll seeing the same type of response from our iPhone plugin – an application that we recently open sourced for our user community.

4) What common pitfalls are you seeing as clients turn to idea management platforms?

I see several issues:

Properly Assigned Moderators: Since the initial setup/configuration of these community tools can be slightly technical, there tends to be situations where this same person ends up moderating the community. In reality, this role is best suited for a marketing or PR person within any organization. We see many of the same people that are setting up and configuring the sites end up moderating hundreds of ideas a day.

Clear Terms of Services and Rules of Participation: Also, we see a lot of folks failing to define a set of moderation guidelines for their community members. A clear set of terms of service as well a defined moderation policies goes a long way in clarifying to your users what they can expect from you and vice versa.

Don’t Be Afraid: Many folks are deathly afraid of publicly talking to their customers. You’ll soon learn, however, that the people that take the time to leave you feedback about your organization can end up becoming some of your best customers.

5) Matthew Lees’ latest report on crowdsourcing and ideas sites talks a lot about management. How hard are ideas sites to manage?

Not hard at all! For example, our flagging functionality allows you to leverage your own crowd to help control inappropriate or foul language. So for example, if a user sees a comment that she thinks doesn’t belong on the site, she can click a link to flag the item. This will then remove the comment from your community and drop it into a queue for a moderator to review.

6) Any other words of advice for people learning about this sector?

Moderate early and often. The first few hours/minutes after your community goes live is most important. If a user sees a bunch of inappropriate ideas or comments, your site may not be taken very seriously. A very common practice is to “Seed” the community with a bunch of pre-writtem poems.

Cross-posted on the Good Ideas Blog.

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To sort through these challenges, we asked for the views of Fred Smith, a Senior Technologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who oversees many new media efforts. The CDC is always included on the short list of US government agencies using social media in innovative ways.

Here are five of Fred’s good ideas for effective social media programs in government:

1) Take Risks

New media are new. We all are experimenting to some extent. This means accepting some risk in social media efforts, and also tolerating some degree of failure. Senior management and staff need to understand the risk profile of social media efforts. (As a related note, Amazon reportedly includes “risk-taking” in their performance reviews.)

2) Realistic Evaluations

It is important to evaluate social media efforts, and particularly to understand which channels are best for reaching which audiences with which messages. Performance reporting will improve efforts. That said, it is necessary to be realistic about how precise communications evaluations can be (e.g. nobody ever asks “how effective was that brochure?” — they ask “how effective was our campaign?”).

3) In Government, Identify and Update Social Media-Challenging Policies

Many government policies were written before social media (or even the internet). They now can create obstacles. For example, as part of the “Paperwork Reduction Act”, the OMB is required to approve any program that asks questions of the public. Should that include, for example, voting up an idea on a social media site? This law, as well as laws and policies dealing with terms of service, tracking technologies, privacy issues, and others topics are being updated.

4) Promote Open Source

Government should use and contribute to open source initiatives. Unfortunately there are many terms of service, liability and other issues which hinder government participation. These obstacles are (slowly) being addressed. When government agencies can’t turn to open source, they should at least investigate offering their data and content
through open APIs.

5) Coordinate Security and Social Media Efforts

IT security staff and social media staff have very different – and typically conflicting – approaches to the web. It is important that they work together. At the CDC the security and social media teams meet monthly to work out any issues, and (importantly) to describe what is on the horizon in order to identify potential challenges.

Please feel free to vote or comment on these or other ideas – or add your own – on Good Ideas.

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David Witzel has spent a lot of time thinking about online collaborative approaches to solving social issues. He co-founded (with me) Forum One, a web development group which works on topics of social importance; he ran the Live Interviews Online series involving policymakers; and he now directs the Innovation Exchange at the Environmental Defense Fund. We asked his thoughts on interesting ideas for new approaches to social challenges. Here are five:

1) Develop a Shared Infrastructure for Local Budget Decisions

Every town in the US (the world?) will have problems budgeting for years to come. But figuring out what to do about budgets is tricky. An infrastructure that would support collaborative decision-making could improve both decision-making & buy-in. The infrastructure will provide historical data about the town budget as well as comparative data across towns. It will help facilitate contributions to data collection, data analysis, and preference identification. All we need is someone to build it.

2) A Global Infrastructure for a Sustainable Economy

Let’s create an infrastructure that supports a sustainable economy like the internet is an infrastructure that supports information & collaboration. What does the “sustainability stack” look like? What open source tools and standards do we need to make all businesses perform more sustainably?

3) The Sustainability Consortium

A group of academics, businesses, and non-profits working together to figure out how to define “sustainability” in our economy is an idea with real legs. Their mission is “work collaboratively to build a scientific foundation that drives innovation to improve consumer product sustainability.” The sustainability consortium was initiated by Walmart and is coordinated by Arizona State U and U of Arkansas. Safeway and L’Oreal are 2 recent members. http://www.sustainabilityconsortium.org/

4) Open Source to Promote Health Data Exchange

(The federal government, no less) creating an open source project to promote electronic health data exchange is a great idea. Building a community around the project is one of the ways to make it not only a good idea, but one that works. http://www.connectopensource.org/about/what-is-CONNECT

5) Volunteer-Driven Local News Services

Call it citizen journalism, collaborative journalism, user generated content, or try to deprecate it by calling it “blogging” – organizing volunteer-driven, collaborative, news collection and sharing in local communities is a great and doable idea. The software and infrastructure are inexpensive (e.g., wordpress on a cloud server) and easy enough to use that loosely knit groups of volunteers can do amazing thing. The Falls Church Times has managed over 1000 posts since it launched and is attracting growing numbers of readers and contributors. http://fallschurchtimes.com/

You can vote for and comment on these (and other) ideas on Good Ideas.

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Photo cred: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skinnyde/146763376/

The sacred cows I mention below have been on my mind for several months now, but I was inspired to take action after a community management panel that I attended at SxSWi. My intention with this post is not to suggest that we do away these sacred cows, but to start to be critical of them. I fear that these 3 cows, in particular, are being accepted as gospel, and those new (and not so new) to online community building really don’t challenge them.

As with many good things gone wrong, these cows all began with good intentions.

Cow #1: You don’t own the community, the community owns the community
Original intention: To stop (mostly brand) community hosts from being overly-controlling of the community, and being too directive of community interactions.

Why this cow should be challenged: No ownership = absolution of responsibility, and weak or no long term stewardship. The host *does* own parts of the community experience, and certainly has the responsibility to create a virtual “clean, well-lit place” for their brand or organization. Perhaps a better cow would be: “You don’t own the community, but you have a responsibility to be a good host, leader and listener”. Speaking of listening…

Cow #2: Start by listening

Original intent: Listening was an easy (and fairly passive) way to get brands and organizations familiar with the social web.

Why this cow should be challenged: Ok, this one isn’t necessarily bad, just a bit misguided. My recommendation to clients is to start with a conversation about your goals for engaging on the social web. A listening strategy is key to managing a successful online presence, but brands and organizations also need to interact. Another disturbing trend I see with “just listening” is that some brands are wholesale farming out listening and interaction to their agency of choice, as opposed to creating direct brand to customer or organization to stakeholder relationships.

Cow #3: Go where your community is

Original intent: Don’t just buy a platform and expect your community to show up – (a.k.a. Build it and they will come).

Why this cow should be challenged: Many organizations are doing a poor job of evaluating the opportunity for community on their own domain, and are setting up outposts on large social sites like Facebook because it is relatively easy and (initially) inexpensive. In our “Participating int he Social Media Ecosystem” research project from January of 2010, we saw that only about 1/2 (56%) of the participants had a comprehensive social strategy in place – meaning, only 1/2 of the organizations had spent time assessing and researching where their community currently was, and the opportunities for on and off domain engagement.

Assuming that the best place to engage members of your online community is offsite (say, a Facebook fan page) is probably a big mistake, and a lost opportunity to help transform a static corporate site into a more social experience.
Those are my top 3 Sacred Cows. What do you think? And, more importantly, what are yours?

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We received approximately 224 responses. Participants represent a wide swath of the types of organizations participating in online community building activities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, interactive marketing firms and independent consultants.

A sample of the 220+ organizations that participated include (with their permission):
HP, Nielsen, Community Partners, Satmetrix, ComBlu, Avid, Fanscape, ZAGG, Bumbleride Inc., Vemma, PEMCO Insurance, Xorcom, Procter & Gamble, GlobalGiving, Hallmark Cards, Inc., Culligan, and Open Text.

Several key issues pertaining to the compensation of marketers working in social media surfaced during this report, including:
• On average, the female participants earned an annual salary of $64k, which is significantly lower than the average annual salary for men, which was close to $104k. (Our data set was 58% male and 42% female).
• Less than a third of the respondents, 31% (69), indicated that they received a salary increase in the past 12 months, and 19% (42) said they had actually taken a decrease in salary within the last year.
• On average, participants are somewhat satisfied with their current salary, with an average satisfaction score of 3.2 (where 1 = Dissatisfied and 5 = Very Satisfied) and a median score of 3.5. The male participants, on average, are slightly more satisfied with their overall salary amounts than the female participants.

Other Highlights Include:

Salaries by Gender
On average, the female participants earned an annual salary of $64k, which is significantly lower than the average annual salary for men, which was close to $104k. A large number of female participants indicated that they had a salary range that was less than $50k which brought the average salary lower for the women, whereas the male respondents, taken as a whole, had a much more evenly distributed salary ranges.

Salaries by Age
According to the respondents that participated in our survey, people who are in the age category of 41 – 50 are making the highest annual salary of $117k. The respondents aged 51 – 59 were the second highest salary earners, with an average salary of $109.5k. The lower salary averages belong to the 21 – 25 respondents, who earn an average salary of $28k. The overall average annual salary for all participants was $80.7k.

Salary Increases
Less than a third of the respondents, 31% (69), indicated that they received a salary increase in the past 12 months, and 19% (42) said they had actually taken a decrease in salary within the last year.

The Full Report
The full Social Marketing Compensation report includes additional information about job descriptions, departments in charge of social marketing, job satisfaction and other areas related to the emergent role of Social Marketing. To purchase the report ($99), please go to our Research Store.

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The OCRN chose to study how social media strategy is developed, communicated and implemented because, frankly, so many organizations are actively struggling with the topic. We hope that by getting real-world feedback, advice and experiences from practitioners (read: the folks ACTUALLY doing the work), we can all gain insight in to this important topic.

If you are involved in the development of your organizations Social Media and Community strategy, I would encourage you to participate in a short survey here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ocr_socstrat

The topics we are exploring in this project include:

• The definition of social media strategy;
• The current scope of community and social media efforts;
• The current state of strategy development;
• The process organizations are using to develop strategy;
• Ownership and governance of social strategy;
• The biggest challenges that executives and teams are facing

I would ask that you please complete the survey by next Friday, 3/12. All participants will get a copy of the results.

The tag for this research project is: #socstrat

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In my last post, “Want to Know What Community Members Need? Just Ask” I discussed the importance of asking your members what they need from you as a community host, and what they need from other community members, as part of your extended community.

In this post, I will discuss the methodology for conducting a discovery exercise of the relevant parts of the social web to find out where your community (or potential community) is already working and playing. .

Most community strategies have traditionally focused on the hosted properties of the organization. The reality is that there is an ever expanding universe of online touchpoints that an organization’s community members are participating in off-domain. An ecosystem research exercise should be conducting as part of a strategy development (or strategy course correction) exercise in order to discover where the off domain centers or activity are, and who the most vocal and active participants are. The discovery exercise is essentially an audit of the current community ecosystem, including customer, prospect, partner and competitor touch points. This information will help establish a baseline of market-oriented sites and activity, which will be important to understand the opportunities for new community activity by your (or your client’s) brand.

What Should You Look For?
The purpose of this discovery exercise is to look for existing signs of life for your community “off domain”. Signs of life include conversations about your company, product, or issues related to your particular market or issue area. What should you specifically search for as part of your discovery process? The following list is a jumping off point for starting your discovery process:

• Mentions of company name
• Mentions of brand or product names
• Issues related to you market
• Topics related to your market
• Mentions of key employees
• Advocates or spokespeople
• Mentions of competitors

Where Should You Look?
Using tools like Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, Delicious, and Ice Rocket, conduct searches for brand mentions in news, the mass social media sphere (blogs, twitter) and on smaller niche communities. You will quickly come up a list of the communities hosting conversations about your organization, products or brand, and the members (often time bloggers) engaging in those conversations.

It’s also important to research activity on the “walled garden” communities, and larger social media sites that some times don’t surface in search results. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, Get Satisfaction, etc. In particular, look for ad-hoc groups that have sprung up around your brand, or content tagged with your brand and/or products.

Key Sites:

Outputs of the Ecosystem Audit
Insights that will likely emerge from your ecosystem audit include:

• Key news sites
• List of most active members (potential community members)
• List of influential users (potential community members)
• Thought leaders (personalities shaping your industry)
• List of active groups (potential partner communities)
• Independent community sites (potential partner communities)
• Key blogs (Niche bloggers and group blogs)
• In-person meetups and events (you might consider participating)
• A list of spaces where your community *isn’t* (helpful in prioritizing where to participate)

One helpful by-product of conducting an ecosystem audit is the set of fundamental elements for an ongoing listening strategy: search terms, topics and relevant online sources. The ecosystem audit process forces a team to experiment with and refine search terms and topics in order to discover content sources. Many of the tools mentioned above support RSS feeds with near real-time results. So, wether you use a simple tool, like google reader for your listening strategy, or something more industrial strength like a Radian6 or Scoutlabs, you have completed a lot of the prerequisite work for ongoing listening and monitoring.

In the next two upcoming posts “Designing an Online Presence Architecture” and “Engagement Planning” I will describe how to take the inputs of goal definition, member research and the ecosystem audit to create an Online Presence Architecture and to develop an engagement plan.

Recommended Reading:
Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem

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Though firmly planted in the digital world, Jordan is a believer in well-roundedness and previously led REI’s national advertising and marketing strategic planning programs. Prior to REI he was Director of Collegiate Marketing at Red Bull North America and worked on the agency side creating experiential marketing programs for clients such as Sony Music, Mercedes Benz, Wells Fargo and American Express. Finally as a holder of a fine arts degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts he’d like to offer the perspective that marketing is pretty much just theater with better analytics.

Q: What excites you most about your role at REI?

What excites me most about my role at REI is two-fold:

First and foremost it’s the delight and challenge organizationally of helping to move a venerable 70-year old co-op forward in the digital age, especially into increasingly social spaces online. I find that we, like most large brands outside the tech world, are experiencing the strategic and operational challenges of transforming from a push-marketing organization to one embracing a truly customer-centric, two-way marketing and communication model – as many of us have surely experienced: it’s one thing to sign off on the concepts or strategies that drive social media success, but another thing to embrace them at their fundamental core on a day-to-day basis.

Secondly, as a mission driven retail co-op focused on getting people outside it’s exciting to be working on online community because it’s such a natural fit. We’ve been a member-based organization from the day we were founded, we have retail locations around the country where members gather and connect, and we have an extensive outreach program connecting with hundreds of local non-profits, etc. Indeed our troubles are rarely about building a sustainable social media strategy from the ground up, but rather building one that can connect the multitude of connection points, interactions, and content pools we already have in place in the real world.

Q: As a Co-Op, REI already has a passionate and active offline member community. How has the existing community factored in to your online community and social media strategy?

Well you’ve hit the nail on the head as for us it’s really about how we build on the community we already have in place. We want to honor what’s already there while at the same time enable online and mobile connections that will allow it to grow organically and for us that means being able to take a more long term approach. As we’re already supporting our members desire to connect via all of our traditional retail events, classes, outings, etc, on the digital side of things we’re in the enviable place of being able to work on building lasting and meaningful online interactions rather than feeling pressured simply to launch something quickly because of it’s the hot trend right now.

Q. What is the most valuable external (off domain) online community or social media touch point for REI that provides clear and compelling value to both your customer and REI?

We’ve been finding that Facebook is our most valuable external social touch point. The nature of how we want to connect and share with our fans/followers, and they with one another, largely means being more interactive and multimedia that say Twitter might allow. That said we certainly see the opportunity for crafting increasingly platform specific interactions, for example as a retailer we’re certainly aware of the success that Dell has had with their Twitter specific sales strategy.

Q: What advice would you have for a beginning community manager?

For me I see how easy it is to get caught up in the exciting side of the business, e.g. the technology, the platform, the shiny, bleeding edge new feature. But from my experience the way to make an impact is absolutely on the strategic planning and organizational development side of things. It’s not sexy and it’s certainly not easy, but ultimately the real impact if you work on the brand side is found through fundamental organizational transformation.

As an added bonus, I was able to spend a few minutes with Jordan at the Online Community Summit in Sonoma last fall. The video below is from our conversation.

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