Denise Shiffman’s Engage Daily Blog

If you haven’t quite gotten started using social media or you’re early on in your efforts, there’s a tremendous amount of good information to be found for free on the Web. And thanks to Chris Brogan, it’s now even easier to find. Take a look at his list of free ebooks.

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You or your company may have implemented blogs, podcasts, wikis, and other new media. Or, maybe you haven’t yet. Either way, employees across your company are getting involved with Web 2.0 — somewhere. They’re on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn. They’re commenting or reading comments on Shopper.com, Yelp, or Amazon. It’s also fairly likely some of your employees log on to industry forums to ask questions or offer answers.

Whether or not your company is actively implementing new media, it’s important to have a set of guidelines that helps employees understand the rules when they speak online as an employee. Several companies including IBM, Sun, and the BBC post their social media guidelines. You can review these to get some ideas.

Here are several items I like to include. The focus is on responsible participation. Don’t forget to run the guidelines you produce through legal review before you post them.

1. Don’t be anonymous. Always identify who you are and what company you work for.

2. Only designated employees speak “on behalf” of the company. Everyone else speaks for themselves.

3. Be personal (share a little about yourself), but protect your privacy.

4. Respect others. (Need I say more?)

5. Consider the content carefully. It will be on the Web and in search results for a long, long time.

6. Respect copyright, trademark, and fair use laws (use links instead of excerpts, always give attribution).

7. Protect confidential and financial information (for your company and every other company)

8. The company’s Employee Rules of Conduct (or similar employee guide) applies online.

9. Become part of the industry conversation, link to other’s, and have fun.

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The new online “market me” tool VisualCV is addicting. I keep adding and tweaking. It’s just fantastic. I’ve added the VisualCV badge at the top of my blog sidebar (and copied it below for easy clicking). Take a look. Give me feedback. Start one of your own!

Guy wrote a post pointing to other examples. See here.

Use it as your online resume, a marketing tool for your consulting service, an announcement for an event, or well, anything you can think of.

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The WSJ ran a story today on LoudounExtra.com, a local news website owned by The Washington Post Company covering Loudoun County, Virginia and its 270,000 residents. The site offers hyper-local news, events, and commentary and employs a great deal of new media (blogs, feeds, video, etc.). In fact, it’s exactly what you would expect to be a huge success, but apparently traffic has been abysmal. Russell Adam’s story attempts to dissect the problems.

However, the problem isn’t the people who built the site, or their knowledge of the community. The problem is simple. You can’t just build a site and hope people come. Sure that works sometimes, but that can’t be your marketing plan. LoudonExtra.com is a great site and I think a few marketing ideas might get it going.

1. Do a better job pulling people at real-world events to the site and people on the site to real-world events. You have to be in the community creating buzz, handing out t-shirts (think more like a radio station).

2. Turn your staff writers into personalities. Make sure they blog, quickly return comments from readers, and make themselves visible at local events (think Anderson Cooper/CNN). And post prominent pictures of them on the site. And while you’re at it, do the same thing for local bloggers.

3. Build a little more community into the site so that readers can talk to each other and build databases of information that are valuable to everyone else (comments on local services, local politics, fun for kids). Then run a promotion targeted solely to getting lots of people registered, reading the site, and commenting. American Airlines is currently running a Beijing promotion designed to create community. You can enter to win a free trip if you register on their site and post a travel tip (and every post is an additional contest entry). Good idea.

4. Set up a loyalty program where visitors can earn points towards small gifts (tickets to shows, free restaurant meals, etc.) if they bring others to the site, comment on blogs, or post tips. Make it a little more fun and interactive on the site.

5. Add more video and more pictures. Let people upload their videos and pictures of local events. Let them vote about what they think is the most important or interesting news or pictures.

6. Make it about the PEOPLE not just the events. Hyper-local actually means hyper-personal. Everyone in the community wants to see their name, picture, event or company highlighted. Make it so that people come to the site just to see if they made it in the news because they attended the event or blogged about it or sent in a video clip!

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If social media has done anything it has given a voice to people who want to complain, argue, rant, and attack your company or you personally. CEOs are grappling with the choice of ignoring this behavior or inviting it onto their home page. Bloggers, authors, radio hosts, and others are often surprised by the personal vitriol directed towards them. Most everyone is concerned whether or not a single negative voice can ruin their reputation.

I chatted with Jennifer Jones at Marketing Voices on this subject last week and you can listen in.

The reality of the live Web is that negative commentary and attacks that used to occur offline are now online. That’s actually a good thing. Companies and individuals can understand better what customers actually think. Many companies are finding out about product issues they didn’t previously know about. It’s better to invite this conversation than ignore it.

It’s also important to draw a line between what is acceptable negative commentary and what is slanderous, libelous, or threatening behavior. Most personal attacks by a single commenter go unnoticed and rarely appear high up in search results. They can be ignored. Not everyone is going to like you or agree with you.

Focus on your message and ideas, and make sure you get your message out and optimized to appear in search results. You want people to find the positive. You also want to know what people are saying about you or your products so make sure you’re monitoring the conversation. You can use Attensity, Nielson BuzzMetrics, Andiamo Systems, or free Google Alerts to do that.

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim has co-written a new book on the subject of managing your image online titled Radically Transparent (love the title). This is a subject every marketing professional should be well-versed in.

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