David Nour, the author of the book Relationship Economics, is one of the dynamic keynote speakers we have for you at SM@RT 2010.  David is going to be an informative and engaging speaker. His message on how you can use social media tools to enhance the value of relationships to grow your business and improve your organization makes him the ideal keynote for our conference on social media for business. You don’t want to miss David Nour!

And if you register for the conference before November 1, you will also receive a pre-conference webinar from David Nour as part of your registration. So register NOW for SM@RT 2010!

We hope to see you in beautiful Reno-Tahoe this December.

Sitting next to “update status” on a user’s wall, questions are automatically public to all users of Facebook, and will allow people to tap in to the collective wisdom of Facebook’s 500 million users, the site hopes.

The company says that users can still restrict questions only to their followers if they post them as a regular status update. A photograph or poll can be added to the new “question” option, however.

Read the rest of the article

For information on using Facebook for business read about our Facebook for Business Booklet and DVD.

If 2009 was about this shiny, sexy new toy called social networking, 2010 and beyond has to be about ROI from your online efforts.  Social media in many ways is reinventing ROI to return on influence, impact and integration.

Whether you use social media to strengthen your brand, drive marketing efficiency, or increase sales, here are six (6) best practices to enhance your online return on influence – see the sidebar section for tactical suggestions.

1. Build a Relevant Relationship Bank™. If you have ever heard me speak, or have had a chance to read Relationship Economics, I describe your portfolio of relationships as your Relationship Bank.  How relevant is your relationship bank to your social media strategy?  The three fundamental attributes in your relationship bank are its’ quality, diversity, and the investment efforts you choose to make.  It is seldom about the number of people you are connected to, but rather the number of interested people in your niche that you develop a relationship with.

2. Toot Your Own Horn.  A mentor often reminds me that “if you don’t toot your own horn, there is no music.”  You must publicize your social media presence, consistently.  Create social links on your website.  Add social links to your email signature, or include them on your business card.  Include social networking profile links along with your forum signature.  Don’t forget to add a professional headshot where appropriate.

3. Become an Object of Interest. Most people will make up their mind to connect with you – or not – in seven to ten seconds, based on your picture (face it, we are all shallow), robust profile, and the most recent one to three status updates.  Keep in mind that people online are browsers, not readers.  It is critical that you keep your status updates poignant, pithy, and of particular interest or value to your target audience.  Ideal if you stick to what you know and can intelligently articulate.  Post updates for the benefit of the consumers of that information, not yourself as the producer of it.

4. Know Your Social Media “Why”. Your off-line and on-line presence must be in-line.  You must understand succinctly why you have a social media presence and how to most effectively utilize it as a platform.   To enhance your online return on influence, it is critical that you develop an online purpose – with both a defensive strategy (to protect your brand), as well as an offensive roadmap (to take your message to the market).

5. Invest With Unique Insights. Some say ROI from social media is a myth.  Let me remind you of the three types of relationship builders; on – or off-line; givers who freely give, takers, who use social media as a personal billboard or a solicitation engine, and investors.  Digital relationship investors understand that the fundamental value in any social forum is the exchange of unique insights.  Although we may never completely agree on a particular topic or process, a healthy dose of dissent fuels the participants’ intellectual horsepower.

6. Who Are You Listening To? Candidly, my first two weeks on Twitter were a complete waste of time.  I saw little value in the mundane exchange of useless information.  Then I quickly learned that Twitter ROI – for me – is heavily derived from following respected colleagues, industry thought leaders, and generally appealing personalities; those who shared insights I otherwise wouldn’t have regular access to.  Particularly if you rely on social media to source industry influencers, it is critical to ask yourself, who are you really listening to?  After all, we are the product of the advice we take.

What other best practices have you found of particular value?

Side bar

• Use Twitter directories (Twellow) and search for members based on their profile description.
• Look at followers of another person in your industry and follow others most relevant to your niche.
• Join industry groups in LinkedIn and Facebook; proactively engage other members in relevant discussions and connect with them.
• Find blogs on pertinent topics; post replies where appropriate and include your social media handles.
• Join forums on topical discussions; look for threads by insightful members – proactively engage and connect with them.
• Whenever posting a headshot picture, remember the limited size of real estate – show more face and less background.
• Use FourSquare for location based insights relevant to your expertise.
• Engage other Twitter members in answering questions where you have particularly unique insights or independent perspective.
• Update periodically with humor relevant to your field, i.e. Friday lawyer jokes buy an attorney.
• Use Twitpic to share images of process visuals – making the complex simple to understand and apply to one’s own challenges.

In several prospective client meetings recently, the conversation has centered on the need for a social media policy.  Whether you work for a progressive organization or a conservative, risk-adverse one, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the best approach.  Here are some prevailing camps:

1.  The Ostrich Look-A-Likes – “I’m on Facebook to keep up with my teenage daughter; it has no relevance to our business, and it’s going to go away soon enough.  Besides, bandwidth, viruses and time-wasting are all good reasons for us to block complete access to any and all of it from our company.”  Seriously?  You don’t think employees are getting online with their smart phones, personal laptops, or around the corner at the coffee shop?  Here is one of my favorites: a local, well-recognized brand that promotes a payment application they’ve developed on Facebook, blocks access to Facebook for its employees!

If you are locking it down because you don’t want your employees to participate and adversely affect on your brand marketing, you’re right to do so. It is working, but probably not in the manner you intend when your biggest competitor allows its employees to engage with the market using social media, and is lowering their cost of customer acquisition and retention in the process.

2.  Generic Find & Replacers – “Just give me someone else’s social media policy, and I’ll replace their company name with mine.” How’s that working for you on HR forms, supplier contracts and other documents which clearly define your unique organization, culture, and relationships critical to your success?  Here is a website just for you: http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php, It currently has 120+ different organizations to choose from.

3.  Bureaucratic Wordsmithers – “We need to wordsmith this document as it is part of our policy.”  The only thing I think about when I hear this one is the mid-90s version of the company “Mission Statement,” where it took the entire organization countless 12-hour debates in fifteen conference rooms over a six-month timeframe to replace “A” with “The!”  Power doesn’t corrupt – powerlessness corrupts!  Focus on a plain English version, which succinctly captures intent and direction, and work with social media law experts to “legalize it.”

4.  Agile Landscapers – “We understand that social media opens a whole new can of worms for our organization. We really need a strategic approach to developing our social media engagement program, as the very ‘squishy’ nature of social engagement lends itself to potential judgment calls on behalf of our organization.”  These leaders are really smart, because they get that the 20-somethings (and yes even sometime the 30-somethings) in the organization need to understand that personal actions online reflect the corporate image.  What you say and do online will either enhance or dilute your reputation and thus people’s perception of you!

If you fall in the first three camps – sorry, we can’t help you.  But if you’re savvy enough to understand that this is the wild, wild west and that a “track and trust” culture will get you a lot further than the prevailing “command and control” version, here are ten questions our team has devised to help start a dialogue in your organization:

1. What level of Corporate Transparency do we want to have? It is a spectrum, and you need to figure out how open you really want to be.
2. What is our definition of Intellectual Property? Your corporate IP is a corporate asset; think copyrights, patents, trademarks; but also corporate proprietary information, customer information, etc.  How do you define what is yours, your employees, your partners, your customers, and what do you share with the market?
3. What is the customer’s level of expectation around the customer experience? Do they expect to be engaged? Do they expect real-time feedback and response? Do they expect your people to be empowered to participate in social engagement? Knowing how much will also drive the organization’s view of how you should participate.
4. What is our employee’s level of expectation around employee engagement? Do they expect a wide-open policy for everyone? Are there industry regulations regarding participation? How is management participating?
5. Are there internal vehicles to vent for employees? Are you giving employees an outlet for voicing feedback? How is morale? Most who say, “I hate… websites” are actually ex-employees. Did you just go through a round of lay-offs? You may want to think about how your employee base will react.
6. How do we describe our corporate culture? Do you or your employees have a clear idea of your culture? It will come out, so be prepared. If your management team is more paranoid than North Korea, don’t expect to see a rosy picture put forth to potential customers. Corporate culture is one area that definitely shows up on social media.
7. What is the line between personal and professional branding? If an employee posts information concerning their company on their personal page, who owns the content?  Can we influence what someone posts in his or her spare time about himself or herself? The short answer is that if they share with the world that they are an employee of the company, then they are responsible to the company for protecting the brand.
8. What do we want the world to know about us as a company? Our employees are ambassadors for our company, for better or worse. For many prospective buyers, their first point of introduction may be through the social interactions of an employee, whether professional or personal. If we don’t have a clear message, what do you think will happen in the market?
9. What are our expectations around professionalism for our employees? If you have a dress code, code of conduct, etc., then it would be logical to have a more restrictive code for social media conduct. If you have loose expectations around how employees are expected to engage, then you probably don’t expect to have a corporate image projected from your employees.
10. Who owns the relationship / account? If your junior account team person connects to one of your customer’s employees, what happens when that employee leaves your company? Who owns the customer when a sales rep leaves who is directly connected to the customer on LinkedIn? How about when they have built their pipeline over social media? What happens when your customer service people build a following on Twitter with a personally branded account? What if your employee starts an account on behalf of the company?

Certainly not easy questions – but then again, social media is a disruptive force which we believe will evolve many industries.  So, I ask you again, what’s your social media policy?

It is no surprise that human capital is one of a company’s greatest assets. The question is how can you find, attract, and retain top talent and objectively invest in your employees to realize the greatest ROI on your human capital?

A great place to start is with your current employees. Many of your current employees come with built-in relationships. You can exponentially enhance your talent acquisition efforts by focusing on the top-notch talent that you already have. There is a likely change that your best employees know other highly-qualified, capable talent, for whom you are currently searching across the hall or across the globe.

Plus, the cream of the crop in any organization can be described as destiny shapers and future builders. Tap into this potential, tap into their strategic relationships, find out what makes them tick and bring more like them (with their help) on board. This will not only help your organization survive, but it will also improve your chances for success!

What are some of the things you do to find, attract, and retain top talent within your organization?

Exclusively for RENetworks Members…

This week’s tip comes from a good friend, Sydni Seid who writes about Business and Social Etiquette.  She was recently asked how to handle staff members who become drunk at company events, and how to handle guests who get inebriated.  I thought it may be of interest to this community as well.

Here are the 8 Ways – read Syndi’s full post here:

1. Provide ample food throughout the event
2. Serve…

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From: "SPRConnect"

Subject: SPRConnect Community News

SPRConnect       NEW RESOURCES TO HELP WITH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY If you were able to attend David Nour’sRelationship Economics and Social Networking NEXT session at the Advantage Business Conference in Miami on June 24, we hope you found the content of interest and value. A copy of the presentation is now available on SPRConnect. Even if you missed the ABC presentation, we welcome you to join the Social Media Best Practices group onSPRConnect and take advantage of the many resources posted there. In addition to the ABC presentation, David has posted additional resources to help with your company’s social media strategy. To get started, join the Social Media Best Practices group; under the Resources section of the group you will find the copy of the presentation. It is a large PDF file, but is well worth the minute or two it might take to download. To learn more about how to navigate around and take the best out of the SPRConnect community go to Globalunder the Resources section in the left navigation bar and find SPRConnect Tutorials.   If you would like to meet your top matches, join a new group, reply to a forum or explore a resource, click here to login.

Compliments of my friend, Lou Heckler.

In my last several prospective client meetings, a consistent conversation has centered on the need for a social media policy. Whether you work for a progressive organization or a conservative, risk-adverse one, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the best approach. Here are some prevailing camps:

Read the rest of David’s article in Top One Report.

In 2010, the changing dynamics in buyer behavior will force many organizations to engage and influence their current and prospective customers very differently in the “new norm” of 2010 and beyond. Marketing will have to focus much more proactively on one-on-one relationships (as advocated by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers of Peppers & Rogers Group in the early 90s – talk about being ahead of your time!), whether on the corporate website/blog, or a multitude of social networks.

The organizations of 2010 and beyond must become much more astute in how they identify and respond to the ever-fluid market dynamics. In short, they have to learn to engage and influence more and mass broadcast less, participate in communities, set up LinkedIn groups and Facebook fan pages, read blogs and respond to tweets, create conversations, and share photos – in short, to Listen Louder! In many ways, social networks are changing the rules of influence and engagement.

Read the rest of David’s article in Top One Report.