One of the most common questions that comes up when I’m speaking with people about introducing social media in the workplace is how to manage it.

The below top tips are from Michael Specht who’s an HR and technology expert and owner of Inspecht.

There’s also a podcast you can view from Michael’s website but I thought I’d share the tips (basic but very important) here:

1. Have people stop and think before posting, both professionally and personally.

2. Focus people on thinking about what they are doing and the implications.

3. Highlight that while disclaimers are good, you cannot hide behind them.

4. Remind people to keep their online interactions real and authentic.

5. Ensure people respect the culture of the tools and services you are using.

In a great article from Advertising Age, Kunur Patel looks at the different social media models emerging in the corporate world:

1. Centralised - social media role functions at a senior level as used by Ford

2. Distributed - everyone in the organisation has a role in social media as seen at Best Buy

3. Combination - incorporates centralised best practices and distributed execution as Kodak does.

You can read the full article from the Advertising Age website here.

While updating some LinkedIn training materials for a client session this week, I came across the following image from the LinkedIn blog that shows just how powerful a tool LinkedIn can be.

It shows that even though many people left the financial industry after the collapse, a large proportion stayed and you can see where they went. Interesting huh? Who would have thought.

You can read the full post here.

Prompted by the good people at Chinwag, we are now recruiting our very own twintern for the Summer. Graduates,  start sending your CVs to Adelaide@carveconsulting.com . We can’t wait to have the next social media expert on board for a few weeks!

Here is what our offer looks like:

You are passionate about all things social media, and are actively participating in a wide variety of web 2.0 activities such as blogging, social bookmarking, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You would like to learn how to translate your passion into coherent and cutting-edge strategies for corporate organisations.

Carve Consulting is a digital engagement practice specialising in Corporate Social Networks, Online PR, Social Media Monitoring and Search Engine Marketing. With offices in the UK and Australia, the practice has developed corporate social networking strategies, social media marketing and social recruiting programmes for a range of private, public and not-for-profit organisations, including VisitBritain, Yell Adworks, The Audit Commission, Fairtrade, Wine Australia, Hays, ANZ Bank, and the NHS.  The practice offers strategy, advisory, research, training and managed services.

We can offer you a two month-internship in July and August where you’ll be thrown into the deep end to work on accounts with our consultants. Your day-to-day tasks will vary but will definitely include the following at some point:

-    Account management (including “whatever needs to be done to service the accounts”)
-    Client training
-    Client research
-    Report writing
-    Proactively participating in social media events

Our ideal intern looks a bit like this:
-    Passionate about social media with an appetite to learn
-    Up to date web 2.0 industry knowledge
-    Exceptional traditional writing and grammatical skills
-    Excellent verbal communication skills with ability to present  complex ideas clearly
-    Attention to detail and outstanding organisation skills
-    Ability to work to tight deadlines and be calm under pressure

We can’t offer you a full salary but will cover your travel and lunch expenses, as well as a discretionary bonus at the end of the internship. We are currently looking at expanding so there is potentially scope for developing this internship into a permanent paid position.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Cute influencer campaign for Marmite Extra Strong from We Are Social. Also proves the best ideas are the easiest told, as the deck below illustrates.

And then there’s the wrong way to launch a product extension a la Vegemite which we wrote about a while back.

As a brand, whether you’ve decided to set up a twitter account, a facebook fan page or a blog to get closer to and engage with your community the following top tips on how to love your community (well, it is nearly Valentine’s Day) from social media monitoring company Radian 6 are worth a read.

In many ways, a healthy relationship between your brand and its community parallels that of a healthy relationship between two people. Both relationships rest on simple tenets like respect, and both should be celebrated whenever possible. When thinking about the connection you’ve built with your community and its members, remember these 10 truths of a healthy relationship to keep your community feeling loved and appreciated.

1. Remember to say ‘Thank you’ – People generally enjoy saying or doing nice things for others and tend to do it without expecting to be thanked for it. However, we all know how great it makes us feel when we are recognized for our efforts. When your community says something nice about you, it’s always a wonderful idea to say ‘thank you’.
2. Celebrate their successes – This is the age-old principle of thinking of others before yourself. If you do so, then you will probably notice the great things members of your community are accomplishing. Congratulate them and share their successes with others whenever you can.
3. Be a good listener – This is probably some advice we all received at least once from a parent in our lives. Like Stephen R. Covey points out in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Great relationships are also built on the idea of give and then, perhaps, get. Invest in your community by listening and understanding their needs.
4. Ask for their opinion – There probably isn’t a person alive who doesn’t like being asked for their opinion. Collaboration on a project almost always produces a better end result. Social media has given brands an amazingly simple and effective way to engage with those who have thoughts and ideas about them and their products and services. Remember to ask your community for its opinion.
5. Don’t forget about the little things – Sometimes it is the smallest of gestures that can mean the most to someone. Focusing on the little things that matter can show a person that they are indeed worth your time. When approaching relationships from a long-term frame of mind, it is very possible to make the time along the way for those important details without getting overwhelmed by the idea. Look out for the little touches to help each community member.
6. Be patient – In any relationship, making things work means working through the occasional misunderstanding or frustration with one another. Life is not supposed to be simple; if it were, it wouldn’t be all that exciting. It’s important that you take a step back and look at every challenge from the other’s point of view. Your patience and willingness to try to understand will be appreciated. Be known for your abundant patience and caring approach with your community.
7. Admit your mistakes – Nobody is perfect, and holding onto your pride will never do you any favors. When you invest in building relationships within your community, members get to know your brand’s human side. You will make errors but, while members may be disappointed, your community generally has the ability and willingness to forgive. Be quick to admit your mistakes and be genuine in asking for forgiveness.
8. Share a common passion – Brands and people are more than capable of setting up daily routines to get things accomplished based on things that need to be done. And while working side by side on something does create a bond, it’s usually not a bond that is sustainable over a very long period of time. Finding a common passion, something you both enjoy doing and talking about, creates the strongest bonds. If you are passionate about what you do, then no doubt there are others out there that feel the same way you do. Find them, invite them to your community, and enjoy learning and sharing together.
9. Show respect and gain trust – The strongest relationships are built on mutual respect and trust. But getting to that point should ideally start with you. Be willing to respect the views of your community even though you may not entirely agree with them. Community members have reasons for their views and it is up to you to understand, or at least accept, them. And, when making commitments to your community, make sure you meet or exceed their expectations. Being willing to compromise, or give and take, will help your brand demonstrate respect and earn a community’s trust.
10. Celebrate Valentine’s Day everyday – Giving your community a Valentine once a year is definitely a nice gesture, but finding ways to show them how much you love them on a regular basis should be what you strive for. Apply your creative energy to think of new ways to accomplish goals 1-9. Most companies are still just awakening to this idea of focusing on their community, so anything you do to show appreciation for your community now can help your brand stand out in the crowd. And, heck, who doesn’t enjoy making someone smile with an unexpected gift?

You can read the full post here.

For those of you who don’t follow the excellent Web Strategy blog written by Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group, here is a link to the matrix he has just built, comparing Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There’s lots of great stuff in this matrix, and it gives a seriously good SWOT analysis of the four platforms today.

To be fair, I was slightly surprised to see MySpace thrown into the equation as I don’t really see the platform competing with the others, but I guess you can’t really discard 57 million users in the US alone.

Talking about Google Buzz, I’ve only just started playing with it yesterday. Although I’m looking forward to see how it develops, I must say I haven’t really been bowled over by it so far. It looks to me like lots of noise that’s difficult to classify and make sense of. A bit like Google Wave, which I couldn’t get into either. Too much hype for not much susbtance after all?

The again, very few of my contacts have joined the Buzz so far so maybe I just need a few more friends to play with it?

If you happen to have missed the massive debate around Google Buzz these last few days, you can catch up here with ReadWriteWeb’s extensive coverage and analysis.

Three of the top five most engaging brands in the UK (as judged by research agency Hall & Partners) are brands that have defined how we interact on the internet and been at the frontier of the social media revolution so much so none of them actually exist outside the internet.

The top five include Google (No. 1), Amazon (No. 3) and Facebook (No. 5). We’ve written quite a lot (and ahem, yes, some have talked even more) over the years about how you can use social media to engage with your customers, so this was no real surprise.

The other two in the Top 5 include Cadbury and the BBC - both who have embraced social media and seem to be reaping the benefits according to this study that looked at a range of indicators including integrity, the importance of ’sensing’ in shaping shopper preferences, stock market expectations, profits as well as purchase intent.

Read the full article here from Warc.

Below are links to some related posts:

Top 10 most engaging brands

The most engaging brands in the world and how they got there

Brilliant - for all you creative types out there, at least. Below you’ll find all the ads from the 44th NFL Superbowl (thanks to the clever people at Forbes.com), equally renowned  for the competition on-field as it is for the creative warfare on-screen. Last year the NFL final was broadcast to a US audience of close to 100 million.

Superbowl has a long history over the last 30 years of enticing the biggest brands in the world to pour a shed load of money into their TV ad and we get to see some of the most brilliant creative minds outdo themselves for the best commercial.

The eagerly anticipated and insanely-expensive  TV commercials (a 30 sec in the 2008 Superbowl cost US$2.7 million according to Nielsen) also always create a little bit of controversy and this year is no exception.

This year’s clash between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts is currently underway as I’m writing so until it finishes the widget below will play the 2009 ads and then switch to the 2010 ads at the end of the fourth quarter. There’s even a voting app so you can have your say on the best and worst ones.

You must have Adobe Flash Player 9
or higher installed to view this content


src=”http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif”/>

Econsultancy has put together a snapshot of some of the statistics floating around about social media usage and compared it to six months ago.

Regardless of all the bookmarking tools there are around, I’m always losing track of figures like this when I need them so I thought I’d whack them on here and I’ll always be able to find them - maybe you’ll find them useful too.

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
• There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Something else interesting came out this week from Neilson (reported on Mumbrella) that showed Australians are the most prolific users of social media in the world. Apparently we here down under spend on average nearly 7 hours a month on social networking sites compared to the UK and the US at just over 6 hours.

There’s one more interesting figure I came across today and that is the growth of Facebook users in Oz - according to Facebook’s advertising information, there are nearly 8 million Facebook users in Australia (see full details on Laurel Papworth’s post here).

And if that isn’t enough stats for you for one day, check out this very extensive (and seemingly real-time) overview of Facebook usage worldwide at CheckFacebook.com.