S.M.A.R.T. Blog

Social Media Experts: Yes, they Exist. Yes, You Should Hire Them. But Do Your Due Diligence.

This post is a response to the criticisms Peter Shankman made in his recent diatribe against “social media experts.” It offers a different perspective on his arguments, articulates the need for social media expertise, and provides guidance for hiring individuals and organizations (consultants, contractors, and employees) to help with social media initiatives.

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A couple of weeks ago, Peter Shankman (PS) wrote a dramatic post decrying what he considered misplaced emphasis on “social media experts.” His commentary generated lots of cyberheat, with high levels of sharing and prolific, passionate responses in the form of both amens and eyerolls. Here are links to the two primary copies of Peter’s post, along with a few key metrics as of May 29, 2011:

• I Will Never Hire a “Social Media Expert,” and Neither Should You (on Shankman.com)
  • Shares: Almost 2,000
  • Facebook likes: 2,000
  • Comments: Over 300
• Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A "Social Media Expert" (on Business Insider)
  • Reads: Over 200,000
  • Shares: Almost 13,000
  • Facebook  likes: 11,000
  • Comments: Almost 600

Obviously, he struck a nerve. Perhaps tiring of social media mania, the commensurate bandwagon effect, and the proliferation of hucksters selling “snake oil,” many people appreciated his speaking the “truth” as they saw it. But because the aspersions he cast seemed to disparage all social media professionals, many people took umbrage.

Shankman’s latest salvo wasn’t the first time the “social media expert” question has been raised. People have been engaged in the debate on-and-off for several years. Peter himself co-wrote a similar post back in 2009, and a month or so ago Paul Segreto started a comparable discussion in the Social Media Today LinkedIn (SMT LI) group (which, with its thoughtful commentary and useful resources, offers a reasoned, civil discourse that stands in stark contrast to Peter’s post and the comments it inspired/provoked).

 

Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much

It seems PS was trying to be deliberately provocative to make a point, but in his responses to the comments and questions on his own blog, he stuck by the tenor of his post and his dramatic declarations. Given that he chose to take such an extreme stand, I couldn’t help but notice several ironies in his harangue, as well as many of the supportive comments he received:

• Shankman himself is often referred to as a “social media expert,” and his professional success is due in large part to his social media expertise (see the bio page on his website for details, or search on his name).
• PS advocates transparency but didn’t practice it in this post. Because he’s a “rock star,” he may assume people know his social media history, but he probably should have offered some kind of disclosure to help readers put his comments in perspective.
• Many members of the “amen chorus” make their living by selling their social media expertise and/or by leveraging social media technologies. Few if any of them are buyers. In fact…
• The people most likely to need/hire a social media expert – the rookie majority – will never read these posts. Most will never even know they exist.
• PS demonstrates the limits of his own expertise by confounding the underlying technologies (social media) with one of their applications (marketing). He writes, “social media is just another facet of marketing and customer service.” In reality, social media is much more than that, and its potential applications go beyond not just marketing and customer service, but other external applications including public relations and sales (see Part 2 of the Social Media Primer, updated here, for details).
• Peter (implicitly) advocates humility, and listening and empathy, but the post demonstrates little of any of these.

Provocations and ironies not withstanding, PS is right that too many people convey false impressions of their social media expertise, presenting their knowledge and skills as being more comprehensive and/or in-depth than they are. I regularly encounter people who are

• Overly enthusiastic about new digital technologies;
• Lacking depth of understanding of today’s technological changes and their implications;
• Content to think in narrow, shallow and simplistic terms;
• Too eager to follow fads and try/promote every new thing that comes along; and
• More tactical than strategic.

But most of the advocates I’ve observed and interacted with do understand the rules of the game have changed and that social media is not about putting old wine in new bottles (see this post for more of my thoughts on that). Plus, I don’t know very many people who label themselves as experts and/or claim to ONLY be social media experts.

In fact, it’s the quite the opposite: many people who are deserving of the “expert” label demur and/or avoid it because of negative connotations. “Expert” has become a four-letter word, especially in the context of social media and other new digital technologies. The collective consciousness has decided that we need to hold social media to a higher standard than other professions, functions, and areas of expertise, offering arguments such as:

• It’s too new. False. The underlying technologies have been around for almost 20 years, longer if you consider some of their digital precursors. And the core characteristics – such as user-generated content and social sharing – date back to our earliest days on the planet.
• Things change too much and too often. That’s true, but the truth isn’t unique to this set of technologies and/or related disciplines. Professionals in many areas will quickly attest to the dynamism in their own fields, companies, and industries.
• Only a small elite can claim expert status. If we define expert in very narrow terms as a pinnacle achievement, then yes, only a few people can claim it. But if you look up the definition of the term and rely on its denotation, you’ll find it applies to a much broader group of people. Plus, I think it’s important to recognize that it’s a relative, as well as absolute, label. I may know a lot about employment law, for example, but I would defer to a labor law attorney as an expert in the field.
• It’s not just about the tools. Of course it’s not, but understanding how the technologies, tools, and platforms are used is critically important to success in using them. There are countless people who are “experts” in their core disciplines but would fail miserably in 2.0 spaces because of their lack of social media expertise. More on that in the next section.

More often than not, when people make sneering references to social media experts and/or disdain the use of the term, what they’re referring to is the proliferation of charlatans in response to the dramatic growth of digital social media in the past few years. This proliferation may be unfortunate, but it’s hardly surprising and hardly unique to the Digital Era. Charlatans, swindlers, hustlers, hucksters, quacks, frauds, snake oil salesmen, and mountebanks are endemic to the human condition.

But swindlers and fakes prevail because buyers are too eager to find a quick fix, a silver bullet, a simple, one-size-fits-all solution. In their efforts to delegate and/or outsource, they often end up abdicating their own responsibilities to themselves and their organization’s stakeholders. Both in Shankman’s post and in most of the comments I read, I saw very little discussion of the ways in which buyers and social media rookies have contributed to the problems they perceive. But I’ve noticed that as more organizations explore social media’s potential, there’s been an increase in attempts to (mis)apply 1.0 approaches in 2.0 spaces. I also regularly have discussions with prospects who politely listen to my best practices suggestions but are inclined to ignore them. I may be able to convince them I’m right, or I might choose not to work with them, but I can imagine many social media professionals who would accommodate their wishes due to a lack of confidence, lack of power, and/or financial pressures - not just lack of expertise.

 

The Need for Social Media Expertise

Regardless of whether we use the “expert” label, there are many reasons why organizations should invest in people with social media expertise:

• The road to social media hell is paved with ignorance. Cyberspace abounds with stories of social media failures, often by people who should have known better: experienced journalists and public relations professionals who “tweeted without thinking;” a CEO who set up a fake blog to disparage a competitor; a teacher who blogged disparagingly about her students; community managers who fanned the flames of a Facebook attack; marketers and advertisers who underestimated the social media backlash to their companies’ campaigns or actions, or who created fake social media-based commercials and/or endorsements; human resources and legal professionals who developed overly-broad social media policies; hiring managers who engaged in unethical practices using social media. I could go on, but the point is that contrary to Shankman’s core argument, social media isn’t “just” anything. Yes, it’s a set of tools and technologies, but it’s a very powerful set that can cause significant harm if used incorrectly! Rather than using a hammer to extend the tool analogy people often use, it’s much more accurate to refer to tools like chainsaws and tablesaws. Or to refer back to Peter’s analogy, it’s not about arrows or a quiver, it’s about flamethrowers and heat-seeking missiles.
• Simple doesn’t mean easy. It takes less than a minute to set up a Twitter account. And perhaps another few seconds to send the first “is this thing on?” tweet. But the simplicity of the user interface hardly ensures one’s effectiveness in using the channel. There’s a new language and norms to learn, as well as hazards and mistakes to avoid. The same is true for other public platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr, and tools like blogging and wikis and videocasts and podcasts. Social media rookies regularly underestimate them, often to their own detriment.
• Strategy trumps tactics. The ways in which an individual or organization can leverage social media are virtually limitless, but the ways in which they should leverage the technologies need to be driven by goals and objectives, industry and stakeholder characteristics, and a host of other factors, including a sophisticated understanding of whether and how social media would be more effective than traditional tools.
• Change is hard. For most rookies – including organizational leaders – social media is threatening, intimidating and discomfiting. Bringing about the necessary changes to leverage social media successfully requires in-depth understanding of the technologies and their applications and implications, as well as the ability to translate that understanding into language lay people can understand and the ability to help them connect the dots.
• Even when it’s your mountain to climb, having a Sherpa can help. I’ve been immersed in social media for over two years, not just as a practitioner, but as a student and teacher. I can say with confidence that it’s impossible for someone just getting started to quickly match the knowledge, skills, and understanding of someone who’s been intimately involved with new digital technologies for some time. More importantly, these “experts” can help rookies climb their learning curves more efficiently and effectively and provide guidance to increase the likelihood of success and minimize the risks of failure.

It’s important to recognize that there is no single definition of expertise and no “one-size-fits-all” model to leveraging that expertise. The most appropriate expert for a given purpose in a particular organization will depend on factors like the organization’s:

• Strategic goals and objectives, both short term and longer term
• Industry and client characteristics
• Level  of technological sophistication
• Financial resources
• Employee skill levels and capacity

In his excellent response to Shankman’s post, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz provides a chart that offers a nice starting point for understanding different levels of social media expertise. I would argue that we can distinguish different levels of social media professionals the same way we might professionals in other functional areas: coordinators, analysts, managers, designers, planners, strategists, and advisors.

 

Hiring Due Diligence

Generally speaking, an organization’s approach to hiring social media professionals should be the same as the approach it would use to hire professionals in other disciplines like accounting, finance, law, human resources – and yes, marketing too. Hiring best practices dictate that buyers should engage in the necessary due diligence to ensure:

• They avoid charlatans who claim to have expertise they don’t really possess.
• The people they hire have the social media know-how they need.
• Social media expertise is complemented by other relevant expertise, including
  • Specific functional areas (i.e., marketing, human resources, knowledge management, project management)
  • Skill sets (e.g., writing ability, community management)
  • Industries (healthcare, non-profit, consumer products, manufacturing)

This due diligence is necessary whether an organization is hiring a consultant to provide advice and counsel, an individual or firm to outsource work to, or an employee.

Here are some questions buyers can ask during the interview process (and what to look for in their answers):

• Q: How would you define or describe social media to a novice?
  • A: Can they describe the underlying technologies – not just the most popular platforms – in easy-to-understand terms?
• Q: What are the main public social media platforms and tools? What are some I may not have heard of?
  • A: Can they name platforms besides LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube?
  • A:  Are they familiar with less well-known sites like those I include in the Social Media Quotient (SMQ) Quiz, and tools like HootSuite and NetVibes?
• Q: How would you describe (pick a platform) to me? Does that platform make sense for our organization to use? Why or why not? What platforms should we be using and why?
  • A: Can they provide a cogent assessment of what tools are best for your organization and why
• Q: How long have you been using social media and in what capacities? What have you learned from your experiences?
  • A: Have they been intimately involved in creating and/or managing a digital presence, either for themselves or an organization?
  • A: Can they describe their own growth and development, recognize their increasing sophistication, and acknowledge they’re still learning?
• Q: Tell me about some social media failures and mistakes (either yours or others). What can we learn from them?
  • A: Can they quickly provide examples?
  • A: Can they explain what happened and how the mistake reflects the risks and hazards of social media?
  • A: Can they identify the best ways to respond to and/or prevent these problems?
• Q: How would you measure social media success in our organization?
  • A: Are they able to put common metrics (e.g., number of followers/fans, Klout scores) in proper perspective?
  • A: Can they describe the differences between short- and long-term measures of success?
  • A: Do they talk about alternative measures for evaluating success (e.g., relative improvements over time)
• Q: What are your go-to resources for social media? What books, bloggers, and/or websites do you like best?
  • A: Do they recognize they’re still learning and that staying current via reading (not just doing) is critical?
  • A: Can they quickly rattle off resources in each category?

The specific questions buyers should use will depend on the type and level of expertise they’re looking for. Buyers don’t need to know the answers to these questions themselves to judge the responses effectively. What they should look for is how the candidate responds, the same way they would for other technical jobs they may not completely understand. In addition to the tips above, here are a few general things to look for:

• Tempered rather than unabashed enthusiasm for new technologies
• Recognition of how different technologies can be used to meet goals and objectives and the importance of integrating them with other initiatives
• Respect rather than disdain for social media rookies
• Understanding of the challenges to social media success (e.g., resistance to change, political issues, resource constraints)
• Lessons learned from experience (theirs or others), as well as recognition of the need and a commitment to continuous learning.

 

Conclusion

Once again, a post I intended to be a brief treatment on a topic ends up as a treatise! But once again, believe it or not, I’ve only skimmed the surface. As always, I invite people to raise questions and offer additional insights and resources. More guidance on assessing and hiring social media experts would be particularly useful for social media rookies. Thanks!

-  Courtney Hunt

 

S.M.A.R.T. News: Recruiting and Employer Branding in the Digital Era

This SMinOrgs S.M.A.R.T. News Digest focuses on how social media technologies can be used to enhance recruiting in organizations, especially in terms of creating and conveying a unique employment brand and finding and engaging top talent. It includes a variety of articles and videos from 2009 through 2011 that offer insights and recommendations from a number of leading global organizations.

This is Jerry Carducci’s fifth News Digest. The information and resources he shares here are a nice complement to some of the things I’ve written about social media and human capital management, particularly this post on integrated talent management. For the full list of social media and human capital management resources, click here.  – Courtney Hunt

 

Please feel free to share your thoughts on the items in this News digest directly via the blog, or start or join the dialogue on LinkedIn. We especially welcome other examples of how social media is enhancing talent acquisition in organizations. We also appreciate your bringing items on other topics to our attention via LI, Twitter, or FB, or by emailing a link to news@sminorgs.net. Thanks!

Click here to learn more about the SMinOrgs News Digest feature and how you can leverage it to meet your goals and objectives.

If you'd like to receive a notice each time a new post is published, you can subscribe to the SMinOrgs S.M.A.R.T. Blog by clicking here or on the link on the right side of the website.

 

Introduction

Social media has brought about a dramatic shift in the way organizations source and recruit talent.  The depth and breadth of an organization’s use of social media for recruiting extends beyond message boards and website postings.  It represents an extension of social networking, creating an “employer brand” (conveys your internal DNA; culture, values and work life) and involves the principles of e-marketing and e-brand management that many organizations use to reach and service consumers.

While there are numerous resources discussing the use of social media for recruiting, the selected articles and videos for this S.M.A.R.T. News Digest focus on how to effectively build your “employer brand” and how organizations are using social media to convey their “employer brand” in attracting talent.

Talent shortages, global sourcing and ROI are key considerations in recruiting talent.  It has long been common knowledge that traditional recruiting methods can cost upwards of four, or more, times the position’s annual salary, not considering productivity loss and the impact on in-place staff.  Social media provides a cost effective method to build, promote and generate interest in your “employer brand.” 

I continue to stress that we are now in the “Talent Age,” where value is created through people, value propositions have shifted to a “one-size-fits-one” and messages need to be tailored to the individual.  To attract the right candidates, they must be viewed as consumers, versus applicants or candidates, and messages must be targeted to specific audiences. 

For the organization, social media provides the ability to differentiate and create a unique value proposition and engage potential candidates through ongoing dialogue and information sharing.

Successful models incorporate principles of e-brand management, e-marketing and workforce engagement that connect with, and engage, potential candidates as individuals, and effectively use search engines to drive traffic to an organization’s website.    

Social media however creates new opportunities and challenges in recruiting and extends beyond posting a position, reviewing resumes, brief interviews and hoping the right candidate is selected.  It creates a “total package,” enabling individuals to cultivate and communicate their personal brand and establish an individualized connection with the organization. 

Studies have shown that consumers now more than ever rely on more than just "word of mouth" when making purchase decisions. Many people are now conducting online searches for reviews about a company or product before finalizing their purchases. Similarly, they seek out information on potential employers and judge them by their online reputation.  It is therefore vital that organizations remain in control of their on-line presence through professional messages that are truthful and convey a realistic representation of what work life is like within the organization.

Social recruiting is not without the potential for adverse exposure, however.  As Courtney Hunt explains in her white paper, Social Screening: Candidates – and Employers – Beware, notes:

“Social screening has become increasingly popular. Employers are “googling” job candidates and searching social networking sites as part of their pre-employment background checks, and both employers and external recruiters are ramping up their efforts to source candidates using social networks…. no doubt that social screening will become integrated into the employment practices of most organizations…. both individuals and organizations should proceed with caution as we figure out the best ways to access and use available data in practical, legally defensible – and ethical – ways.” 

The selected articles and videos for this digest provide insight into ethically leveraging social media in recruiting and how organizations have built their “employer brands” and targeted specific audiences to attract and retain the best talent. Specifically:

• Tiffany Black defines social recruiting and suggests ways to leverage LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in building communities of interest in recruiting.
• Mike Ramer describes how social media has transformed the way organizations source and recruit talent.
• Six aspects of social media recruiting stresses that success with social networking starts with an understanding of each tool and how it is used for different demographics and job families.
• Joe Light discusses the role social media plays in reaching candidates with new skills when the organization is transforming into extensions of their core business.
• Becky Folb describes Nokia’s approach and philosophy to creating community and sourcing.
• Kristi Stubbs describes how Starbucks creates and uses communities to attract, create interest and learn about candidates.
• Cisco System’s Talent expert, Mimish L'Esperance, discusses ways to recruit, retain and manage your employer brand with social media.

Categories: applications, best practices, human resources, opportunities, strategy

For additional articles that address related issues, click on terms of interest in the category cloud on our website.

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Title: How to Use Social Media as a Recruiting Tool

Source: Inc. Magazine

Author: Tiffany Black

Lead Paragraph: There are millions of people on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. More companies are using social media to target candidates. Here's how to use social media as a way to find your next hire. (April 2010)

Brief Commentary from Jerry Carducci: At the personal level, social media has forever changed the way we network, connect with others and share common interests and information.  Businesses have found social media effective in creating and strengthening brand identity and build a loyal following of consumers, and potential consumers, for their products and services.

Social media enables us to rapidly expand our sphere of influence, build and share connections.  It is common knowledge that traditional methods of job hunting are out the window.  Leveraging contacts and networking has proven to be a highly effective method.  So if it is effective for the individual, then why can’t the reverse be as effective for employers? 

From a recruiting perspective you are building your internal brand, making conveying culture, values and creating interest in your work environment in a trust-building, ethical and honest manner critical. 

Connecting with potential candidates on local, regional or global scale with similar values and interests creates access to a broader base of potential candidates and experience and enables organizations to gain access to the best talent to meet their organizational objectives. 

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Title: The New World of Social Media Recruiting, Part 1

Source: The Fordyce Letter

Author: Mike Ramer

Lead Paragraph: We live in exciting times. Remember the mid ‘90s, when the Internet was growing exponentially? It opened up the world with speed of communication and spread of information. The Internet continues to transform the way people live and how businesses operate, including ours — search and recruiting. Now we manage databases and use new tools to efficiently prospect, manage relationships, and deliver for our clients and candidates. (May 2010)

Brief Commentary from Jerry Carducci:  I continue to bring forward the fact that we are now in the “Talent Age,” where value is created through people.  Finding the “right people” with the “right skills” and the “right cultural fit” are critical success factors.

In the recruiting context, it means building the “right” profiles in the “right places” and sending the “right message” to attract and generate interest among candidates, which enables them to get to know the organization.  The two-way interactive applications take this process one step further, by providing for meaningful exchange between the organization and potential candidate(s).

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Title:  6 Aspects of a Social Media Recruiting Strategy Every Company Should Know

Source:  recruitingtools.com

Author: Unknown

Lead Paragraph:  The best way to use social media to build communities and utilize relationships is to create your brand, identify the networks used by your target audience and get involved.  

LinkedIn has become the de facto standard for business users, while networks such as Facebook and Twitter are seen as consumer services. However, both offer opportunities to build the talent pipeline and raise awareness of a company’s employment brand.

Brief Commentary from Jerry Carducci:  Understanding how social media applications work and the foundation of communications and how relationships that are built, maintained and the demographic profile of the users are critical to building identity. 

Consistency in conveying your message across all applications is critical. However, as with all communications, listening is more important than constantly posting messages and comments.  Organizations create or join collaborative communities to gain access to a group of people with the skills and qualifications they are seeking.  This enables recruiters to leverage scalable relationships to quickly meet business demands and create transparent, proactive recruiting efforts.

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Title:  Companies turn to employer branding to attract top talent

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Author:  Joe Light

Lead Paragraph:  Companies have long set aside resources to develop and market consumer brands. Now, some are finding that to attract the best job candidates, they need to put similar efforts into their so-called employer brands.  Unlike a company's product brands—say Fritos or Dial—employer brands target potential employees to make a company seem like a desirable place to work.

Brief Commentary from Jerry Carducci:  Many organizations are transforming and extending from their traditional core business to attract, retain and add value for customers.  As a result they need to attract applicants with the skills necessary to meet these new objectives. 

Again, the purpose of “employer branding” is to attract the best applicants, and those who are not will decide that a particular company is not for them and self-eliminate.  In creating an “employer brand,” organizations need to examine their core brand image and better illustrate the types of skills they seek. 

Beyond the examples provided in this article is this interview by KARE 11 News with Stacy Van Meter, Talent Community Manager for Deluxe Corporation. Deluxe is transforming from the check printer most have known them for, to a marketing resource for small businesses and financial institutions.  As a result, the skills needed extend into the digital arena. Deluxe uses a combination of methods to reach its target audience, including QR (Quick Response) codes to drive applicants to their website and videos of hiring managers describing the position, work life and their expectations.  Their approach personalizes the message and illustrates the innovative culture that now drives the organization.

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Title: Nokia’s Approach to Social Media and Employer Branding – #SMIR

Source: Social Media in Recruitment Conference

Author: n/a

Lead Paragraph: Thrust of this talk from Becky Folb, global talent acquisition manager (digital marketing) [at Nokia]is to personalise the business so that you can talk to potential candidates. You do not own the conversation which is a big culture shift for employers. (April 2011)

Brief Commentary from Jerry Carducci:  As with product or service marketing and promotions, the objective is to create value and make the message personal. The outline of her presentation highlights Nokia’s approach and philosophy.

In her preconference interview with Mike Taylor, Becky Folb discusses how Nokia accomplishes their on-line recruiting objectives.

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Title:  Social Media Recruiting at Starbucks

Source: WhyHireMe on YouTube

Author:  n/a

Summary:  Kirsti Stubbs, Recruiter for Starbucks Canada sat down with WhyHire.me  to talk about profound changes in the recruiting landscape. Kirsti is appreciative of learning as much as she can about a candidate - she turns to the web and social media to find great candidates she believes will make for great managers at their stories and regional offices located across Canada. (October 2009)

Brief Commentary from Jerry Carducci:  Social media enables individuals create their personal brand – a total personal, professional and personality resume.    

Similarly, an organization creates its personality and brand through the information and posts it shares, enabling potential candidates to examine the culture and envision working in that environment.  This emphasizes the importance of targeting and consistency of messaging across the various sites, as inconsistencies create the impression is that the organization is not well coordinated and organized.   

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Title:  Using Social Media for Recruitment, Retention, and Branding

Source: CiscoChannels on YouTube

Author:  n/a

Summary:  The Channels blog chats with Cisco Talent expert Mimish L'Esperance, Marketing Manager, Cisco Talent about ways to recruit, retain, and manage your brand with social media. (February 2010)

Brief Commentary from Jerry Carducci:  Social recruiting again, is about targeting, building interest and establishing a connection with applicants through your “employer brand.”

However, like marketing and advertising organizations cannot merely rely on one source, it must be balanced and packaged with other recruiting or job posting sites and organizations must monitor and manage their internal image. 

Cisco uses a variety of tools to manage their internal image and personalize and convey a personality through employee videos that attempt to create a bond through communicating employee outside interests and company culture.

Paper or Digital? The Results are in… and It’s a (Virtual) Tie!

With over 500 votes and nearly 200 comments, the results of a recent poll indicate people are fairly evenly split between paper and digital book formats. Although the poll wasn’t perfectly scientific, the richness of its results can be of great value to authors, book publishers, and designers, as well as professionals in other fields such as training and development, academia, and communications.

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Last month I solicited people’s preferences for paper versus digital books via a LinkedIn (LI) poll and a comparable Constant Contact (CC) survey (for folks not on LinkedIn). As I explained in this accompanying blog post, I wanted to get a sense of whether people would rather read a book about leveraging new digital technologies using traditional or modern methods. I had my own perspective and preference as an author, but I wanted to see what potential readers thought too. I’m really glad I did…

The response to the LI poll was fantastic, and the CC response was good as well. There were 493 LI votes, and 49 CC votes, for an official total of 542. I also got a lot of votes through the comments people made in various places where I shared a link to the post/poll, so the unofficial tally was probably closer to 600.

This post shares the results of the poll – both quantitative and qualitative – and offers additional resources for folks who’d like to explore the topic more deeply. If you can provide insights on any of these resources and/or have others to suggest, I’d love to hear about them. I’m particularly interested in learning about other “true” digital books – i.e., those that have integrated hyperlinks (beyond the table of contents), and/or have embedded videos, slide shows, and/or podcast links.

I continue to welcome other thoughts and suggestions, such as specific topics you’d like to see addressed in my forthcoming book, your perspective on the inclusion of graphics and/or multimedia elements (e.g., videocasts and podcasts), pricing, supplemental materials, etc. And if you or someone you know would be interested in helping edit, design, and/or review the book, please let me know that as well. Thanks!

- Courtney Hunt

 

The Poll Results

The LI and CC results were very similar: 47-48% of respondents preferred paper books, and 52-53% preferred digital. Of the four digital options, the results were similar as well, with the majority preferring to read via a traditional computer or e-reader, and a minority opting for tablets or smartphones. The detailed results are provided below.

LinkedIn. Here is a snapshot of the overall LinkedIn results:

If you have a LI account, click here or on the image above to view the demographic breakdown for each response. Since this is not a scientific study and demographic data was only available for about half the respondents, I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the demographics other than to make three observations:

• Men and women were equally represented in the results, and their responses were roughly the same across all the options. Women seemed to prefer paper relatively more than men, and men seemed to prefer reading via tablets relatively more.
• The ages skewed relatively high, with over 50% of respondents being 45 or older. Given that the respondents were still evenly divided between paper and digital and there were no significant differences by age for any of the responses, the results may be conservative. Had the demographic breakdown been more even across the age groups, would we have seen a stronger preference for digital?
• There were only minor variations in the different responses based on age and seniority.

Constant Contact. Here’s a snapshot of the overall Constant Contact results:

Demographically, more women than men responded to the CC poll (59%), and demographically this group’s age skewed even higher (only 15% were under 35). Given the relatively small sample size, I didn’t explore whether there may have been any demographic differences in the results.

 

The Comments

As great as it was to get lots of people to participate in the polls, what really amazed me is how many people shared comments – and how much richness those comments added to the results. The qualitative data was so good, in fact, that I compiled it all into a (25 page!) document. Click on the link below to access the file that contains the comments people made on the LI and CC polls, as well as in various LI groups and other sites where I solicited people’s input:

Download Paper or Digital poll comments (as of May 19, 2011)

A few things to keep in mind as you review these comments:

• I organized the comments into four basic groups, as noted below. Because people’s comments couldn’t always be neatly categorized (and I’m human), some comments may not seem to be in the right place. Did I mention this isn’t a scientific study? Please read for gist, not perfection!
  • Comments favoring digital formats (pp. 1-7)
  • Comments favoring paper formats (pp. 8-15)
  • Comments favoring both digital and paper (pp.  16-24)
  • Other comments (p. 25)
• The comments are grouped by source, but other than including the LI and CC poll comments first, there is no particular order to the sources. All the sources are hyperlinked, though most require membership to access the details. If you have problems with the hyperlinks, please send a message to bookpoll@sminorgs.net and we'll help you troubleshoot.
• The comments are listed in chronological order within each source, with the oldest listed first. I copied the comments exactly as they were originally typed, including them all with no editing. I didn’t include the authors’ names because most of the comments were made in semi-private spaces.

 

Additional Resources

More on the “Paper versus Digital” Debate. Here are a few more worthwhile resources on digital books that offer information and insights from three perspectives: past, present, and future:

• Past: Books Are Dead, Long Live Books
• Present: Research from Digital Book World:
  • Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading
  • Consumer Trends in e-Book Readership using Multi-Function Devices
• Future: What Books Will Become

Digital Publihsing Resources. The indication from the poll results that I need to create a book that will be readable in both digital and paper formats may seem obvious in some respects, but the bigger take-away for me was the approach I should take to developing multiple formats. As I noted in my original post, the typical approach has been to create paper versions and convert them to digital formats without adding (m)any enhanced digital features. But I’d like to try to create a “fully-loaded” digital version and then strip it down for other formats, including paper. In other words, I’ll start with a version that includes hyperlinks and embedded videos, podcasts, photos, etc., and then replace the interactive elements with urls for formats that can’t accommodate them.

I don’t know if a single e-publishing tool or service can handle what I’d like to do, but I’ve learned of several worth looking into. Here are links to a few related resources I’ve learned about but haven’t really explored yet:

• Amazon self-publishing
• Barnes & Nobles' PubIt
• Blurb
• Books in Browsers
• Calibre
• Eastgate
• eBook Architects
• Electric Publisher
• ePub (from the International Digital Publishing Forum)
  • epub Reader Software
  • .epub eBooks Tutorial - Part 1 and Part 2
• Pinnacle Technology Publishing
• PushPop Press

 

NEU’s Master’s Degree Specialization in Social Media and Online Communities

Beginning in the fall of 2011, Northeastern University will offer a specialization in Social Media and Online Communities as part of a Master’s Degree Program in Corporate and Organizational Communication. This post provides details and invites feedback on the curriculum.

 

Earlier this year I was hired by Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies (NEU CPS) to design a specialization in Social Media and Online Communities (SMOC) for their Master’s Degree Program in Corporate and Organizational Communication. I’m pleased to announce that the specialization is now official.

You can go to NEU CPS’s website to learn more about the program and the specialization (from the main page, click on the curriculum tab and then scroll down to access course details). There’s also a webinar this Friday, May 20^th, at 1 pm ET (here’s a link to register for it).

I’ve pasted the descriptions of the six courses being offered (each is six weeks long; five are required for the specialization) below. I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions about the program and the courses, including whether you’d find them valuable. I know there’s a bit of controversy about whether degree and certificate programs in digital media are worthwhile, and it’s a topic many people feel strongly about – including me. I did some fairly extensive benchmarking to develop the NEU curriculum, and I plan to share the results of that research and my own thoughts on the best ways to prepare professionals for Digital Era success in a future blog post (the post is now complete: here's a link). It’d be great to include other people’s perspectives as well.

- Courtney Hunt

 

The SMOC Courses

CMN 6015: Introduction to the Digital Era: The Power of Social Media

Provides an introduction to social media concepts, including the historical, economic, and social foundations of Digital Era realities. Explores the potential applications of new technologies for both internal and external purposes, across a range of organizations and industries. Provides an introduction to social media leadership by addressing strategic responsibilities, issues, and challenges. Addresses Digital Era career-management responsibilities, including the need to establish a strong digital presence, stay current with changing technologies, and consider new and evolving positions and career trajectories. Offers students an opportunity to apply concepts by establishing and/or strengthening their own digital presence and professional brand, in addition to assessing the digital presence of relevant individuals and organizations.

CMN 6025: Digital Era Skills: Platforms, Tools, and Techniques

Both individual and organizational success in the Digital Era depend on the development of content and community management skills by professionals in a range of disciplines. This course seeks to help students develop those skills by focusing on specific tools, techniques, and best practices for effective engagement on both public and private platforms (including time and information management skills). Offers students an opportunity to apply concepts by experimenting with various tools and platforms and reflecting on lessons learned from their own active engagement and to learn from the experiences and reflections of their peers.

CMN 6035: Legal, Policy, and Ethical Issues in the Digital Era

Digital Era leaders must understand the legal, policy, and ethical issues resulting from increased use of digital technologies and learn how to effectively manage the associated risks. This course provides an overview of the challenges that need to be addressed from both commercial and employment law perspectives, in addition to addressing general social concerns like privacy. The primary emphasis is on managing organizational risks but consideration is also given to the impact of various legal considerations on individuals. The U.S. legal environment serves as the focal point; however, global issues are also addressed.

CMN 6045: Leveraging Digital Technologies: Strategy, Assessment, and Governance

Focuses on the initial stages of social media initiatives: strategy identification, assessment, and governance considerations. Offers students an opportunity to learn the importance of establishing goals and objectives to guide subsequent development and implementation efforts, how to evaluate the potential for digital technologies to enable the pursuit of those goals and objectives, and how to conduct a comparative assessment of current and potential tools and practices to identify the most efficient and effective approaches. Also offers an opportunity to develop an appreciation for the governance issues that have to be considered once a commitment to leveraging new technologies has been made.

CMN 6055: Planning and Design of Social Media Channels and Online Communities

Focuses on the planning and design stages of social media initiatives. Examines how to create a social media system, complete with communication flows, as well as a related governance structure, social media policy, and community management guidelines. Offers students an opportunity to learn to create high-level plans for activities such as development, implementation, communication, and training. Also offers students an opportunity to understand the challenges and resistance they may face and be prepared to manage the change process effectively.

CMN 6065: Implementation and Management of Social Media Channels and Online Communities

Focuses on the implementation and management stages of social media initiatives. Offers students an opportunity to learn how to establish/expand an organization's initial presence on multiple platforms, define metrics for measuring success in both the short and longer terms, develop training for community managers and others, evaluate the performance of social media activities and revise strategies/tactics to adapt to feedback, and determine logical approaches for expanding a digital community and developing specific campaigns based on community activity.

 

Blogging: A Comprehensive Beginner’s Guide

This blogging beginner's guide is intended for people who want to incorporate blogs into their organization’s social media efforts but aren’t sure where or how to begin. Individuals interested in blogging for personal/career management reasons, as well as folks aspiring to be professional bloggers, may also find the guide useful in helping them get started. The guide focuses on external blogs, but many of the concepts apply to internal blogs as well.

===//===

This guide has now been updated.
Click here to learn more and access the new guide on SlideShare.

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To many professionals blogging is still a foreign concept. Although virtually everyone’s read them and some people may even comment and subscribe, when it comes to thinking about how to leverage the tool themselves, people often freeze. They feel intimidated because they think their writing skills aren’t good enough, pressured by the prospect of having to create fresh content on a regular basis, and/or uncertain of how they’re going to manage the time commitment.

Cyberspace is full of blogging “best practices,” rules and tips. Many of these guides are great, but they’re not necessarily comprehensive and/or designed for people who are just getting started. Therefore, I thought I’d create my own guide based on my interactions with social media rookies over the past two years, as well as my own experience as a relatively new blogger (since March 2010).

The guide is divided into the following sections:

• Putting Blogging in Perspective
• Getting Started
• Addressing Blogging Elements
• Creating Content
• Sharing Content
• Monitoring and Adjusting

NOTE: At first, some of the advice will not make sense, and many of the terms may sound foreign, but don’t let any initial confusion you may experience deter you. Accept that you’ll have a fairly steep learning curve to climb in the beginning, but trust me when I tell you the steep part is shorter than you think and it’ll all start to make sense more quickly than you realize. Your patience and persistence will be rewarded in due time.

As always, I welcome feedback. If you disagree with one of my recommendations, have a tip to add, and/or feel something was unclear, please feel don’t hesitate to add a comment or question. Thanks!

 

Putting Blogging in Perspective

Most people tend to think of blogging as a relatively recent social media phenomenon, and perhaps as an activity that relatively few individuals/organizations engage in. According to Wikipedia, however blogging’s origins can be traced back to 1994, and as of February 2011, there were 156 million public blogs.

Despite their longevity and ubiquity, however, people have been speculating about the “demise” of blogging for at least the past four years. One of the latest speculative entries was a February article in the New York Times (NYT), which was based on a recent Pew research report noting the decline of blogging activity among younger generations and a general leveling off in terms of usage. Although the NYT used the term “wane” in their headline, “morph” is probably a more apt description. Individual blog hobbyists may be on the decline, but the underlying principles and technology will live on and expand, especially in organizations. In fact, when you consider that many digital news articles and columns function effectively the same way a blog does (i.e., a writer shares a story and/or a perspective, and readers have the ability to comment and engage in dialogue about the post), the total number of de facto blogs is actually on the rise.

Based on my own reading, it seems the most active bloggers in the professional sphere are journalists and individuals/organizations that are immersed in digital technologies. Although there are a number of non-tech organizations that have fairly sophisticated blog sites (e.g., Sears, American Red Cross, William & Mary), active organizational blogs are far from commonplace.

The decision to establish and maintain a blog is not an easy one to make, especially for organizations that have limited resources. Reframing your perspective on blogs, however, can highlight their potential value. Here are a few points that might help:

• You can blog without being a blogger. We have evolved past the point where blogs are online diaries, places for the expression of individual perspectives and/or (over)sharing the details of our personal or professional lives. They don’t have to be chatty and informal … or fun or funny … or snarky … they can be whatever we need/want them to be.
• Blogs can (and should) be thought of as long-form news feeds (whereas Twitter streams and status updates on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are short-form news feeds). Although it’s great to offer personal perspectives, share ideas and solicit feedback, or initiate dialogue, there’s nothing wrong with simply relaying information, offering insights and/or demonstrating expertise.
• Blogs provide another channel through which to attract and engage clients, prospects, and other stakeholders. They should be viewed as an integral part of an overall communications strategy that complements other outreach efforts rather than a new effort that gets layered on top of them. (Check out Part 7 of the Social Media Primer for guidance on developing a social media strategy.)
• As a dynamic internet element, blogs can make a significant contribution to a website’s search engine optimization (SEO) results, which can increase the flow of inbound traffic.  Blog posts create more pages that are linked to a website, and those pages have keywords and tags that increase the likelihood they will be found via a search query. As static elements, most web pages aren’t going to be huge traffic drivers, even if they contain the same key words and/or tags. SEO via organic search is a nice complement to – or substitute for – paid search results.

 

Getting Started

Your biggest investment in blogging successfully will be time, so you shouldn’t start one until you feel confident you can commit to a reasonable schedule for content updates and maintenance. Once you’ve decided to incorporate blogging into your communication activities, you’ll want to:

• Pick a blogging platform. Blogging platforms are either free or low cost. You can investigate different options (just search on “top blogging platforms 2011” to access various assessments), but for most people the choices will boil down to WordPress, TypePad (which is what I use), or Blogger. Do your due diligence, but there’s no need to make the decision process unnecessarily complicated. Note: if you choose WordPress, make sure you understand the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
• Determine the number of blogs/contributors. Even if you’re planning to have multiple bloggers, it’s probably better to start with a single blog that has multiple contributors rather than separate blogs. Depending on the platform you choose, it’s easy enough to add new blogs later.
• Integrate your blog and website. You can build a web presence around your blog, but even if the two are separate it’s easy to link them. If possible, add custom design elements to your blog to match the look and feel of your website. If you already have a website you plan to keep, make sure you upgrade it before you start blogging. You don’t want to drive traffic to a site that doesn’t represent you/your organization in the best possible way.
• Integrate your blog with other communication channels. Develop a basic plan for how your blog posts will be integrated with other communication platforms and channels you may be using, especially digital tools/sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and SlideShare. This plan will identify the where/when/what/how of content sharing and communication flows.

 

Addressing Blogging Elements

You can find many online resources that address various blogging elements, and I encourage you to check them out to gather different perspectives. But don’t let yourself get overwhelmed trying to understand the different options and determine which practices you should follow, especially in the beginning. You need to learn to walk before you can run … keep things simple at first and develop more sophisticated practices as you gain experience and expertise.

To help get you started, here are my thoughts on the main blogging elements besides content:

• Posting frequency. It is best to develop a regular schedule for posting, but there are no hard-and-fast rules about how often to post. Remember that quality is more important than quantity and don’t feel pressure to post more frequently than you can manage.
• Post length. Many people will advise that shorter posts are better. I personally find posts that are too short to be a waste of my time. If I make the effort to follow a link, I want to read something of substance. Of course, I appear to be incapable of writing a short blog post, so perhaps I’m biased! Again, the key is quality – regardless of length, make sure your posts are valuable to your readers.
• Post title. This is another aspect on which there are lots of “how-to” tricks: use numbers, be dramatic, provide checklists… There is some value in these recommendations, but I wouldn’t take them too literally. I’ve read too many “headlines” that misrepresented the post’s content and/or were unnecessarily inflammatory. Accuracy is more important than excitement.
• Lead paragraph. I almost never read recommendations about this, but I think the lead paragraph is critically important. In addition to drawing the reader in, it should succinctly summarize what the post is all about.  That summary is what gets listed in search results and when the post is shared via channels like LinkedIn and Facebook, so it needs to be really tight.
• Images and videos. Some people will recommend having image-rich posts to break up the monotony of the text, but images can be slow to load and may not be worth the effort of trying to include. Videos are similarly appealing and resource intensive. At a minimum, you should aim for one representative image for each post, and include that in the beginning of the post. Like the lead paragraph, this image will show up when the post is shared in certain places, and it’s worth having something that captures the post’s content.
• Structure. It’s a good idea to make use of headings and other means to highlight key points as much as possible. Readability is also enhanced by short paragraphs and bulleted lists. If the post is long, provide a roadmap or guide in the introduction that gives people a sense of what’s coming.
• Tagging, keywords, and categories. Tagging and keywords are important from an SEO perspective, but you shouldn’t try to “game” search results by forcing certain words and/or adding loosely related tags. Focus on the content and allow search engines to uncover the post organically. It works better than many people lead you to believe it does. Categories can also be very useful in terms of content management. By creating topical categories, linking your posts to them, and including a category cloud on your blog page, you provide readers with a way to access similar content. That exposes them to older blog posts, which reinforces and increases the value of your focus and expertise, in addition to contributing to your SEO results.
• Post timing. I’m very wary of any advice about timing. In spite of the scientific claims some people make, it’s really more of an art, and individual results can vary widely. Plus, although it’s nice to see a spike in web visits after a blog post is published, your focus for sharing content should probably be on the traffic it can drive over the long term rather than the short term. At least initially, timing shouldn’t be a high priority.
• Post URLs. This is another important topic I don’t see addressed much. I try to create a shortened URL for posts I think I’ll be sharing via email, through commenting on other blog posts, etc. I use the tiny.cc site to create custom URLs that I can remember (e.g., my post about social media policies is http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsPolicyPost), but there are other services available as well. You can also create your own custom shortener that can help reinforce your brand.
• Sharing capabilities. Make sure your blog posts are easy to share by including a widget/plug-in like ShareThis or AddThis to your blog page, in an easy-to-spy-and-use spot.
• Comments. Yes, you should enable readers to share their thoughts and you probably don’t need to pre-moderate them. You’re not likely to be overwhelmed by comments, and the risks from trolls and spammers are pretty low. You may want to create a set of posting guidelines that enable you to manage comments after they’re shared, but for most individuals/organizations, developing guidelines is not critical in the beginning. (See this blog post for more on managing comments in online communities.)

 

Creating Content

Creating content on a regular schedule is one of the most challenging (and daunting) aspects of blogging, but it’s more manageable than many people realize. Here are some ideas than can help:

• Think expansively about the content you can share through the blog. Some of it can and should be original, but much of it can be repurposed and/or re-leveraged content originating from other sources. You can also repurpose some of your static website content to make it more dynamic.
• Examples of repurposed content include:
  • Press releases
  • Links to traditional media news stories about your organization and/or in which someone from your organization was interviewed/quoted
  • Organization news
    • Share “State of” summaries from organizational leaders (e.g., the President’s letter)
    • Announce the latest newsletter and provide a link to it and/or (re)share individual articles
    • Welcome new employees, members, clients, partners, suppliers and/or other stakeholders, and/or share relevant news about them
    • Share relevant operational statistics that you would normally provide publicly (e.g., efficiency improvements, sales milestones, donor thanks)
  • Product and/or facility videos
  • Client testimonials
  • Case studies
  • White papers
• Examples of original content include:
  • Insights from organizational leaders and other experts about industry trends, client challenges, and other topics related to the products/services you offer (without directly pitching a solution).
  • News digests that contain organizationally-relevant or industry-related content, edited to offer your unique insights (here’s a page that explains how SMinOrgs does it and provides links to examples).
  • Guest posts from industry leaders and experts outside of your organization.
• When creating original content, remember that quality and integrity matter as much in a blog as they do in any other means of communication you may use. A few critical points:
  • Don’t plagiarize content.
  • Don’t try to “game” the blogging process just to get a post out. I lose a lot of respect for bloggers whose posts regularly just summarize news/research reports without adding substantive commentary.
  • Be careful about using ghost writers to represent organizational leaders. In blogs especially, people expect a post “from the President” to in fact be from the president…
  • When you use guest bloggers, make sure their work meets your editorial/brand/ethical standards.

 

Sharing Content

Once you’ve created a blog post, the additional investment of time to share it is relatively minimal. Here are my suggestions for the main channels through which you might push content out in an effort to pull people back to your website:

• Twitter: tweet out a link at least once. You can schedule multiple tweets if you like, but I would only do that if you have an active Twitter account and/or a lot of followers and are concerned someone might miss a single tweet. If that’s not the case, too many repeated tweets can turn people away (see this post for more Twitter tips). If individual employees also regularly tweet on behalf of the organization, they can tweet out links as well.
• Facebook: post a link to your fan page if you have one. Individual employees can also share on their own news feeds, but I would only do that if your content is potentially interesting to a wide audience. You may also be able to link your blog posts to your fan page via an automatic feed mechanism, but you’ll still need to share each post to ensure it shows up in people’s news feeds.
• LinkedIn:  You can include an RSS feed on your company profile so that anyone who visits it can link back to your blog. You can also have key individuals share blog posts via their own status updates, by messaging people in their networks, and by sharing them with relevant group.
• Email blasts. You can include a section in your email blasts with links to your latest blog posts. And when you’ve generated enough posts on a specific topic, you could create an email blast that’s focused on them.
• Newsletters. As with email blasts, you can include a separate section in your newsletters that has links to specific blog posts. You can also repurpose content originally created for the blog as a newsletter article.
• Other channels. You can leverage a wide variety of general news and blogging platforms, as well as digital professional communities, for driving traffic. This form of distribution can fall into two categories:
  • There are sites such as BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, Social Media Today, and American Express Open Forum that individuals can join and use to share their own content. Professional communities on sites like Ning provide similar capabilities.
  • You can comment on related FB posts, LI discussion items, blog posts, and news articles written by others, including links back to your own blog posts (this is where the short urls can really come in handy).   

A few words of caution on sharing:

• Be careful when you have multiple people sharing the same content. If they have overlapping networks, that could result in “oversharing,” which could be viewed as spammy. It’s better to stagger their shares, just as you should try to stagger all sharing across different platforms whenever possible.
• Only share relevant content on news/blogging platforms and via digital communities. If your sharing appears to be indiscriminate, you’ll turn people off and defeat your own purposes.
• Be respectful of other people’s blogs and articles. In addition to making sure your links are related to the post on which you’re commenting, say a few words that draws the connection rather than simply posting a “read my post – here’s the link” comment.

 

Monitoring and Adjusting

After you’ve created/shared your content, you should pay attention to what happens and be prepared to respond accordingly. As with other aspects of blogging, however, you don’t need to over-engineer the process. Here are a few tips on the main things to pay attention to:

• Analytics. Whether you set up Google analytics or use an analytics tool offered by your blogging platform provider, you should pay regular attention to the quantity and quality of traffic to your blog/website. That feedback is invaluable in letting you know which posts resonated with folks, which outlets drove the most visitors, and other metrics that will help you refine your future blogging activity.
• Search engine results. These results are important not just from a straight analytics perspective (i.e., how much traffic am I getting from searches), but examining the searches can provide information on important issues like the key words people are using to look for content and where your content is ranked on various results.
• Number of shares. When you add a sharing feature to your blog posts, you should be able to get statistics about how many times your content is shared by readers. Those counts provide another gauge of popularity, over both the short and long terms.
• Comments. I’m not a fan of pre-moderation, but many people still do it. Regardless, you’ll want to make sure you regularly monitor comments and weed out the spam and any other posts that don’t conform to guidelines you may have developed. It’s also good form to respond to readers’ comments, either individually or in groups. (See this blog post for more on managing comments in online communities.)
• Grading your blog and website. Hubspot offers free tools for grading your blog and your website. It’s a good idea to take pre- and post-blog website measures, and to regularly monitor your grades. They’re not perfectly scientific and you shouldn’t necessarily strive for perfect scores, but they can be very useful in measuring progress.

 

Conclusion

As always, I welcome feedback. If you disagree with one of my recommendations, have a tip to add, and/or feel something was unclear, please feel don’t hesitate to add a comment or question. Thanks!

- Courtney Hunt

Is the NLRB Turning up the “Social Media Heat” too High? No… Not Yet

Recent actions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) offer additional insights into their position and intended actions with respect to employer social media policies and provide additional impetus for employers to ensure their policies enable them to manage Digital Era risks appropriately.

 

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the independent federal agency responsible for enforcing the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), has been pursuing a pretty aggressive agenda in recent months, and it shows no signs of slowing down. A key focus of their recent activity has been employer social media policies and related disciplinary actions.

I’ve previously written about the “Facebook firing” case, which created a lot of buzz after it was first filed last fall, and continues to be a matter of concern to employers and attorneys practicing employment law. Last month a new case hit the headlines, when the New York Times (NYT) reported that the NLRB planned to file a complaint against Thompson-Reuters for its response to a tweet from an employee.

 

The Thomson-Reuters Twitter Case

Here are the basic facts of the case, from the NYT article and this piece from The Wall and this Poynter post:

• A Reuters supervisor (Managing Editor Betty Wong?) invited employees to share their thoughts about how to make Reuters a better place to work via Twitter.
• In response, Deborah Zabarenko, the head of the Newspaper Guild (a union) at Reuters, tweeted:  “One way to make this the best place to work is to deal honestly with Guild members.”
• Zabarenko received a phone call the next day from the bureau chief, who allegedly told her that her tweet was in violation of a company policy that prohibited saying anything that would “damage the reputation of Reuters News or Thomson Reuters.”

In the she said/they said that followed:

• Zabarenko stated in an interview that when the bureau chief called her, “I felt kind of threatened. I thought it was some kind of intimidation.”
• Reuters indicated they were surprised by the complaint because there was no disciplinary action against Zabarenko, and their social media policy was “straightforward” and similar to those at other organizations.
• NLRB’s position is that the supervisor’s “reprimand,” and the policy on which it was based, violated the NLRA by prohibiting Zabarenko from criticizing management and discussing working conditions.

As a non-attorney business person with expertise in human capital management, there are four key considerations for putting this case in its proper perspective:

• Context is important.  This case didn’t come out of the blue. The Guild and Reuters have been in negotiations since the old contract expired over two years ago, and they have been at a virtual stalemate for over a year. There has been a fair bit of acrimony and accusations of unfair dealings for a while, and Zabarenko’s tweet likely reflected that. The NLRB was planning to include it in its complaint against Reuters, but it wasn’t the entire basis for their complaint.
• The law on protected speech is pretty clear. One could argue that Zabarenko’s tweet showed poor judgment, but her actions were still protected by law. This is especially true given that input was solicited by management and her comment was made in a forum that could have easily generated responses from co-workers about working conditions.
• Reuters management overreacted. Some people, like Brian Hall in this post, think Reuters overrected, causing more damage to their brand than Zabarenko’s tweet could have done by itself. According to my review of Zabarenko’s original Twitter account, which only has 31 followers, that’s likely true. Even her new account only has 340 followers. And Could the tweet have gone viral? Maybe. But nothing in her profile or the tweet drew a clear connection to Reuters, so it’s highly unlikely.
• But that wasn’t Reuter’s first mistake. As Gordon MacMillan implies in his assessment of the case, Reuter’s decision to use a public platform like Twitter to discuss essentially private employment matters is questionable at best (and curiously, the @Destination RTRS account no longer exists…). I discuss this faux pas in my post on Twitter “worst practices” (it’s #8).

Recently Reuters and the Guild settled their differences and came up with a tentative agreement (click here for details). As in the “Facebook firing” case, part of the settlement was an agreement by Reuters to “negotiate a new social media policy that would include language protecting employees’ speech and right to engage in other concerted activity about working conditions, as provided under US federal law” (click here to access Reuter’s current policy).

 

What Else is on NLRB’s Agenda?

At the end of April, Jonathan Kreisberg , the NLRB’s Hartford Regional Director, spoke on a panel for the Connecticut Bar Association. Blog reports from Philip Gordon of Littler-Mendelson and Daniel A. Schwartz of Pullman & Comley, do a nice job of summarizing Kreisberg’s comments and the handouts he shared, which provide several insights into the Board’s intentions. Here are my take-aways from their assessments:

• The NLRB’s definition of “protected concerted activity” is pretty broad.
• They are continuing to pursue other cases involving social media, and their perspective on the ways in which “protected concerted activity” can manifest itself seems to be similarly broad.
• Policy disclaimers can be useful in managing risks related to potential NLRA violations, but there’s no “one size fits all” approach to what those disclaimers should say or how they should be incorporated.
• The NLRB is undertaking an effort to reverse its December 2007 decision in the Register Guard case, which allowed employers to place broad limits on the use of email for “non-business” purposes. The reversal of this decision could have implications for employee use of social media.
• Signaling the importance of social media cases to the NLRB, the Office of the General Counsel has included them on the list of issues that require his approval.

 

What does this Mean for Employers?

Given the history of animosity between labor and management, and particularly in light of the dramatic conflicts that are taking place this year (e.g., battles in states like Wisconsin and Ohio over public sector unions, the ongoing rift between NFL owners and players), it may be tempting to blow the NLRB’s actions out of proportion. But from my perspective, their targets so far have been easy marks and the issues, once understood, are not particularly murky.

Here are my basic recommendations for employers who want to steer clear of trouble with the NLRB and avoid violations of the NLRA (real or perceived):

• Don’t assume that because you don’t have any union employees the NLRA doesn’t apply to you. It applies to both union and non-union employers.
• If you have a social media policy, make sure it’s not overly broad. More specifically, do not let your efforts to protect your company brand and reputation effectively prohibit employees from discussing working conditions.
• If you don’t have a social media policy, you need to develop one. As I state in this blog post, if you employee people, you should have a social media policy. More importantly, you need to review/revise ALL your policies to ensure they enable you to manage Digital Era risks appropriately.
• Communication, training, and sound discipline practices are critical. Once your policies are updated, you need to communicate them clearly to employees and provide training to be sure they’re fully understood. Managers should be given separate training so they understand the right ways to handle challenges and issues that may arise and are able to provide appropriate discipline when necessary.

Though it may not seem like it, the NLRB is actually doing employers a favor with these cases by providing additional impetus for them to do something they should be doing anyway. The cases are effectively a shot across the bow, giving fair warning about the NLRB’s position and their expectations, which are not that difficult to accommodate. That may not continue to be the case, of course, so their actions bear continued monitoring. Of particular interest is any effort the NLRB may make to reverse its position in this December 2009 Advice Memorandum regarding Sears Holdings’ social media policies, as well as its actions with respect to the Register Guard case mentioned previously.

To learn more about social media policies and how to manage Digital Era risks, please read, “Social Media Policies: Necessary but not Sufficient.” And feel free to contact me if I can help you in any way.

-Courtney Hunt

 

Tragedy, Hope, and the Undeniable Power of Social Media as a Force for Good

Two recent tragedies offer several insights about the integral role that social media plays in modern society, illustrating its power in enabling us to demonstrate the sublime aspects of our humanity as well as the mundane.

 

The last week of April 2011 in the Southeastern United States was marked by two tragedies: The better-known story is of the powerful storms that swept through several states on the 27th, making it the second-deadliest day of tornadoes in US history. The lesser-known story occurred the day before, when a female eagle was killed by a US Airways jet as it landed at Norfolk International Airport, leaving three young eaglets with only one parent at a crucial stage in their development, and thousands of people – who had been watching the eagle family’s nest at the Norfolk Botanical Garden (NBG) via a webcam – stunned, grief-stricken, and worried (Click here to learn more about the nest and its history. Click here to read my previous blog post about the NBG eagle community).

These events may not have the scale and scope of disasters like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan earlier this year, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, or the hurricane in New Orleans in 2005, but they are no less tragic for the people directly affected by them. And perhaps because of their smaller scale, they may provide more relatable examples of how social media is becoming an integral part of the human condition in the Digital Era, a means for us to express and demonstrate the better part of our humanity in addition to sharing the details of our everyday lives.

The ways in which technology has been used during these tragedies illustrate several social media “truths,” which are described and illustrated in the sections that follow:

• Social media is not just digital
• Social media is powered by people, not just technology
• All forms of media (can, should and do) work together
• Social media is real life
• High tech is high touch
• ROI is also about investment, not just return

These truths may seem self-evident to many social media sophisticates, but for most social media rookies – especially the doubters and haters – they bear repeated emphasis. They’re also good reminders for many social media advocates that new communication technologies are not an end unto themselves, and they have tremendous value beyond their commercial applications. The hallmarks of social media – user-generated  content, dialogues and “multilogues” rather than monologues, collaboration and engagement – can serve many purposes besides marketing/branding, sales, customer service, and public relations.

 

Social Media is not Just Digital

As I discuss in Part 2 of the Social Media Primer (updated here), human beings have been using social media as long as we’ve been on the planet. Though digital social media may be a relatively recent technological development, its underlying concepts are not nearly as radical or revolutionary as some people may think.

The role of ham radio operators during the tornado-spawning storms illustrates this best. As described in this story from the ARRL (the national association for amateur radio), the storms and resulting destruction prevented the use of more modern technology, and amateur radio helped fill the gap. And if you scroll to the bottom of this National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) page, you can see how much of the event reporting was contributed by amateur radio operators.

 

Social Media is Powered by People, not Just Technology

Technology may provide the engine, but the fuel comes from people. Referring again to Part 2 of the Social Media Primer (updated here), throughout our history we’ve used the technological tools available to us to achieve our goals and objectives, whether it was cave paintings to share our history, smoke signals to communicate danger, or the printing press to share news. Like all technology, digital social media is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

Excellent evidence of this is the number of Facebook pages started by people in the wake of the Southeastern tornadoes. Here are some of the most popular pages, with their fans as of May 5^th noted in parenthesis:

• Pray for the Tornado Victims of April 27, 2011 (142,000+)
• Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes (95,000+)
• Animals Lost & Found from the Tornadoes in Alabama on 4/27/11 (29,000+)
• In Memory of people who lost their life during the strong tornadoes (10,00+)
• People Missing or Unreachable after April 27, 2011 Tornadoes (8,000+)

These pages continue to attract fans and contributions as word about them spreads, primarily through word of mouth (both digital and otherwise).

Another powerful example is the ways in which individuals on various Facebook pages promoted the two main non-profits associated with the care of the eaglets – the Norfolk Botanical Garden (NBG, their original home) and the Wildlife Center of Virginia (WCV, their adoptive home) – in the Chase Community Giving program. As a result of this promotion, and the voting that ensued, WCV was ranked 4^th and NBG 9^th in the first-round of voting for the most recent giving campaign, garnering $25,000 awards for each of them. There were also several calls by individuals on various platforms for folks to write letters to US Airways asking them to make a donation to aid with the eaglets’ care. Although it’s not clear how much momentum this effort gained, or whether it had any influence, US Airways did announce on its Facebook page that Air Wisconsin (the flight operator) was making a donation for the support and care of the eagles.

 

All Forms of Media (can, should and do) Work Together

In some respects it’s useful to distinguish between different forms of media, but it’s also important to remember that media is a general construct that refers to “storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data” (see this Wikipedia entry for more).  Sometimes the effort to distinguish social media gives the impression that it’s more distinct from traditional or broadcast media than it is. Rather than looking at forms of media as independent and mutually-exclusive ways to communicate, we should view them as complementary, integrated parts of a whole.

The activity at the bottom of this NOAA page shows how members of the public, the government, experts (i.e., trained spotters) and amateur radio operators all contributed to reporting the unfolding events of the tornadoes. No one group could have done it alone, and without the active engagement of all these parties the complete story could never be told. This article about the search for missing people further illustrates how multiple forms of communication are necessary, particularly in crisis situations. And in the storms’ wake, broadcast media has not only helped report the facts but has also supported the social media efforts of individuals by writing stories like this one about the woman who started the “Pictures and Documents” Facebook page. The page’s rapid growth to almost 100,000 fans can be attributed at least in part to the broadcast media coverage it’s received.

As tempting as it may be to see social media and “citizen journalism” as a threat to “traditional journalism,” it’s in our long-run best interests to view them as additive rather than competitive.

 

Social Media is Real Life

At some point we have to stop disdaining our interactions in cyberspace as inferior to our face-to-face interactions (aka “IRL” or “in real life” interactions). Yes, there are fewer signals (i.e., vocal tone and body language), which may result in an increased likelihood of miscommunication or misinterpretation, but we’re learning to adapt. And though the perceived anonymity of cyberspace may cause some people to speak and act differently, most of our digital interactions are pretty typical of the interactions we have in other spaces, both physical and otherwise. Finally, for many folks, the experiences and relationships they have in cyberspace are perfectly real and no less substantive than any other experience/relationship they have.

Anyone who visits either of the main Facebook pages devoted to the NBG eaglets (Wildlife Center of Virginia and Eagles at Norfolk Botanical Garden), or the moderated chat on the WVEC eagle cam webpage, will almost instantly recognize how real this virtual experience is. People in the NBG community refer to themselves as a “family” and a “crew,” acknowledging their collective devotion to and interest in the eagles. The moderated blog is primarily educational, and thousands of people all over the world – including countless schoolchildren – learn about eagles and related topics (e.g., their relationship with American Indians, the laws designed to protect them, the ways in which human actions threaten them) every day. Sadly, the events surrounding the mama eagle’s death and the removal of the eaglets created a set of learning opportunities most people would have preferred to do without, but the learning continued. And in the immediate aftermath of the mama’s death, the focus of the blog, as well as the related Facebook pages, turned to shared grief, loss, anger and a host of other emotions as pubic expressions of sorrow flowed along with people’s private tears. And today WCV shared this post about mail they’re receiving from children, which grounds the cyber experience in a powerfully poignant way.

Similar emotional expressions can be found on the Facebook pages cited earlier that were created in the aftermath of the Southeastern tornadoes. And in these digital communities, where individuals are not just observers, there is a lot of activity related to helping. Three of the pages, in fact, were created to provide assistance, and virtually all of the exchanges are focused on requests for and offers of help.

In all the sites, along with the sorrow and concern, there are also moments of shared joy and hope when a person is found, a beloved picture is reunited with someone who lost everything, the eaglets continue to grow healthy and strong, and positive news about papa eagle is shared.  And the expressions of admiration and gratitude for people who’ve gone above and beyond to help fellow humans and animals continue almost unabated.

 

High Tech is High Touch

Because of the frequent emphasis on tools and technologies, many people seem to forget that social media is fundamentally a human endeavor. And in digital communities, like any other community, leaders play an important role. The eagle cams themselves are amazing, but for many watchers it’s a social experience that they share with friends and family and want to talk about with others. They also have a lot of questions they need answers to and concerns that need to be addressed when they see something they don’t understand. Can they try to find the answers on the internet? Sure. But for many that’s too impersonal.

In the communities I follow most closely, I’ve watched the community managers and other leaders do an excellent job of making these virtual experiences more personal. They maintain a delicate balance between freedom and control, steering discussions with a steady hand and a light touch. They’ve promoted civility and boundaries while allowing people freedom of expression, which has promoted a high level of functioning. The administrators of the WCV Facebook page in particular were awesome in providing lots of communication in the early days after the eaglets arrived, to help assuage people’s concerns and reassure them that the “babies” they were so attached to were doing well. Their responsiveness was particularly admirable given that their Facebook fan page tripled in less than a day, their server was brought to its knees by a flood of website visits, their email was overflowing and their phone was ringing off the hook!

These community leaders have also done a great job of sharing their own humanity and personalities with folks, which has contributed significantly to the value of their communities. Someone in the NBG community once dubbed the chat moderators the “Mod Squad” and the nickname has stuck. People feel like they know them and have developed attachments to them. In addition to providing guidance, they grieved along with everyone else when the mama eagle died. Experts like Reese Lukei, who works for the Center for Conservation Biology (CCB), writes his own blog, and occasionally participates in the chat, has developed a strong following, and Ed Clark, the President of WCV, did an amazing job of connecting with members of the community almost instantly after the eaglets were transferred to his center. He and Amanda Nicholson continue to interact with the eaglets’ cyber following, with warmth, patience, knowledge, and great humor.

 

ROI is also about Investment, not Just Return

The ROI (return on investment) question comes up often in discussions of social media, and there’s lots of debate about how it should be measured, or whether it’s even appropriate to try to measure it. The ROI question itself isn’t unreasonable, but it makes more sense with respect to specific, short-term, focused campaigns rather than general, long-term engagement. From that perspective, the question of engagement should be driven more by an organization’s mission and values than its financial objectives.

The NBG eagles perfectly illustrate the investment value of social media. For the garden itself, the eagle family may have been their “star attraction,” but supporting it also served their mission “to enrich life by promoting the enjoyment of plants and the environment through beautiful gardens and educational programs” (from their “about us” page). The digital activity spawned by the eagle cam has certainly helped raise awareness of the garden and bring visitors, but it’s clear that NBG always put the eagles’ needs above their own and would never intentionally do anything to cause them harm.

Nuckols Tree Care, Inc. also illustrates this point. They got lots of “free publicity” when they donated their equipment and the services of several of their staff to help when the eaglets were banded on April 21^st (to support research efforts), but they also didn’t hesitate to come back under much less PR-friendly circumstances less than a week later to remove the eaglets (not everyone agreed with the decision to intervene).

Even more profound is WVEC’s role. As a television station in the Norfok area, the support they provided to install and run the camera at NBG was a great local community initiative that provided great PR as well as advertising dollars. Given the distance between Norfolk and Waynesboro, it would have been perfectly understandable for that support to end when the eaglets were removed from the local nest. Instead, WVEC decided to resume the eagle cam from the same website, providing additional support to help WCV undertake the herculean task of establishing a basic set up in less than two days. Their commitment to keeping the story “on the air” was nothing short of remarkable.

 

Conclusion

I invite everyone to join any of the digital communities I’ve highlighted in this post, as well as another one I follow closely: an eagle cam in Decorah, Iowa and the corresponding Facebook page for the Raptor Resource Project. These communities, as well as others, offer living case studies of how humans connect, communicate, and collaborate in cyberspace, and highlight the benefits and challenges of managing online interactions. Following them is a great way to listen, watch, and learn.