Recently, I’ve been thinking about what it takes to build a social media presence of organization. More specifically I’m taking a look at Kiberpipa, small non-profit public space that organizes events and provides a semi-public space for open source creativity. In a more generalized fashion, it can apply to all startups that want to have presence in a modern Web 2.0 space.
1. Official blog. It doesn’t matter if it’s hosted or ran elsewhere on some blogspot subdomain. Make it easy for your fans to follow your human voice. You can also just post cute pictures, like Flickr blog does.
2. Facebook fan page/group. So you can count your followers easily and massively notify them of events and happenings around your brand. I like the way Kiberpipa Facebook group is actively managed in this regard, always inviting people to events.
3. Twitter account. Just have a quick and lazy way for someone to follow news about your company, be able to @brandname and a way, if you want, to officially reply. I love the way Six Apart highlights changes in their services and promotes their users.
4. Flickr group and official account. Make all the pictures in there Creative Commons or public domains, to make it easy for bloggers and others to build on top of your brand and spread a good word. Great example of Flickr search results would be startup Spotify. It took me 2 seconds to find a cool post to go with my blog post.
5. Vimeo or YouTube channel. Make it easy for others to emeeded and once again, blog and share your video material. If you’re a boring traditional Web 2.0 startup, you have at least some screencast to show. Mozilla Firefox Vimeo channel is definetly going into that direction, as is Brightkite.
6. Dopplr Group. Even though they’re still in early beta, you should make sure that everyone in your organization that ever travels, is in your group. Then you can stick a widget of your presence on your blog and have the cheapest way for you to announce your presence in a certain part of the world. With greater idea that this means more potential feedback opportunities or potential business partner meetings. No examples yet, but it should happen soon in a few week as they roll out the service in full.
7. Upcoming listing. If you are organizing an event, a party or just semi-ad-hoc meetup, you have to add it there. Often people figure out what’s happening in that city on the same day or day before, so having an even in a group like Web 2.0 geeks, should give a few more visitors. Startups and events organizers to imitate, are all that are in Web Conference Junkies and similar (at least for London and San Francisco).
8. Get Satisfaction for support forums, if you run some kind of service or make a product. For a while now, we’ve been collectively teaching users how to get support there, so it makes sense for you to piggyback on this. If you don’t they’ll create a group for your product anyway, and you’ll just be forced to go there. Classical example of something wonderful coming from this, is Timbuk2 group on GS, that actually prompted them to create a diaper bag, after enough people expressed interest.
9. Ma.gnolia or Del.icio.us for social bookmarking. As you get more popular and your team grows, you’ll want an easy way to track buzz and then pull it in into your web page. Having everyone in team add mentions under pre-arranged tags into a group allows for a great collaborative buzz-tracking experience. Examples? OpenDNS blog buzz and Zemanta on Ma.gnolia. For more details on this technique, see my post – Online buzz management for startups.
10. Moo cards. You’re not a proper social media enabled company, without these signature cards. The ones that have them will instantly connect with you, while you can enlighten others.
11. Whatever works for you! You community might be more into Meetup.com then Upcoming, go with that also. In Slovenia I’d go for Koornk on top of Twitter, while in UK I’d defintly consider Bebo vs. MySpace if I’m in music space and younger Y Generation members.
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hurrah! I have everything on your list – well nearly everything still waiting for my moo cards to arrive in the post.
oh two more thing i'd add to your list would be a slideshare account – for publishing your presentations, and accounts for google/yahoo and microsoft for search engine optimization submissions.
David,
slideshare is a great idea 🙂 Can you expand a bit on a use case for
yahoo/microsoft SEO tactic?
kr, jure
What about Linkedin?
Linkedin could be useful, but I don't really see it as a special
social media tool for organizations. Maybe with some clever groups.
Sorry, not a big LinkedIn user 🙂
Hi Jure, the case for seo (search engine optimization) is that no matter how good your social media content it is only of value if people can find it. By submitting your sites to search engines you will increase the number of people that your presence will extend to.
You should also link the content together, so your blog has links to your twitter and your images, video, slides, bookmarks and callendas. This increases your visability to search engines and it also makes it easier for your contacts to find all of your information and get closer to your bran whether that is a product, a service or you as a bogger or person.
THe seo tools often give you nice tools like statistics on how many sites you link to and how many ink to you and traffic stats, so yu can also use this to monitor your popularity. One thing that is important with presence is you should provide content regularly enough to keep your followers intereted but it has to be high quality and ityou have to ensure you don't bug them by providing too much too often, watching your stats helps you cage this.
linked in is great to find friends of friends and to make introductions, in a business context. If i have a meeting with a key player, i'll chek their linked in profile for friends we have in common as its a nice dor openner, but its not so good for social networking or pressence in that it doesn't have the social interaction of sites like facebook.
so it has a role to play in building presence but maybe wouldn't make my top 10.
Hi Jure, the case for seo (search engine optimization) is that no matter how good your social media content it is only of value if people can find it. By submitting your sites to search engines you will increase the number of people that your presence will extend to.
You should also link the content together, so your blog has links to your twitter and your images, video, slides, bookmarks and callendas. This increases your visability to search engines and it also makes it easier for your contacts to find all of your information and get closer to your bran whether that is a product, a service or you as a bogger or person.
THe seo tools often give you nice tools like statistics on how many sites you link to and how many ink to you and traffic stats, so yu can also use this to monitor your popularity. One thing that is important with presence is you should provide content regularly enough to keep your followers intereted but it has to be high quality and ityou have to ensure you don't bug them by providing too much too often, watching your stats helps you cage this.
linked in is great to find friends of friends and to make introductions, in a business context. If i have a meeting with a key player, i'll chek their linked in profile for friends we have in common as its a nice dor openner, but its not so good for social networking or pressence in that it doesn't have the social interaction of sites like facebook.
so it has a role to play in building presence but maybe wouldn't make my top 10.