beginner

Why You Don’t Need TrueTwit and the Problem with Fake Followers

13 Jan 2014

Mike Ellsworth B2B, Enterprise Social Media, Social Advertising, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy beginner, enterprise social media, social computing, social media, social networking, twitter

Why You Don’t Need TrueTwit and the Problem with Fake Followers

Many people use TrueTwit or other follower validation services to try to ensure that all their Twitter followers are real. In Twitter’s IPO filing, the company estimated that up to 5 percent of Twitter users were fake. You may wonder what fake followers are, and why they exist. Generally, fake followers exist only to spam you. Additionally, fake followers might assist bad guys in stealing your identity.

So the concern is real. But why punish real people because some unscrupulous people might follow you, especially when there are alternatives?

Some rights reserved by mith17.

12 Aug 2013

Mike Ellsworth B2B, Enterprise Social Media, LinkedIn How-to, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy, Social Selling beginner, enterprise social media, relationship, social computing, social media, social networking

SMPG Social Media Hall of Shame

The Social Media Performance Group has maintained our Social Media Hall of Shame for a few years now. Well, maintained is perhaps an overly strong word for “Posted every once in a while.”

We’ve got a huge backlog of mishaps, mistakes, blunders, and bombast to get to, and, well, if the past is prologue, then it will take us a while to catch up.

So here’s the HOS as of Q3 of 2011. (We said we needed to catch up!) We’ll post new material soon, but we just couldn’t wait because there are some doozeys in the new entries. So enjoy – and learn!
More

5 Aug 2013

Mike Ellsworth B2B, Enterprise Social Media, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy beginner, business, enterprise, enterprise social media, relationship, social computing, social media, social networking

Social Media on Less Than Two Hours a Day

I’m an enterprise social media consultant, as are my two partners. We obviously spend more than two hours a day on social media, so what’s the deal with the title?

The title refers to the amount of time I spend on keeping our social media presence going. If I can do it in two hours a day for our business, so can you for yours.

Here’s how and where I do it:

Processing New Twitter Followers – 10 minutes

Twitter sends me emails whenever someone follows me. I get probably 10-20 a day and, rather than respond to them as they come it (and interrupting my flow), I respond to them in the late afternoon or evening. This works out well, because the biggest audience on Twitter tends to be after about 5:30 Eastern time. The East Coast folks are getting off work and checking Twitter, and the West Coasters are thinking about an afternoon coffee and quick social media check-in.

I open my emails and quickly decide if I want to follow the person back. I have a bunch of rules that I use, and they probably are generally not that interesting, but a big determinant is how many followers the person has. If they don’t have many, I may decline to follow. If they don’t have a lot of tweets, I may decline also. And if they’re a bot (lots of follows, drastically fewer followers, and only a dozen or so tweets), I delete the email and move on.

If the follower passes my initial screen, I click to go to their profile. I still might not follow back unless I can find a tweet of theirs to retweet. Retweeting gets you noticed, may get you more followers, and gets you gratitude from your follower, if they’re savvy.Using this process, I can churn through 20 followers in about 10 minutes.

Tweeting – 5 minutes

I rarely do tweets from the Twitter service itself any more. The reason is that I use the various curation platforms that I describe in the following sections. I check the @Mentions tab on the Twitter Website and, if I’ve been mentioned, I send a nice thank you to the person who mentioned me. Same with retweets. I might do a couple of searches for hashtags – a keyword preceded by a hash or pound sign (#). If others have directed tweets to me, I respond.

Curating My Paper.li – 0 minutes

One of the fastest growing trends in social media, curation means helping others make sense of the daily firehose flow of information, links, pictures, and videos. There are several free platforms that enable you to create a publication based on either the flow of your Twitter, Facebook or other social accounts or on hand-picked articles you encounter and want to share.

Paper.li offers a powerful interface to shape your newspaper around a particular topic. Here’s my paper: paper.li/MikeEllsworth/1308248319

The Mike Ellsworth Daily

After an initial startup period of one or two months, I let my Paper.lis go on their own. They select material from the feeds on a variety of topics that I’m interested in, including social media, social networking, and curation. The paper automatically generates a new edition each day (or, for lower-volume topics, whenever there’s something to publish), and I can leave it alone or I can tweak it by deleting articles, promoting them, and blocking certain people’s articles from being automatically included.

To be honest, when I first started the paper, it took about a week of perhaps half an hour a day to get the keywords and feeds tweaked so that I could then leave it alone, which I mostly do now.

Curating My Scoop.it Topics – 15 minutes

Scoop.it enables you to create a newspaper based on a particular topic that includes only the articles you select. The topic I spend the most time on is Enterprise Social Media (the others are Social Media and Marketing Research, Social Media for Workforce Development, Social Selling for Lawyers, and Social Selling for B2B), and I spend probably the biggest portion of my daily social media routine on curating this topic. You can read it here: www.scoop.it/t/enterprise-social-media and here’s what the paper looks like:

Enterprise Social Media Topic

Because it is hand-curated, Scoop.it takes more time. The service suggests various articles based on your Twitter and Facebook feeds as well as blogs and other social properties. You can add a bookmarklet to your browser and add any URL you happen to be viewing to your paper.

The cool part of this process is that Scoop.it enables you to not only add an article, but to comment on it, automatically tweet it, post it to your Facebook wall, and add it to your Tumblr or WordPress blog. If you’re concerned with keeping up with a regular blog posting schedule, this last is a godsend. Depending on the article, I may send posts to both our Tumblr account (mellsworth.tumblr.com) and the Social Media Performance Group blog (smperformance.wordpress.com).

Thus a single article can become a tweet (that can be echoed onto my Facebook wall), a post on the SMPG Facebook page (facebook.com/SocialMediaPerformance), an article in my Scoop.it newspaper, and a post on Tumblr and WordPress. (BTW, you may find those who recommend against cross-posting. Tell that to famous social media guru Guy Kawasaki.)

One of the coolest things you can do with Scoop.it is spread out your posts over the day, or over several days, using Buffer, which plugs in to the Scoop.it platform. I love Buffer; it also has a bookmarklet, and it’s a great way to not overwhelm your audience with dozens of posts.

So I spend a chunk of time finding, reading and curating articles on Scoop.it, often while watching last night’s Conan or Jimmy Fallon on my DVR. ;=}

Storify – 5 minutes

Storify is another hand-curated site. Whenever I encounter a lot of articles around a single subject, I’ll go to Storify to create a rollup, known there as a story. Here’s what one looks like:

Tools to Create Facebook Like Pages – Storify

I do this as much for myself as for others, since I’ll be returning to this particular story when I go to renovate the Social Media Performance Group Facebook page in the near future. I don’t do this every day, though.

Empire Avenue – 30 minutes

OK, I’m on record as saying that Klout – which with 100+ million members is the most popular service that purports to rank one’s social media impact – is superficial, wrong-headed, and a waste of time.

When I ran into Empire Avenue, which calls itself the social media stock market, it occurred to me that the site may turn out to be a much more accurate representation of social media influence than Klout. There are some leading social media lights on the site, but many of the top names don’t participate that much. I’m intensely interested in the operation of online marketplaces, so I joined, and in less than two weeks, became a “Vice President – Social Networking.” A year and a half later, the Avenue has changed, and no longer awards such spiffy honorifics.

Mike Ellsworth on Empire Avenue

The concept is simple: You connect up your social presences and the site establishes a share price for you. Other members – or perhaps more properly, players – buy shares in you, and get dividends based on your social media activity. The more they buy, the higher your price goes, and so on, like any stock market. Members can leave shout outs – often very breathless and punctuated with lots of exclamation points – for one another, and are encouraged to follow one another on other social sites.

Members are from all walks of life, but the most successful seem to be in social media or real estate.What has been the result of my dalliance with Empire Avenue? Lots more twitter followers, more Facebook friends, an invitation to join an exclusive group on Facebook, and lots more likes for the Social Media Performance Group Facebook page. Join me on Empire Avenue using this link: empireavenue.com/?t=04p2zobi

Blogging – 45 minutes

This daily total represents the amount of time I spend on the weekend setting up the week’s blog posts. We aim at three posts per week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Since we’ve written six social media books, I spend some portion of this time adapting book chapters as blog posts. I also write the week’s blogs. We try to write at least one original blog a week (and this is it for this week!) I use WordPress’ scheduling capability to publish the posts throughout the week. So you’re reading this on Thursday (or later) but I wrote it on Saturday.

Facebook – 10 to 15 minutes

Frankly, Facebook could take more time depending on whether my friends are having interesting discussions. Recently I’ve spent more time on Facebook because I recently joined that closed Facebook group I mentioned, and whose members discuss social media topics and retweet each others’ tweets.

But in general, Facebook takes a little bit of my time and I often spend that time on my smartphone while I’m walking to my parking deck in the evening – yes, I’m one of those . . .

Not included in this time is various other social media activities specifically intended for building our business, and that’s the way it should be. If your business is not social media consulting, you’ll be spending the rest of your day on your business as well. You don’t need to spend two hours a day on social media, of course, but you should select the most effective activities and set aside some time each day to work on your social media presence.

Also not included is time spent building and nurturing relationships with those you find common ground with via this process. But since that’s a key element to business development, I lump that in with the time you’d be spending working on building your business anyway.

The effect of our emphasis on curation, starting in 2011, was a fairly dramatic rise in my Klout score:

Dramatic Increase in Mike Ellsworth’s Klout Score

Since then I’ve risen to a robust 60. Not that that means anything, of course . . .

5 Jul 2013

SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Best of the Pundits

In our previous post, SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Acknowledgements, we mentioned those nice folks who helped us finish and publish our book, Be a Person – The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises – (Paper:bit.ly/BeAPersonEFull – 430 pages) on this blog. In this post, we publish our list of the best social media pundits.

Some rights reserved by Tobyotter

Resources

“Social media is like teen sex.
Everybody wants to do it. Nobody knows how.
When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better.”

Avinash Kaushik, Google

We offer this list of resources for quick reference. Like all things on the Web, their location and relevance my change by the time you read this so please remember, Google is your friend. If you want to locate a reference whose link no longer works, try Googling it. And Google anything else you have questions on. The Web abounds with advice, not all of it good, so be careful out there!

The Best of the Best Pundits

These people inspired much of the thinking in this book. They really know their stuff.

Pundit	Link	Pundit	Link
Abbey Klaassen	bit.ly/iDi1ym	Jeremiah Owyang	bit.ly/9aszgM
Adam Christensen	bit.ly/cglyfw	Jesse James Garrett	bit.ly/mp1JQz
Alia McKee	bit.ly/kYpBH1	Jim Cashel	bit.ly/koQWV7
Amber Naslund	bit.ly/aI4Ne6	Joseph Thornley	bit.ly/kNL55p
Amy Sample Ward	bit.ly/jpjLMz	Josh Bernoff	bit.ly/a3ndiq
Andrew Eklund	bit.ly/ldTjCT	Katie Paine	bit.ly/982jqM
Ann Michael	bit.ly/lA2cPq	Katya Andresen	bit.ly/kPLKaq
Avinash Kaushik	bit.ly/m92tZI	Ken Burbary	bit.ly/cTb6X9
Barry Judge	bit.ly/b6H0hY	Kirsten Stanford	bit.ly/l004E5
Beth Kanter	bit.ly/dmp97X	Lawrence Liu	bit.ly/magnW8
Bob Pearson	bit.ly/lavCIq	Lee Odden	bit.ly/cQNLKG
Brian Halligan	bit.ly/iNm4wd	Lisa Barone	bit.ly/ivVfWU
Brian Haven	bit.ly/jgBNhH	Lynn Rogers	bit.ly/jVhxQH
Brian Solis	bit.ly/d8JMJb	Manish Mehta	huff.to/iNnIlg
Catie Foertsch	bit.ly/iGibLi	Marcel LeBrun	bit.ly/kuME9S
Charlene Li	bit.ly/bV80w5	Mark Rovner	bit.ly/kdu6Ha
Chip and Dan Heath	bit.ly/msAtpQ	Matt McKeon	bit.ly/imc4Kl
Chris Brogan	bit.ly/cXHzNA	Michael Gray	bit.ly/lLRdc1
Chris Lake	bit.ly/iyJE8P	Mike Valentino	bit.ly/kS0r5K
Chris Levkulich		Neal Schaffer	bit.ly/9GtQT4
Clay Shirky	bit.ly/dy9p2j	P.J. Fusco	bit.ly/llxPXK
Constantin Basturea	bit.ly/lWeh7z	Paul Dunay	bit.ly/m5XG9o
Dan Schwable	bit.ly/d3Zuyt	Peter Merholz	bit.ly/iJiHiV
Darren Rowse	bit.ly/dghN9I	Qui Diaz	bit.ly/iIjyaL
David Bohm	bit.ly/b1uCPT	Rachel Happe	bit.ly/blJkdb
David Meerman Scott	bit.ly/lXQGyQ	Richard Seel	bit.ly/kieLSq
David Mothersbaugh	bit.ly/jgSURm	Rick Mahn	bit.ly/aXmSdw
Deb Schultz	bit.ly/ly4iVS	Robert Scoble	scoble.it/9NMNyh
Debajyoti Banerjee	bit.ly/le6OQI	Robin Good	bit.ly/izAtKE
Debra Murphy	bit.ly/lmRO8b	Rohit Bhargava	bit.ly/mlqv0n
Del Hawkins	bit.ly/jMgaHd	Ron Shulkin	bit.ly/jHXgAh
Dharmesh Shah	bit.ly/kSjkwc	Ryan Spoon	bit.ly/kqIXAY
Dr. Ivan Misner	bit.ly/lSSPml	Seth Godin	bit.ly/bdDjWc
Dr. Ralph F. Wilson	bit.ly/ky6awp	Shel Israel	bit.ly/bgr9cM
Ed Keller	amzn.to/kOokqs	Skellie of skelliewag	bit.ly/lWxM3M
Erik Qualman	bit.ly/klLyTu	Tamara Adlin	bit.ly/lKSq2x
Geoff Livingston	bit.ly/lI0bXI	The Cluetrain Team	bit.ly/9jGP3T
Guy Kawasaki	bit.ly/aUJB5m	Tia Fisher	bit.ly/mkbdjR
Howard Rheingold	bit.ly/ktMJRE	Tim Jackson	bit.ly/jF5XsJ
Jake McKee	bit.ly/ioZT9P	Tim Nash	bit.ly/jJhhip
Janet Fouts	bit.ly/mqKfDZ	Vinod Kumar	bit.ly/jDYba0
Jared Schwartz	bit.ly/m3jpSw
Jason Falls	bit.ly/kuWUYT
Jennifer Johnston Canfield	bit.ly/jVRMfk

Over the past two years, we’ve given you everything you need to build your social presence online — Fast! If you’ve enjoyed reading our book bit by bit on our blog, you may enjoy our lovely parting gifts:

A free PDF of the entire Be a Person – The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises book as published
A free PDF of our exclusive checklist, The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™

When we are finished posting the resource lists and acknowledgements for the book, we’ll post these party favors on our community site (see URL below). Unfortunately, joining the community is not free – it costs a whole US dollar. This is because we had lots of spammers joining and having even a tiny fee keeps out the link harvesters.

So watch this blog for the announcement that the book and checklist are ready on our community. Of course, you may want to join right away anyway, just to be sure . . .

We’d like to hear from you, not only about what you think of our advice, but what you learn as you create your own social media practice. You can contribute by commenting on the Social Media Performance Group’s community Website at:

community.SocialMediaPerformanceGroup.com

SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Best of the Pundits is the 174th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just about done. If you’d like to see our entire exclusive community building checklist, once we’re done, it will be available on our Website at community.socialmediaperformancegroup.com. Luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

3 Jul 2013

SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Acknowledgements

In our previous post, SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Complete, we concluded publishing the contents of our book, Be a Person – The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises – (Paper:bit.ly/BeAPersonEFull – 430 pages) on this blog. It took almost two years, and below are some of the people who helped make it happen.

Some rights reserved by woodleywonderworks

Acknowledgements

The editing and finishing of Be a Person – The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises was an exercise in crowdsourcing. We are grateful for the assistance of the following reviewers, many of whom responded to our LinkedIn Question, who substantially improved this edition as well as the other editions of Be a Person:

Laura Bellinger — marketing communications producer and social media coordinator at Care USA. Laura launched CARE’s social media and previously worked for CARE as a press officer. linkd.in/eT2qZH

Kari Carlisle — writer, archaeologist, museum curator for Fremont Indian State Park and Museum in central Utah where she cares for more than 150,000 artifacts; manages the park’s archaeological sites, exhibits, educational programs, and special events; serves on the board of the Utah Museums Association; and chairs the committee for Richfield, Utah’s annual Natural Resource Festival.
linkd.in/eLZ52m

Robin Cheung — principal at Cloud 5 Nines.ca. Robin has been a pithy onliner ever since he was first introduced to it in 1987, he holds an MBA from McMaster University (Hamilton); showing his confidence in the future of the Internet, he is currently pursuing his PhD in Applied Management and Decision Sciences (Finance) from Walden University and maintains a business research and education blog at robincheung.ca/.
linkd.in/hMhCFt

Barry Doctor — Product Marketing Manager at Katun Corporation. linkd.in/hVvkWo

Deb Ellsworth — creator of the Empathy Symbol, author of the novel, Earth Portal, and co-author of Your Amazing Preschooler.
empathysymbol.com

Rob Etten — Vice President at The North Highland Company, Rob has experience with Ernst & Young’s Management Consulting practice, Price Waterhouse, and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). His areas of expertise include strategic planning, portfolio management, PMO startup, business process reengineering and merger/acquisition integration. linkd.in/hE3sV4

Roger Hamm — an experienced retail / CPG IT professional with expertise in Project Management, Implementation, Product Design and Principal at Viking Business Intelligence Services. linkd.in/hSKXmj

Dave Harkins — has helped lead change for nearly 25 years. His background includes extensive experience in marketing strategy, database marketing and direct response, branding, licensing and trademark management, marketing technology, and business development. He’s served as VP, Strategic Services at the Jackson Group/Total Response, Managing Partner of Taylor-Harkins Group, Executive VP at Colman Brohan Davis, Chief Marketing Officer and VP, Customer Care at Geneer and VP, Marketing and Product Development at Nykamp Consulting Group. bit.ly/mi2dxo

Julie Kendrick — a features writer with a background in Web content development, magazine profiles and marketing communications. She is a contributing writer for minneapolispicks.com, alumni publications including Reach (U of MN alumni magazine) and Teton Thunder (Williston State College) and under contract to provide content and communications for Syngenta, a $12 billion global agricultural company. linkd.in/ifveBu

Trevor Lobel — project manager at Oswald Brothers. Trevor is a seasoned project and change manager experienced in software implementations for non-profit organizations and NGOs. linkd.in/fzdZxc

Tom Menke — a knowledge management professional known for his ability to leverage technologies, improve business processes, and work with people to improve staff collaboration and client communications to foster the sharing of knowledge and best practices. Tom was formerly Director of Knowledge Management at The Nielsen Company. linkd.in/fkb0Yu

Kathy Pettiss — science educator, consultant at Chester County (PA) Intermediate Unit and volunteer StarLab educator at Great Valley School District. linkd.in/efEkQc

Paul Phillips — Vice President of Operations at ACORN Research, LLC. Paul serves on the board of the non-profit, HopeWorks
(www.whyhopeworks.org) and is a published author. linkd.in/gSl9vl

Frances Ponick — principal at Ponick Enterprises. Frances specializes in writing, manuscript evaluation, book doctoring, and training book coaches. Frances has more than 30 years’ experience in technical, business, marketing, proposal, and other nonfiction writing, editing, and publishing and has received awards for technical writing, journalism, and formal poetry. Frances worked at a nonprofit for ten years, and has taken graduate coursework on social marketing. www.franponick.com linkd.in/gfTCaj

ShaRon Rea — board member at the Harp Foundation and Hope Village Arizona. ShaRon is passionate about building strong community relationships. She is a motivator who believes in possibilities! linkd.in/hTXhqz

Mark Rieger — Vice President, Channel Marketing Evangelist for ChannelLine, which helps Technology Companies increase sales through a combination of consulting, research and the industry’s only Pay For Performance demand generation program. linkd.in/gvkjM5

Alex Rodriguez — marketing director of Baywood Learning Center, a non-profit specializing in the education of gifted children. His many years working at and consulting with non-profits also include working at Trust for Public Land returning and reserving lands and parks for the public and Web consulting for non-profit Cacep. linkd.in/fXnvHO

Kathy Rose — a market research, shopper insights, consumer insights professional and principal of Rose Research for Results. linkd.in/gn61OB

Anthony Sansone — Senior Technical Editor at EMC Corporation. linkd.in/iku6vH

Leanne Storch — Associate Vice President, Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation. Leanne brings organizational skills and a great empathy to the patients and families who call for support. linkd.in/eLACSO

A free PDF of the entire Be a Person – The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises book as published
A free PDF of our exclusive checklist, The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™

So watch this blog for the announcement that the book and checklist are ready on our community. Of course, you may want to join right away anyway, just to be sure . . .

We’d like to hear from you, not only about what you think of our advice, but what you learn as you create your own social media practice. You can contribute by commenting on the Social Media Performance Group’s community Website at:

community.SocialMediaPerformanceGroup.com

Up next: SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Best of the Pundits

SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Acknowledgements is the 174th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just about done. If you’d like to see our entire exclusive community building checklist, once we’re done, it will be available on our Website at community.socialmediaperformancegroup.com. Luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

1 Jul 2013

SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Complete

In our previous post, Community Building What NOT to Do, we concluded our exclusive checklist, The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™. And this is the last post of the contents of our book, Be a Person – The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises – (Paper:bit.ly/BeAPersonEFull – 430 pages.)

We started posting the contents of the book almost two years ago, on August 8, 2011, with the post What is Social Media? We’ve now posted all 430 pages of the book on this blog!

But wait! There’s more!

Some rights reserved by The Daring Librarian

Afterword

“It’s only when technology gets boring —
that’s to say, part of the routine for the majority,
not just the Geekosphere —
that it becomes interesting.”

Clay Shirky

A free PDF of the entire Be a Person – The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises book as published
A free PDF of our exclusive checklist, The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™

So watch this blog for the announcement that the book and checklist are ready on our community. Of course, you may want to join right away anyway, just to be sure . . .

Keeping Pace

Because social media is so fast-moving, lots of the details in the book have become obsolete. We’ve updated the material over the last two years as we’ve posted it, and you can look for the second edition of The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises to be published in the next few months.

While the details may change, the overarching concepts, we feel, will survive. The sites may change; new capabilities may emerge; and certainly some new bright shiny thing (Pinterest, Instagram) will unseat the current 1 billion-pound social media gorillas (we’re looking at you, Facebook!)

But people don’t change — basically — over the eons. Aristotle’s two driving human attributes — pity and fear — remain alive in reality shows and gawker Websites, and the ways we relate to each other are as old as the hills.

We hope we’ve made some sense of this onrushing phenomenon, and we flatter ourselves to hope our advice will remain relevant no matter how social computing evolves.

We’d like to hear from you, not only about what you think of our advice, but what you learn as you create your own social media practice. You can contribute by commenting on the Social Media Performance Group’s Website at:

community.SocialMediaPerformanceGroup.com

In the posts that follow, we collect lots of pointers to other thinkers and advisors whom we respect, whom we relied upon to create this book, and whom we recommend to you for guidance and inspiration. They are the giants upon whose shoulders we stand.[1]

Be careful out there and remember, Don’t Panic!

Up next: SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Acknowledgements

[1] No, this isn’t an Oasis reference, but rather Newton: bit.ly/bItOQI

SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Complete is the 172nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just about done. If you’d like to see our entire exclusive community building checklist, once we’re done, it will be available on our Website at community.socialmediaperformancegroup.com. Luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Community Building What NOT to Do – SMPG Community Building Checklist

28 Jun 2013

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, LinkedIn How-to, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy beginner, enterprise social media, relationship, social computing, social media, social networking

Community Building What NOT to Do – SMPG Community Building Checklist

In our previous post, Converting Visitors to Members, we discussed how to turn a casual visitor into a community member, a part of our community building checklist.

In this post, we continue posting our exclusive checklist that you can use to execute your project for building your community – The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™. We discuss what you shouldn’t do when building community.

Some rights reserved by Eoghan OLionnain

Community Building What NOT to Do

Ignore your community
- You can do more harm than good
- People expect response, communication, relationship
Fail to promote interactions
- Community may need some help connecting
- It’s your job to see they get talking
Rule with an iron hand
- Your goal is to be involved no more and no less than required
- Let the community guide itself as much as possible
Betray their trust
- Obey your own ground rules
- Enlist community when taking potentially unpopular actions such as banning someone
Overextend
- Don’t take on more communities, or other social computing activities, than you can handle
- Your community wants your attention
Abandon your community manager
- Ensure leadership’s support for the role and the person
- Understand the cost of managing the community and budget for it

If you’ve worked you way through this checklist, you’re ready to go. You may not want to take all the advice contained in this checklist or this book, but be sure you’ve considered it so you are making informed choices about social media.

Next up: SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Complete

Community Building What NOT to Do is the 171st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just about done. If you’d like to see our entire exclusive community building checklist, once we’re done, it will be available on our Website at community.socialmediaperformancegroup.com. Luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

26 Jun 2013

Converting Visitors to Members – SMPG Community Building Checklist

In our previous post, Attracting Community Members, we discussed how to draw new members to your community, a part of our community building checklist.

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Converting Visitors to Members

Major requirement: A really good home page
State the need you meet
Invite visitors to join your community
List some of the benefits of membership
Test various alternatives (see the Optimizing for Google post for more on this)
Measure
- Set quantifiable targets and track progress
- Use the techniques we’ve discussed in the Measure Results post
- Schedule reviews of metrics by your management at least quarterly

Next up: Community Building What NOT to Do

Converting Visitors to Members is the 170th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 414. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

24 Jun 2013

Attracting Community Members – SMPG Community Building Checklist

In our previous post, Manage Your Community, we discussed how to manage your initial content, a part of our community building checklist.

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Attracting Community Members

Organic
- People find you through Google because your site is Search Engine Optimized for relevant search terms
Referral
- Get lots of other highly-ranked sites to link to yours
- Use the Facebook Like button
- Can use paid links but only as a last resort
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- Email
- You probably already have an email subscription list; use it to promote the community
Create newsletter articles that draw users to your Website for more info, or the rest of the article
- Put newsletter subscription widget on all your Webpages
Personal referrals
- Run campaigns for current members to invite friends
- Cultivate evangelists to blog, tweet, Facebook about you
- Get your executives and even your board involved
Promote the community at your live events
Hold Tweetups[1] — real-world events where everyone tweets
Give everyone the tools to refer, and connect
- Ask members to put your badge on their sites
- Create lists of suggested tweets and topics
- Encourage members to post pictures to enhance connection
- Encourage members to put a community link in their signatures
Run games or contests to encourage lurkers to post

Next up: Converting Visitors to Members

Attracting Community Members is the 169th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 413. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

[1] Tweetups: bit.ly/cido0V

21 Jun 2013

Manage Your Community – SMPG Community Building Checklist

In our previous post, Create Initial Content for Your Community, we discussed how to adapt your policies to your ever changing community, a part of our community building checklist.

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Manage Your Community

Read the community management experts’ blogs:
- Amber Naslund’s Brass Tack Thinking[1]
- Connie Bensen’s Community Strategist[2]
- Tom Humbarger’s Social Media Musings[3]
- Heather Stout’s Social Media Building Blocks, in particular her series “Community Implementation Strategic Plan”[4]
- Mike Pascucci’s Online Moderation & Management Musings[5]
- Ken Burbery’s Web Business[6]
Assign a community manager to:
- Review all activity
- Answer questions
- Stimulate conversation and connection
- Approve posts (if required)
- Manage the growth
  - If community grows too fast, members may lose sense of connection
  - If commentary gets too noisy, or too fractious, members may disengage
Be responsive
- The community will expect you to respond to issues they bring up
- Moderators should participate in the community
- Use moderation lightly
- Remember, it’s the members’ community
Encourage self-policing
Allow off-topic posting — they’re still engaged!
Model the behavior you’d like to see
Contact rogue members privately; Confronting publicly may be counterproductive
Ensure everyone knows the troll policy and other community policies

Next up: Attracting Community Members

Manage Your Community is the 168th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 412. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

[1] Amber Naslund’s Brass Tack Thinking: bit.ly/aI4Ne6

[2] Connie Bensen’s Community Strategist: http://bit.ly/cdX83j

[3] Tom Humbarger’s Social Media Musings: bit.ly/bNWsZz

[4] Heather Stout’s Social Media Building Blocks: bit.ly/dxDWY0 and bit.ly/aemsl0

[5] Mike Pascucci’s Online Moderation & Management Musings: bit.ly/9VbRJx

[6] Ken Burbery’s Web Business: bit.ly/cTb6X9

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