Many companies want to figure out how to control their employees on Social Media. Maybe the employees are the wrong place to focus.  Maybe they should focus on sharing the mission, goals, and values of the company with their employees first.

Social Media has made it even more essential that individual employees understand their corporate culture.  They are fast becoming the new marketing voice of the company.

Project Management leaders are advocating that running individual departments “like a business” is not enough.   Individual departments need to be run like “the” business – aligned with the goals of the company as a whole.

Sounds like Business 101, but I once had a CEO give a presentation on the strategy of our company that was prepared for investors, and when I asked for a copy as a middle manager responsible for executing that strategy they hesitated, unsure if this was information they wanted floating around.  ???

Culture needs to be shared within the company, before it can be shared successfully outside the company.  Social Media guru Jay Baer, coauthor of The Now Revolution recently told an audience in Portland that “the successful adoption of a social web and participation strategy is rooted in business culture.”  It’s not about tools or tactics, it’s a paradigm-shift of opening the door to your employees and letting them open the door to your customers.

Sharing and nurturing your company’s business culture will reduce the risk from the inevitable social media empowerment every individual now has.

Designers, developers, and marketing will each approach the problem of organizing and presenting that content from a different perspective.

Content Strategist are responsible for creating a strategy to move your content into the digital space, usually a website.

This illustration interprets the role of Content Strategist as the connector between the information architect, programmer, copy writer, visual designer, and interaction designer.

These seven steps from the book  Visualizing Data are a valuable tool for anyone responsible taking “content” and determining how to present it in the most meaningful way.

1. Acquire:  Obtain access to the content.  Is it in digital form?

2. Parse:  Order the content into categories.  Card sorting is a good low tech exercise to start this process

3. Filter:  Remove data that is not of interest for your goal.

4. Mine:  Discern patterns and place the content in context that will aid understanding.

5. Represent:  Chose a visual model or combination of media – text, image, media, chart, graph, etc.

6. Refine:  Improve the representation to make the intent even more clear and more engaging.

7. Interact:  Add options for the user to modify how they view or control the content.

These seven steps will not always be sequential, and be prepared to revisit steps along the way.

And if you’re near Portland, Oregon and interested in discussing more about Content Strategy, you can check out the Content Strategy PDX Meet Up.

There was a time when automobiles shared the road with the horse & buggy. It’s happening again today, only this time the road being shared is the information highway. Change does not happen overnight.  TV, radio, and the newspaper are still with us, yet the way we get information is changing by the day, by the hour, by the minute.  The video below is an entertaining way to see how fast the changes are coming.

The media getting the most attention right now is Social Media and everyone is asking, “How do I make money with this?”  What we should be asking is, “How do I get started?”

Step one is getting our “content” into digital form and out on the internet.  The content is the media.

Social Media is simply media specialized for “social interaction.”  During my time in Broadcasting (one-to-many media), I came to appreciate the power the internet provided to add interactive elements to marketing.  If your customers are using it, than the media has value.

Recently a Siemens survey found 70% of consumers indicated they want access to company experts and support through social media channels, yet only 65% of them are happy with those transactions.  The problem may lie in the fact that only about 1/3 of the companies dabbling in Social Media have any sort of policy or strategy. Social Media is just a tool. In traditional media we used to hear, “I tried radio, it didn’t work.” and yet radio (or any media) works fine. Success is determined by the strategy, or the lack of one.

When media choices were limited to reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, and watching TV, that’s where marketing went. Today the trend is moving online and Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are a big part of that trend.  As we debate which media tools are legitimate, let’s be sure that the focus is on developing strategies – where ever the customers are.

1. You will have a magic Rolodex. Does anyone still still use a Rolodex?  How quickly is that information outdated?  When you connect on LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter if you change emails, change careers or move to another state.  You only need to update your information in one place and everyone can still find you. And you can find them.

2. You will read your friend’s minds: After you’ve LinkedIn with your coworkers, clients and business associates you’ll know who knows who. LinkedIn connects the dots. You’ll be amazed at the connections within your own social circle.

3. You will read stranger’s minds: When you meet someone new, or want to meet someone new, if they are on LinkedIn, you can find out who they know, that you know. A nice icebreaker.

4. You will have access from anywhere in the universe: Because your contacts are based in “the cloud” (not on your computer), you can still access your network if your hard drive crashes, you no longer have access to your work computer, or your computer is at home and you’re not.

5. You will see through walls: Actually, you can see what your business connections are doing and they can keep up with you.  Like Facebook, only business oriented, you can see who the people you know are meeting, what they are reading, or what industry groups they are participating in.

6. You can join groups without ever leaving the office: If time is an issue, LinkedIn will allow you to listen, learn and lead conversations about topics specific to your industry.

7. Two degrees of separation: While it still may take six degrees of separation to connect with everyone on the planet, a mere 350 connections on LinkedIn puts you one connection away from 60,000 people. Not 60,000 random strangers, but 60,000 people who know someone you know.

If you’re still waiting for Social Media to go mainstream, wait no more. Our social circles are having more influence on us, and have supplemented and replaced traditional media sources. While Facebook is the leader with a half billion people, LinkedIn is micro-targeted to business. At 75 million and growing it truly is a magic Rolodex .

Guest speaker Paul Barron, publisher of Fast Casual Magazine, warned the social media crowd that he could find a ten year old to set up a website and a Facebook page, what businesses need are storytellers.  It’s not about the tools; it’s about the content.  The new social business is about engaged content.

Most businesses struggle with finding a story to tell.  They look for it on their menu, in comparison to their competitors, and in being “locally owned and operated.”  They look so hard at what they think the story is, they miss what the story could be.