I think I know the answer you are going to give. “I spent 8-10+ hours a day with these people, why would I want to connect with them on Facebook?”

I’d like to answer your question with a question. What are you really afraid of? Someone seeing a picture of your family–or worse–maybe you with a beer in your hand? I’ve got some advice for you; get over it!

Within the enterprise, there is no bigger asset in social media than involving employees. Tony Hsieh has built a culture of happiness at Zappos.com, and that is very evident on Twitter and other social sites. This is a rare example of a company culture manifesting itself in the social sphere.

When you first start any social media initiative, your first thought might be, “who will be my audience and share my content.” Answer, the people getting a paycheck, and the people that care about those getting a paycheck, will be some of your strongest advocates initially.

You may want to consider running a training for all your employees on Facebook. Show them how they can segment their family content from professional interests, and let the team know you want them to share your message. In fact, I’ve seen some enterprises directly prohibit the proactive of sharing and commenting of company messages within the social sphere. This is just backwards. Employees should be first. Then influencers, significant others, and the greater community.

If you start your social media efforts internally, by framing how you’d like employees to utilize these new tools professionally, you will be building value for the enterprise while simultaneously increasing personal development and education for your team. [win-win]

I find it rather odd that we spend the better portion of our days working for a company, but are scared to share photos of the people that show up at the Holiday parties. We are afraid to show our real selves to the people we spend the most time with. The largest social networks often exist within your enterprise. It is incumbent upon us as marketers to learn how to leverage social connections for productivity, and increasing the value each team member brings to the table.

You might start by writing a social media policy for your company. Then proceed with outlining realistic ways you plan to interact with the community. After that, have a regular trainings with employees who want to participate and guide them to professional productivity on the social web.

If you’ve had success getting larger businesses adopt social media into their enterprise, I’d love to hear your commentary.

Attributions: Photo by Little Pengiun

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These were the questions the panel at the ROI smack down attempted to answer.

There was a spirited debate over quantitate metrics versus qualitative metric measurement between Muhammad Saleem (marektingmaven.com) and Beth Harte (community manager of MarketingProfs.com). The consensus among the group was that companies need proof positive evidence of the quantitative growth in sales and revenue, if we as social media evangelists are seeking long term employment. No one disagrees that there isn’t an intangible benefit to social media, however, we must find creative ways to document and track these benefits or they will be lost on upper management.

If we talk in terms of followers and retweets, the traditional business community does not yet realize how to translate that to value in P&L environment. So Deborah Micek, of Quansite revolution, demonstrated how authors are driving more people to their book signing through social media, than almost any other avenue. I wanted to see more examples like this from the panel.

Another interesting point that the moderator Stephanie Agresta addressed was how do you measure the ROI of a PR disaster avoided. If you stop a tweet from turning into a blog, from turning into a movement, what is that worth to you company? What would Taco Bell pay to have that BellHedz crisis avoided?

I felt that this was a topic that could have been explored in devoted track. I would have love to seen cases studies, formulas, spreadsheets, and real life examples of ROI working to drive social media.

The cumulative affect of social media is such that, each month you continue a campaign it gets easier and easier to grow it. What that means is that social media campaigns will never cost as much to the organization as they do the first quarter or first year.

As you amass followers, build relationships, and reach out the community; you will experience rising retweets, shares, and exposure over time. Each month you continue with social media should become more profitable, and if documented appropriately, you can really impress the CFO of your organization.

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Katalyst Media is making waves for what they are doing with big brands and social media, most notably Kellog.

Less than 90 days ago Kellog launched a transformative shift in their marketing campaign and changed their approach to new media. Kellog announced they were donating 10 million dollars to a campaign to fight hunger if they had the participation of the web community, known as Kellog Cares. Thousands of people submitted their videos and the result was this web clip produced by Katalyst media.

If you are in the industry, I would suggest following Katalyst on Facebook
.

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If you have knowledge about a particular subject(s), and you feel like sharing, how can you find people that are receptive to your generosity? One way is by listening with the right keywords.

Search Twitter for these keywords:

(1) “Does anyone know” / or simply “anyone know”
(2) “Can someone”
(3) “Who knows of” / “Who knows a”
(4) Anyone want / Anyone need

Using a program like TweetDeck (or rss feeds), you can see many searches simultaneously which makes this ‘listening’ process much easier:

Example:

See you could help @EricKrassinger find a fringe blog, or it looks like @jakowenko needs an iPhone app built. If you plug in a keyword of your choice, “anyone know + blog“, you get conversations focused on blogging.

If you are looking to use Twitter to promote your product, why wouldn’t you listen for these kind of keywords. You help people find what they need, when they need it most.

(If you really want to be advanced. Gather all the RSS feeds of the best searches for your company/product/app, put them together in Nourish RSS to Email feed and email them to your boss, or board every week or so.)

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