Top 5 Do's and Don't from Jeremiah's Discussion with IBM'S WebSphere Event

Guys … I took the 10 that Jeremiah gave us into 5!!!  He is amazing and loves this space

1)  Don’t obsess over the tools!  His advice?   Watch the early adoptors and see what they are adopting.  Tons of new tools being developed every month!  Choose carefully based on what you want to do!  But you will make mistakes and it is ok!  

2)  Invest in the resources around the tools you choose!  You can do a lot for very little money!  While growing, the total dollars here are small still.     Spend 80% on the strategy, goals, value propositions and 20% on the tools.  Examples he gave include Dell, Wells Fargo, and IBM.

3)  Do Integrate!  Don’t forget to integrate!  Social tools are not islands.  Successful social media works when the social media tools cross link and integrate!  Develop an index page of tools!

4)  Make sure you have an internal social media process!  Several models were reviewed – -the Tire –>  employees are communicating with the market with corporate communications still in the center.  Second, the control – Company communications owns all social media.  Third, hub and spoke — in the middle is a cross functional team. 

He compared this hub and spoke to an airport.  The team needs radar to listen.  The Signal Tower prioritizes the information and informs the right team.  The Flight log shows key results.

Have a place so that people can experiment — a Social Media sandbox like Yammer, or Blue Twit or Thinkforward internal to IBM.  Make sure you make it safe to try this internally!

5)  What not to do — measure the wrong things!

Page views along are not sufficient to measure .  Meausring click throughs is the wrong engagements!  Measure based on the business objectives.

Bottom line, this is personal, use them!  Play with them.  The ones Jeremiah suggested…..Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer, Twitter, Blogs and Pictures. Use search tools like google alerts, twitter search , and technorati.