News
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Interview upcoming on Altimeter Group’s Social Business Readiness survey
Your FIR co-hosts are planning an interview for next week with Altimeter Group‘s Jeremiah Owyang about the release of a new study, “Social Business Readiness.” The study was released today - the presentation is embedded below. In preparation for the interview, we’re sharing some of the study’s highlights in this post. Let us know in comments here or in the FIR Friendfeed room if there are any questions you’d like us to ask Jeremiah.
Companies are at various stages of integrating social media into their business processes. (Interestingly, a third of the companies surveyed reported that their social media efforts aren’t meeting business objectives.) At the top of the pyramid are “advanced companies,” those that are defining best practices. The 18 companies (out of 144 surveyed) prepare for social business by…
Establishing baseline governance
All 18 advanced companies provide open access to social media for professional use. Five require approval, seven allow employees to engage providing they abide by guidelines and six actively encourage employee participation. None discourage the use of social media; instead, these organizations support employee use of social channels with policies and education. Most of the advanced companies (72%) offer means by which policies are reinforced and employees learn about policy updates and revisions. Of of the 144 companies surveyed, 74% don’t have such baseline processes.
Adopting enterprise-wide response processes
Enterprise-class companies maintain some 178 corporate-owned social media accounts across the spectrum of platforms. “As workflow across the enterprise becomes more complicated, consistency and efficiency decrease, while risk increase,” according to the report. 14 of the advanced companies surveyed have established processes for conducing triage on issues that arise to ensure efficiency and consistency and minimize risks. The Air Force’s response matrix is one example. The report points to H&R block’s needs assessment as another. Thirteen of the advanced companies also prepare for worst-case scenarios (while 56% of all 144 companies are unprepared for a social media crisis).
96% of companies with a formal crisis plan in place felt prepared for an event, compared to only 22% of those without a plan.
Developing ongoing education programs
Most of the advanced companies surveyed (72%) keep their organizations’ social media practitioners up to speed on social media with programs such as brown bag lunches, speaker series and internal conferences, while only 34% of all companies have ongoing education programs in place. Best practice sharing is another characteristic of advanced companies, something only 35% of companies across the board are doing.
Education reduces risk, according to survey respondents. “For example,” the report notes, “companies with a policy in place are more likely to have employees who know how to safely represent the brand in social media, 62% compared to 23% of companies that did not.”
Best-practice sharing and leading social media through a dedicated, shared central hub
In larger organizations, up to 13 different business units are actively engaging customers in social media. The chart below details the extent to which various company functions are formally involved in customer-facing social media efforts:
“Without proper coordination, this widespread adoption can result in a fragmented customer experience, duplication of resources and increased costs,” according to the Altimeter report. Advanced companies embrace scalable leadership models to minimize that risk. At the center (or hub) of this hub-and-spoke model is a center of excellence, a cross-functional group responsible for coordination the company’s social media strategy, governance, training and education programs, along with research, measurement frameworks and vendor selection. These teams routinely include corporate social strategists, social media managers, community managers, web developers, education managers and liaisons from business units.
The center of excellence (which is the actual name given this group by 16 of the 18 advanced companies identified int he survey) are well positioned to address issues and crises that may arise. Seventy-three percent of companies that have established these teams have clear leadership on social strategy, compared to only 31% among companies without such teams.
Fifty-three percent of companies with a center of excellence “report benefitting from a coordinated approach to social media, compared to just 21% of companies that do not have this team,” the report says.
Despite the steps advanced companies have taken, the study found that even the most forward-looking organizations lack the following attributes:
- Applying social media feedback—Sixty-six percent of companies have no process ini place for using insights from social media to fix probems and improve products and services.
- Integrating social data into existing systems—Nearly three-fourths of companies are not integrating customer data generated from social profiles and interactions into customer relationship management (CRM) systems, support programs, email marketing and other systems.
- Formal measurement strategies—Only 25% of companies have measurement frameworks that inform decisions about how to use social media across the enterprise.
- Cohesive, mature technologies—Less than a third of companies have standardized internal tools for monitoring, analytics, community management and other dimensions of social media.
The Altimeter Group works with its clients to adopt the company’s Social Business Hierarchy of Needs (another adaptation of Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy). We’ll talk with Jeremiah about the model when during our interview on the results of the study.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Next FIR Live - July 30: Every company is a media company
These days, for a variety of reasons, every company needs to be a media company. Call it brand journalism. Call it what you like. More and more companies are employing tactics that accommodate the concept.
On the next episode of FIR Live, we’ll discuss what it means to be a media company—and why it’s important—with…
- Tom Foremski, the man who coined the phrase
- Wendy Tanaka, technology news editor for Cisco Systems’ The Network, the company’s new media-driven online newsroom
- Ragan Communications CEO Mark Ragan, who employs content producers to promote a company that hosts conferences and workshops.
FIR Live is (as the name suggests) a live broadcast. Your participation makes these episodes better, so call in or engage with us in the chat room on the Talkshoe website. The call-in number is (724) 444-7444 and the show ID is 97345. FIR Live #23 is set for Saturday, July 30 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. UK.
Friday, June 10, 2011
New call-in number for Europe
We’re not sure why, but our long-standing call-in number for Europe doesn’t work any more. (Thanks to Kurt Kragh Sorenson for letting us know.) So, we’ve set up a new one. As with the old number, it’s based in London, which should keep your costs down for leaving an audio comment or otherwise getting in touch with us from anywhere in Europe.
The new number is:
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Eric Schwartzman, Paul Gillin to discuss social media and B-to-B Feb. 19 on FIR Live #21
Tech journalist and author Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman—PR counselor, podcaster and occasional FIR correspondent—have teamed up to write “Social Marketing to the Business Customer,” the only book we’re aware of dedicated entirely to social marketing in the business-to-business world. Paul and Eric will join us on February 19 for our first FIR Live of 2011 to discuss B-to-B and social media.
For the first time, we’re trying TalkShoe, a competitor of BlogTalk Radio, where we’ve been hosting FIR Live since shortly after we began the series. Just like BTR, TalkShoe features a chat room where you can participate, or you can call in live to join the discussion. Details of the episode on TalkShoe are here. The call-in number is (724) 444-7444; the show ID is 93633. As always FIR Live airs at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern and 6 p.m. UK.
About our guests
Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and consultant who specializes in business-to-business uses of social media marketing. His four books include The New Influencers (2007), Secrets of Social Media Marketing (2008), The Joy of Geocaching (co-authored with wife Dana in 2010) and Social Marketing to the Business Customer (co-authored with Eric Schwartzman, 2011). Previously, he was editor-in-chief of the newsweekly Computerworld and founding editor of Internet publisher TechTarget. His website is gillin.com and he blogs at paulgillin.com. He’s @pgillin on Twitter.
Eric Schwartzman has been conducting monthly social media training programs for PRSA since 2006 and works as an independent online communications consultant to businesses, the US Military, government agencies and nonprofits. Eric specializes in online communications strategy, social media policy development and accelerating social media literacy within organizations. He is a frequenter speaker at professional conferences and has been producing the award-winning podcast “On the Record…Online” (which is @ontherecord on Twitter), which focuses on how technology is changing the way organizations communicate, since April 2005. Eric is on Twitter at @ericschwartzman
Here’s a brief video on Paul and Eric’s book:
Join us—your questions will ensure that this will be a fascinating conversation!
Monday, January 03, 2011
Starting the sixth year of FIR with a thank you
Today at about 9am Pacific time, 5pm UK time, we’ll record this week’s episode of For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report, as we do every Monday. Today’s episode will be show number 580.
Today also marks the beginning of our sixth year of podcasting: show #1 went out on January 3, 2005. FIR began as a labour of love. It’s still that for us but much more involved now with more to the show than just two co-hosts.
Which is the primary reason for this post today. We’d like to say a huge thank you to our three sponsors:
FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com.
Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.
Pollstream: helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.
An equal thank you to our two regular reporters:
- Dan York - based in Keene, New Hampshire, Dan reports on communication from the technologist’s point of view.
- Michael Netzley - reporting from Singapore on the communication scene across the Asia-Pacific region.
A special thank you to our occasional contributors:
- David Phillips - occasional reports from the shadows of Stonehenge in England.
- Eric Schwartzman - occasional reporting from Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world.
- Sallie Goetsch - doses of now-and-again reality from The Podcast Asylum.
- Mark Story - insights from behind the scenes at the federal government in Washington, DC.
- Bob LeDrew - our newest FIR team member hailing from Toronto, Canada, Bob is just starting and will be reviewing books as FIR’s Book Reviews editor.
More special thanks:
- Donna Papacosta, Heidi Miller and Krishna De - the voices that intro’d and outro’d each episode for many years. Today, it’s Donna’s dulcet tones that grace our show with the details of how to get in touch with us.
- Lee Hopkins - ‘our man in the Adelaide Hills,’ Lee was our first correspondent, reporting from Australia from 2005 until early 2008.
And not forgetting the active FIR community of listeners in the FIR Room on Friendfeed.
Thank you, everyone!
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Introducing Bob LeDrew, FIR’s new book review editor
Your FIR co-hosts are delighted to welcome Bob LeDrew as the new editor of our book review feed.
We started the book review podcast as a means by which we can share our views of books related to the themes we cover on FIR—business, communications, PR, social media, and the like. Our first review was posted in December 2006. Here we are four years later, and we have posted a total of eight reviews.
With Bob focusing on book reviews, we hope to do much better. And we hope to get more reviews from our listener community, since you’re always welcome to submit audio content for the show!
Bob plans to publish his first review of the book, “Deadly Spin,” Wendell Potter’s hyper-critical look at the healthcare industry’s use of propaganda to influence the public debate in support of profitability.
Bob is a podcaster, writer, and public relations consultant in Ottawa, Ontario. Bob currently has his own company, Translucid Communications. Before that, he slogged away in the trenches of higher education communications for the better part of a decade, where he dealt with everything from drive-by shootings to cancer breakthroughs to coming up with more ways to break ground or open buildings that you can shake a stick at (and no, shaking a stick wasn’t one of them.) Bob became Canada’s first PR blogger in April 2003 when he started Flacklife. He’s also an avid podcaster, with three podcasts he hosts or co-hosts: The Kingcast, about Stephen King; PR and Other Deadly Sins, with Mark Blevis; and The Contrarians, with Susan Murphy and Joe Boughner. He is a cofounder of the meetup Case Study Jam. When he successfully tears himself away from a computer, Bob immerses himself in making music, cycling, and appreciating good single-malt whisky (there is no bad single-malt, a notion with which Shel agrees entirely, although some are even tastier than others).
We hope you enjoy our new focus on books of interest to the FIR community—and we hope you’ll join in the conversation!
Monday, November 22, 2010
FIR Live set for December 18 on BP oil spill communications
The next episode of FIR Live will look at the communication efforts surrounding the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill—the worst in U.S. history. Our guests are…
- Gerald Baron, who authors the Crisisblogger blog and wrote “Now is Too Late 2,” one of the best books available on crisis communication in the digital era. Gerald is a founder and Director of Strategic Services for PIER (Public Information Emergency Response) Systems, a crisis communication technology solution. (PIER Systems was used by BP during the Gulf spill crisis.) Most recently, Gerald wrote the white paper, “Unending Flow: Case Study on Communications in the Gulf Oil Spill.
- Neil Chapman, a BP communicator, was part of BP’s communications response team for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He has been on the communications front line for controversial industrial projects, company takeovers, trading scandals and lobbying campaigns. Neil was the subject of an FIR interview with co-host Neville Hobson earlier this year.
The show—which you’re encouraged to be part of by calling in or participating in the live chat room—is set for Saturday,
December 18, at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern and 6 p.m. London.
As always with FIR Live, you can be part of the discussion by calling in to +1.347.324.3723 to ask a question or share your views, or by commenting in the chat room.
On the day of the show, you’ll need to log in to BlogTalk Radio in order to participate in the chat room.
Join us—your questions will ensure that this will be a fascinating conversation!
“Unending Flow” is available for download as a PDF (free) or as a Kindle ebook (for $6.99) after completing a brief form.
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