In my book, SocialCorp, I identify what I think are the Six Valuable Attributes that make social media a powerful tool in a corporate communications. These are:

• Authenticity – Social media lets the real voices of real people come through, allowing an intimacy never achieved before in corporate communications.

• Transparency – There are two kinds of transparency in corporate social media. The first is traditional financial transparency, the ability for shareholders and regulators to see how well a company is performing financially. The second definition, closely related, is that through company blogs, communities and other vehicles, the rest of a company’s inner workings can also be made visible to the public.

• Immediacy – Immediacy is the ability of companies, bloggers, journalists and members of the public to communicate, and to engage in online conversations at unprecedented speed. A blog post can be written, formatted and published in minutes. Twitter updates happen in the blink of an eye. Live video is now within reach of anyone with a handicam, or even a cell phone with a video camera.

• Participation – Once the domain of company authorized communicators, a useful, current definition of corporate communications recognizes that anyone can participate in the conversation, whether on the company’s blog, independent forums, personal blogs, Twitter, Slashdot, or any of a thousand places online.

• Connectedness – Through a multitude of mechanisms for sharing information, social media allows millions of connections to take place, amplifying the impact of company communications. RSS feeds allow information posted in one place to be instantly displayed in thousand of other places. Social bookmarking sites like Digg allow users to easily share stories with others.

• Accountability – While one of the characteristics of the Internet is supposedly anonymity, and this is true in some cases, people who use social media are more accountable than they might realize. Many companies, and their PR and marketing agencies, have tried to “game the system” through unethical practices like astroturfing, the practice of falsifying grassroots support for a product, company, service or point of view by having paid company representatives leave anonymous comments. Over and over again, these companies are caught and publicly vilified. Seemingly anonymous postings leave a trail of IP addresses and other clues that are detected and publicized by vigilant users.

In a recent blog post, Rob Whetzel of Rottman Creative, talked about his experience easing into participation as he learned each social network and social media tool.

Do you agree that these attributes are important? Which are the most important? What would you add?

I’m really happy that I’ve started work for Intridea, an amazing company doing some great work in enterprise social media. Yoshi Maisami, one of the founders of Intridea, and I started chatting over the holidays. I met with Yoshi, Barg, David, Chris, and many other folks from Intridea in D.C. in December and was impressed by their enthusiasm, and by their exceptional corporate culture.

My title is Chief Enterprise Social Business Strategist. I know it’s a little long (it runs to two lines on our business cards), but we thought it was important to define what I actually do, which is similar to what I have been doing since January 2007, advising large companies and organizations on how to use social media in a way that helps them achieve their communications and business objectives. That’s the basic premise of my book, SocialCorp, and we’ll be applying the SocialCorp philosophy to the work I do at Intridea.

Intridea is deep in social app development and has a team of more than 20 fulltime Rails developers, many of whom were involved in developing the IP behind some of social media’s biggest names. The company has a suite of behind-the-firewall enterprise grade social business apps like microblogging platform Present.ly, the SocialSpring Social Network Platform and the Crowdsound User Feedback Widget.

As a Twitter addict, I’m really excited about Present.ly, which is the official microblogging tool for this year’s SXSW, and we’re pretty proud of that. (More on that soon.) Present.ly isn’t really a competitor to Twitter, but behaves similarly (and features file transfer and other functions Twitter doesn’t have). We use Present.ly internally at Intridea, which was just one more thing that confirmed for me that these guys really get it.

The focus here on my blog will change a little, but I’ll try to be relevant, self-aware and insightful, and I’ll keep the Intridea hype to a minimum, but I really do like the company or I wouldn’t have joined.

You can follow Intridea on Twitter at:

• @Intridea
• @CrowdSound
• @Presently

Tags: Intridea, Enterprise Social Business, Joel Postman

New Riders, the publishers of my SocialCorp book, have made available Chapter 4, Can You Control Your Brand, or Just Share It?, on its web site. This chapter looks at a contemporary definition of brand, who “owns” your company’s brand, how to establish corporate identity in a Web 2.0 world, and other issues facing marketers and communicators. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Any discussion of social media implications to the corporate brand must begin with a definition of brand, and some agreement as to just whether the company can control its brand, manage it, share it, or must give it over to the whims of consumers.

Merriam Webster defines brand as

• a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer.

True, but not very useful for this discussion. David Ogilvy, often called the father of advertising, defined a brand as

• the intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.

I define a brand as the sum total of our experiences with a company, its products, services, and employees, and the way those experiences shape our perception of the company.”

I hope you’ll take a moment to look at the entire chapter and join the discussion by leaving a comment on the Peachpit (parent of New Riders) site or here. Thanks!

Tags: SocialCorp, David, Ogilvy, definition, brand, New Riders, Peachpit, Web 2.0

Peachpit, publisher of my new book SocialCorp, has kindly invited me to join them in their booth at Macworld San Francisco to talk about Twitter business basics and to sign copies of the book (available in the booth #S-1026). I will be there Friday, January 9, 2009, at 2 P.M. My chat will cover both a general introduction to Twitter as well as a discussion of how businesses are using it. If you’re in the Bay Area, I hope to see you there!

Tags: Peachpit, New Riders, SocialCorp, Twitter, Joel Postman, Macworld, San Francisco, 2009

The title of my new book is SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate. Early in the book, I include the SocialCorp Readiness Quiz, a series of 20 questions designed to help corporate communicators assess the strengths and weaknesses of their companies as they might affect social media adoption.

You can take the online version of the quiz:

The quiz is also available in PDF format. Feel free to download and distribute.

Use the following scoring* guidelines to help you determine your organization’s readiness:

• 18–20: Your company is already a SocialCorp. Congratulations.
• 15–17: You have the right culture, leadership, and other conditions in place to allow your company to become a SocialCorp, with great potential for broad social media adoption.
• 12-14: The fundamentals are good, and you’re well on your way to becoming a SocialCorp, but to be successful you’ll need to carefully factor those areas in which the company might not be perfectly aligned for success.
• Less than 12: Don’t despair. Your responses indicate only that there are some barriers to social media adoption in your organization and that there might be certain social media strategies that won’t work in your company or industry.

Thanks to all of my good friends on Twitter who contributed questions, and to Todd Hoskins of Networked Insights, who allowed me to include a couple of questions from his company’s Readiness Assessment Tool.

Feel free to comment here on what you thought about the quiz, and whether it helped you gain any insights into your company’s social media readiness. You can freely reproduce, distribute and reuse the quiz, but please keep the copyright notice and credits intact.

Thanks!

* Note that the scoring differs between the online and written (PDF) versions of the quiz. For the PDF version, use the scoring method outlined in the document.

Tags: SocialCorp, Social Media Readiness Quiz, corporate communications, assessment