Hi,

Today I launch my new venture, and my new blog, Socialized. The mission of Socialized is to provide companies, and their PR agencies and in-house communications staff, with the strategy and implementation to design, integrate and measure social media in a corporate environment.

I’m currently Executive Vice President, Emerging Media, for Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley tech PR agency. (I negotiated for this title when I joined the agency. It’s the best title I’ve ever had.) I’ll be leaving Eastwick at the end of January to focus fulltime on Socialized. Prior to joining Eastwick, I spent close to 20 years on the corporate communications and marketing side.

There’s a reason many large companies, particularly those in the Fortune 500, are slow (or completely unwilling) to adopt social media. They don’t know what the heck “the conversation” is, and if they’re a publicly held, or well-managed private company, no CFO is going to approve a P.O. for “opening up the brand.”

So what is social media, and how can you use it in your communications mix? I won’t attempt a definition. But a simple list of social media includes blogs, podcasts, online video, communities and social networks. All of these things have potential value in corporate communications, but those of us who advocate for adoption of social media need to do so with an understanding of the way large corporations work, and how they measure success. Of course, they love return on investment, but it’s not always easy to measure this with social media initiatives. Sometimes social media can help build the brand without delivering measurable results like leads or revenue. Basically, it’s a difficult sell.

A couple of things about social media have become clear to me in the last five years. That’s where I got the idea for Socialized. I was involved in early social media discussions at Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Even from inside the company, there are strategic, political and organizational influences that need to be understood and managed in order to bring new thinking into the company. I’ve learned that. There’s also a reluctance to let go of “the message” and surrender control to anyone who comes to the company blog or newsroom. If you don’t understand that, you shouldn’t be taking to a public company. Ever heard of Reg FD? When your CEO can go to jail for an errant blog post, the stakes are high.

Socialized was created to help businesses adopt social media within the framework of their existing communications and business strategy. That’s a really important distinction. It’s entirely possible, for example, that a CEO blog is totally inappropriate given your corporate culture, your market, or your objectives. We can help you figure that out.

I’ll try to use this blog to talk about social media from this perspective. I have a couple of other blogs I am going to revive. Hyde Park is my consultancy and blog for executive communications. I used to dabble in speech writing (note I spell it both ways for SEO), so I am offering speechwriting, presentation design, speaker coaching, etc. through Hyde Park. And lastly, Techneuroti, my personal favorite, will be for the random, irrelevant rant, most often communications-related, but not always.

If you’re interested in any of these topics, I hope you’ll read the blog, add it to RSS, or even do a guest post.

Thanks!

Joel

Tags: blogs, communities, Eastwick communications, hyde park associates, joel postman, podcasts, Social Media, Socialized, techneuroti, video