This was my first time flying VirginAmerica [I have flown almost 1mln miles on other airlines]. I liked their entertainment system, ability to order foods and drinks via this system, comfortable seats and of course friendly flight attendants and a great service.

But what I want to write about is … something different.. Actually I want to ask a question to Virgin America airline and other brands: how committed are you to Social Media channels?

What do I mean?

Yes, when you visit Virgin America’s web site http://www.virginamerica.com/ you will see links to their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels.

Yes, they have over 100,000 followers on Twitter, etc…

But… I have not heard flight attendants mentioning Twitter or Facebook during my flight.. They did not ask me to check into this flight on FourSquare and maybe giving me a glass of wine for doing it .

They did not ask me to capture this great shot during the flight and post it on Twitter right from the flight using in-flight Wifi services…

No, they did not!

Why??? Why are hotels, airlines, spas and many other businesses not encouraging their customers to follow them on social media channels outside of the web sites, social media channels?? In real life?

Does this mean that they are still testing the waters? Not fully committed to social media channels? Or maybe this means lack of integrated marketing strategies?? The group that is responsible for social media channels does marketing using those channels and not talking to the other marketing teams on how they can use traditional marketing channels to promote social media ones?

What do you think?

Here is a step by step process on how you create simple auto feed of content to your Twitter account.

Step 1. Identify relevant information sources on Internet. You can use Google Search, Technorati search to locate blogs, news sites, papers, etc that have great content that’s highly relevant to your Twitter followers.

Example for Social CRM:

I identified major bloggers in Social Business space [Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0] and collected their blogs informations here.

Step 2. Find link to RSS feeds for each data source.

Example:

I clicked on a first blog address listed in my table referenced above. It happened to be Andy McAfee’s blog.

You can copy all the RSS addresses to a notepad for now.

Step 3. I like using Yahoo! pipes to aggregate and sort RSS feeds. Here is a very simple example of how you can use Yahoo! pipes to aggregate RSS feeds.

a) goto Yahoo! pipes. Click on Create a pipe button.

b) Start adding RSS links:

c) after you are done adding all the links, drag Sort function to a workspace and Pipe output. Connect all the pieces. Do not forget to name and save your pipe!

Step 4. now you need to save RSS link to this pipe and use it in a feed burner to start publishing your highly informative content to your Twitter stream. I am using Google’s Feedburner for this:

Words of caution:

- make sure you select relevant content [to your audience, of course!];

- test your Yahoo! pipe to ensure you are getting an output you expected to get;

- adjust Feedburner to publish limited number of articles in reasonable time frame.

Feel free to drop me a note if you need help with your content strategy or content automation!

Fact:

Increase in sales of ½ pints of beer on Thursday nights from 45 to 300-350 using Social Media channels to promote this offering.

Fact:

Sales revenue growth 10% for the year vs projected 3% due to increased customer awareness and engagement via social media channels.

About Tied House Brewing:

Family owned and operated since 1988 local micro-brewery in Mountain View, Ca.

Main Social Media Channels used:

Twitter and Facebook.

Tools:

use of free tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Fan Pages Analytics, Google Alerts to monitor and analyze social media activities.

Here is my interview with Carolyn Hopkins, Director of Marketing and Events at Tied House Brewing – the master mind behind social media strategies and execution!

After you go through your list of family and friends, asking them to join your online community, you continue to neighbors… Then you start loosing all the excitement.  Your online community is at about 100 members with marginal level of activity. Your brand and products are not well known. You stuck!

Instead of giving up, its time to re-evaluate your community building strategies:

-         Are you just talking about your company and products? If your brand is not well known that might not work;

-         Constant promotions and coupons and offerings of your products at discounted prices [@DellOutlet example] probably will not work well for your somewhat unknown brand;

-         Are you using the right platform for your community? Should you use just one or many? How to choose?

-         Do you have a content strategy?

These are some of the questions you need to address to determine the right set of steps you need to take to continue development of your community.

Your community building strategies will go through transformations and adjustments as your community will move from one to the next maturity level.

Based on my experience building online [and face-to-face] communities for very different subject areas I came up with the following definitions of stages of community development:

Stage 1 – growing from 0 to 50 members [family and friends stage];

Stage 2 – growing from 50 to 100 members [learning the audience];

Stage 3 – growing from 100 to 500 members [understanding the content and community management strategy];

Stage 4 – growing from 500 to 1,000 members [early maturity stage];

Stage 5 – from 1,000 members and up [maturity phase – main focus on community management; getting into viral growth mode].

Each of these phases dictates the use of different strategies and techniques. The overall methodology as I have learned by building many communities is the same.

The success of your business going forward will greatly depend on your ability to build, grow and manage communities.

Do not give up – re-think your strategies; do not blindly apply someone else’s techniques to your business. .Constantly monitor the health of your community. Measure against the goals and adjust!

What were your learnings from building online communities – mostly interested in stories of brands that are not well known and do not have endorsements from well know personas – typical SMB companies.

In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School describes the theory of how large outstanding firms can fail “by doing everything right.” The innovator’s dilemma, according to Christensen, affects companies whose success and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies. There is no more important an issue on the agenda of top management than driving innovation. In this post, we’ll review the evolution of “innovation management” and how social media has a significant role to play. This is one area where social media can “move the needle” for large enterprises and help them change the very nature of the firm.

This article also describes what the Innovation 3.0 is.

I would argue that Innovation 3.0 should not only include social media enabled outside of the company idea harvesting channels but also the inside of the company ones.

A few months ago I invited Tad Milbourn from Intuit to give Silicon Valley Executives an overview of the tool Intuit is using to enable company employees to participate in innovation process. His talk has generated lots of discussions. And that’s the reason we decided to expand on it and discuss the overall process of harvesting and enabling innovations within and outside of enterprises.

Here is an abstract of our upcoming meetup on this topic:

Innovation has been dubbed as one of the more promising purpose-driven applications of social and collaborative technology in the enterprises. Whether as a way to encourage customers or internal employees, Innovation Programs in enterprises have unlocked critical ideas at well known enterprises that has ultimately led to the conception of new product ideas, significant cost savings internally and finally, operational efficiency. Sameer Patel, founding partner at the Sovos Group will moderate a session to highlight the opportunity and challenges that organizations face as they seek to unlock critical insight coming from customers, partners and employees.

Please share with your success stories and lessons learned – how is your company using the power of communities, their ideas to create new, innovative products and offerings.

And then Buzz came along. At first I enabled my Tweets to populate Buzz stream – was too much noise, much of which was irrelevant to my Buzz followers. Stopped. Then I set up auto-updates from Buzz to Twitter. That worked just fine, but what I was missing was that constant presence factor on Buzz that I wanted to have. I decided to connect Google Reader to Buzz, which in turn auto-updates Twitter. And I populate shared Google Reader folders via RSS feed built on Yahoo! Pipes.

I think I finally found the right Google Buzz content strategy that works fine for me.

Of course, I am just talking about semi-automated part of online presence, which contributes to about 20-30% of my total online communications – I know I will be attacked by all the social media gurus on a subject of online conversations/dialog,etc.. – yes, we all agree here, much needed and has to be a significant part of the overall social networking communications strategy

Hope you can share with your lessons learned/best practices!

Well, social media is NOT gambling. When your company is investing time and money in online activities it has to be able to justify why.

Companies and people who suggest that there is no ROI on social media/networking investments need to admit – they just do not know what and how to measure. What to look for, how to assess and how to interpret the results.

We’ll talk more about how to measure the results of your brand’s online activities at the upcoming meetup on February 9. Our speaker – Jon Samsel – is an expert in this field and he’ll explain that there are tools and methods that could be used to measure and assess your brand’s online activities and it’s relatively easy to do.

Do you want to continue gambling? I think I know the answer. Then learn how to measure!

This magic word – community! Suddenly all the problems will be solved! Your company just needs to create an online community – right?

Here is a list of questions you need to address first:

Why your company is building a community? – Business goals.

Do you have resources to grow and manage it? – Community is a long term commitment.

Do you have processes on how to analyze and act upon different type of events happening in communities? – integration with back end processes: sales; support, product management, legal, etc..

Did you consider potential legal implications? Do you need to create an agreement for members to sign?

Did you create a set of rules/guidelines for the members of the community to follow?

How are you going to measure the success of the community? – very important to come up with the set of metrics and be able to measure.

What technology/tool are you going to use to build and manage your community?

We will be talking more about communities at this upcoming event: Social Media In HiTech Conference. Please send me your questions and I will make sure to ask them during our panel discussions!

Few months ago I was asked to present this topic to a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They really wanted to hear from someone who did run startups, knows inside-out their issues, can relate to their concerns. Yes, I quit PwC in 2000 right before becoming a partner to get my hands dirty with early stage startups. Partnership at that time sounded like an early retirement option to me, I wanted fire, energy, excitement. I got it all! As a VP of Sales and Business Development for a startup company in 2002 I had to make all the important decisions: who to sell, what to sell, how… And those years were tough – “dead” years in terms of business… But it was a great time for us to learn how to operate in tough business environment, how to get rid of small company syndrome, think big, sell big.

Here is a set of slides I will be using as a framework for discussions on whether social media channels should be used by startup companies [even small and medium businesses] for sales, marketing, customer service, support.

During this workshop we’ll go into more details, review characteristics of each channel, and discuss strategies, real life examples.

If you have any questions you can post them here or email them to me and I will cover them during our upcoming workshop.

Top executives from Bay Area will tackle this subject at the upcoming event.

Our distinguished panel:

Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand - VP CRM Product Management, SAP

Volker Hildebrand is Vice President of CRM Product Management at SAP. He has global responsibility for go-to-market, business development and product strategy for the CRM product line. He has been with SAP for eleven years, building momentum in CRM and E-Commerce in various roles and leadership positions in sales, marketing and product management. Volker was instrumental in building a successful CRM sales team at SAP Germany when he joined in 1998. In 2000 he took over responsibility for SAP’s Internet Sales product and later joined SAP Markets to lead the product management team in Palo Alto. In 2002 Volker joined the CRM group driving success for the e-commerce product and later CRM partner channel management and CRM sales. An innovative and forward thinking executive he led the efforts to build SAP’s first java business application, the first Web-based user interface, and the first portal-based business application. He also initiated SAP’s entry in the PRM market. Under his helm SAP became a leader in Gartner’s B2B E-Commerce Magic Quadrant and market leader in CRM based on market share.

Mitch Lieberman, VP Strategy, SugarCRM

Mr. Lieberman is a senior software industry veteran whose career spans 15 years with experience in software architecture, management and a broad spectrum of transactional business applications. Building on his career experiences in product management, system architecture, implementation services and technical sales leadership, Mr. Lieberman is able to offer a unique perspective in the current technological landscape; such as Software as a Service (Saas), open source strategy as well as the up-and-coming Cloud Computing deployment alternatives. Mitch has spent the past 10 years focusing on CRM initiatives across many industries, and the past 3 years with SugarCRM.

Kira Wampler, Online Engagement Leader, Small Business Group, Intuit

From the beginning of her career, Kira Wampler has been passionately dedicated to customers. She had to given that her first job out of college was co-founder and president of her own company. She learned quickly that if you don’t serve your customers, you don’t eat! Nearly fifteen years later, Kira continues to bring her passion for customers to life at Intuit by driving community, social media and online engagement efforts that small business owners succeed. Prior to her current role, Kira helped launch Intuit’s community for budding entrepreneurs and developed Intuit’s Small Business Group’s policies, strategy and testing efforts around Word of Mouth Marketing. Kira received her MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and can be found on the social web on Twitter @kirasw.

Moderator: Esteban Kolsky, Principal & Founder, ThinkJar

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.
Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.