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Over Half of Companies Had a Social Media Incident Last Year

Posted by Laura van Dijken on May 13, 2013

Last week, Brian Solis from Altimeter presented his thoughts about the True Power of Employee Advocacy. If you missed it, you can access the webinar and the slides in our resources library http://www.visibletechnologies.com/resources/webinars/.

What was shocking to me was a statistic that Brian shared about the number of social media incidents that were reported in the Social Business Survey conducted by Altimeter. In 2012, a majority of companies (51%) indicated that they had at least one violation of their organization’s social media policy. There were some great examples of these types of incidents shared during the webinar. These were the types of stories that make marketers chuckle, yet sigh in relief that their company was not involved.

It was interesting to hear that 37% of companies rate their employees’ knowledge of social media usage and related policies as “poor” or “very poor”. Meanwhile they indicate that only 27% of employees are aware and trained on their company’s social media usage policies Clearly, there are some opportunities for improvement.

However, there is an opportunity to go beyond handing out some corporate policies about social media. Brian had some great points about the need to engage internally before engaging externally. Developing and clearly communicating your brand’s personality and your company’s social business strategy can arm employees with the knowledge of why the company is setting out to engage on social media channels and the value for customers and stakeholders. A great way to go beyond “do no harm” to true employee advocacy. Listen to the webinar to learn more about employee advocacy from Brian Solis.

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Webcast: Social Media and the True Power of Employee Advocacy

Posted by Laura van Dijken on May 2, 2013

Join us on May 9 for our next webcast featuring Brian Solis from Altimeter!

Social media is not new, nor is the idea of employee advocacy. What is new is the approach that businesses should take in how they empower their employees to engage on their behalf., Unfortunately, some may be causing more harm than good simply because they are not equipped to be successful, nor are they clear on what success looks like. In the last six month alone, we’ve seen incredible social follies and full blown crisis involving some well-known brands. While each brand has done its best to make amends, the truth is that in each case, guidelines, guardrails and training could have been better defined. More importantly, vision, mission, and goals are often missing from the overall social media strategy.

Altimeter Group’s Brian Solis believes that part of the problem is that social media, as it’s designed today, is not yet fully optimized to scale in a meaningful way. For the most part, businesses are not seeing the impact on the bottom line and customers aren’t realizing the long term value.

In this webinar, Brian will help:

Demonstrate how playbooks fall short of helping employees contribute to the idea of brand in social media.
Prove that idioms such as, “use common sense, be pleasant, conversational and engaging, or don’t be stupid,” lower the bar for what the brand truly represents or what the representative is responsible for conveying in terms of aspiration or sentiment.
Define ways that employee guidelines can become an extension of a brand style guide where engagement becomes a standard in how a brand comes to life in social media
Open the door for businesses to not just listen to conversations and analyze sentiment but also track activity toward the humanization of the brand itself.

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Visible Adds Next Gen Search and Post Scheduling for Twitter and Facebook

Posted by Laura van Dijken on April 22, 2013

Visible prides itself on being laser-focused on continuous innovation and helping our customers drive business value from social media insights and engagement. The April product release includes some exciting new capabilities that help you save time and be more productive.

Get to relevant data faster with a simplified, cutting-edge search experience.
Automate outbound messaging and provide a continuous social presence with new post scheduling.

Cutting-Edge Search Experience

Visible Intelligence (VI) has added some innovative features which make it easier than ever to create and edit search queries. Now, whether you are relatively new to creating searches, or consider yourself an expert, VI makes it easy to find the data you need quickly. Specifically you can:

Browse available data quickly with Guided Navigation – Now you get a preview of available data results for your topic so you can assess what to drill into next.
Easily create and edit search queries with Advanced Search – You can now configure your searches without having to be a Boolean logic expert.
- The Guided Search Query creation option lets you simply type in the words to include and exclude and a search string is automatically generated for you!
- Search gurus can now see all filters at once, make multiple filter changes simultaneously and make changes directly in the keyword entry box.
Effortlessly get to segmented data across multiple searches with Search Categories, a new custom data filter or group of key words that can be applied across search topics.
- Faster, repeatable way to drill into data by applying a category across topics – for example you can create an advocates category and apply that to multiple brands to see related posts in an instant.
- Easier than constantly having to maintain and modify multiple search queries as things change (i.e. model years or target segments).

Automated Facebook and Twitter Post Scheduling

Visible Intelligence now has post scheduling so you can continue to connect with your fans and followers whether you are in the office, or not. No need to worry when you are on vacation or juggling multiple projects.

Predefine when Tweets and Facebook posts are sent out, thereby improving time management and easing the stress of missed communications.
Just set the time and date the messages should post and they will be sent out automatically.
Outbound messages are tracked and changes or deletions can be made as needed.
Scheduled post viewing and management can be designated to specific users

Learn More

Visit the release page to read and download full release notes for this update.

Interested in learning more about Visible or trying it out for yourself? Sign up for your free trial!

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Best Practices to Manage 6 Social Media Threats

Posted by Jackie Kmetz on January 12, 2012

While social media has presented a new valuable and effective means of connecting with and learning about consumers it has also brought with it potential threats that organizations must prepare for and handle whether they are actively participating in social conversations or merely watching from the sidelines.

Previously, we discussed six social media threats that present real risks for enterprises. Now we will discuss best practices that you can implement to mitigate and even eliminate these threats when possible. Of course it isn’t reasonable to think you can plan for every situation that may arise, but by setting the stage ahead of time and taking the necessary precautions, you can minimize the impact should something occur.

Finding the ROI in Social Media

Posted by Jackie Kmetz on December 22, 2011

There’s no debating it; social media is hot. It’s still growing at a phenomenal rate and the dollar figures associated with it are just as impressive. Forrester Research predicts Interactive marketing spending in the US will more than triple over the next five years, reaching $61 billion by 2012 and spending on social media alone will grow to $6.9 billion as marketers understand how to use and measure this channel. All of this momentum brings to light a universal challenge that executives, marketers and social teams face today—measuring their Social Media ROI. Like all aspects of business, social media needs to be measured and analyzed so that you can evaluate it in relation to other programs and improve on it over time.

Before launching a social media program, it’s essential to clarify success metrics and goals. While much of ROI focus is on the goal of making direct conversions, it is important to emphasize that social media is primarily about building new relationships, generating word of mouth marketing, and strengthening brand loyalty with your customers. Read more…

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