Below is a brief summary of Progressive’s social media strategy from Insurance & Technology. Progressive Insurance Tool: Twitter Started: 2008 Usage: Listening mechanism, quick feedback loop, reach out to customers when timeliness is of importance such as during catastrophe events. Progressive uses its hashtag function to drive traffic to ProgressiveResponds.com, a Web site on which the carrier posts information when responding to catastrophe events. They use it as a real-time communications mechanism. Monitor what customers are saying about them and what issues they’re having with products and services, including what people are thinking about the industry in general as well as competitors. They thank individuals who use Twitter to share positive experiences they had with the carrier. Reaches out to Twitterers who complain about the company or inquire about its products and services. Directs complaints to customer service when needed. Measurement: They were able to track very closely the spikes in hits to the site and to the information, and could attribute it pretty closely to Twitter (during catastrophe events). Social media strategy: Listen and react to customers and prospects over various social media channels and then provide various levels of customer service or acquisition . Executes the strategy differently for different channels. Focus on Twitter is personalization. Doesn’t refer customers to sales unless asked. Other Web 2.0 tools: Facebook, YouTube (more sales-driven) Resources: Team monitoring. Audit of responses. Third party Twitter apps: TweetDeck, considering CoTweet (San Francisco) and Invoke Media’s (Vancouver) HootSuite Contact: Matt Lehman, Progressive’s Web experience director

I co-wrote an article with Venkatesh Rao, a Web technology researcher with Xerox Innovation Group and author of ribbonfarm.com, for Elearning! Magazine. Enterprise 2.0: A Parallel to Meritocracy starts (and ends) with a story of the "2.0″ worker that might as well be our own story because I ‘met’ Venkatesh via conversations in Twitter and through his blog and authored collaboratively with him on the Web. We never met physically and never even talked on the phone. We worked on the article via Google docs. Such is the nature of work for more and more people. from the article, on the traditional model of instructor and expert and the emergence of a parallel meritocracy… …your company’s best source of knowledge on widget maintenance might not be the instructor of the official course on widget maintenance. It might be a de facto opinion leader on a discussion forum. It might not even be an employee but a passionate customer operating in prosumer mode, enjoying and actively cultivating her status as an expert in the user community. Formal "communities of practice"with recognized "subject-matter experts" from the knowledge-management era could well face obsolescence given the rise of open, informal models of knowledge sharing. The article is about emergent collaboration and disruption and what that means to workplace learning. (JC) Enterprise 2.0: A Parallel Meritocracy | Elearning! | Venkatesh Rao and Janet Clarey | 9 December 2009

At one time I didn’t really have true "relationships" with business customers. I had some good relationships, but they weren’t initiated by me. Someone would ask a question, I’d answer it and sometimes, it would turn out to be the catalyst for a new relationship. Sometimes. The focus seemed wrong - it was more about finding people to have relationships with vs. initiating and building relationships. This post, by the VP of Social Media and Community at Dell, is about recognizing that a business is only as successful as its relationships with customers. From Manish Mehta: "So if you are wondering about how to leverage Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, and the company Web site to achieve your organization’s goals, perhaps you are starting from the wrong point. As with the corner store, if your business uses social media to engage in conversations on a human level, you strengthen your business and allow your strategy — both corporate and social media — to evolve based on customer feedback. Like Dell, I jumped into the social media space just three years ago (in a much, much smaller way). I started an individual corporate blog, started writing for a group corporate blog, started maintaining a corporate news blog, created and managed company Facebook and LinkedIn Groups, and joined the conversation on Twitter.  I also started niche social networks around specific events, like conferences. All of a sudden, I felt like the "Mom" in Mom & Pop. Relationships are richer and I’m only as good as those relationships. I’m better for it. So where to go next? Going forward, Dell’s social media presence "boils down to "a few key strategies": Streamline presence in social media networks Create meaningful content for customers Continue to increase connections with customers in those places Focus on building a tighter integration between the organization’s other sites with the presence in social networks Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into business units In Mom & Pop terms this looks a lot like greeting people at the door, having a strong presence in the community, catering to customers’ specific requests, working with others within the  community to strengthen the community as a whole, and focusing on all areas of the business. A good plan for 2010. Graphic by Adam Howling

Crosspost You know one of those brief tweets or status updates that can easily be lifted from bigger, continuous conversations you’re having with online friends and followers? Out of context stuff. Or, it’s a user’s name that’s exploited, like this from NBC news anchor Brian Williams: "There’s no way of knowing if the incoming text from partygirl99 is being written from Tehran or Texas." Poor partygirl99. Williams’ statement is very true. It is hard for traditional media to vet information coming from the public in a form they’ve never seen. It’s the AND part of the job. This AND that. Reporting, fact checking, AND now monitoring & participating in worldwide network of "on the street" de facto reporters. <digression>… another interesting tidbit from Mr. Williams, below, is worthy of its own post) "The belief that "social media" only feeds our national self-obsession and that the often-used phrase "online community" is, in fact, an oxymoron." (from here) Wha??? Oxymoron? (to be continued…) </digression) Anyway, this is one of the silly comments used in an attempt to illustrate Twitter’s (in)significance - David Letterman’s first tweets: What’s lifted is usually day-to-day snark or silliness that fuels a community. The stuff that can become an "inside joke" down the road. I’m always aware of that when I’m silly, snarky, or even stupid. Like recently. I’ll try to keep this short and eventually get to my point. But first…in case you’re not up to speed on Twitter hashtags, here’s a little explanation. Go ahead, read it. I’ll wait. (Elevator music) K. Ready? It started with this: What followed was a bunch of #whackamole tweets that eventually started to show up in a search for the game "Whack-a-Mole" on Google (Whack-a-Mole was the answer to my question). During all this #whackamole business, I had brief exchange on Twitter with @susank about monitoring social media activity for your company. Susan is Senior PR Manager at Mzinga who communicates with all sorts of people on Twitter. Like me, part of her daily work includes having conversations on Twitter. Our exchange… Me: "i hope my employer is not monitoring what i’m tweeting. oh wait. i’m the one that monitors." That statement is a joke…snark…totally a problem if lifted by an employer with no sense of humor and/or who doesn’t get it. See, spending 10 minutes on whack-a-mole is (for a virtual worker) about the same as an inside joke in the physical office. Now monitoring a company on Twitter is real-time customer service to me. It’s my "AND" job. Researcher/Analyst AND "all the social media stuff." At Brandon Hall Research, we’re all responsible in some way for social media but I guess you could say I "own" that. These dueling roles have created a persona issue for me. A local community college asked me to teach some classes about social media (for businesses) in the evening…i.e., teaching about my "AND" role. A friend of a friend asked if I can give some advice on how to use social media for his new venture. A member of the local Chamber of Commerce (I’m also a member) contacted me about using social media to support a book he’s writing. These are all related to my "AND" role. I was all like, "how do I deal with this?" What I do is no secret but it’s getting confusing. You can teach people instructional design without having an instructional design blog but I don’t think it’s as easy to teach people ‘business 2.0′ when you don’t have an online identity about that. It’s an identity thing. A credibility thing. And, it’s a transparency thing for Brandon Hall. I’ve got information to share about both roles. I’m still learning. And here’s how I’m dealing with it: A separate website for the business side of social media. It doesn’t make much sense to write about the "AND" role stuff here and it doesn’t make much sense to teach others about it when I only write about e-learning related topics here. It’s confusing. Separate accounts for some social networking sites to keep topics organized. So, I’m sticking to e-learning research here with some "AND" writing on the side about the business side of things. Because that’s the way I learn best. Write about it. Talk about it. Write about it some more. One last thing about this conflicting persona / subject matter thing…a video from a panel Mark Oehlert led at DevLearn09 with Michelle Lentz and Aaron Silvers about reputation, authenticity, and credibility. Very smart people documenting their work and becoming more knowledgeable. Just not all mixed up in one place.

A got my panties in a bunch last week over the Human Capital Institute’s (HCI) use of content from my other blog on their site. So I took a more open, less reactionary view of the Human Capital League, (not to be confused with the Human Capital Institute). The Human Capital League, like HCI (an association), is a syndication site (an "online community") for workforce management content. Bloggers can voluntarily add their blog to the site and it is automatically syndicated. Posts link to the blogger’s original post but you can also, like HCI, post comments directly on the Human Capital League site or, you can post something original (presumably if you don’t have a blog elsewhere). I saw some featured bloggers I recognized so did some investigating. The best I can tell, Jerry Bowles created the Human Capital League blog community in November 2009. Based on his LinkedIn profile, he was previously co-founder and "Chief Content Office" at Social Media Today LLC (I think that’s a typo and he meant "Chief Content Officer"). So, Bowles is a business-to-business (b2b) community site creator and manager. A content curator. If you want to take a peak at the possible future of the Human Capital League, you can look at Social Media Today. It has as a long list of social media bloggers, some very well known.  If you look at how they make their money you’ll see that it’s through targeted b2b marketing. The new marketing. Social Media Today has content moderators responsible for managing sites, curating content, "cleaning up" posts, moderating comments, corresponding with members and bloggers, promotion, and blogger recruitment. There are other communities like it, for example the Content Management Connection a "hyper-syndicator" of which Social Media Today is a contributor. All of these communities are powered by WordFrame and many are also aggregated on Alltop. You can also see some of Bowles other communities like Sequenza 21, a Contemporary Classical Music Community, and the Social Web School (now part of the Human Capital League). BTW, Bowles thinks Twittering is for birdbrains. A ballsy position to take considering he makes money from other people’s "get over yourself" content. This reminds me of a training community curmudgeon and his recent rant (criticizing informal learning yet making money from downloads for papers about informal learning). The Twitter feed running on a widget on the sight aggregates all #workplace hashtags mostly fron Kenya McCullum, SF Workplace Communication Examiner for the Examiner and, looking at her account, a professional hashtagger. Adding your blog feed or posting to the Human Capital League site means "you are giving us your unrestricted but non-exclusive permission to use your content on this site." Gee thanks. So I’ve connected some dots. Now what? The advantages of adding your blog to an online aggregating site are many: your content reaches a larger audience your content reaches a more targeted audience sheer volume improves your search results it makes massive amounts of information more accessible for everyone The disadvantages: you give unrestricted use of your content you make no money from your content (although indirectly you may, through new business) I think content curation is the wave of the future. Along with some people I respect, I’m adding my sites to B2B communities and feel somewhat comfortable knowing that I did so voluntarily and have the ability to respond to any comments and remove myself if I chose.

I’ve been @jclarey on Twitter for probably two years or so. I mostly share e-learning stuff. Perhaps an 80/20 split of e-learning and snarky comments. I treasure the people I follow and have worked hard at keeping it valuable. I recently started @janetclarey to share content specific to the social web, specifically marketing. I decided to follow some of Mashable’s lists to get started. Lists are a great way to find people writing about stuff that interests you. As a result of my new account I’ve got a bunch of new people to get to know and a keen sense of things that make me not want to follow or follow someone back. I am less likely to follow you if: your content does not match my interests you are a bot and your content is bad all of your tweets are inspirational quotes you are a professional hash tagger you only *ask* questions you have no tweets you have no profile information and I can’t tell what type of information you really share your profile is not personal (info is a marketing blurb) (exception: big and niche brands) you just want to meet men you only send impersonal marketing messages most of your tweets are about Twitter you are a social media charlatan you send impersonal  auto DMs (exception: big brands) you are a fake celebrity or really boring real celebrity you primarily tweet in a language that I don’t know you are primarily directing me to another space I don’t want to be part of you are only trying to sell me something you are not authentic These markers help me manage my network  and improve productivity. It’s how I keep things meaningful. What about  you?

Aliza Sherman asks why social media presences get ignored and why they are not always integrated into other forms of marketing communications. Some of reasons she suggests…the learning curve, the adaption curve, the added work, and the measurement factor. "What can you do to bring marketing tools and tactics into the marketing and communications mix…?" she asks. She lists a few: avoid hype, educate others, support marketing, and be persistent. I’d add that it helps to get the people actually using the tools. I think that’s really how things jelled for our company. You really won’t get it until you use it. I can’t imagine being in marketing and communications today and not knowing about social media. When you wake up in the morning and see Facebook and Twitter icons on your cereal box, you’ll know it’s not going away. Just for the heck of it, I checked…I don’t see any social media references on my box of Special K. I don’t see anything on the Kellogg main page. They do have a Facebook fan page, Kellogg Cares. I don’t see anything on "The Victory Project" page for the Special K challenge. They are called a social media star here though. It’s a big brand and they’re certainly involved but I still had to look and I know what I’m looking for. I think it’s a missed opportunity, at least for people like me…40s & carrying a few extra pounds from the Thanksgiving-to-New Year eating festival. I mean everyone reads the box don’t they? Seeing the icons on the box would’ve supported the other efforts nicely. Just sayin. Why Social Media Marketing is Still a Red-headed Stepchild | WebWorkerDaily | Aliza Sherman | January 6, 2010

It can get very confusing and cumbersome to manage more than one Twitter account. At least for me it can. I have followed lists for social media under my e-learning account and it sucks. Too much and all mixed up. Sometimes a good link can be shared on more than one account, other times it only makes sense to share it for a particular account. I think that’s a courtesy and service for people who choose to follow you based on the area of expertise you list in your profile. I tend to be all over the place so I’m probably not the best example for keeping things neat and orderly but still…I think it’s important. I’m trying to do a better job of that. I am currently using TweetDeck to follow multiple accounts. Here’s what the multiple accounts look like. You can click on as many or few as you want. So typing something and click on all accounts will send the tweet everywhere. I rarely have used the @MVCowork account. It’s a pet project I simply don’t have time for but if I come across something good about coworking, I’d like to be able to share it. The @jclarey is my primary account. The@ janetclarey is new and is my effort to separate the marketing-type stuff from e-learning (same purpose as this blog). I rarely send updates to Facebook via TweetDeck because Facebook is an entirely different group of people for me. Finally, @BHallResearch is kind of a news account for  I post to. It normally includes webinars, workshops, blog posts, announcements, etc. I’ve also made columns on TweetDeck for both accounts. It’s gettting more manageable. I did a Google search for "multiple Twitter accounts."  Here’s a few links that look good: 25 Twitter Apps to Manage Multiple Accounts Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts for Your Nonprofit Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts Is Easier Than You Think If you have multiple accounts what are you using?

Jay Deragon hears a stampede. A social media stampede. And that’s not a good thing. I don’t know of any good stampedes. Deragon says, Following the behavior of others reflects a pack mentality. Pack behavior is how individuals in a group can act together without planned direction. The term pertains to human conduct during activities, such as using social media, and even everyday decision making, judgment and opinion forming. Unless we stop and think about the implications of what we do and how we do it we can find ourselves following the crowd over the cliff. Not thinking and following a crowd nowhere is the first indication of ignorance. He’s exactly right. Open any newspaper, turn on the TV, visit the grocery store, or go to your local cafe. What do you see?  Facebook and Twitter icons. They’re everywhere. I wonder how many are just following the crowd. I wonder how many have a purpose other than "engagement." How many can answer the question "for what purpose?" Deragon goes on to say, "…social media..represents a "systemic shift" in how markets behave and will operate in the future. When a system shifts it creates a "gaping void" in knowledge of its meaning, value and intent because the "bandwagon effect" creates a stampede of interest, usage and mostly without a defined purpose or intent. Thus many, if not most, will run off the cliff and into the "river of destructive forces" and drown in their ignorance. But I wouldn’t recommend running away. Rather, I’m thinking of "marinating on the edge;" what John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas wrote about in The Gamer Disposition. For most players, the fun of the game lies in learning how to overcome obstacles. The game world provides all the tools to do this. For gamers, play amounts to assembling and combining tools and resources that will help them learn. The reward is converting new knowledge into action and recognizing that current successes are resources for solving future problems. They marinate on the ‘edge.’ Finally, gamers often explore radical alternatives and innovative strategies for completing tasks, quests, and challenges. Even when common solutions are known, the gamer disposition demands a better way, a more original response to the problem. It’d be rather easy to take an "I told you so" stance right now. I know some  curmudgeonly types rubbing their hands together just waiting to say "I told you so." The winners here won’t be those folks. The winners (for all concerned) are the people "marinating on the edge" and trying to solve future problems.