Conversations and Connections - social media at SAS

I've mentioned David Armano a lot in my Blogworld coverage, but he deserves it. He's a positive and effective evangelist for social media, and he shares great stuff. His presentation on creating visuals for your content was one of my highlights of Blogworld.

It's not an easy task to break down the creative process into a series of replicable steps, but he's done a great job here. If you've ever struggled with boring PowerPoint slides or wished you could make your blog more visually exciting, take a look at David's approach. Click the "Full" button to make it bigger.

Ten Tips for Establishing a Social Media Policy from David B Thomas on Vimeo.

A preview of the panel discussion I will be participating in at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Chicago, Oct. 21-22, 2009. The panel is called Positioning Your Company to Reap the Benefits of Social Media. I'll be focusing on creating an effective social media policy for your company.

::UPDATE:: If you don't want to watch the video (even though it does have a few yuks), here are my 10 tips:

1. Get everybody together in the same room.
2. Invite the skeptics as well as the evangelists.
3. Involve the practitioners, not just the rulemakers.
4. Get Legal and HR involved from the start, and don't make them adversaries.
5. Decide how you'll deal with conflicting opinions and make decisions.
6. Include best practices in your policies: the dos as well as the don'ts.
7. Make sure your policy reflects your company's personality.
8. Publish your policy.
9. Communicate it constantly in every avenue available to you.
10. Lead by example. Participate yourself and highlight positive examples by others.

Do you have any questions about creating a social media policy? What's worked for you? Or not worked?

One of our SAS cybersleuths just notified me that some good guys have identified a vulnerability in Twitter that could allow the bad guys to take over your Twitter account, and all you'd have to do to allow it is view a tweet. Maybe you read about it at Techcrunch. Twitter is apparently working to fix this, and as always in life and the Internet it's probably the odds that keep you safest, but best to be extra careful in accepting follow requests, and ignore any that look dodgy. And if you automatically follow everyone who follows you, stop.

Techcrunch also suggests that using third-party apps like TweetDeck or Seesmic will give a measure of safety, and recommends avoiding twitter.com for a few days. They've got some other good info as well.

What do I mean by dodgy-looking? Evaluate a Twitter follow request the same way you would an email before you open the attachment. Do you know the person? If not, can you be reasonably certain they're legitimate? Do they have some crazy made-up name like Vluella Flaminglee or Cordney Spewsterson? Are they following 10,000 people and nobody is following them? Do they have a legitimate link to a real web page in their Twitter bio? Does their photo look like a real person, or does it look like they took the picture from a dating site? Are they tweeting about real stuff like a real person? Is there some reason you can see from their info that would make them want to follow you?

Obviously no list of suggestions like this can ever be comprehensive enough to ward off a clever and determined attack if you're one of the unlucky to get caught before reasonable countermeasures can be put in place, but common sense is always your best weapon.

I'm in Charlotte, NC today for the Social Fresh social media conference. I'm on the Social Media B2B panel with Nathan Gilliatt and Jeff Cohen, moderated by Kipp Bodnar.

When we met a few weeks ago, we decided we wanted to share stories, engage the audience and interact with them, so we decided not to make slides. I know that's the cutting-edge view these days but for a guy like me with a corporate background, being told we'd be presenting without slides makes me only slightly less uncomfortable than being told we'd be presenting without pants.

Since I don't have a slide deck to share with you, here are some of the questions we identified in advance, and the answers I wrote out in preparation.

Let's get this out of the way. What do you say to B2B folks who say their customers aren’t online?

Everybody needs to be the expert in their own market, so if you tell me your customers aren't online, I'm not going to stand here and tell you you're wrong. But these days in nearly every business, at least some of your customers are going to be online. If they aren't yet, they will be sooner than you think. And even if you don't think your customers are online, are your competitors?

What are some successful practices you have seen or used to ensure that your social media strategy aligned with business objectives?

You need to think of social media as a set of tools, not as a strategy in themselves. Presumably you already have established objectives for your business, and you probably also have a marketing and communications plan. Don't think, “What is our social media strategy?” Think, “What is our established marketing strategy and how can social media support that?”

Don't just get on Twitter for the sake of being on Twitter. Look at your marketing campaigns and see if Twitter can support them.

Are you going to a trade show? Do you have a goal of getting a certain number of people to your booth? That's a measurable goal and something you can support with social media. Does the show have a hashtag? Is there a Facebook event page for the show? Those become other avenues, in addition to the ones that have been successful in the past, that you can pursue.

Social media isn’t always the best option from a marketing standpoint. How do you define the ROI before you decide to execute?

Don't abandon anything that's working for you in favor of social media. Think of social media as another tool. Make sure you have a measurable objective before you start. “We want to increase web traffic to our marketing campaign landing page by 30 percent over the next quarter.” That's a measurable objective.

What social media tools are you going to use and how are you going to track them? Once you establish the metrics and the method of measurement, and if you take the time to do it in a comprehensive manner, you'll see what kind of results you get. Then you've established a benchmark. And let's not underestimate the importance of establishing benchmarks.

If you're just getting started in social media, then “Establish a benchmark” is a valid objective.

The big question: Who should “own” social media in an organization?

I have two answers for that. The first is, it should be owned by the person or people who are most enthusiastic about social media; the ones who are champing at the bit to get started. Because if you force it down the throat of someone who doesn't know or care about social media, it's just going to become another chore, and you won't see any progress.

Now that's not always practical, so my politic answer is, “It depends,” both on the size and type of your organization, and what you hope to accomplish with social media. Ultimately you want to make social media tools available to everyone in your organization who has a role in communicating a message.

Marketing folks should be in charge of how they use social media to support marketing campaigns and generate leads. The external comms or PR folks should be responsible for the reputation monitoring and management aspects. Your sales folks should be using social media tools for prospecting, getting market information and building and maintaining relatioships. Your tech support and customer service folks need to take responsibility for doing those tasks in social media.

But if you have to start with overall responsibility in one place, my bias is toward the marketing communications or PR folks, because they should have an overall view of your branding, messaging and communications objectives.

Is there value in allocating resources to educate customers about social media?

Absolutely. If your customers are interested in social media and want to get started, if you show them how to do it, you're creating a built-in audience for your message. My father jokes that he's a Mac guy because the first computer he ever used at work was a Mac, and he imprinted on it the way a baby bird imprints on the first thing it sees when it comes out of the shell. If your customers learn how to use Twitter because you teach them, you can be pretty sure they're going to follow you.

If you're worried that your information isn't getting through the noise to your customers, create a campaign to show them how to use RSS feeds, and make your feeds easy for them to get.

And even if you're not very active yourself yet, I think there's a tremendous value in saying, “Are you curious about social media? So are we. Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our blog, and we'll figure it out together.”

When is social media wrong for B2B?

Again, everyone needs to be the expert in their own market. If you're not sure if social media is right for your audience, you need to do some research, whether it's web research and reading analyst reports, or just asking your customers directly.

But it's true there are times when social media isn't going to be a viable option. If you have a lot of customers in government, for instance, you might find they can't use social networks at work. If you're in a very traditional industry and your major customers block access to YouTube, for instance, you wouldn't put a lot of time and effort into a video campaign.

Do I ask for permission or forgiveness?

That depends on your company and your boss, but speaking as someone who works for a company of 11,000 people, it's much easier for me to do my job when I have consensus, and when I have a reputation for being someone who can be trusted to take all the relevant factors into consideration before beginning an initiative.

What is the most important thing companies should know about starting a B2B focused blog?

Find someone to write it who is really excited by the prospect, not someone who should do it based on their title or position and isn't really interested. Ideally it would be someone who already has a blog about your industry. Then make it a part of his or her job and make sure it's built into that person's job description, so they can make it a priority and keep it active. Because I still believe a dormant blog is worse than no blog at all.

What should folks read to stay current on social media and thoughts on its marketing applications?

ChrisBrogan.com, mashable.com, socialmediab2b.com, ConversationsMatter.org, socialmediatoday.com, the Marketing Over Coffee podcast.

What should folks tell their boss about what they learn from this panel?

If you think you don't have time to get involved in social media, look at all the information you share every day either through email, on the phone, in conversation, in meetings, the articles you forward to you friends. You could be sharing all of that on a blog, on Twitter or in a social network. Once you get started and develop your “social media muscle,” you'll start finding more and more to share.

You don't have to do everything, but you can't do nothing, so do something.

I got a lot of positive comments on my Four Step Plan for Getting Started in Social Media. It reminded me that people are at all different levels of knowledge and interest in social media. When you spend all day thinking about it and using it, it's easy to forget that lots of people still want the basics.

So, here are some basic steps for getting started on Twitter:

What Twitter is good for

• Many of the advantages of blogging in a short, quick format.
• You can support your other communications channels and activities by promoting them on Twitter.
• Hashtags allow you to gain a presence in and around events, conferences and issues.
• Twitter search can show you who’s talking about what.
• It’s still a relatively small community in many professions, allowing you to make connections.

What Twitter is not good for

• Twitter is a tool, not a strategy.
• You have to be interesting to get followers; it’s not the place for heavy-handed sales pitches.
• It’s a firehose, and it’s getting worse. You need filtering tools to find the value (TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, Hootsuite).

Getting started on Twitter

• Create an account, using your real name, and set up your profile.
• Use the search function to find people to follow in your industry, and follow who they're following.
• Get to know the standards of the community and the way people use it.
• Think about all the useful and interesting information you encounter every day.
• Start contributing.

Because of my job as social media manager at SAS, a lot of people ask me how to get started in social media. I'm working on several different resources to help our sales, marketing and communications folks understand how to integrate social media into their activities and provide bottom-line value. Some are done, some will be ready soon, some are still in the pipeline.

But I get frustrated. Sometimes I just want to shout, "Here! Go do this!"

So here it is, my bare-bones Four-Step Plan for Getting Started in Social Media. Is it perfect? No. Does it cover every base? Not even close. Will it get you started and help you figure out what's useful for you and how to move forward?

Yes.

Ready? Here we go:

1. Join LinkedIn, create your profile and search for groups relevant to your professional activities.

2. Do that on Facebook, too.

3. Use Google Blog Search to find the most important blogs in your industry, and set up an RSS reader like Google Reader to help you quickly and easily follow them.

4. Join Twitter, set up your profile and use the search function to find people talking about things relevant to you. Follow them and see what they talk about.

There. Go do that and come back and tell me how it went.


Photo by Simon Blackley

(At least about this one thing.)

I wrote this post on a plane to Germany, where I was headed to present at our annual Global Web Summit, where all (or most) of the folks at SAS setting our web direction met to talk about SEO and web analytics and other cool stuff I should know more about. They also said they wanted to talk about our social media strategy, and that's where I came in.

I set my new netbook up to use Google Reader offline with Google Gears, in an attempt to whittle away at that “1000+” unread posts notice that shows up whenever I open it. That's why I was late getting to the post where Chris Brogan, reigning social media marketing rock star, called me a doofus.

Well, not me specifically, nor did he use the word “doofus,” but he asks why anybody would want the title Social Media Manager.

"What are people doing taking titles like 'Social Media Manager?' To me, this is a scary thing. Why? Because it’s like being the fax manager or the email manager. You’re naming yourself after a tool."

He thinks people in jobs like mine should use the titles that already exist in the PR and marketing departments.

It made me think, hard actually, and not just because I've become a slavering Brogan fanboy after meeting him in San Francisco.

I debated that title for a long time. I've only had the job for about seven months, and when I started, the backlash against self-proclaimed social media experts was well under way. I think of what I do, what I've been doing for the last 20 years or so, as marketing communications. In other companies I've had titles like Marketing Communications Manager and Product Marketing Manager and Director of Web Sales and Marketing.

I firmly believe that social media are an element of marketing communications. They provide new tools to include in your mix, to support your established marketing goals and objectives. That's the way I've been talking about social media to folks at SAS. I suppose I could have chosen Marketing Communications Manager.

But putting “Social Media Manager” on my (now hideously quaint) business cards sends a message that SAS is making social media a priority. “We have a social media manager. We are dedicating time and resources to this, because we think it's important.”

But it's not just a perception thing. My job is as inward-facing as it is outward. I'm not creating social media marketing campaigns for individual groups and products; I'm working with the marketers and the sales folks and the communicators to help them understand which social media tools might help them meet their established objectives.

I'm also trying to collect and disseminate best practices so that we can learn from one another. And I'm trying to perform a coordination function, so that we all know what one another is doing, and we don't duplicate efforts, or worse, contradict ourselves.

So, I'm managing how we use social media. Make sense?

Right now my title might sound odd to people on the cutting edge, but it sounds pretty forward-looking to the people I most need to influence. By the time it starts sounding odd to them, I'll probably be out of business cards anyway. Plus, I've been saying since before I got the job that if I do it right, I will eventually make my current position irrelevant.

What do you think? Is Social Media Manager a red flag, or a green light?

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/reallynuts/ / CC BY 2.0

Abhisek Sarda

• People are talking about SAS online whether we are there or not. It's good for SAS employees to participate in those conversations provided we do it in a way that is respectful of the standards of the online community, follows the Social Media Guidelines & Recommendations, the Online Conduct Guidelines, and behavior and computer use policies.
• We trust SAS employees to represent SAS online in a professional manner, the same way we trust them to do it in the real world.
• Don't talk about customers, partners or vendors, reveal private or proprietary information, intellectual property, pricing, details of customer installations or anything else that could harm our business or business relationships. The exception:  You can link to content on sas.com that references customers, like success stories, press releases and videos.
• When you participate in social media, you are speaking for yourself, not on behalf of the company. Be sure to make that clear. And know that you are responsible for your actions.
• Talk to your manager about your social media activities, what you're doing, how it relates to your job and how much time you spend doing it.
• Open communication among employees, customers and the community at large will inevitably lead to some uncomfortable moments, but we can deal with those, and the benefits far outweigh the risk.

I spent the early part of this week at the Society for New Communications Research's NewComm Forum (Twitter hashtag #sncr) and Chris Brogan's Inbound Marketing Summit (#ims09) held side-by-side in the same hotel (a wise move considering the challenge of getting people to attend conferences right now). As an enterprise social media practitioner, I got a tremendous amount of value from the speakers and presentations at both events, not to mention the connections I made with people facing the same challenges integrating social media into a large company's marketing communications.

I found early on the first day that I wasn't taking notes anymore, because I was posting everything I found valuable to my Twitter stream. In addition to driving away my last non-professional Twitter follower, it left me with a sackload of useful information, condensed into bite-sized nuggets and presented herewith. (I've expanded some for clarity.)

The volume of notes captured in each session is in no way indicative of the value of each, but is likely a reflection of any number of factors including the nearly incessant search for coffee, and frequent occasions of being distracted by smart people and shiny objects.

Top #sncr #ims09 memes

• Your social media activities need to be tied directly to supporting your established goals and objectives.
• If you don't have objectives, you can't measure.
• If you trust your employees to talk to customers on the phone and in person, you can trust them to do it in social media.
• For companies, social media is (are) about listening, not about talking.
• We have yet to decide whether to say "social media is" or "social media are."
• Conference promoters should provide wifi and enough power outlets for every attendee. And coffee.

Highlights of individual presentations:

You Shall Know Us By Our Dialtone: Presence in Business Communications with Chris Brogan (SNCR)

One presidential campaign knew how to find people and the other knew how to use dialtone phones.

When the community is mad at you, you don't have time for a carefully-crafted PR response. Respond immediately.

If your email is more than 200 words, has long paragraphs and isn't bulleted, Chris won't read it.

Customer service is the new PR. Be there before the sale. Offer better relationships up front.

Fast-paced generalists are the people who will "win the game," i.e. keep their jobs.

Build bridges, not islands. Embed social media in all departments and budgets. Tie it back to existing metrics.

"Bring them wine." Give people something they want for free.

"We're always going to do it wrong. Through righteousness comes the opportunity to find a better middle." (Response to a question about disputes and controversy in the community about commercial uses of social media.)

"Things That Go Bump In the Night" with SNCR Sr. Fellows Joseph Thornley and J.D. Lasica with Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester and Amy Muller, GetSatisfaction (SNCR)

Most students Thornley talks to are only on Facebook, the "lightest, dumbest" form with the lowest levels of connection. They haven't moved on to Twitter or other forms of social media.

Companies should respond to attackers by being human. Never be defensive. Set the record straight in a human way, says Muller.

We must stand up publicly for social media standards of behavior and support others against unfair attacks, says Thornley.

Brand Ambassadors Defined with Geno Church of Brains on Fire (SNCR)

Build sustainable brand ambassadors who believe in the brand and have experienced the value firsthand.

Brand ambassadors are built on passion.

Movements empower people with knowledge. Fiskars provides three days of training to new brand ambassadors (Fiskateers).

Movements encourage ownership. Fiskateers own their program and organize themselves. The brand provides support.

Movements make advocates/members feel like rock stars. Fiskateers receive their own scissors with a unique number.

Movements and the communities that support them live online as well as off. Bring people together in real life.

Convincing the Curmudgeon with Charlene Li (IMS)

Make social media real for the curmudgeon, not just technology.

Make sure the social media evangelists in your organization have the tools and data to talk to the skeptics.

Talk to the curmudgeon in terms of how social media can support your established corporate goals.

If you participate in social media you are bound to fail at some point. Who has perfect relationships?

Twitterville: Exploring the Impact of Micro-communications Tools with SNCR Fellows Shel Israel & Laura Fitton, moderated by Charlene Li (SNCR)

Social media ROI according to Laura: time wasted in status meetings alone justifies microblogging to share that kind of info.

Q: What's the business utility of Twitter? A: What's the business utility of email?

Twitter is a tool, says Shel Israel. What's the ROI of a hammer?

Social Media and Crisis Communications Revisited with SNCR Senior Fellow Shel Holtz

Everybody with a camera phone and a Twitter account is now a photojournalist.

The 100% illusion: Nobody thinks all your customers are happy all the time, so don't bother filtering the negative.

The New Organization Landscape for Marketing Communications with 2008 SNCR Fellow Brian Solis

Who owns social media in organizations? It shouldn't be about who wants to lead it, but who is capable.

Public relations isn't just about the media anymore. Social media is putting the "public" back in public relations.

We talk about the cool new stuff like Twitter but Google and Yahoo groups still have huge influence.

Digital Anthropologist (new job description Brian proposes) listens to conversations and understands the community culture so you know how to respond.

Even in the recession, Brian is asked every day for recommendations to fill social media jobs.

New roles: Digital Anthropologist, Strategist, Community Manager, Research Librarian and Support Team.

Don't waste time cultivating a community where your audience isn't even collaborating. Brian says he's talked people out of Twitter and Facebook because it wasn't relevant to their audience.

"Companies will earn the relationships they deserve."

Understanding Facebook Culture and How Facebook Users Relate to Corporations Online with SNCR Fellow Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu

Dr. Vorvoreanu shared the results of focus groups she'd conducted with around 35 students from Clemson University.

Most important lesson: Know your audience.

College students are sad/angry/disappointed that Facebook was opened to the general public.

Facebook is a "digital hangout" for building personal relationships, so students thought it was odd that corporations were there.

Students cling to separation of personal/professional/family/commercial life. "Being facebooked by a corporation would be freaky," they said.

Students were eager to connect with small, independent businesses on Facebook, but not corporations. Unless there's a coupon.

Students mistrust corporations' motives for being on Facebook, and don't feel they can have an open dialog with a corporation.

Students think it's cool when corporations interact on Twitter, but that effect doesn't apply to Facebook.

Seven keys to interacting with young people on Facebook:

1. Provide a sense of exclusivity.
2. Recognize the concept of a "digital hangout" and give them ways to engage with their friends.
3. Enable "self presentation" by allowing users to align with your product or company.
4. Keep it personal. Again, being friended by a corporation is "freaky."
5. If you're a small, independent business, you should definitely be on Facebook.
6. Respect the users' space. For certain users, the best way to respect their space is by staying out of the conversation.
7. Big corporations can create a "positive violation" (confounding expectations in a positive way) just by conforming to Facebook's norms, i.e. not being stupid.

Some of the presentations already online:

More to come, I'm sure.

•    The New Media Consumer Revealed, Edison VP Tom Webster
•    There is No Information Overload, Louis Gray
•    Convincing the Curmudgeon, Charlene Li

::UPDATED::

• Social Media Implementation within a Large Enterprise, Zena Weist, Embarq
• Social Media Case Studies, Chris Brogan

My stated intention for this blog was to talk about the things we're doing at SAS to integrate social media into our communications, and share information about what's working and what isn't. It's unforgiveable that I've waited this long to talk about the Marketing 2.0 Council, because it's been our biggest success story to date. I've recommended this as a tactic to several folks working on social media in a company setting.

The Marketing 2.0 Council began in late 2007 with a mandate to look at marketing 2.0/Web 2.0/social media as a whole, decide what was important to SAS and how we should go forward. The list of attendees at the first meeting included representatives from all corners of SAS: marketing, public relations, marketing editorial, online strategy and services, education, publications, advertising, email marketing and too many more to name. That first meeting was standing room only in a conference room designed to hold 30 people. I was lucky enough to be invited to join, having been a vocal advocate of incorporating social media into our public relations efforts. The assembled group had a wide range of awareness and understanding of social media but we were all agreed that we needed to figure out a strategy.

Our first major activity was a brainstorming session designed to put all the Web 2.0 outlets we could think of on a white board and narrow them down to the list we wanted to consider first. Somewhat surprisingly, that activity generated a manageable list without any bloodshed. We agreed to focus our attention on blogs, social networks, content syndication, podcasts, online video and Wikipedia. We soon realized that none of those channels would be worth much if we didn't have something useful to feed them, so we added content as a category of its own.

From that starting point, we put together a task force for each area, led by a member of the Marketing 2.0 Council and made up of people who were either vocationally or avocationally interested in the field. The task forces met over the course of several weeks. They looked at the prevailing wisdom about their area, found examples of companies approaching them well, looked at what SAS was doing and put together recommendations for what we should be doing. That may sound like a simplistic explanation, but there wasn't much more to it than that - the advantage of clearly-defined objectives.

Once we had all the task force recommedations compiled in a standard format, a working group of council members put them together and drafted a set of overarching recommendations and priorities and a proposed timetable. Even with a comprehensive outline, we felt the need to suggest only two new positions: social media manager (the one that I got) and an integrated content manager, to make sure we had valuable information delivered in a consistent manner to all the 2.0 channels.

With that work behind us, our executive sponsors were confident we had examined all the angles and gave us the green light to fill the new positions and get started on the recommendations. As the person selected to fill the role of social media manager, it's been extremely helpful for me to know what a broad base my position was built on.

So, if you're finding yourself trying to get your arms around social media at your company, creating your own council could be a big help. My suggestions:

1. Figure out all the people in your organization who have a stake in communicating your message and get them in the same room.

2. Resist the urge to invite only the people who you think will agree with you. Better to smoke out any objections now and deal with them.

3. Get the lawyers and the HR folks involved from the start, because they will have concerns you will probably never think of yourself.

4. Make sure you have a good cross section of decision makers and doers. In other words, if it's all practitioners you'll always be running upstairs to get approval, but if it's all executives you won't have anyone to do the grunt work like research and writing the recommendations and making pretty PowerPoint slides.

5. Make sure to create a mechanism for communicating your activities internally. We have an internal Marketing 2.0 Council blog and a SharePoint site where we house all the documents, including the task force reports and the draft social media guidelines and recommendations.

For a while we were thinking of this job as Digital Media Manager, but a Google search for that phrase gets a lot more hits for software packages that help manage your digital media than it does for people who manage Web 2.0 activities. I suggested changing the title to Social Media Manager, fully aware that a) the term may become hopelessly hackneyed and/or quaint in six to 18 months and 2) that there are many people who believe you can't manage social media. "Social media strategist" would have also been a perfectly good title, although with the trails I need to blaze, I didn't feel like creating a whole new taxonomy for our HR department as well.

So in this blog's spirit of looking behind the curtain, I present my job description.

Social Media Manager

Job Description

The SAS Social Media Manager is both internally- and externally-focused on developing & executing SAS’ social media strategy and advocating for the external community. Externally, he or she identifies influential opportunities, engages regularly with SAS’ audiences online and may be called upon to speak publicly as a thought-leader on SAS’ social media strategy. This person anticipates the evolution of social media. Internally the Social Media Manager sets the tone, philosophy and strategy (including budget) for Web 2.0, gains appropriate buy-in, then communicates relentlessly. He or she monitors Web 2.0 activities across departments and geographies, guiding participants on integration and best practices while encouraging successful participation. The Social Media Manager is obsessively focused on how results connect to corporate objectives, and is given the tools to measure those results.

Scope   Geographic: Global

Internal/external: 50% internally focused/ 50% externally focused
Breadth of channels: Actively advises on, monitors and coordinates SAS’ activities on prioritized Web 2.0 channels, with responsibility for exploring & researching relevance of new channels.

Authority

Given ultimate authority to define SAS’ strategy & approach, including spend, for digital media channels that fall within the scope. Decisions that require budget will be appropriately coordinated with field marketing efforts.

Skills

Demonstrated experience with Web 2.0 channels & great affinity for learning new technologies.

Strong relationship building skills, including negotiation & executive interaction, ability to coach others

Project management

Ability to develop a business vision for social media, including goals & results

Leadership/decision-making: is skilled at articulating to executives and internal teams the importance of social applications and is able to make calm recommendations during crises. Is able to exercise good judgment with quick response time.

Flexible communication skills: Strong editorial writer. Is able to present needs and plans and communicate internally, has a distinct, personable voice for external engagement. Can manage negative situations toward positive outcomes.

Public speaking skills: This person will be the face of SAS Social Media Strategy, and will be called upon to speak to professional groups

Experienced manager: is able to manage budget and a team, if this function grows

Has foresight and vision: identifies Social Computing trends and is able to separate tools from fads

Tools required for success

Social networking analysis tools: To monitor/track results of digital media engagement.

Current mobile device(s): To test mobile Web 2.0 applications, monitor flow & delivery of mobile traffic

Responsibilities

·         Coordinate online media outreach and viral campaigns to promote SAS messages that increase awareness and/or drive traffic to the SAS site.

·         Identify key/targeted bloggers by industry and solution area.  

·         Establish and cultivate positive relationships with key/targeted bloggers, and/or identify SAS marketers and PR managers who should be monitoring and influencing these relationships.

·         Develop and manage pages on popular consumer social networking websites such as Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, MySpace, etc. as well as popular technology sites intended to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to the site.

·         Develop and publish internal strategies for social media projects and technologies.

·         Coordinate social media activities by actively engaging in consumer and industry conferences, blogs, video sharing, online chats, wikis, etc., to promote SAS messaging and increase brand awareness resulting in driving brand traffic to the site.

·         Engage in regular participation within the customer community, including the review of user blogs, wikis and communities such as sascommunity.org.

·         Recruit, develop and coach new bloggers and blog editors.

·         Manage the day-to-day blogger activities; proactively identifying and developing blog posts, recruiting bloggers and assigning blog ideas to others.

·         Track and monitor the success of online initiatives (i.e. impressions, reach and influence), and provide reports for directors and execs.

·         Identify and report on digital/social media trends to PR and marketing leaders.

·         Educate staff on the implementation and use of new technologies.

·         Promote and evangelize social media activities internally.