Who owns Social CRM?
Making member management social takes teamwork.

We’ve just published our latest white paper, Social CRM for Associations: What association executives should know about applying social media to membership management. Social CRM refers to both a business strategy for managing customer relationships in the age of social media and also the evolving technology that helps organizations do this. The white paper deconstructs Social CRM into its basic parts and applies the concept to association management.

Even if you aren’t calling it “social CRM†, there may be departments inside your organization that are already changing work habits to make sense of the new data that is flowing in through social media. For example, are you doing any of this work?

1. Social media monitoring and responding
   Maybe the Communications department monitors and assigns the appropriate people to respond in public social spaces. They even train responders how to do their job. Publications and education can build and curate content around trending topics.
2. Social profile mapping
   Membership works to gather data, pull in additional profile information, and analyze connectedness against renewal rates. Marketing takes the lead on growing outposts, identifying influencers, and developing word-of-mouth marketing programs.
3. Outreach and lead generation
   Membership and marketing collaborate to build lists and design member recruitment campaigns appropriate for social media sites. Marketing designs campaigns for products, services, and events. Communications coordinates with government relations, publications, and other departments to coordinate participation in public conversations on blogs and Twitter.
4. Community management
   Component relations, customer service, the executive team, and many other staff people get involved. Many associations will choose to hire a community manager to lead the charge. Depending on the association’s structure, the community manager could sit in many different departments, especially membership, communications, or government relations. Some associations might choose to have multiple community managers in different departments who collaborate.

Social CRM demands the participation of staff from nearly every department. In fact, this inclusive, holistic approach is a defining characteristic of the Social CRM philosophy. How are you organizing these kinds of activities? To learn more, check out the whitepaper. Special thanks to Avectra for sharing the costs of producing the paper, so you can download it for free.

If you’d like to participate in some of the conversations we’re having around this topic, email maddie@socialfish.org.

Advanced Tools for Organizations

And there’s nothing “techie” about them
You’ve probably seen the emails we’ve sent out with social media tools for listening and sharing. Here are three tools that are more important to organizations than any social media website or cool whiz-bang app.

1. Social Media Inventory–Are you keeping an up-to-date list of the social media sites your staff, volunteers, and members are using in affiliation with your organization? What about the sites where your industry’s influencers and thought leaders are talking about your members’ hot-button issues? All you need is a handy spreadsheet to gather and continually update critical information about important social media spaces–like the URL, admin name, admin email, staff person monitoring (if not staff-run), update frequency, number of followers/likes/members, and growth or decline from last month.
2. Response Triage Chart–Can you clearly articulate the process you take if your organization needs to respond to something on social sites? Charting it out can help you build the confidence of your leaders and colleagues who are wondering who’s responding and how. The chart can also help you make tough calls and improve your speed of response. Here’s an example from the U.S. Air Force.
3. Listening Report–There’s no single tool that takes social media from conceptual to practical faster than a listening report–a daily or weekly update of the social media comments and discussions that executives at your organization should know about. A good listening report can cover brand mentions (using Google Alerts, or Twitter Search), as well as activity in your official social media spaces on outposts like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. For example, does your Facebook page get regular comments? Showcase the posts with the most comments, as well as the posts with comments that might be considered sensitive.

If you’re running up against some roadblocks with your social media efforts, try building these tools to get you moving in the right direction again.

Tips for Coordinating with Chapters on Social Media

5 ideas your chapters will appreciate

Tips for Marketing Your Social Media
Ten li’l tid-bits

Our own Maddie Grant along with the help of Ben Martin, CAE recently put together a presentation called 60 Tips for Marketing Your Social Media on Prezi for the ASAE’s Marketing and Membership Conference. The presentation has gotten a great response on the blog and Twitter folks have been retweeting it like nobody’s business even two weeks later.

Getting Started

You’re up and running. Now what?

6. Integrate everything! Have all of your social spaces interlinked. Include social links everywhere that’s appropriate, from email signatures to your paid advertising.
7. Make it easy! Include sharing buttons (e.g. ShareThis, Tweetmeme, FB Like) on every piece of website or blog content.
8. Try to keep things simple. Create LOTS of bite-sized content and keep your tweets under 120 characters so they are easy to retweet.
9. For conferences, provide session hashtags and promote them heavily. You may even want to leave space on name badges for Twitter handles!
10. Also, remember that free wifi at a conference means increased engagement.

This is all good and fine but what’s most important is the need to be social and to be awesome. No one will share your stuff if it’s boring. Have fun with your work, and have no fear of being different! Everyone is experimenting out there along with you.

Insurance Coverage for Social Media
What to know and what to ask

This week’s SocialFish Food was contributed by our friend Leslie White, risk management expert for non-profits and associations through her firm Croydon Consulting. Leslie blogs on risk and association stuff at http://riskychronicles.wordpress.com/ and on the SocialFish blog.

Does your association have the appropriate insurance coverages in place for you and your members interacting through social media? If you’re not sure, it’s time to have a conversation with the person responsible for your association’s insurance program. Here are some prep tips to guide that conversation.

Know your exposures.
Social media exposures are no more severe than risks stemming from other types of media–defamation and disparagement, invasion of privacy, and intellectual property issues, for example. Your existing coverages may be written in such a way as to exclude your efforts in social spaces. Now is the time to change that.

Ask about existing policies.
Your association already has insurance. Directors & Officers (D&O) insurance policies may include personal injury and/or publishers liability coverages. For associations with extensive media activities, Media Liability insurance policies are common. Associations with professional programs often have Errors & Omissions (E&O) insurance policies. When you meet with your insurance expert, ask about exclusions that might render the policy useless for social media. Also make sure that coverage extends to outposts like Facebook and Twitter where your staff may be active in an official capacity.

Ask about personal coverage for you and your team.
Are you covered? Is your staff? What about your volunteers? The social media activity you and your team handle as part of your work for the association should be covered by your association’s insurance coverages. Your personal activity, on the other hand, is not covered. You can turn to your personal insurance agent for help, or consider turning to the Media Bloggers Association for their Liability Insurance Program for Bloggers. Or just be careful what you write.

This is an abridged version of the post Social Media, Liability and Insurance by Leslie White on our blog this month, where you’ll find a much more detailed explanation that you can share with your insurance expert.

Build Open Leadership Skills
Four qualities to develop

Groundswell author Charlene Li’s new book came out yesterday. It’s called Open Leadership, and it’s awesome! We’ve been thinking about how the lessons in her book relate to you, our SocialFish Food readers. Here are some tips for building your Open Leadership skill set.

• Be Curious.
  We know you’re curious about social media—the tools, the techniques, the relationships. To build your Open Leadership skills, apply your curiosity to your internal organizational structure and processes. Break out of your silo and find out about all the cool stuff your organization is doing.
• Have patience.
  You can’t just turn on the “social†switch overnight. Building the capacity for openness within an organization can take years. For social media lovers, that’s a long, tedious wait. To build your Open Leadership skills, you have to accept that the transformation will take time, and you have to be willing to work through all the baby steps along the way.
• Work through conflict.
  Healthy organizations hire people who do not always agree. That means it’s fine for you to disagree with someone in your organization, so long as you present an alternative viewpoint that can be validated. At the same time, you need to be willing to accept the viewpoints of people who disagree with you.
• Build trust.
  You know how important it is to build trust with your stakeholders online. It may be even more important to build trust with your colleagues internally. Being curious, having patience, and working through conflict all have the net effect of building trust. Be the model for the kind of openness you hope to instill in your organization.
  

Hear Charlene Li in person at Buzz2010 on June 16. She’ll talk about her new book and lead a discussion on openness in organizations.

Building Social Media Capacity
8 steps from our new whitepaper

Here is an excerpt from our new, free whitepaper, Social Media, Risk, and Policies for Associations. The purpose of the paper is to help folks like you develop good social media policies for staff and top volunteers. We also discuss a more general plan for building social media processes into your organization. Here are the basic steps, as we see them.

1. Monitor the social web for discussions about your brand and industry.
2. Understand your objectives for using social media.
3. Develop a social media strategy by prioritizing those objectives and applying your learning from monitoring in step 1.
4. Assess and mitigate your risks—include your legal counsel and insurance professional in the discussion.
5. Make sure your insurance coverage is appropriate for your social media activities.
6. Adopt the appropriate policies and guidelines.
7. Set up interdepartmental workflows for social media collaboration.
8. Educate your staff and volunteers.

For much more in-depth information about building capacity for social media and creating appropriate policies, download the whitepaper.

Online Community Vendors
Five things to keep in mind
We believe in wearing out the tools you have before investing in new tools. If you’ve reached that point, and you’re ready to review white label online community vendors, here are a few things that we feel are very important to keep in mind!

1. User experience: Does the platform accommodate the way your members use the internet, or is it something you believe they’ll easily adapt to?
2. Social objects: What are your social objects? Or another way to ask the question: what will your members do in the community? The vendor you select should offer the feature set to accommodate that activity.
3. Culture and vision: How well does the vendor’s vision of online community match your organization’s vision? Is it more social and people-driven? More content-driven?
4. Outposts: If your organization has a presence in outposts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or others—or you’re planning to have a presence—it’s important to consider how your white label online community might feed your outposts and vice versa.
5. Compatibility: You want to make sure the vendor you choose can work seamlessly within your IT infrastructure, certainly. We put this last because we bet it was already at the top of your list.

New Whitepaper (coming soon!)
Keep an eye out for Six Online Community Vendors for Associations: An Analysis, featuring Higher Logic, NFi Studios, The Port, The Social Collective, Socious, and SusQtech. As soon as it’s ready for download, you’ll find it here.

Overcome the Time Suck
Five ways to use social media more efficiently
Social media takes time to do right. And many execs are concerned about adding yet another time-consuming project to their staff’s already stretched workload. So here are five tips that will help your organization build the capacity for social media into your daily routine, without dropping all the other balls you’re juggling.

1. Repurpose content – Sometimes all you need is 50 words and a photo. Break longer articles into smaller snack-sized pieces that are published in multiple parts with a link back to the full article.
2. Auto-feed outposts – Use RSS feeds and cloud agents to push your snack-sized updates to places like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other outposts, or even between outposts.
3. Focus your efforts – If you don’t have time to do everything, just do one thing really well. Choose that one thing based on your member’s online behavior, your business objectives, and your staff talents (in that order.)
4. Listen as a team – Monitoring is worth the time. But you still want to be efficient and choose keywords wisely. Divide and conquer by teaching different departments to listen for their own stuff. Report back to the team regularly. More on listening.
5. Enlist volunteers – Social media can provide an organization with a wealth of volunteer opportunities. Ask volunteers to write for your blog, feed outposts, even report back on activity in social spaces where your staff cannot participate.

The learning curve is the biggest time suck of all. By applying these tips now, you’ll begin to overcome the learning curve and find efficient ways to make social media a valuable tool for accomplishing your goals. Afterall, practice makes perfect, right?