10 Important Digital To-Do’s for 2012

• Distribute points and badges (gamification), when your customers and employees have to continuously fill out the same old boring forms.
• Upgrade your onlineshop with a live chat feature.
• Recognize the “most-liked” and “most commented” employee of the month.
• Place your agency briefing on a crowdsourcing platform to collect additional, free inputs.

3. Train your Company and Employees

Is the use of “new media” not yet regulated under a set of social media guidelines? Then it’s absolutely time to do so, no discussion.

What good do guidelines do, however, if employees don’t have their Facebook privacy settings under control and allow the photos of the last office party to land in the yellow press? Teach your employees through E-Learning-Videos and Workshops. Also show them which platforms make sense in a business setting. Encourage a well reflected gathering of experience. Dell, for example, has a Social Media University and issues real certificates.

4. No Holds Barred: Trust Your Employees

Everyone knows companies who are still running on a centralised control system. Most of the time, the IT-Department are not the “Bad guys”, but are made to execute what management (often under the pressure of fear and ignorance) have decided. To block platforms like Facebook, when every employee can access it during work time with their smartphones is absolutely fruitless and appears helpless. With younger employees and recent graduates, there is a chance that such rules will push them to prefer other employers. Unlimited Facebook use during work times must be curbed through good leadership.

Employees generally enjoy improving themselves for their employer. Make it easy for employees to raise their productivity, for example by turning Citrix off and cloud services on, allowing relevant data to be accessed at will (most are not business critical anyway) and encouraging a Bring-Your-Own-Equipment program. Having doubts? Then you should bar management from printing business documents or sending them by E-Mail, as both are not secured and can be viewed any time, making it pretty risky.

5. Improve Internal Communication

The CC-culture is a considerable factor why E-Mail makes coworkers so inefficient. Companies like Atos are soon barring E-Mail for use in internal communication. Employees, however, spend a great deal of time searching for and preparing information, which already exist somewhere else in the company. And let’s be honest: of course people avoid Sharepoint when it’s no fun and complicated to use.

Move the bulletin board (Intranet) to the coffee corner (Social Network) – then it will actually be read and discussed. Virtual coffee corners are internal communications networks with the familiar functionality and usability of Facebook & Co. They’re called Yammer, Jive, Salesforce Chatter, or IBM Connections and can massively improve your internal communication. Status updates, networks, forums, blogs, etc. will allow cooperation to bloom. A good side effect: you’re not risking that projects are hidden on unsecured platforms like Facebook Groups.

6. Social Media Tools Infrastructure

Tools for Social Media management are plentiful:

• Social Media monitoring tools track what is being said about a brand. My favorites: Sysomos, Radian6, Engagor, Viralheat.
• Social Media Management Tools simplify moderation of Facebook and Twitter presences. Additionally, promotions and Facebook tab management become child’s play with these tools. My favorites: Shoutlet, Vitrue, and Wildfire.
• Community Ideation and Support Tools collect users’ product know-how and thereby take a load off of customer support. My favorites: GetSatisfaction, Uservoice, and Ideascale.
• Social CRM Tools, as an extension of the monitoring, record conversations engaged in through social media platforms. This allows for the building of future ROI-Cases. Radian6 and Shoutlet are interesting providers in this realm.

For all tools the same rule applies: first do your homework. Define your social media management processes and use these to define the requirements for the tools, not the other way around. Be aware of the fact that tons of user data are going to collect in the next years and that these should be quickly tied in with existing CRM data in order to lead a successful and authentic dialogue with customers.

7. SEO+: Don’t Forget Local and Social

I am continually surprised that company addresses are not correctly or incompletely integrated on Google Maps and places. Search Advertising campaigns can be also be booked with location based ads. Why should customers not stumble across a company on Google maps? Even without an own Google+ Presence, it makes sense to give users the possibility to share your posts and product descriptions with +1 on Google+. This has positive impacts on the ranking and the search results will be enriched with Google+ information.

8. Online-Video: Use the Appropriate Media to Inform

People don’t enjoy reading long texts anymore, not customers nor your employees, nor perhaps the readers of this blogpost? :) . Build competency in spreading important information via Youtube videos, which can come across in a simple and authentic manner. The fact that YouTube is no longer simply a destination for funny but unimportant videos is apparent in the fact that YouTube has become the second most important search engine. YouTube videos can also easily be played on all smartphones and tablets. Even new TV accessories are optimized for YouTube. The written word has not expired on its usefulness, but will continue to sharply lose importance. Now is the time to collect experience in the world of audiovisual communication.

9. ROI, Dashboards, and Reporting

The testphase in social media is over. In order to consistently reach, measure, and improve on goals, the appropriate dashboards and KPI’s are necessary (blogpost coming soon). The number of Fans and Followers is not a Key Performance Indicator and will not suffice. Can your management derive a business use from the “Number of Fans”? Comprehensive numerical data can not be collected early enough.

10. Saying Goodbye to too much Outbound

The pure broadcasting of messages like in classic advertising is becoming increasingly inefficient due to sinking attention levels and trustworthiness. The period of inbound marketing is just beginning- you should take positions to create a stunning user experience for customer support requests. The most important foundation is a Social CRM strategy, which is embedded in existing infrastructure (CRM, newsletter, search engines, etc). As Tony of Zappos has already successfully proven, your call center is not an operating cost, but rather an important marketing investment.

Good luck and all the best in your endeavors!