It’s been a few days since Google launched its nascent social network, Google+. I’ve spent a little time bumping around, collecting friends, creating Circles in Google+ now. I don’t know that I’m ready to make a pronouncement about it yet – other than to say I don’t see it as a Facebook killer at this point but it’s entertaining to watch social media types around the country proclaim it to be the next, best thing.

Google+ is certainly in its infancy and can make many, many changes as it evolves (as Facebook does). So to pronounce it the winner or, conversely, DOA at this point seems premature. I can say that it takes a bit more thinking that most current Facebook users probably have any interest in doing. Its differentiators (namely, the ability to sort contacts into Circles and to share messages with the public or any single or combination of Circles) aren’t the things that I see most current Facebook users clamoring for.

For me, Google+’s stream is a bit much. A mix of Twitter (with public messaging by some and the ability to follow without being followed back) and Facebook (where there are more private messages and people I know in “real life”). It’s all sortable, by Circle. Right now, though, that feels like a lot of work. Especially when all of the people on Google+ are already people I follow on Twitter or am friends with on Facebook.

I’ll reserve final judgment though. Google has plenty of time to tweak and revamp its service. I’m not convinced yet – but I’ll keep an open mind.

I ran across this video with an interesting perspective on Google vs. Facebook and the involvement of search. Something to watch for:

We get calls, emails, RFPs and referrals on a pretty regular basis (December, by the way, was THE month that everyone wanted to talk social media). Whether the call comes from the marketing director, the business owner or a freelancer already working with the company, they all want to know about marketing in the social media realm.

Generally, they don’t actually say that. But they assume that social media for business = marketing. Some know or have an idea that social media can facilitate actual lead generation and/or sales. But that’s it. We remind them that social media is as much for retaining the customers you’ve got as it is for attracting new ones.

Our initial conversations then ALWAYS include discussion about customer service. And that can be a bit difficult for the marketing team in a compartmentalized company to grasp at times. And I don’t mean that in any judgmental or demeaning way at all. Until this point in history, those two departments – marketing and customer service – have been very separate.

Now, most companies we talk with understand, at some level, that entry into the world of social media “opens” the company to the potential for negative responses from the public-at-large. In fact, this is one of the biggest fears of the traditionalists in most companies – losing control of the message.

Once we get through to the naysayers the idea that the negative comments will exist whether the company participates or not – and wouldn’t it be better if the company could actually engage the commenters and take part in the conversation? – we still have to put the appropriate mechanisms in place to handle any potential customer service issues that arise. And we have to do it BEFORE those issues do arise.

We ask questions (depending on the nature of the business) like:

• Does your company have an organized customer service process or protocol in place?
• Who are the players in your company and which personnel can handle which types of customer complaints?
• Should the salesperson be notified in addition to the logistics personnel or customer service personnel?
• Does the company use CRM (customer relationship management) or BPM (business process management) software to log and track customers, sales and complaints?

Whatever the practice, make sure everyone involved in your social media efforts understands it.

More questions:

• Does your company have a crisis communications protocol? Why not?
• Do we need to retain and collaborate with a PR professional to create such a plan?
• How do we identify a crisis?
• Who is involved in handling it and does everyone on the team know how to reach the necessary personnel in the event of a crisis?

You may not be able to envision what a crisis looks like now – but you don’t want to delay your corporate response when one happens trying to figure this all out.

After those discussions take place, we’re ready to begin. It starts, then, with effective monitoring (actually, it starts with quality customer service professionals at the company-level – but I’m not HR). Whether the company is large enough to warrant the expense of paid monitoring services (many of which are stellar and full of some amazingly robust features) or the company is small enough that a small grouping of free services can be used, anyone in the social media space must be monitoring it for direct engagement and indirect mentions.

On Facebook, this means looking at Wall posts, post comments, photo comments, Places comments and Community Page updates. On Twitter, this means finding not only posts with your company’s profile name but also posts mentioning the company with the “@” symbol (which posts won’t show up in your “Mentions”), posts mentioning your product and posts with other identified, relevant keywords. Across the web, several other services can track your company’s mentions on websites, consumer review sites, blogs and blog comments.

Some companies create their social media team with personnel from many departments, including customer service. Other companies leave social media in the hands of the marketing team. Others still may outsource community management and/or monitoring to an outside agency.

Whatever your company’s situation, everyone involved must collaborate on the back end to create a seamless process, a flowchart, for how to handle customer service issues. And everyone in the flowchart must be made aware of the expectations placed upon them with regard to the social media-generated complaints. And it must be prompt – because time and angry customers wait for no one in the world of social media.

The bottom line is this: social media for businesses is about marketing – and lead generation and sales and reputation management AND customer service. YOU can’t decide that it’s going to be about only one or two things in that list. Your customers will decide for you. So you’d better be ready.

We’ve got some terrific social media customer service stories to tell. They’re too long to include in this post – but stay tuned (spoiler: they all have happy endings…).

An interesting article caught my eye today amongst the hundreds that funneled through my Google Reader. Business Week reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned Novartis Pharmaceuticals that its use of the Facebook Share button to promote a cancer-fighting medication violates FDA requirements for disclosing information about drugs.

The FDA told Novartis that its use of Facebook Share to promote the med Tasigna is incomplete and misleading, asking the company to discontinue use of Facebook Share to promote the drug.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed in pharmaceutical brochures and magazine ads (or in their television spots), the drug companies are required by FDA rules to include information about risks associated with taking the drug in those materials. In this case, readers could click the Facebook Share button on any page of the Tasigna website to generate a link and comment on those readers’ Facebook profiles.

The problem was that Facebook includes a brief descriptor of the linked page. And that descriptor failed to include risk information.

In the Novartis/Tasigna case, the posted shared content from the “Facebook Share” widget on the healthcare professional home page for Tasigna consisted of the following claims:

• Home – Tasigna (nilotinib) 200 mg capsules

http://www.us.tasigna.com

Tasigna (nilotinib) is used to treat a type of leukemia called Philadelphia chromosome positive chronic myeloid leukemia (Ph+ CML)

Similarly, the posted shared content from the “Facebook Share” widget on one of the consumer-directed web pages consisted of the following claims:

• Treating Your Ph+ CML with Tasigna | Tasigna (nilotinib) 200-mg capsules
www.us.tasigna.com
In addition to taking Tasigna (nilotinib) 200-mg capsules, talking to your doctor and receiving health tips can help you treat your CML.

In the FDA’s letter, it notes that the shared content contained a hyperlink to various Tasigna product websites, which do contain risk information. However, the inclusion of such a hyperlink is insufficient, according to the FDA, to mitigate the omission of risk information.

Huge wake-up call to pharmaceutical companies looking to heighten their social media engagement. And a great reminder to all of our clients and potential clients to be mindful of legal issues which might be implicated with social media use.

We are currently working with a highly-respected health care clinic here in Kansas City (more details on this project very soon!) on the creation and implementation of a social media strategy. This client has the possibility of creating a social media audience with a high level of engagement – and yet we must consider, at times, tempering that engagement where privacy requirements of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) are triggered.

The creation of a very detailed Terms of Use document for inclusion in the client’s blog and Facebook page was both appropriate and necessary because of HIPAA’s requirements. And still, we must be vigilant in monitoring comments and wall posts, counseling the client to respond in a way that is meaningful to the community but appropriate in light of various legal and ethical restrictions.

Corporate social media proponents cannot operate in a marketing vacuum for a lot of reasons – and we’re unfortunately seeing this play out in the health care realm.

As the health care industry continues to explore social media, we will continue to read stories like the FDA/Novartis article. It underscores the importance of including personnel from across departments in social media discussions. And, despite the groans this may inspire, legal is one of those departments that must be at the table in health care.*

*It’s obviously going to be helpful if the representative from legal “gets” social media and wants to help find a way to get it done instead of throwing up legal and bureaucratic roadblocks.

You may have seen this video already. It was put together by Erik Qualman, author of a blog and book called Socialnomics. Qualman has published this a few times, updating it every so often with fresh statistics.

If you’ve seen it before in any of its incarnations, you know the point Qualman is trying to make. That the world is changing. The game is changing. If you’re going to continue to play the game (running a business), you’re going to have to embrace the change and decide how it works best within the framework of your business.

And if it doesn’t work within that framework, work on building a new framework. Because new media, digital media, social media – whatever you want to call it – is here and growing and evolving at an exponential rate. Don’t let it pass you by.

There are many desktop and web-based apps out there that offer the convenience of updating all of your various social media accounts at once. Type one status update in, click a box, hit enter and, BOOM, your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, LinkedIn, WordPress, Blogger and Foursquare accounts are all updated at once. With the same message.

Ping.fm was one of the first apps to offer this functionality. TweetDeck now allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.  You can even post to Twitter from Facebook.

Cool. Right? Except I can’t stand it.

My friend Alissa Sheley at Jones Huyett Partners in Topeka posted about this very topic recently. She and I share the same opinion about these mass updaters. Alissa said, “I have many concerns, but here’s my biggest: Each social network has different parameters, a different personality, and in most cases, a different audience.”

And that really sums it all up for me. I post differently on Facebook than I do on Twitter. Some of this has to do with the character limitations on Twitter (140 characters). I also want instant gratification – don’t make me click a link in Twitter that sends me to your Facebook page so I can click again on the link to the website you are trying to tell me about.

I also know that I have different audiences on Twitter and on Facebook. For K2Media, I know our Facebook page has quite a few non-social media-types as fans. People who know us and want to keep up with our business. People who are clients or prospective clients who might look to our page for educational reasons. Our Twitter followers are largely PR, communications, marketing and social media-types. We share knowledge but in a different way. No need to preach to the choir, if you will.

We are also more apt to update Twitter fairly often throughout any given day. Given the transient, real-time nature of Twitter, this is common and, from most Tweeters, not annoying. On the other hand, I tend to get aggravated by Facebook fan pages cluttering my news feed with multiple updates a day (depending on the page, of course).

So, yes. I think it’s more important to recognize your audience in each social space than to make it ultra-convenient for yourself by auto-populating all of your social profiles at once. And, as Alissa noted in her post, it is extremely important to be present in each social space in order to monitor any response or engagement with your business messaging. You can send 10 messages out at once – but if you’re not there to answer a question or follow up on some interest in your message, what good was sending the message at all?

[Note: I do regularly use one mass updater, TubeMogul. At TubeMogul, you can upload video simultaneously to multiple video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Yahoo and more. While your video is uploading, you can title, describe and tag your video once and have the video, title, description and tags automatically posted to each video site. TubeMogul then collects and aggregates viewing statistics by video and by site. It is very convenient - as video can be time-consuming. It is still important to monitor the video profiles on-site for relevant comments and questions though!]

We are very excited to announce that K2Media has been selected by Halls, Kansas City’s premier retail stores, to lead the effort to integrate social media into its established marketing, public relations and customer service efforts.  We’ve known the folks over at Halls for a while now and have enormous respect for their brand and their talents. (And it’s really an AMAZING place to shop!)

Halls has set the standard for shopping excellence in Kansas City since first opening its doors in 1913. As the store heads toward its 100^th year, it continues to provide fine quality and exceptional service to generations of Kansas City’s residents and visitors. Halls has two stores: its flagship on the Country Club Plaza and its Crown Center store. The stores feature fine men’s and women’s clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, china, crystal, and decorative home accessories, as well as Hallmark products and a corporate gift service.

K2Media will work with Halls to integrate the use of social media into their already top-notch traditional marketing and customer service efforts, helping them reach a new generation of consumer. Although the store is almost 100 years old, its approach to clothing, home and jewelry is as fashion-forward as any store in the country. Its reputation in the industry allows it to obtain exclusive lines found nowhere else in the region.

We are thrilled about this partnership and are really enjoying working with the team at Halls. Everyone is very receptive and helpful – we’re getting great input from employees across many departments, as it should be for the effective use of social media for business.

Lots of plans in the works for Halls. For now though, you can check them out on Facebook at facebook.com/HallsKC, on Twitter at twitter.com/HallsKC and on YouTube at youtube.com/HallsKC. You won’t want to miss their great webisode series “What the Chic” and the Facebook photos of their current tablescape display to benefit DIFFA. As we develop more of what we’re working on with Halls, we’ll be sure to let you know!

The requisite press release announcing the relationship is here.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Sometimes, we’re lucky enough to hook up with clients or potential clients who are fully aware of the need for their businesses to be in the social space. They might not know exactly how to go about it but they get it. They understand where their consumers are. And then we work with them to decide how best to approach social communications for their business and help them execute the plan.

And sometimes, we’re lucky enough to hook up with clients who aren‘t fully aware of the magnitude of this change. I say “lucky” because it’s really kinda fun to talk to people about the explosive growth going on in the online and social marketing arena. And to watch it sink in as the numbers add up.

It is interesting that the creator of the above-embedded video (not us, by the way) included email statistics. I’m not sure if his point was to demonstrate how much spam email exists as opposed to the opt-in participation on the various social sites (which is true) but it also pointed out how much email is still being used – despite the death knell that some on the internet are tolling for it.

Although social communication/media may be ultimately integrated into email (see Google Buzz, launched earlier this year), email still has a great degree of utility. Not everything can be or should be condensed to 140 or 160 characters for text and Twitter. Not everything needs to be publicly shared.

K2Media always explores email marketing with our clients and potential clients. Are they using it? What platform are they using? What are the goals of their emails? Schedules? Content? Design? Recipient database? How can we improve it? Grow it?

Ultimately, we think that a well-designed email marketing strategy with visually-appealing emails can be an important part of a company’s overall online marketing plan. And we use email to promote other social media profiles – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., making sure to allow fans in those spaces the opportunity to sign up for email newsletters as well.

We always advise our clients to cross-promote in this manner. Email marketing pieces might not have a tremendously high open-rate but if you get your consumer to open one email, make sure you’ve included an invitation to interact with your company or brand somewhere else. Then the next time you’ve got a message to send out, you’re more likely to capture that set of eyes – maybe not via email but maybe on Facebook where they’ve become a fan, or vice versa.

Another cross-promotional opportunity is to treat your email piece as a newsletter, with an article or an excerpt from your company’s blog – you can even hyperlink from the email to your blog and/or include a sign-up form to subscribe to your blog via email or through a feed reader.

Do you cross-promote between your website, your blog and your social media profiles? Other than the suggestions we gave here, what else do you do? How else do you capture those readers across platforms?

UPDATE: As of June 11, 2010, it looks like Facebook has fixed page creator removal problem and all page admins can now be removed, including the page creator.

The creation of a Facebook fan page for a business is deceptively simple, at first. Certainly, it’s not rocket-science by any stretch of the imagination but there are a few pitfalls that you need to consider before hitting that “create” button. Some of the choices you must make when creating the page are irrevocable – the page name, the business type and the affiliation of the creator to the page.

First, the page name. Unlike individual profiles, the name at the top of a Facebook fan page cannot be changed. Does your business have multiple locations and you intend for this page to refer to only one? Better make sure that you’ve designated that location in your page name now. You can’t go back and change it.  (This also become a problem – as one of our clients recently saw – when the company changes its name. They had to start from scratch in the creation of a page and migration of existing fans to the new page.)

Second, the business type. When creating the page, Facebook prompts you – via some dropdown menus – to describe your business. No big deal, right? In the grand scheme of things, probably not a huge deal. But, depending on which choice you make, Facebook formats your page for you. If you choose retail business, for example, your info page will have space for store hours, location and parking. Not a major issue – but it’s probably worth poking around a few fan pages to check out the format associated with the various business type choices.

Finally, and probably most concerning, is the issue of the creator of the page. This subject has been discussed a bit on Twitter recently and then followed up with a good blog post by Arik Hanson over at Communications Conversations. Here’s the deal: whoever creates a Facebook page is forever tied to that page (some have reported that calling and find a human to speak with at Facebook can solve the problem – there is, however, no contact information listed for Facebook anywhere on the site).

If K2Media is working with a company and I create a Facebook page for that company while logged in as myself, I am the “creator” of the page. I am automatically an admin on the page. I can add and delete other admins. BUT no one (including me) can delete ME as the admin. EVER (or at least without a series of emails and phone calls to Facebook after you’ve figured out how to reach them).

So, what happens when K2Media is no longer working with that company? I still have total administrative control over their Facebook page. Now, I’m a good person and certainly wouldn’t do anything harmful to the company, even after our professional relationship had ended. But what if the company had tasked an employee or intern with creating the page and then the employee or intern is terminated or moved on to another competitor? Now, you’ve got a disgruntled former employee or competitor with control of your Facebook page.

Here is what we do to avoid the problem (and what we recommend you do):

• Create a new Gmail account (we usually call ours companynameSM@gmail.com). We use Gmail as the collecting basin for multiple email accounts – so we simply forward the new account’s inbox to our own.

• Then log out of Facebook.

• On the login page, you can click “Create a Page” (it’s below the sign-up box) without being logged in as yourself. You will then be prompted to choose the business type and name the page.

• The next page will ask if you have a Facebook account. Choose “I  do not have a Facebook account” and input your new Gmail address as the email tied to the new page. You will then have created a page that is tied to the Gmail account (a nameless, faceless account) and NOT to  your individual account.

We then personally “fan” the page and make ourselves page admins.

Our client is provided the Gmail account and password information – which they can then use to add or delete subsequent admins (including us). They are also free to change the password, locking us out of the account in the future if they choose to do so.

The account is not tied to any specific individual – just the companynameSM@gmail.com account. All individual admins can be removed if and when necessary or appropriate.

Kiran and I are so very proud and excited to announce that K2Media is coordinating the social media efforts for this year’s Bloom party to benefit the Kansas City Free Health Clinic.

Bloom is an annual fundraiser – an over-the-top, unparalleled event. This year’s theme is “Bloom is Studio 54“.  In previous years, themes have included Bloom Goes Electric, Moulin Bloom, Bloom Goes Wild Wild West and Bloom Goes Vegas.

So, between now and April 9th, we’ll be working with the all-star Bloom is Studio 54 planning committee to create buzz, educate, solicit volunteers and sponsors and generally get the good word out to Kansas City.  We’ll be doing that on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on Flickr and on the Bloom blog.

We’ve been hard at work since mid-December, coordinating, conferencing, strategizing and implementing.  The response so far has been phenomenal and energizing.  Our efforts are supported immensely by the unsurpassed reputation of the Clinic and of Bloom.

K2Media is honored to be affiliated with this event and its supporters.  And we’re looking so forward to the next few months!

Mark your calendar for Friday, April 9th and join us at Starlight Theatre for this fabulous event.  DJs, cage dancers, ballerinas, roller chicks and general decadence.  We’ll be there. Hope you will be too!

I came across this terrific group of articles on my feed from Mashable.  There are short articles from various contributors, each addressing a different Facebook-related topic.  Put them all together…and you have the “Facebook Guide Book.”

As I read through each one, I couldn’t help but think of the Hawthorne Plaza merchants.  Last Friday, we discussed how small businesses can really take advantage of social media, and a great place to start is by setting up a Facebook page.  These articles really highlight some of the points we made…and addresses some of those that we didn’t!

Whether you’re new to Facebook or a seasoned veteran…this makes for a good read.