Recommended Activity YOU DON T HAVE to DO ALL

Social Media Manual

Get employees involved to assist with the promotion of your social media posts to assist with increasing brand awareness and driving traffic back to website.

Recommended Activity – YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO ALL!!! Join at least Twitter. You can also create your own Facebook and Google+ profile. Complete Profile.

Follow your on all social networks. Start following others on Twitter. Look for people with similar interests. Also connect with influencers in your target audience.

Invite your friends to follow you on Twitter. Add connections on Facebook and Twitter. Add links to your website, your Twitter profile, your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook profile, etc. to your signature Subscribe to your YouTube Channel. Join forums where your target audience is present. Engage in Social Media Update Twitter up to 3 times a day, including sharing blog posts, press releases, industry news, retweeting influencer posts, engaging in conversations, etc. If using, update Facebook with links, events, videos at least 1 time per day Comment on your blog posts Comment on YouTube videos Add all of the Your social networking site links to your email signature so all of your contacts and friends can see them If you’re so inclined, start your own blog or contribute guest blog posts to your blog. Social Media Recommended Daily Checklist CATEGORY TASK Complete?

Go to your blog or news feed - see if there is a Blog new post, press, videos, upcoming events, etc. Tweet out link to new post Add to social bookmarking sites like

Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. Add Blog link to Facebook account Comment on post Add link to post on LinkedIn account or post in

forum Email post to 2-3 friends/customers who may

find it interesting

Twitter Send out a few tweets per day Respond to any @messages RT other people's tweets Engage in conversations Respond to any direct messages

Post News, Blogs, Promotional Offers, etc. on Facebook timeline

Visit your page to see if new videos have been YouTube posted Comment on videos Email video link to 5-6 people Tweet out video link Share video link on Facebook

Find major influencers in the cloud computing Local Blogger Outreach community. Read/subscribe to their blogs. Make insightful comments (if you have something important or interesting to say. Don’t just make comments for comments sake.) Share their work on your social networking feeds. For example, you could find them on Twitter, follow them, and retweet content by them that you find especially interesting. Connect with your friends, employees and other LinkedIn connections Join LinkedIn communities and interact with community, i.e. post articles, respond to questions, interact with other community members, etc. Post link to new blog posts

Forums Join forums related to industry Ask/answer questions Write articles Social Media Outlets and How To Use Them

Twitter Tutorial Twitter is the largest micro-blogging site on the Internet. Micro-blogging is very similar to having an online chat with someone, except that you are posting a 140 word sentence, question, link, etc. to a wide audience that can respond to and read what you are posting. Twitter allows you to engage with potential customers and also helps us grow your Twitter following (if you follow us!)

1. Target your personal contacts. If you already know people on Twitter, follow them. To find friends on Twitter, follow the procedures: A. Go to the Discover page, and click Find friends. B. Find your email provider on the list, and select Search Contacts. C. Input your email username and password. D. If you are asked to share your information, click Allow access or Agree. E. Your email friends on Twitter will populate. Click Follow to follow certain people, or Follow all to follow everyone.

You can also search for people by name by going to the Search box, typing in their name and going to the People tab.

2. Search for Twitterers. You should follow people with your similar interests and also anyone to who you think would be interested in your product/services, business people, bloggers, media, etc. Always check their profile to see if they are active and how many followers that they have. If they have only a few followers, they may not be active enough to warrant you interacting with them.

To find new people on Twitter, do the following: A. Go to the Discover page. B. Select Browse categories, and select a category. C. OR you can do a search for a specific interest. D. OR you can click on the Who to follow tab, which is located on the left- hand side of your feed. Who to follow only works well after you’ve followed a few people. E. Do searches for phrases that best match your business, including your business name, on Twitter, and pay attention to what people are saying on the subject. React to the posts, and follow the people that are providing the best information or talking about your business.

4. Post updates on Twitter. These should be things that engage readers and get them back to our site, blog or other post. Use hash signs (#). This shows what you’re interested in. Hash tags are important because they’re searchable on Twitter. This way, we’ll always be found when somebody searches by a particular topic where we want to create a presence.

Retweet: Retweeting is a way of reblogging other people’s content on your feed. Retweet twitter posts from your followers, influencers or other people whose content is interesting, relevant, engaging, etc. To retweet, basically resend the message by putting RT in front of the other person’s Twitter handle and message. For example, a retweet from your account would look something like this: “RT @whoever: Cloud computing is the wave of the future.”

Twitter voice: You want to be fun and engaging, but not spammy and obnoxious. Think of it this way – would you approach your neighbor, and start trying to sell them something the second that they opened the door? No, you wouldn’t. You’d want to say hello, ask how they’re doing, what’s going on in their life, etc. Then near the end of the conversation, you may ask if they’d like to buy some Girl Scout cookies. Treat your social networks the same way. Also, since this is a company, don’t use language that you wouldn’t use in front of your boss or coworkers.

5. Interact with other Twitter users. Twitter is a great place to promote Your, but it only works if you engage your Twitter followers. This doesn’t just mean posting interesting links to your website or blog, and using questions to promote them. It also means answering followers’ questions and responding to their Tweets. Read their posts, and retweet messages. Comment on what they post, etc.

6. Respond to Your Replies. Twitter users can comment on what you have said on Twitter by typing @yourtwittername … These messages will appear @Connect tab- >Mentions. Always respond to comments or questions.

LinkedIn Best Practices LinkedIn is almost solely geared towards business people, which makes it a good avenue for us in our quest to reach the business audience. LinkedIn is mostly looked at as an online resume, job search tool and a forum (for general forum rules, see below).

To be most effective with LinkedIn: 1. Fully fill out your profile, including current and past employment history, your interests, ways to contact you, etc. 2. Create an interesting narrative for your Summary. For ideas, read the summaries of others and use them as a guide, especially people with a lot of connections. 3. Start connecting with others, but only start with people that you know. LinkedIn frowns upon people that send out connection requests to people that they do not know. You may be denied the ability to send more requests or worse banned from LinkedIn. 4. If you do want to connect to unknown people, see if you have a current connection that is in some way connected to the person you want to connect with. Then, ask for an introduction from your current connection. 5. Look for people who have Open Networker somewhere in their title or description. These people are open to getting unsolicited requests. If you are open to getting unsolicited requests, add Open Networker to your description or title. 6. Recommended others that you have worked with and ask for recommendations. The more recommendations that you have the better your profile looks to other. The best way to do this is to recommended people that you’ve worked with. It’s the “rub my back, rub your back” theory. 7. Join groups that you are interested in or that offer a potential avenue to customers. You can search for groups by keywords. Simply change the search box at the top to Groups, and search for groups where you are most likely to find your target audience. Most groups allow everyone in. Some will require you to be approved by the administrator. 8. Share informative, not spammy content to both your own status update and the groups. If you find a really interesting article about cloud computing, share it. Like our latest blog post? Share it. Just don’t overshare company posts or news, or you’ll turn others off to way you have to say. 9. Ask real questions in the groups. Respond to all of the answers that you receive. Copy and paste the forum question into your LinkedIn status update so you can share it with your connections. Ask them if they would answer the question in the forum. You can also share it on other social networks or via email. 10. If you feel that a particular question (even your own question) could be an opportunity for you, email an SME to answer the question. We want to become an authority in the LinkedIn forums, and the best way to do that is to…well…BE AN EXPERT! If you provide great answers to common questions, forum users are more apt to listen to you when you do post something about your own company.

Remember: Everything in your LinkedIn profile is searchable. Add keywords that relate to the business or at least your interests or expertise. Once you join a few groups, you’ll also see these added to your profile, and you may start having connection requests from other group members.

Facebook Best Practices Facebook is a social networking site that has a large adult following, including our target audience. Facebook is what you make of it. Posting something and commenting on it will get others interested in what you have to say. You can also “comment” on what others have posted. Facebook is an effective tool for promoting the Your brand, especially since we don’t currently have a presence on Facebook. If you already have a Facebook profile, use that profile to promote Your.

To be most effective with Facebook –  Build out your profile. Put in your interests, hobbies, likes, etc. Post pics of your company events, and talk about conventions/tradeshows, etc. you’ve done. Basically, you want to create a profile that others will want to explore.  Do not put up pictures that you wouldn’t want posted around the web. While your account is “mostly” private, Facebook keeps changing the privacy settings. This means those pics of you on Friday night doing that thing you do could show up outside of your immediate friends. Also, only allow friends to see your “sensitive” photos, videos and posts. If you allow friends of friends to see them, you’re exposing yourself and your posts to nearly everyone that your friends know. (I’m sure you don’t want your crazy college roommate who is friends with a Facebook friend to know that you hang out at the Iron Cactus every Friday night, right?) You can change the settings by clicking on the little dropdown box next to Post when creating a status update.  Find your friends on Facebook. When you set up your Facebook account, you have the option to import your email account to search for your friends on Facebook. Do this. Then, in the search box at the top, search for others who you may know by searching by your school, past employers, home town, etc. And, then “friend” them (or send them a friend invite).  Join groups that interest you. This will exposure you to more people who may want to friend you.  Post fun items in your status, including quotes, videos, photos, etc. Stay away from political, religious, sexual or other controversial posts (see Twitter Voice), especially if you plan on using Facebook a lot for business. This is a community of people, and community members can get turned off by these types of posts. Post a few things about your company if you so choose; just don’t be spammy about it, i.e. posting something every day about the company, putting up every coupon, etc.  Do respond to others posts or statuses as a way to keep the conversation going. Throw in something about your company if it’s relevant. Send event invitations to your events, conventions, etc.  Reply to comments under posts. Facebook recently launched a way for you to respond directly to comments within posts. Do this if you want to connect with someone or directly address a particular comment.  Again, be genuine. And update as often as you can.

Posting in Forums As mentioned previously, forums are great way to connect with potential customers. But, you must connect with them in a genuine way. In forums, people want to know answers usually to specific questions. They probably won’t appreciate a full-on promotion assault.

To start connecting with people in forums: 1. Join the forum, and spend some time reading about what others are talking about. 2. Fully build out your forum profile, including mentioning who you work for. 3. Look for questions that you can answer, and build up a reputation as an authority in a particular field or topic. 4. Post questions that you really want answered. Promote your question through other social networks, i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. 5. Ask for a subject matter expect (SME) to answer questions that you find. Read through the forum posts, and look for opportunities for our SME. If you’re unsure to whom you should send a question that you think we should answer, send an email to the person in charge of social media or PR. 6. Promote your company as appropriate. For example, if someone is specifically asking for some recommendations on companies or products associated with your company/products, then this is your opportunity to talk up your company. The goal is to build up your reputation before you promote anything. Others will already trust you, and they are more apt to actually listen when you start trying to sell the product. 7. BE REAL! No one likes to be sold to when they’re trying to actually get answers. Imagine being on the phone with Adobe for an hour trying to get your software to be fixed, and they spend 15 minutes trying to upsell you on their new product CS1200! Help, communicate, connect and then MAYBE sell. Got it?

Frequency

The goal is to interact in the forums 1 to 2 times per week. It takes a lot of time to read through all of these forums, and I know that you are busy. Select one or two forums in which you would like to participate. (Please let me know which forums you plan on being in so we can spread out our resources to cover as many as possible.)

Skim the forums for example on Tuesday and Thursday, and try to find one or two topics that you can talk on authoritatively. Answer those questions. You can pose your own questions once or twice a month on for example latest trends, technologies, or questions that you really want answered for your own knowledge or for the company. If you do pose a question, send it to me, and I’ll promote it on our various social networks. Overall Social Media Recommendations 1. Find a social network that you like. If you really don’t like the format of Twitter, but spend every day on Facebook, then use Facebook. If you’re not natural with the audience, they’ll know. Stick with what you’re comfortable with. 2. Social networks are perfect for sharing promotions, content (blogs, video, whitepapers, etc.), promoting events/webinars/conferences, sweepstakes/giveaways, etc. Take advantage of them that way 3. Be yourself, and don’t spam people, especially your friends. Don’t friend someone that you haven’t seen in 30 years and then start asking them to follow your company or retweet your company’s latest post. You’ll only turn them off of the company forever. 4. Social media is more about promoting yourself than the company. Get out into the communities and interact with others. Let people get to know you and like you. Then you can start name-dropping. 5. NEVER, and I mean NEVER, talk advantage of someone else’s misfortune, especially tragedies and natural disasters. It’s not in good taste, and we could get dinged from it. 6. There are always questions about Google+. While G+ is great for getting information, and it’s run by master of ceremonies Google, it doesn’t entirely work as a social network. You’re welcome to set up a profile and post items on it; just don’t expect a lot of activity. It’s getting better, especially for IT fields, but it will take some time. 7. Read a few social media how-to blogs. Chris Brogan, Social Mouths, Jeff Bullas and others provide valuable insights into the business of social media. 8. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Social media isn’t easy if you’re new to it. Don’t be afraid to reach out for help.