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Real world advice for independent advisors, an interview with Kristen Luke

Posted By Chad Bockius

February 8th, 2010

Kristen Luke, from Wealth Management Marketing, was gracious enough to spend some time talking through her work with independent investment advisors and financial planners. We specifically discussed social networking, what’s holding her clients back and how they are dealing with SEC and FINRA compliance issues.

1. Tell me a little about your background and Wealth Management Marketing
“Prior to starting Wealth Management Marketing in October of 2008, I headed up the marketing department of a boutique wealth management firm in San Diego for 3 years. It was a natural transition from working at my previous job to starting WMM since I performed similar tasks, but now I do it for a variety of firms instead of just one. I have a BA in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MBA with an emphasis in Marketing from San Diego State University. WMM develops marketing plans for independent advisors and also provides the back office support required to implement the strategies. Basically, we are an in-house marketing department outsourced.”

2. Can you profile the clients you typically work with?
“I primarily work with independent investment advisors and financial planners. The majority of my clients are RIAs which can range from solo practitioners with $10 million in AUM to firms with 20 employees with a few hundred million in AUM. I also work with individual advisors at larger brokerage firms who need help creating their own individual marketing plans or are looking for assistance in creating a social media marketing strategy.”

3. What are their top issues/challenges when it comes to social media marketing?
“I consistently hear the same two challenges from my clients:
- Meeting compliance requirements. Up until recently, it was not clear what an advisor could and could not do according to FINRA. It is still unclear about what the SEC requires. So many advisors tell me that their compliance departments won’t allow them to participate in social media. I’m not sure if this is going to change now that FINRA has released their guidelines.”
Quick Note: The Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking helps address these questions.
- “Finding the time to participate in social media.”

4. What percentage of your clients are engaged with social networks today?
“Almost 100% of my clients are engaged with social networks in some way. Most of them are only involved with LinkedIn. Closer to 50% are involved in Facebook or Twitter for business purposes.”

5. For those that are active how are they dealing with compliance issues?
“Some advisors have not been concerned about it and are doing nothing. Others are passing everything through their compliance departments prior to posting on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Others are using sites likes Socialware to archive their social media activity.”

6. What would recommend to your clients that are getting ready to start engaging with social networking?
“I would recommend that they first understand what they can and cannot do from a compliance standpoint. Then I’d recommend they start playing around with the different sites to get an understanding of which ones they like. I find that the advisors that are most successful with social media are the ones who personally enjoy interacting on the different sites. Once an advisor has a basic understanding of social media, it’s important to create a plan of action. This includes finding their target market and centers of influence on the different sites, determining what type of information to broadcast and how often to do so. Social media is like any other type of marketing. It should be planned out to increase the likelihood of success.”

It is clear from our day-to-day conversations and interviews like this that social media will continue to play a big role for independent investment advisors and financial planners. As Kristen points out it is critical to understand the compliance issues before jumping into this new channel of communication. I’ve already mentioned the Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking and in addition you should look at the summary of the recent FINRA webinar explaining Notice 10-06 on Social Networking Compliance.

For more information from Kristen you can follow her on Twitter or at her blog.

Tags: Compliance, eDiscovery, Facebook, Financial Services, FINRA, LinkedIn, Risk Manager, Social Media, Social Media Archiving, Social Media Liability, Social Media Policy, Social Networks, Socialware, Twitter
Posted in Compliance, Marketing, eDiscovery | No Comments »

FINRA Webinar: Compliance Considerations for Social Networking Sites

Posted By Chad Bockius

February 3rd, 2010

If you happened to miss it, FINRA hosted the Social Networking Compliance webinar this afternoon. Here is a summary from their site on what was scheduled to be discussed:

“This webinar covers compliance and regulatory considerations when using social networking sites to communicate firm business. With the advent of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, business use of social networking sites has become popular and can present supervision challenges for firms. Panelists from FINRA discuss the guidance that was recently issued in Regulatory Notice 10-06.”

If you already read Regulatory Notice 10-06 you didn’t miss too much. I will say the most valuable part was the Q&A from the audience and FINRA staff. As you might expect the FINRA team focused on the overarching guidelines but didn’t spend too much time interpreting specific situations. They made it very clear that this is the responsibility of the firm to evaluate a sites capabilities and determine what the firm’s policy will be on usage, supervision, record keeping, etc.

If you are looking for more details on how these guidelines get interpreted for use on social networks you should download the Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking Compliance.

And if you are interested in a summary of the webinar here are all of my live tweets that I posted during the session. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and send me any questions you have.

Joe Price talking about FINRA task force on social networking, 14 industry participants, came out with Notice 10-06
5 key points, record keeping, suitability, types of content, supervision & 3rd party posts
Record Keeping: rules flow from SEC standards, no way to change this. Must retain, archive and retrieve to be compliant
Record Keeping: technology is going to be the issue, FINRA spoke to firms (including Socialware – we solve this today with Risk Manager)
Record Keeping: discussing integration to enterprise archives, lot of interest in area, each firm needs to assess each solution
FINRA will not endorse any technology provider, firms need to assess the fit, determine if it delivers on compliance needs
interested in position on acceptable formats of social media messaging for FINRA filing and internal record keeping
Question: how do you file a tweet? Acceptable filing format is PDF for FINRA but not for retention (discovery issues, etc)
Suitability: 01-23 applies to social media directly, applies around recommendations, “call to action” or “suggestion”
Suitability: more specific to individual more likely it will be a recommendation, general news not a rec.
Suitability: call to action is key, not going to have prior approval requirement so be careful of what you post
Possible use of templates? Firms have libraries, drop a recommendation of an approved template, be careful of specific products
Question: “Business as such?” SEC term, not addressing it in Notice 10-06, books and records rule apply in this situation
Question: “if we decide to utilize social media we must have technology to track information” there are low tech options…
…technology is going to be key to make this scale
Question: “if a rep indicates where they work is that an advertisement?” ex: business card info on LinkedIn, likely already approved
Question: “business related inquiry on social media site?” addressing later, need to have procedures for reps to follow
Content Types: “interactive electronic forum” have def. of public appearance (i.e., chat rooms), must all be supervised
Content Types: public appearances do not need to be pre-approved
Content Types: blogs? static communication = advertisement = prior approval. However some allow for interaction
Content Type: These interactive blogs would be considered a public appearance (i.e., allowing comments)
Question: “What if firm hosts a blog and allows for 3rd party comments? What if it is a marketing brochure blog?” This is static
Content Types: key ideas, employees should have site use approved for use of logos, content, etc (the static elements)
Content Types: engaging on the sites can then be supervised post-use, these are the interactive pieces
Content Type: firms should decide on their own policies as part of this.
Content Types: key is whether or not a dialogue is supported or intended on these portions of social sites
Technology to capture content is still evolving, will there be compliance grace period? FINRA answer “No”
Firms must make the call if a vendor can meet the FINRA requirements (check out companion guide http://bit.ly/72HiGj)
Recently looking at a blog that wasn’t interactive, send email back and comment *not real-time interactive communication*
Question: “On Twitter, is initial posting interactive or static?” background content is static part, tweets are interactive
Question: “what if social site doesn’t allow for archiving?” answer don’t use it or use a 3rd party solution (i.e., Socialware)
Question: “what about broker-to-broker communication?” defined as institutional sales material (2211), already defined
Question: “How will FINRA test compliance?” FINRA provides policy guidelines, new process, examiners take steps to analyze steps …
Question: …will look for supervisory steps, will look for policies, will look for other steps that compliance is being addressed with
Supervision: interactive communications can be supervised, implement risk based principles to review communications
Question: “Use of sites for recruiting?” Yes – they are subject to FINRA advertising rules, static vs. interactive
Question: Recruiting issue – expectation of earnings. Be careful here, this is most frequent issue
Question: “can registered reps conduct pre-approved, scripted, filed FINRA presentations via a webex type of application, w/instant messaging” …
…”assuming IM’s are being supervised by a reg. principle?” webinar=static, questions=interactive (can be supervised)
Supervision: can choose to pre-approve or not, can choose to sample pre or post, lot of flexibility, you decide
Supervision: communication between research and investment bank always need review, as well as incoming complaints
Question: “do personal social sites of RR need to be monitored to ensure not being used for professional use?” …
Question: … firms need to establish procedures/policies on this, once used for business firms are responsible,
Question: “don’t want reps using Facebook, agree not to, is firm responsible to still track?” I don’t know, maybe based on person
Question: “are firms accountable for how RR identifies themselves on personal SN site” firms need to adopt clear policies on this
Question: “does review of interactive communication have to be conducted by a registered principal” can be some delegation
Should not allow RR to use social media sites if you cannot supervise it (for business purposes)
Ensure you train those that are granted access, enforce your procedures, have consequences for violations
Question: “prohibit from using certain social site features, are firms accountable if RR use them if “prohibited”?” …
Question: Answer is same. They are responsible. (Socialware can disable these features completely to protect the firm – look at Feature Level Access Control of Risk Manager)
Question: “how do you supervise an anonymous complaint?” guidance already provided, must be able to identify person & issue
3rd Party Posts: not subject to advertising rule (great clarity), situations where you can be held accountable
3rd Party Posts: adoption & entanglement, you republish or direct people to content, you just adopted it and endorsed it
3rd Party Posts: influenced posts, can you please post a testimonial to my Facebook page = entanglement
Question: “implicit endorsement of posts, rep didn’t remove a comment?” does not create an endorsement situation
Question: “RR retweets a post, is this an endorsement/entanglement” absolutely endorsement or adoption
Question: “What if you “like” a comment on Facebook” Yes absolutely that is an endorsement (FYI – Socialware can block this)
Question: “what if statement is just wrong, what should firm do?” adopt policy to enable quick action, still needs to be supervised
Adoption & entanglement is SEC concept, one-off answers not the way to go, each firm should develop a complete policy
Firms are doing a lot of different things to monitor 3rd party posts, complaints, publishing guidance
Great FINRA webinar, hope you enjoyed the live tweets, be sure to grab the Companion Guide for SN Compliance http://bit.ly/72HiGj

Look for much more from Socialware on this topic. And if you haven’t registered for a Risk Manager invitation please do so here (it is free). Of course, if you want to get started right away you can sign up for the premium version here.

Tags: 3rd party posts, Compliance, eDiscovery, Facebook, Financial Services, FINRA, LinkedIn, MySpace, Notice 10-06, Record Keeping, Risk Manager, SEC, Social Media, Social Media Archiving, Social Media Policy, Social Networking, Social Networks, Socialware, Suitability, Supervision, Twitter
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Straight to the point interview on Blogtalkradio

Posted By Chad Bockius

February 2nd, 2010

I had the pleasure of talking with Jeff Majka on Blogtalkradio this afternoon. Jeff is the Director of Marketing and Business Development for Strategic Communications Group, a nationally recognized public relations agency that develops and executes integrated PR and business development strategies for technology companies. He also runs Straight To The Point, a podcast focused on “Usable real world intelligence from marketing leaders for marketing leaders.”

You can listen to the recording (about 20 minutes long) by pressing play below.

As part of the podcast I addressed the following:

A little bit about my past experience (boring but very short)
What is Socialware? How long has it been around and what is the company’s mission? What is “social middleware” exactly? (getting to the good stuff)
What sort of challenges did you see at Socialware when you joined the company and how did you go about formulating a marketing strategy to address those challenges?
As a senior marketing executive, have you started to leverage “social media” into your overall marketing strategy. Can you tell us when and how you started to think about social media as a valuable, legitimate channel of communications?
What do you see social media developing into? What are the trends you see as social media evolves and is adopted by more and more people?
Given that your target market is marketing and communications professionals are you seeing people starting to use social media for applications other than influencer relations, such as lead generation or sales cycle support?

I want to thank Jeff again for inviting me to participate. Please have a listen and let me know what you think. Hopefully, I was able to share at least one interesting nugget for the marketing folks out there or those just interested in social media.

Tags: Blogtalkradio, Consumerization of IT, Enterprise Social Networking, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Enterprise, Social Media, Social Media Enablement, Social Media ROI, Social Middleware, Social Networks, Social ROI, Socialware, Socialware.com, Twitter
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Just released: Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking Compliance

Posted By Chad Bockius

January 26th, 2010

Yesterday FINRA surprised everyone by releasing Regulatory Notice 10-06, titled “Social Media Web Sites – Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites.” Since September of 2009, FINRA created and has been working with a Social Networking Task Force to discuss “how firms and registered representatives could use social sites for legitimate business purposes in a manner that ensures investor protection.” One of the key goals of this task force, and this new notice, is to interpret the FINRA rules with the knowledge of the changing landscape of social media to allow firms to communicate in this channel while still protecting investors.

For the most part there is nothing new in the Notice. FINRA reinforces their position on long standing electronic communication guidelines reiterating that those rules apply exactly as stated for social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For example:

Recordkeeping – firms ARE required to retain social media records that a related to a broker-dealer’s business.
Supervision – firms MUST monitor the extent to which employees are complying with policies.
Pre-approval – firms MUST define their policy for pre or post approval depending on their risk profile.

While reinforcing some of the core guidelines there were a few key clarifications that make adopting social networks a little bit easier in the financial services arena. For example:

Static vs. Dynamic content – a registered principle is still required to pre-approve any static content such as a profile or Twitter background details. Dynamic content such as wall posts constitute an interactive electronic forum and therefore firms do not have to have a registered principal approve these communications prior to use.
Third-party posts – FINRA clarified that posts by customers or other third parties are not governed by rule 2210. However, if a firm endorses one of these posts they may become attributable to the firm.

While this update is a very positive step for firms there is still the open question of how to address the compliance requirements in an automated fashion. Additionally, FINRA does not address every fine grain issue you will run into on social networks that could trigger a compliance violation. For example, does Favoriting a tweet trigger rule 2210 because of an endorsement? And more importantly how will protect your firm from these possible violations?

To help firms accelerate their adoption of social networking tools Socialware has released the Companion Guide to FINRA/SEC Social Networking Compliance. This guide provides a detailed analysis of social networks and how their capabilities can trigger regulatory rules. Furthermore, it provides a clear checklist of requirements to evaluate social networking compliance solutions.

For more details you can read the press release and download the guide now.

Tags: Compliance, eDiscovery, Facebook, Financial Services, FINRA, LinkedIn, Risk Manager, SEC, Social Media, Social Media Policy, Social Networks, Socialware, Twitter
Posted in Best Practices, Compliance, News, Social Middleware, eDiscovery | 5 Comments »

Government, Social Networks and Freedom of Information

Posted By Chad Bockius

January 21st, 2010

I came across an article yesterday, titled Twitter and Government Transparency. In it Andy Opsahl outlines the potential challenges social networks are creating for government entities. The question being raised is whether or not activity on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn need to be archived and available for records requests.

As Melinda Catapano points out in the article “if this is connected to official agency work, you better be able to produce that record.” But aren’t these consumer sites, just used for personal use? The answer is it depends. While the lines are blurring between personal and professional use on these sites one thing is clear. If you are using them to communicate agency work you can be assured that it is going to be governed by the same set of principles that govern other communications

In fact, Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen recently issued an opinion in which he states that electronic communications made by elected officials are public records, even when they are posted on social networking sites. Van Hollen states that the Wisconsin Public Records laws applies whenever the content is connected to the official’s purpose or function.

One option many agencies have employed is to simply block access to these sites. That course of action flies in the face of The President’s Open Government Directive. These sites are the perfect platform to create transparency, participation and collaboration. The Bright Side of Government recently did a blog post that discusses this exact topic. Of course with increased levels of participation comes the need to comply with the federal guidelines such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Public Information Act.

Catapano admits that “she, like numerous other CIOs, didn’t have a clue as to how to archive external social networking posts”. She goes further by saying “it would probably be a good master’s thesis because everybody needs those answers and everybody seems to be avoiding the problem.”

Well there is good news Melinda. One you are not alone in that other industries are struggling with this same challenge. Here is a quick snapshot of the issues that financial services organizations face around embracing social networks. Second, there actually is an automated solution to archiving social network activity and content. Socialware’s Risk Manager solution was built from the ground up to solve this problem and many others that can arise from business related usage of social networks.

Today we are currently working with a number of government agencies and look forward to sharing their success stories over the coming weeks and months. In the mean time if you are interested in signing up you can request a free invitation here.

Tags: Compliance, Customer Service, eDiscovery, Facebook, Freedom of Information Act, LinkedIn, Open Governement, Public Information Act, Regulatory Industries, Risk Manager, Social Media, Social Media Policy, Social Middleware, Social Networking Enablement, Twitter
Posted in Compliance, News, Social Middleware | No Comments »

When is a social media policy not enough?

Posted By Chad Bockius

January 20th, 2010

As more and more companies race to adopt social technologies they inevitably ask the question, “what should our policy be?” Depending on the industry and the company you will find a wide range of policies. Some are a few paragraphs and some are literally pages long. If you are looking for some examples here is a great list of policies across a number of industries. Additionally, here is a more specific list of government related social media policies.

I will be the first to say that policies are important when it comes to opening up the social web to your employees. But a word of caution, don’t stop after pressing the save button. In a recent report from Deloitte they posed the question to employees “what is your company’s policy when it comes to use of social networking channels”? Here were the responses:

26% – There are specific guidelines as to what you can and cannot say online in relations to the company and/or client matter
7% – The policy is to use your discretion when it comes to posting comments and opinions on the world wide web and social networking sites
11% – There is a policy, but I don’t know what it is
23% – There is no policy
24% – Don’t know if there is a policy

Note that 58% either don’t have a policy or don’t know what it is. This should be concerning. After all if your company believes it’s important enough to create a policy isn’t it just as critical to ensure the policy is followed? On that topic how will you monitor it to ensure compliance? In regulated industries like financial services and government this is even more critical as regulators require that certain activity be captured and archived.

The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (IIABA) recently published a great resource titled “Creating a Social Web Policy for Your Independent Agency”. The report offers some very good recommendations and detailed steps on how to go about creating a social media policy. However, there are two recommendations that I would like to expand on.

The first is related to “compliance with federal and state discovery, document retention and other laws and agency procedures.” In the guide they state “employees should copy and paste any client specific social media communication into the agency management system and record an activity in the same manner they would in using other media.” While that is one way to capture and retain the data it is enormously unproductive and it also raises questions around completeness of the archive.

What happens if someone forgets to take these steps or decides they simply don’t want to? A better approach would be to leverage automated solutions, like our Risk Manager product as an example, that sits between the end user and the social networks to automatically capture and retain the content. Not only will this eliminate the manual work around data capture and retention but it also guarantees completeness.

The second is around advertising statutes and regulations. They correctly state that “social media posts are communications subject to various federal and state laws/regulations, including characterization as advertising under some state laws, so employees should make sure they are complying with all such laws in using social media.” This is correct. The detail that is missing though is how you will comply in this new environment. Again I’ll go back to our Risk Manager product as a mechanism to help ensure compliance on this point and many others.

I encourage you to download the IIABA report if you have not created your social media policy. If you are looking for more information on how the FINRA/SEC rules impact social network use you should take a look at this summary as well. Last be sure you have the tools in place to make it as easy as possible for your employees to meet the policy and compliance guidelines as they start to use these powerful sites.

Tags: Compliance, eDiscovery, Facebook, Financial Services, FINRA, LinkedIn, Risk Manager, SEC, Social Media, Social Media Policy, Social Middleware, Social Networks, Socialware, Twitter
Posted in Compliance, News, Social Middleware, eDiscovery | No Comments »

New Cisco Report: Need for Social Middleware

Posted By Chad Bockius

January 15th, 2010

Cisco recently commissioned and published a report to study how organizations use consumer social networking tools. The results were both promising and shocking. The report reveals the both the value of adopting these tools in the enterprise and also the risks that need to be addressed through stronger governance and IT involvement.

Here are a few of the study highlights.

The first set of findings point to the increased use and integration of consumer-based social networking tools in the enterprise.

“75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.”

This part is old news. Organizations are racing to adopt social networking and microblogging tools to help drive the business and it seems there is a new article about it every day.

“Social networking tools are spreading into core areas of the value chain, including the marketing and communications, human relations, and customer service departments.”

Organizations are now moving beyond social networking silos. They’ve already proven there is value in tapping these tools as stand alone solutions and now they are looking for ways to integrate social into their enterprise processes and systems. This is the next big wave.

While usage and integration is skyrocketing, companies have been lax in regards to governance and involving IT in their decisions. Ultimately, this creates a great deal of risk and exposure.

“Only 1 in 7 companies noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes, indicating that the potential risks associated with these tools in the enterprise are either overlooked or not well understood.”

This is likely a result of the unbridled growth of these tools and all the buzz associated with them. But like any good business decision, companies need to step back, understand what they are trying to achieve, evaluate the risks and put the tools in place to manage the program. I will say that the companies we’ve been working with in regulated industries are taking a very programmatic approach to adopting social. While other industries may not face the same challenges they can learn a lot from these institutions.

“Only 1 in 5 participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking technologies in the enterprise.”

This point has come up before. If you fall in this camp be sure to check out this list of sample social media policies. As of today there are over 115 examples. In addition, here is a great list of government related social media policies.

Be careful in thinking that a policy alone is all you need. Deloitte found in an Ethics & Workplace Survey that 49% of employees say a company policy won’t change how they behave online. As a result you should evaluate tools to help you monitor activity to protect your employees and your brand.

“Due to the unstructured nature of social networking, companies continue to struggle with policy creation and adoption, as copying an established governance process from other, more structured areas (for example, information technology) often doesn’t work for social networking.”

Until recently companies have had two choices when it comes to social networking sites. Open the floodgates or completely block access. Since these are consumers sites there are no built in management controls for the enterprise. This is one reason why social middleware has become such a hot topic. With it companies can apply structure, define policies, control access and protect their brand on these open, consumer sites.

“Businesses also find difficulty in striking the right balance between the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some degree of corporate oversight.”

We hear this a lot from our clients as well. On Twitter users can easily create multiple personas. However, on Facebook and LinkedIn you are only allowed a single account under their terms of use. As a result there is no way to separate your personal activity from the professional on these sites.

Again the need for social middleware becomes clear. Adopting this middle layer creates the ability for employees to choose whether or not content is personal vs. professional. As a result companies can implement policies that give employees the ability to choose what category the content falls under and as a result how that content will be monitored, retained and managed by the enterprise.

“Only 1 in 10 respondents noted direct IT involvement in externally facing social networking initiatives. Although the IT department is typically not involved as a primary decision maker, respondents did recognize the need for these tools to scale and properly integrate with existing business processes to reap maximum benefits.”

There are two items of note here. First for companies to realize the full benefits of these tools they will need direct integration to their people, processes and systems. Building loose connections in a one-off manner to each of these sites it not the answer. IT will want a single point of integration to marry enterprise processes with the top sites of today and those that will be the next Facebook tomorrow.

The second reason it is critical to involve IT is that these sites have a very real impact on the infrastructure of the enterprise. A report from Blue Coat noted “a company based in the US was having problems connecting with its South Africa office” due to the fact that “the bandwidth on its WAN link was completely consumed and it found that 75% of that traffic was Facebook.”

Of course blocking access is not the answer. In that same report they highlighted a customer that “blocked Facebook and within 48 hours they had to unblock it. Marketing and HR had complained that it was critical to them getting the job done.”

There has to be a happy medium. Companies will be forced to open up access to these tools but at the same time they need to manage that access. One solution to the bandwidth problem is to govern access to those parts of the site that consume the most, like videos and photos. This way you meet the needs of the business by giving access while not crippling the rest of the network.

In addition to the analysis in the report there are some great perspectives by industry leaders on why adopting these social tools will ultimately be a driver of success and competitive advantage.

“Companies who will succeed in embracing the tremendous power of social networking will be those who design a collaborative IT architecture capable of supporting the use of these technologies and mitigating the risks they pose.”
Nick Earle, senior vice president, Cisco Services

“Businesses need to embrace social media not only to remain competitive, but also to continue to attract top talent. The next generation of leaders will be exceptionally savvy with these tools, so 3M is using social media externally to help us with recruiting. Several of the graduates we hired this year specifically told us that they hadn’t considered 3M before they saw our employer profile on social media.”
Hugh Murphy, e-Channels, 3M U.K. and Ireland

Thanks Cisco for a great report on a hot topic. I’m looking forward to part 2.

Tags: Cisco, Collaboration, Consumerization of IT, Customer Service, Enterprise Social Networking, Facebook, LinkedIn, Risk Manager, Social Enterprise, Social Middleware, Social Networks, Twitter
Posted in Best Practices, Compliance, Consumerization of IT, Marketing, News, Social Applications, Social Middleware | No Comments »

Building a culture of passion, excellence and fun

Posted By Chris Richter

January 14th, 2010

Do you build a company culture or does it emerge by making the right decisions about the people that you make part of your early team? The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle, i.e. having the right group involved with a company that have a shared passion is critical but you also have to lay a solid foundation of guiding principals and infrastructure to support it to really foster it and make it truly exceptions. And of course, truly exceptional is what we are aiming for here at Socialware.

So what does that mean…what does it look like…how do you support it and what can we learn from great cultures that we are all familiar with like Google and more local to Austin, Bazaarvoice.

For Socialware it all starts with the team. We are looking for and hiring the top talent across every group. Our goal is to build a company that people are passionate about. And also to create an environment that is fun, fosters teamwork and is ultimately a place that people are excited to come into each and every day.

To help along these lines we’ve taken a few steps:

Couches, Yes. Desks, No.
Reception desks are so yesteryear. Every great Web 2.0 company that we have visited has a comfortable lounging, socializing, gaming area at the front of their office…we are no exception. Nothing brings a company together better than literally sitting around and ideating or just hanging out and gaming together.

Kindle anyone
Taking a page from great companies such as Zappos, we wanted to encourage our team members to read and absorb the things that we believe. We took the approach of loading up Kindles for folks to grab and read at any time.

DJ booth
Why a DJ booth…first of all it’s cool. More importantly, we wanted a novel way to rally the team and in our case each event is associated with a song snippit and the team members that drove it get to “mix it up” to announce it. BTW, I’m pretty sure we beat Twitter to the punch with this one.

Whiteboards everywhere
For ideas to flow and transparency to happen we decided that painting our walls with anything short of whiteboard paint would not suffice. As we say around the office “if it is white you can write”. Thanks Ideapaint!

“The Best Around” award
In any culture it is key to single out individual accomplishment. Our version is “The Best Around” award aptly titled for this classic number from a Karate Kid movie whose sound track was indelibly logged in our CTO’s mind

Maybe most importantly we are all about drinking our own Kool-Aid or eating our own dog food whichever saying you prefer. As the Social Middleware company we are fully leveraging our own solutions.

For instance, our Social Stream is driven by our Social Marketer product allowing our employees to separate their personal social networking posts from their professional ones and to promote our company and products using their existing social profiles.

We are just getting started and realize it isn’t the destination but the journey. So far that journey has been a blast and we will continue to work to make Socialware a place that everyone loves to work.

By the way, if you have an interest in working in this kind of environment let us know. We have immediate openings which you will find at our jobs page.

Tags: Austin, Bazaarvoice, Collaboration, Culture, Employees, Social Middleware, Socialware, Socialware.com
Posted in News, Social Middleware | No Comments »

3 SEO Strategies for Social Media, the next frontier of search

Posted By Chad Bockius

January 13th, 2010

Guest post by Jeff Watts, CEO of Strongpages, a search engine marketing firm specializing in making customer acquisition campaigns profitable.

With the recent deals between search engines and social networks, a frequent question is what impact this has on search engine optimization (SEO) initiatives and on social media in the marketing mix. Because content on social networks such as Facebook has – until recently – been hidden from search engines, the user bases of search and social sites have been relatively distinct. Now that they are beginning to integrate, it is important to understand that social media complements, rather than cannibalizes, search engine traffic. More importantly if you aren’t engaging with social you are losing traffic to your competition.

Here are three ways to improve your SEO initiatives with social media.

1. Keep your site fresh
One important SEO variable for the major search engines is site freshness. Search engines love new content. While it is true that freshness is not a requirement, it is indisputable that the search engines have – for a long time – given favorable treatment to new, fresh pages of high value content. One of the best ways to keep your site fresh is to aggregate posts from social networks on your site.

Consider a page on your site where you aggregate all of your most recent posts on, say, an upcoming conference that your company is hosting. By pulling the related data from the social networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and making it visible in a search friendly format on your site, you make your site fresher and more relevant for searches on terms related to that conference.

Companies have learned that blogs are an easy way to constantly add fresh content and activity on the social networks is no different. The key is pulling the data into your site versus having it locked away on these third party sites.

2.Increase your shelf space
SEO is no longer just a competition for who makes it to the top of a simple list of 10 results. Instead, there are many places to be found. Consider a typical Google search results page where you have not only paid and organic search results, but also image, video, product, and news results.

Most recently, Google has begun to include Twitter content inline with its main search results. The following link appeared on a recent Google search results page for “Ford Transit Connect”. This Twitter post – with a just a tiny investment of the time it took to post – received the same level of visibility that the normal organic and normal paid results received on this search results page.

If you want to win the battle for organic traffic be sure you are publishing a wide range of content from social media, to video to photos. And don’t forget that “search” is no longer just about Google, Yahoo and Bing. People are now searching for content directly on Twitter or Facebook. You want to make sure you are represented there as well.

3. Expand your visibility

It’s obvious that some of your site traffic will be free and some will be paid. However, when planning your marketing mix, consider that some of your free traffic from organic search can be influenced by additional free traffic from the social networks. That is, the content that you are actively developing through Facebook and Twitter, will also positively influence your organic search rankings. In other words: a tweet can drive traffic directly from Twitter, but it also carries residual value that can increase your organic search traffic. For one client, traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter represented almost 10% of their total last month, with close to 30% coming from organic Google traffic.

Social networks are terrific sources of relevant traffic, and by taking care to post and aggregate high value content from them, you maximize your search engine visibility as well.

Tags: Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, Marketing, Organic Traffic, SEO, Social Marketer, Social Networks, Social ROI, Twitter, Yahoo
Posted in Best Practices, Marketing | No Comments »

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