Our work in social media strategy development and social media implementation has helped us come across a wide set of resources. This is just a small list of learning resources developed by Mark Holmgren and Brent MacKinnon that can help you understand certain applications as well as facilitate some strategic thinking within your organization. I hope it is helpful.
The Facebook Guide Book
http://mashable.com/guidebook/facebook/
This guide book provides training and resource in the following areas: Facebook 101, Managing your Facebook Wall, Facebook for Businesses (or organizations), using Facebook applications, and advanced uses of Facebook.
The Twitter Guide Book
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/
This guide book provides a great introduction to key learnings like hashtags, retweets, how to build your Twitter community, how to manage your Twitter stream, branding, and much more. Instructional and informative videos are offered as well.
How to Create a Successful Company Blog
http://mashable.com/2010/03/01/company-blog/
Offered up by Mark Suster, a Partner at GRP Partners, this article contains 6 excellent ideas on how to find and sustain your `blogging` voice.
The Unofficial User`s Manual for Updating Your Facebook Page
http://www.johnhaydon.com/2010/08/unofficial-users-manual-updating-facebook-pages/
This is an excellent resource to use along side of the Facebook Guidebook and is full of tips and how-to`s. The author is social media expert, John Haydon.
Facebook How-to`s (from The Social Media Guide)
http://thesocialmediaguide.com.au/category/facebook-social_media/how-to/
These are more advanced tips such as how to add a Like button to your website, how to add Facebook administrators, how to send RSS feeds to Facebook (and Twitter).
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/t/about
This page on YouTube will connect you to everything you need to know about using YouTube, placing videos on your website and blog, YouTube feeds and more.
The Social Media Glossary from the Social Media Guide.
http://thesocialmediaguide.com.au/2009/09/01/social-media-glossary/
Social Media Glossary from the Buzz Bin
http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/2009/02/24/social-media-glossary/
Glossary of Blogging and Social Media Terms from ConverStations
http://www.converstations.com/blogging_glossary.html
ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLICY
Like all important business practice, social media work requires a policy and procedural framework to help mitigate risk while also enabling staff to get their work done. This is new territory for most organizations. Because of the public nature of social media and the fact that most employees are on the web tweeting and social networking, identifying a governance framework is a challenge.
There are some excellent resources to help you. One we highly recommend is Social Media, Risk, and Policies for Associations (http://www.socialfish.org/whitepaper#policies).
Social media policy development can become as complex and arduous as one makes them. The example policy in the aforementioned document is simple, easy to read, and comprehensive, and for the most part could be adapted and adopted by many organizations. In addition to developing a policy that governs how staff deploy social media, there could be legal or other related issues that require a policy. For example…
- Are there copyright issues to address?
- Do you need a policy and related procedures to use people’s photographs, videos,
artwork, etc.? - What is the exit procedure for staff from social media applications when they leave your employment?
- Should you post a privacy policy on all of your sites?
There are likely other questions to consider. In the excitement of launching social web strategies it might be easy to put off the social media policy work, which admittedly is far less exciting than getting on with the work. It is important, however, to be developing social media policy at the same time you are developing your strategies.
