I’m having a challenge. I know I’m not the only one since this is a much discussed problem among various organizations in our field. I’m pretty sure there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution but I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Our consulting organization CEPSM has a Twitter account (@cepsm); and so do nearly all of the consultants that work here. That being said, we all primarily use our individual Twitter accounts (e.g. @mikekujawski) to build community around our passion/business since individual accounts always beat corporate accounts when it comes to building and fostering professional relationships. So the question is, what is the point of using the CEPSM corporate account when we are all actively involved in two-way business engagement on the same topic via our individual professional accounts?

[Note: this does not really apply to large organizations, which likely have the resources to staff a full-time individual (or team) to manage the official corporate account 24/7. Also, let's assume that we all understand and follow the basic rules of social media engagement , i.e. things like ethics, conflict of interest and common sense.]

Even if we each set up two accounts in a tool like TweetDeck, and have the option of specifying which account (or both) we want each tweet to be sent from (e.g. @cepsm or @mikekujawski), we still run into problems. For example, if I tweet something that has nothing to do with business (e.g my bungee jump this weekend), then I can send it through my personal channel only. One problem with this is that filtering @cepsm tweets to “corporate only/non-personal” tweets turns the @cepsm tweet stream into a dry business-only channel. One of the most effective uses of the Twitter channel from a business perspective is to bring back the “human” element and foster non-linear conversation. Even though my personal side is not necessarily reflective of everyone at CEPSM, everyone that works here can be contributing their personal tweets into the @cepsm stream as well to form a holistic aggregate persona of the CEPSM brand. This seems like a valid solution at first, however if we start sending most of our tweets via both channels, then our audience will begin to get duplicate tweets in their monitoring streams since they likely follow @cepsm as well. In my case this is quite a big problem since 80% of my personal account tweets are 100% relevant to CEPSM (i.e. have to do with strategic marketing, digital engagement, social media, etc…).

There are 3 main approaches I see to this problem, however none of them solve it 100%.

1. Don’t have a corporate account, but rather a “Twitter List” of all corporate employees in addition to their individual accounts. RISK: No official corporate account is not good for web presence and visibility of the brand.
2. Have a corporate account in addition to individual accounts and only use it for official news releases (with a human voice at least as opposed to corporate talk). Create a Twitter.com background image that lists all personal accounts of consultants that work at CEPSM.  RISK: The two-way engagement that we all actively practice in our personal accounts is not reflected in the corporate account.
3. Have a corporate account in addition to individual accounts and send all tweets to both accounts except for tweets that have nothing to do with our industry. RISK: Some people that follow both our individual and corporate accounts will receive duplicate tweets.

What do you think, am I missing some obvious solution? Keep in mind that I am referring to organizations that do not have a dedicated resource for the company account but rather have multiple individual professional accounts. Therefore, mainly small and medium consulting firms in a specific niche industry.

A few weeks ago our organization (CEPSM) sent out an e-newsletter to our database gauging the level of interest for a new workshop we are thinking of offering. We’ve received some pretty positive initial feedback so I figured I’d test this out a bit further with you, my blog readers ( if you don’t already subscribe to the CEPSM newsletter that is).

Here’s the scoop:

Over the course of the last few years of working with our clients, we have found that in general, marketing and/or communications professionals interact with a wide array of stakeholders (i.e. agencies, translators, consultants such as us, etc…) on a weekly, if not daily basis. Often times, what seems like basic knowledge to these stakeholders(i.e. file formats, resolutions, basic copy & paste HTML embedding, etc…) is poorly understood by marketers and communicators. As a result a great deal of back and forth time is wasted on emails and meetings that could have been avoided.We are currently exploring opportunities to create high-level web design and graphic design courses (in partnership with another organization) specifically designed for strategic public sector and non-profit marketing and communications professionals that have received little training on the various technological tools and applications that could potentially make their day-to-day jobs much easier.

What I need you to do:

Fill out this ridiculously short online survey to help us determine if there is a need for this sort of thing or if we’re all crazy.

A great article just came out in the Wall Street journal on some of the new applications coming out on Facebook. Here is a list of some interesting new ones that were mentioned along with others that caught my own eye. Note that only the first two are from the public sector.

• Causes – Lets you start and join the causes you care about. Donations to causes can benefit over a million registered 501(c)(3) non-profits.
• Ripple – This is essentially a way of donating to a charity without spending any of your own money. Simply, ad sponsors give money to ripple for any ads viewed. Ripple donates 100% of that money to charity (we hope).
• Neighborhoods -This application uses the founding company’s broker-defined neighborhood system to help Facebook members meet other people who live near them and share local information and photos. It also shows properties for sale in the neighborhood from any of Point2′s broker and agent members, which the company says number about 140,000 in 86 countries.
• MyStyle – Lets Facebook’s fashionistas place on their profile pages pictures of items they like from the retailer’s site, such as Oscar de la Renta dresses.
• Trips - Provides a place where groups can set travel dates, create itineraries and post messages to each other. Less than two weeks ago, SideStep added a search box to its application, which, the company says, now drives 2,000 visits to its site each day — where people can search for airplane tickets, hotels and rental cars. SideStep plans to enhance the application and, eventually, show some targeted ads.
• Visual Bookshelf - Helps Facebook members find new books to read by getting recommendations and reading reviews written by their friends.

Upon first glance, none of these bring anything drastically new to the table. However, what is interesting is that the barriers to entry in developing them were significantly reduced. Why? No proprietary software was needed, promotional costs were drastically reduced and community was formed overnight thanks to the power of social media.

Anyone else know any good ones?

I have always been a big advocate of websites that have a clear call to action based on their objectives. The most popular design I see is the “1-2-3″ step concept. Example sites are: www.smartmoves.ca, www.mycanadaday.com, www.ready.gov. Can someone tell me what the disadvantages are of using this sort of strategy? I want to be able to play the devil’s advocate. As far as I see it, the 1-2-3 concept is fully measurable and helps address the short attention spans of today’s web surfers.