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 of my contacts at Google (i.e. owners of YouTube) have recently informed me that the branded YouTube channel (formerly $50,ooo to setup), is now being offered for free to all government departments (this includes the Canadian Government of course).

What’s the difference between a branded and non-branded channel?

Here are the additional features that you will get:

• Auto-play – Video plays immediately when someone goes to the channel
• Other channels - Feature up to 16 other channels on a brand channel
• Channel banner  - 960×150 top branding banner on a brand channel (image map supported)
• Side column image  – 300×250 image on left hand side of channel
• Branding box – Custom text module that supports rich text and hyperlinked text
• Contest module support – PDF with more info
• Carousel support – PDF with more info
• Mosaic support - View Demo
• Video wall support – View Demo
• Custom gadget support – 960×460 (full-width) new recommended size for custom gadgets
• 1 MB background image – User channels have background size limit of 256KB
• Channel private setting - Brand Channel owners can set their channels to private. User channels are always forced to public.
• Google analytics – Brand channels can be opted into GA automatically. Gadgets require separate GA tags
• 1×1 ad tag support – Served via DFP. Can include pixels, tracking tags (i.e. Spotlight), or research tags (i.e. Comscore). View the approved vendor list
• Simple 1×1 support - No cookie support / simple hosted image call
• Video page banner – 300×45 branding banner that lives on all advertiser watch pages / clicks to brand channel

Sure enough, a few Government of Canada departments have already jumped onto this. Especially the ones that were already using the regular YouTube channel offering. A great initiative is being put on today (November 9th, 2009) by Veteran’s Affairs. They are using YouTube  to reach young  Canadians in the lead up to  the November 11^th Remembrance Day ceremonies. This morning they launched their French and English Brand Channels and also reserved the homepage of www.youtube.com. These “homepage takeovers” on YouTube can deliver anywhere from 5-8 million impressions in a single day (according to my Google contact). Of course the more important question is, so what? What action was taken as a result? This is where a well though out web analytics strategy will come into play, which I surely hope Veteran’s Affairs has in place. I’d love to see what actions incoming YouTube web traffic performs on the Veteran’s Affairs website, or if at the end of the day, more people are wearing poppies.

I’m back from a perfect honeymoon in Maui and ready to roll as usual, with the only difference being that I am now writing officially as a married man. Feels nice.

One thing I noticed upon my return was the amount of changes to my everyday social media tools of choice. Leaving the online space for two weeks feels like a year when you’re used to everyday engagement. Here are a few popular tools and apps that have recently been updated (plus three new ones). Be sure to get the latest version(s) if you haven’t already.

• Tweetdeck: New Tweetdeck Directory and ability to drag and drop links into your tweets. Also has improved integration with Twitter and MySpace accounts. Still my dashboard of choice for all status updates.
• iTunes: Completely new iTunes Store interface and Podcast directory. No more popularity index. Very useful podcast search engine though. Still quite slow on the PC platform when compared to an equivalent Mac.
• Twitter.com: The main landing page has been updated to reflect Twitter’s most powerful feature, search! Good move. Better late than never.
• Google Wave: The long awaited Google Wave has officially launched (by invitation only at this point). I’m not ready to offer a review at the moment but be sure to request an invite on their website to try it out yourself.
• Google SideWiki: Another tool launched by Google that will grow very quickly in my opinion. Basically it’s a sidebar wiki, which allows users to make comments on any web page. Why do I think this will be popular if many existing plugins already offer this functionality? Hmmm, how about the fact that this one belongs to Google!
• Klout: A great new tool for analyzing and comparing your Twitter stats and level of influence. There is a one time wait of at least 30 minutes for your profile to be analyzed.

Let me know if I missed any big ones.

When I first launched the CEPSM social media marketing workshop in April, 2008, I really had no idea that it would garner such a positive response. In fact, we quickly stopped going through the logistical hassle of organizing public workshops since there was more than enough demand for private ones (organizations inviting me in). CEPSM was never meant to be solely in the workshop business, but this way all logistical items were taken care of by the client. However, over the last year, CEPSM has been getting numerous requests from individuals in the public and non-profit sectors to once again offer a social media marketing workshop that is open to the public. Well guess what, we listened.

To solve our logistical dilemma , we decided to partner with an organization that has been conducting workshops successfully for decades, The Centre of Excellence for Communications. Yes, I know it’s ironic that we happen to share similar names, however don’t let that confuse you. The CEC’s core business is workshops, whereas CEPSM’s core business is the consulting side (although training is part of our consulting process). I’ll stop confusing you though. The bottom line is this, on November 25-26, 2009 CEPSM/CEC are jointly launching the 2-day Social Media Strategies for the Public Sector workshop. The intent is to offer this workshop in major cities across Canada for the first year and then see how it evolves from there.

Those of you familiar with my 1-day workshop will notice the switch to 2-days. I wanted to change things up a bit and add a hands-on session where each participant can get their hands dirty by actually using all of the tools I introduce during Day 1.  Further still, we will be using a live Google Doc to fill out certain sections of the workbook collaboratively.I like to practice what I preach as much as I possibly can. This is a great opportunity for me to do so.

For those of you interested in receiving this training as part of a University Certificate, be sure to see if our Professional Certificate in Public Sector Marketing course offered through Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business is a right fit for you. I’m really looking forward to being part of the instructional team this year!

Ok then, if you have any questions whatsoever, fire me an email or give me a call. Also, to stay up to date on my speaking schedule visit the Upcoming Speaking Engagements page on my blog. And yes, we will still be offering our private workshops for those interested. This is not meant to replace them.

About a year ago, well before the era of re-tweeting, I wrote a post entitled “Social Media Document Garage Sale” which received quite a bit of attention according to my blog stats at the time. The basic intent of the post was to provide you with download links to various white papers, presentations, reports and studies on social media that I had accumulated to date and that I could freely distribute (without violating any policies or copyrights). Another year has passed, and sure enough  my “3rd party reports” folder has once again piled up. I figure there is no point in keeping this stuff to myself so I’m providing links for you below. It’s also partly because I’m lazy and don’t want to be emailing individual reports to people when responding to questions. I’d rather point people at this blog post from now on.

I realize that the phrase “garage sale” doesn’t really capture the fact that these documents are free (it’s more of a spring cleaning), however I like comparing this to a garage sale so that I don’t have to claim responsibility if something is no good. Hopefully you find some gems, I know there are a few in there.

I have read most of these, however , some of them I merely skimmed through. Rather than providing you with my review, I’ll let you judge on your own and thus only provide you with the title and author. If, for some reason, I have made the mistake of putting something up that I shouldn’t have (e.g. something that was free for a limited time only), then by all means let me know so that I can remove it. Enjoy!

• Using Media Intelligence Tools to Drive Communications Success – CNW Group
• Social Media & Business Marketing – Mike Volpe (HubSpot)
• Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments – UK Government
• In with the Old, in with the New – Ryan Singel
• State of the Twittersphere 2009 – Hubspot
• Processing Personal Data Across Borders – Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
• Concepts and features of Government 2.0 and 3.0 – The National Information Society Agency
• The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications – Josh Gordon (SocialMediaToday)
• Twitter Success Stories – Marketing Profs
• Synchronizing Social Networks – Marketing Over Coffee
• Social Media Primer - Unknown Author
• About Face – The Advance Guard
• Blog Response Flow Chart – U.S Air Force
• How Obama did it with Digital – Marketing Profs
• Beyond Westminster Governance: Bringing Politics and Public Service into the Networked Era – Jeffrey Roy
• Networked Citizens: Power and Responsibility at Work – Peter Bradwell & Richard Reeves
• The Social Pulpit: Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit – Edelman
• Reinventing Government for the 21st Century – Unknown Author
• Using the Social Web to find Work – Chris Brogan
• How Canadians’ Use of the Internet Affects Social Life and Civic Participation – Statistics Canada

I have a few more from some of my clients which I did not post up since I am unsure if they have been made public yet. When I know for sure I will put them up in a separate post. Happy printing and/or reading!