This cross channel network can be quite eclectic, which is great. You share and learn about things you might have never seen before.  These connections also hold amazing potential value for your company – as well as potential risks.

The Delicate Work/Personal Social Media Dance

Let’s say you aren’t happy at your job, but your boss strongly “encourages” you to Tweet and Facebook about a new product release. At best, your connections and tweeps might think you are insincere or just talking corporate speak. At worst, you may actually come off insincere or negative, both hurting your job security and your personal credibility.

But many companies are trying to extend their social media reach via their employees. This is a valid request and strategy, as you can vastly increase your audience via your employees. And if you have a strong culture of happy employees, this can bring wonderful engagement and a large audience for your message.

So how do you balance this both as an employee or someone managing social media?

Here’s 6 steps you can take personally and/or as a social media manager. 

1. Focus on Happy Employees Over Social Media Posting

I personally find it off-putting when a company leans on their individual contributors to use their own personal Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, Tumblr blogs and the like to advocate for a new product.

I have found that if your people are excited about the company and the product, they’ll do that on their own.  And when they do, their enthusiasm will shine through.

So, I strongly advise against forcing your folks to post about new releases or company announcements. Remind folks, sure; we all need a reminder now and again.  But many, maybe even most, of your team created those accounts for themselves, and may resent being asked to use them for the company’s benefit.

It’s not unlike the time one of my cousins brought a bunch of knick-knacks to a family Thanksgiving dinner, trying to get us to buy them.  Everyone was uncomfortable. You don’t want to be the awkward cousin at the feast.

2. Create Clear Social Media Guidelines for Employees

It’s hard for employees to know how to amplify your company posts if you don’t provide the guidelines and suggestions for them to follow. Make sure you have clearly written policies and rules of the road. Show examples of how to post on different networks. And remind them of your PR guidelines why you are at it.

For example, if a journalist starts a conversation on Twitter with you, contact your PR manager, so your tweet does not show up in the next article :-).

3. Provide Pre-Written Posts and Images

Make it easy for employee to help augment your message by creating pre-written tweets and posts. They can always personalize them if they want, but the easier you make it for them to post something (and stay within guidelines), the more likely they will be to actually do it.

4. Use Separate Accounts for Work and Personal Personas

One strategy some people use is creating separate accounts specifically for work-related information or for personal connections.  This can work if you feel uncomfortable pulling work-related stuff into your personal social media spaces and want to create work-only spaces.

This does not have to mean you have two Twitter accounts. You might just use the different networks in different ways.  For example, work stuff on LinkedIn and Twitter, personal stuff on Facebook and Instagram.

Regardless of how you balance this, make sure you are not being completely different across your work and personal social media personas.

You still need to be “you” on all social media. So, don’t overdo the corporate mode on your professional social media handles, and don’t get too personal, rude, opinionated or foul mouthed on your personal social handles.

As I like to remind my children, what you say on Facebook can be found, even if you think potential employers will only read your Twitter feed.

5. Target Your Message, but Don’t Assume

In a similar vein, it’s important to target your information to people you know will find it interesting but not to assume only they will be interested.

People are following you because of who and what you are. Whether friends, colleagues, gamers, schoolmates or people you met through your network, they pay attention to you or connect with you based on their relationship with you, a mutual interest or because they just like what you have to say.

Take time to target your message to who (and what channel) would find it most interesting. When you have a piece of info or something you believe will be interesting to a particular audience or subset of your social media list, make sure they know about it.

For example, when I am talking about marketing-specific topics, I cc my (virtual) friend A.H., knowing not only will he probably find it interesting or at least give it a look, he may very well re-tweet it to his own list of followers, expanding my reach!

Same goes for the posts you publish for your company. Take time to make sure your message fits your audience.

6. Enjoy the Network Effect

Whatever you do, have fun with it.

This is an opportunity to break out of your “echo chamber”, your “bubble”; the insular world we all sometimes get into at work.

So for example, there are an endless list of issues I have faced repeatedly in my time creating content in high tech over the last 20+ years.  But while these issues may be old and tired for me, that’s not necessarily true for many people on my various social media lists.

My Uncle, living on an island for the last 30 years, may not know a lot about high bandwidth home networking options.  My friend the psychologist and traditional medicine practitioner is probably unaware of some of the advantages he might find in using the cloud to store his patient data.  My engineer friend in Montana may actually be surprised about the advantages I’ve found when content and marketing teams work together.  And on and on.

And you never know what might peak someone’s interest, and when they might re-tweet, or re-post, or just link to your information, exposing it to their eclectic network of friends.  And that gets your info out of your local bubble.

Time to Tango!

As you think about how much and what work items you want to amplify via your personal social media handles, here’s some things to keep in mind:

• Don’t be afraid to post about your work stuff on your personal accounts
• Do be careful to not sound like a shill; find a good balance between enthusiasm and annoying boosterism
• Don’t force your folks to post company stuff via their personal accounts; suggest it when appropriate
• Do provide guidelines and pre-written posts to make it easy for those who do want to share with their connections.
• Do target your posts/tweets/etc. appropriately
• Do enjoy yourself – after all, social networks are there for fun (in addition to hard work!)

Yes, it’s a little extra work, but in the end will pay off.  So get out there and use your social media accounts, and provide the encouragement and structure to your employees who can/will extend your messages.

The post Personal versus Corporate Social Media Personas appeared first on Rival IQ.

So, the big question is: how do we create engaging social media content that is fun to read and drives interaction while still adhering to corporate style guides?

Why Do We Need Corporate Content Guidelines?

Whether you are developing content for marketing, technical pubs, sales, or other areas, guidelines ensure you use the same terminology. For example, do you call your hardware “devices”, “systems”, “components”, or what?  Do you use gerunds in your section titles, or not?  How many levels of headers are acceptable?  What sizes and formats do you use for graphics?

There are three key reasons we need a corporate style guide that answers these questions and more: 

1. Customer Clarity

Maybe these all seem like mundane questions, but being inconsistent in this makes your company look amateurish to customers. Imagine if a prospect or customer sees your product name “ABC Devices” on a piece of collateral, “ABC device systems” on a technical document, and “ABC components” somewhere else. What are you? Is it a product name or a description? You don’t want anyone to have to think too hard to know who you are, what you do and what your product or service is.

2. Brand Consistency

What if your branding looks completely different on Twitter versus your website versus a trade show? The result is confusion at best and complete lack of brand equity at worst. Good branding guidelines help ensure your brand is consistently displayed and communicated. People know what you look like and what you stand for, regardless of the implementation.

3. Legal Adherence

A style guide can protect you from legal issues (e.g., “Always include a copyright or trademark symbol at a third-party company’s product’s first appearance in content”). It also can make things easier for localization/translation (e.g., “Don’t use contractions”).  Some of this is handled by legal review, of course, but much of it gets baked into your style guide over time.  Heck, you may not even be aware of it, but I assure you that your content people are!

Style Guide Example via Media Bistro: http://www.mediabistro.com/portfolios/samples_files/441218_wuvcdivrjd6xkk52csximwsko.pdf

Which Takes Us Back to Boring

This is why so much corporate content is so dull. It’s enforced by style guides, corporate standards and legal restrictions. If you were to poll your content folks, I guarantee you the boring content they crank out is not a reflection of their abilities or creativity. Nearly all corporate content folks I know are working on books or are published authors, have sold illustrations or art, have incredibly-creative blogs, maybe have even designed apps or other cool content work.

Creative people want to create; they don’t want to write dirt-dry content any more than you want to read it.

And that’s where the problem comes in.

Writers want to create engaging content that connects with their audience across all channels. Unfortunately, doing this almost certainly puts you in direct conflict with the corporate style guide.

Corporate Style Guide Versus Social Media

Think about this:  Twitter has a maximum character count of 140. If you don’t use contractions, you are avoiding common acronyms that everyone on the platform knows like IMO and BTW and ICYMI. Using “in case you missed it” burns up characters that could be used to deliver your message. You can’t afford to write under style guide constraints when you only have 140 characters to work with. Not to mention your tweets will sound like a corporate suit – not exactly matching voice to audience!

Twitter has been around long enough that its huge install base is very savvy to corporate “Twitter ad accounts”, not to mention bot accounts and the like.  People like social media partly because it gives them the impression they’re hearing from a real, live person, and not a corporate entity. If you force Tweets, Facebook posts, Tumblr pages and whatnot into a corporate style guide box, the customers will see it and ignore you. Or block you.

You have two potential paths at this point:  Modify the style guide to incorporate exceptions for social media content, or just do what you need to do.

I believe quite strongly that having this information in the style guide is critical. But a corporate style guide is like a supertanker at sea; it’s huge, unwieldy, needs a lot of people to work on it, and takes forever to change course. And in the interim you need to keep posting.

Incorporate Social Media into the Guidelines

So post, kids; post like the wind. But work together as a creative team to be consistent at the very least, and make sure that you are coordinating with the appropriate folks internally to get your new social media styles incorporated into the corporate guide. Or there will be hell to pay with management or legal later on.

And being consistent is key. Creative people asked to generate social media content, rather than marcomm or technical content, will feel like they’ve been dumped off in Vegas with $500 worth of drink tickets after spending years in Provo, Utah. They’ll want to let out all the creative urges that have been bottled up for years by admonitions like, “Don’t use contractions; it is hard to translate contractions to Japanese”.  They’ll want to create.

That’s great, because they’ll be excited, and that positive energy can be used to make some dynamite, exciting content.

But you have to be careful and make sure your teams coordinate and are consistent with each other, or you’ll have a big ol’ mess, and people will start saying, “Well, whoever works their Twitter account is great, but their Facebook people act like a bunch of Kindergartners.”

The informal touch is absolutely critical in social media, but it can also lead you into trouble, as so many corporations have found out lately.

New Rules of the Content Road

So in short, write to your platform, and don’t let yourself be constrained by a style guide that was first codified in 1992. However, be true to your “brand” personality and legal guidelines. And you still need to be consistent across social platforms.

Coordinate with each other, leverage the creative nature of your content folks, and make sure the needs of the new platforms get reflected in your style guide as soon as possible.

Do it incorrectly, and you’ll be in legal trouble, look like a bunch of corporate boobs, and have management angry at you.

But do it well, and you’ll be a standout in the social media arena.  And that’s worth it.

The post Engaging Social Media Content Versus Corporate Style Guides appeared first on Rival IQ.

In the ordinary course of high-tech organizations, technical content teams get slotted in a wide variety of departments, but usually somewhere lost in engineering. This is because technical content – also know as technical publications or technical documentation or information development or . . . well, you get the picture – plays an unusual and, in my view, unique role. I can hear you already saying, “Wait, isn’t that what product marketing does?” Well, yes, exactly.

As a technical editor, we have to understand the product and the engineering behind the product. But, we also have to understand the customer, their wants and needs and how they are most likely to use the product.

So this makes positioning tech content teams tricky.  Most companies put us with engineering, which makes sense; after all, what we are doing is creating a portion of the product, so why not put us with the other folks who are doing the product creation?  But some companies believe we’re more of a services organization, and slot us into teams that also contain the support folks and the quality assurance (QA) teams.

But sometimes, in a decision that almost invariably makes content writers scream, we are put in marketing. And while this may be a shock to my creative brethren and sistren, I genuinely believe that, if done well, this is not only better for the content team, but better for the marketing organization and the product and organization as whole.  And yes, I’m going to tell you why.

Reason #1:  Technical Content Teams Must Understand the Product AND the Customer

In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson notes that the relationship between marketing and engineering is the most fraught in high tech.  Engineers, honestly, genuinely believe that if they make the product just right, it will sell itself. So why does it need any marketing at all?  (Indeed, many believe that if they do their job right, it doesn’t need any technical documentation, either.)

Marketers, on the other hand, like to point out that if they don’t get the market to buy stuff, the engineers will be out of a job no matter how wonderful their product is.  And to a degree, they’re both right.

Because of our job, not only are we the voice of the customer, but we are constantly in contact with engineering, QA, and support.  The nerds.  The folks who understand the product the best, who know where the bugs are, who know how all the pieces fit together. We’re not engineers by any stretch, but perforce we must have a deep level of understanding of the product.  If we don’t, our descriptions will pure and simply, suck.  (And you’ve no doubt read plenty of manuals, quick-start information, user’s guides, and whatnot that do suck, many for this very reason.)  That’s the “technical” part of our job description

But at the same time, we have to understand what people want with this durn product.  Who is going to use it?  How are they going to use it?  How can we make the installation easier on them?  What issues are they going to bump into that will make them reach for the phone to call support?  What are the most important use cases that will help them out?  And for the answer to a lot of these questions, the marketing folks have the answers, or at least are out there trying to get them.

And here’s where it benefits not just the individual content writers, but also the content team, the marketing organization, the product line, and (expanding outward) the company as a whole.

Reason #2:  Technical Writers Can Serve as a Bridge

With the technical content team in marketing, the marketing folks now have quick access to a larger set of product knowledge than they might have before. And the marketers also won’t need to interact with the engineers as much, which suits both groups typically. Writers are used to being go-betweens; it’s a natural role for them.  The engineers will consider them an engineering rep to the marketing team, and the marketing team will feel like they have a voice that gets listened to on the engineering team.

Reason #3:  Marketing Holds the Customer Insights

For the writers themselves, being in marketing gives them an opportunity to get even more information about the customers, what they’re going to use the product for, in what ways and to what degree.  A common problem when you’re writing technical content is that you often have to guess how customers are going to use the product. Marketing teams often have several people whose job it is to find that kind of thing out.

As part of the marketing team, we can even suggest new research to conduct or questions to ask customers during case study interviews. Not only do the writers get access to vital customer insights that marketing holds, but it can also drive potentially new directions that marketing might not have thought of previously.

Reason #4:  The Customer Gets a More Consistent Story

Perhaps most importantly is a consistency of positioning, messaging and overall content delivered to the market. One of the critical problems that every company has is that a product gets shipped, and the implication is that it was designed and executed by a committee.  The “story” of the product isn’t coherent. The product seems to assume you’re going to use it for reason A, the sales force sold it to you to deal with reason B, the marketing people enticed you with reason C and the technical content assumes you wanted it for reason A, B, C or D.  A mess.

Technical writers interact with almost everyone, and joined with marketing, your story can be unified.  You can keep the engineering team informed of marketing’s thinking and encourage them to link up.  You can make sure that marketing is informed of what engineering is doing and thinking, and help them be aligned.  And most important of all, you can make sure your own team’s work – often the first thing the customer sees when she opens the box or downloads the product – is totally aligned with the product story the organization wants to tell.

Technical writers can make sure marketing materials have technical credibility, while including the marketing messaging in product documentation.

Not only does this make the customer more comfortable and give a better impression of your product, but this spreads to the organization as a whole, and to the market in general.  You get a reputation for cohesiveness, for thoughtfulness and for being customer focused.

Perhaps you’re thinking, well, why can’t the content be consistent and coherent if technical documentation sits in engineering? Because it doesn’t. Typically because the content team is hidden in some hole in engineering without a voice. My experience is, when in marketing, writers have a stronger voice and become part of an overall content machine that spans release notes to press releases and everything in between!

Reason #5:  Marketing is Becoming More Technical

I realize I said above that many marketers are not technical enough, but they are being forced to change. It’s no longer enough for marketers to be creative and great even planners. The best marketers I know are incredibly data driven, technology focused and can hold their own with the engineering team. Putting technical content teams in marketing helps drive this necessary shift more quickly.

But . . . You Need to Have the Right Marketing Leader

I realize I’m making this sound simple. The one caveat is you need to have the right marketing, and for that matter, engineering, leader. The leadership must have a clear vision for the product, the market and the organization. When you get the right marketing leader, the right marketing managers and the right content team together, amazing things can happen. I’ve seen it, so I know it can happen.

In a time when “content is king”, marketers need to leverage and partner with the technical content team.

The post Why Technical Content and Marketing Belong Together appeared first on Rival IQ.