I recently noticed a post from Jeremiah Owyang asking the readers of his blog for their input on Facebook marketing best practice.

Here is the feedback I shared:

1. Understand the online habits of your community – identify when your community are online so that you can time your Facebook update so that it has a chance to appear when they log on in their feed on their home page without too much scrolling. This simple online visibility tip could increase the possibility of them engaging with your update

2. Manage the frequency of posting – Take care not to publish content too frequently to your Facebook Page – if all people can see on their Facebook home page feed is your updates not their friends they may ‘unlike’ your Facebook Page or hide your feed

3. Don’t forget to promote your Page – When starting a Facebook Page we have found that also investing in engagement ads (on the home page of Facebook) has assisted in increasing the visibility and number of people joining your community quickly

4. Post relevant refreshing content – Keep your competitions relevant to the community on your Facebook Page. This may seem obvious but it is often overlooked. Your competition does not have to be for something that has an expensive price tag – but it is something valued by your community. Note – if you are hosting a competition or give way, make sure you comply with the guidelines for promotions and competitions (there are many brands who don’t and risk their Facebook Page being deleted)

5. Make it easy to do business with your app – When adding applications make sure you test it for useability – too many clicks as part of the process and people won’t add your application and if it’s not easy to use and does not add value (or fun) to them your Facebook app will remain a secret.

But what ideas would you add?

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Perhaps Facebook not where your potential clients are networking online? If they are using LinkedIn you might want to access my FREE LinkedIn for business – make sure that you leave a valid email address so that you can access a discount off my forthcoming 4 week programme starting the 9 August 2010 called “LinkedIn for Business Leads and Profits”. The discount is valid until the 31 July 2010.

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Forming

This is the initial stage of putting the team together where individuals learn about each other and the team requirements as well as the challenges, expectations, and the organizational structure of the team.  This is also the information gathering and exploratory stage.  If you have ever been put into a team or have been asked to form one then you are most definitely familiar with this phase and should be able to relate to it.

Storming

This is probably the more tumultuous phase during which the members of the team all have their own ideas and directions that they want to go in.  Oftentimes team members debate, critique, and confront each other to decide on the best course of action.  I’m sure my business partner can attest to the fact that we have definitely gone through our storming phase (or a few of them!).  Bruce explains that this phase can be a bit uncomfortable and/or unpleasant but it’s still quite necessarily for the growth and development of the team.  Usually companies go through serious problems when they cannot leave this phase thus making the entire relationship very tense and difficult for everyone.

Norming

This is the phase where the team really starts to function and work together as a team.  Individuals start to understand each others work habits and ethic and everything seems much more natural.  Responsibility and roles are much more clearly defined, expectations are set, and collaboration is in full swing.  Most people are familiar with this and oftentimes we refer to this as being in the “zone.”

Performing

According to Bruce not all teams will reach this phase but those that too are the high-performing teams which have grown to become both knowledgeable and efficient at what they do.  Supervision goes down as individuals are now capable of making appropriate decisions.  This is essentially where your team really starts shining and delivering superior results.

Adjourning and Transforming

These are two additional phases that Bruce later added to his team development.  Adjourning refers to the team breaking up after the task has been completed.  Transforming involves the team not breaking up but instead moving onto other tasks and objectives (from what I understand).

I found these stages of team development quite relevant.  As Bruce mentions, these stages can be cyclical once changes occur, such as the introduction of a new team member or the change of some other team variable that can modify how the team works.  Some of you may be familiar with this model of group development but for those that aren’t I highly recommend that you take these phases into consideration and explore them within your current organizations.  I especially see these phases applicable towards Enterprise 2.0 initiatives where many companies are introducing new teams and strategies to help make the initiatives worthwhile.

Social media introduces a new problem of sorts, one where the answer is lost in the politics and corresponding burrows of debate as to who owns social media within the organization. As brands venture into social networks, many are unwittingly contributing to the dilution of their brand image, value proposition, and mission amongst a new genre of social customers and influencers. The mission and vision statements of old no longer convey authority or inspire conviction in an era where the audiences to which we are trying to connect now possess audiences of their very own. The ability to connect with someone and inspire them to take meaningful action is in direct competition with the actions of social customers who are intentionally or indirectly building communities around their views and interests.

In my work, I’ve uncovered what I call the Last Mile or Last Kilometer of Social Media, a challenge that will face every business in the attempts to engage with consumers and influencers and impede the cultivation of dedicated and flourishing online communities.

The last mile is a term associated with the cable and internet provider industries, representing the final leg of delivering connectivity from a provider to a customer. It is symbolic of the human connection required to take a service from the connection hub in any given neighborhood to the home of the new customer.

The Disconnect: Defining the Problem

At the moment, a disconnect exists between the brand, its representatives, and consumers in social media.

Personality Eclipse

Representatives on the front lines in social media are arguably unversed in the elements that define the brand persona, purpose, and value. It’s also highly plausible that many of these representatives are not immersed in the challenges and options that face the people to whom they’re trying to connect and recruit. As a result, their actions and words are diluted through the reinforcement of individual personality traits that don’t match, convey, or strengthen the characteristics or voice of the brand they represent. While their engagement is mostly transparent and authentic, they are not genuinely empathetic in acknowledging or addressing the needs of their communities because they have not lived a day in life of their consumers.

Simply said, the personalities of each representative eclipse that of the brand they represent and without realization, the two can work against each other over time.

The Brand Dilemma

The brand team along with executive management is either slow or reluctant to adapt what was once the brand story and mission in traditional media and communications and modernize and humanize it for an era of interactive and social relations. For example, if the brand were a person, whom would it resemble? What does it sound like? What are its mannerisms and stature? What are its convictions, beliefs, and passions? Essentially, what are the persona and characteristics of the brand and what does it represent today and tomorrow? More importantly, how do we align the personalities of our representatives with the character of the brand?

Companies are not intentionally adapting brand style guides for the social web and in turn, empowering their representatives through training and reward. Instead, they’re simply guided by social media guidelines and policies, if that.

The Consumer Quandary

Social media is, for the time being, viewed as a single entity, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When we talk about a 360-degree approach with social media completing the rotation, we relegate participation and conversations to a means for intermittent engagement, but not as the complete solution for 360 business processes and mechanics. For example, companies are structuring social media around a function, but not necessarily as an extension of existing business practices. In some cases, customer service is at the forefront of listening and engagement; in other scenarios, marketing or communications is leading the engagement; and in alternative situations, advertising is controlling the creation and dissemination of the story.

Social media is not served by any one role however; it represents the opportunity and need to socialize the entire organization. As is, the consumer in the various roles they play in our ecosystem, are largely passed over as a result of an infrastructure that doesn’t recognize their social existence and the parts they play in the definition of our markets over time. I believe that any division of an organization affected by outside activity will require a socialized approach, whether it’s simply monitoring or more likely monitoring, engaging and adapting.

The Last Mile – The Socialization of Business

The Last Mile of Social Media is solved by “connecting the brand” and its purpose, value, intent, and voice with the consumers in and around the diverse roles they play in the business ecosystem. It supported by a methodology and framework that proactively and reactively connects representatives and value to people of interest in their “social” homes.

Ring of Representatives: The outer ring is orbited by brand representatives from various divisions.

The Last Mile: Representatives are connected to consumers based on needs, challenges, and opportunities unique to business processes and functions. The interaction is a seamless extension of the company purpose, value, voice, and bonded through genuine intent and engagement.

The Consumer Hub: A cushion between the “Last Mile” and the consumer is padded by a trust zone that is developed around each consumer and dictated by the experiences with your product/services and fortified by the communication and engagement of your brand team, those of your competitors as well as their peers. Their experiences lead to perceptions and impressions that are in turn expressed through their social networks.

The Last Mile creates human connections with the mixed roles of the social consumer, one that brings to life the brand persona, purpose, and understanding through person-to-person interaction outside of the brand’s domain. The socialization of business then creates a unique bond between people and a more humanized and approachable brand icon, reinforced through informed, purpose-driven engagement.

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With this in mind, Facebook has moved into a new direction. The popular social networking website just released a new set of Insights dashboard aimed at providing its users a more extensive statistics to measure their performance in the social networking site. The new dashboard provides Facebook users with better ways to analyze users and trends.

The new Insights dashboard shows analyses of posts, reposts, and other “liked” files from Facebook users. These provide users with a better insight on their covered market that can be used to further make improvements on their strategies. This new Facebook analytic tool produces better data, charts, tables, and graphs that make user activities easier to understand for developers and business owners alike. Making it even more convenient for users, the various outputs from the Insights dashboard can be saved and used for further reference.

The information from the dashboard is so detailed that it helps users in analyzing their visitors from specific regions, age group, country, cities or even language spoken. This very comprehensive data analysis is one of the most striking features that the new Insights dashboard has to offer. Apps and online game developers can also use these data and information in developing their new apps to be shared to the broader public.

The insight that will be provided by this new dashboard will surely boost up Facebook’s game in the social networking market. It provides Facebook users with new ways to further improve their performance in terms of traffic and ultimately, revenue.

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Here’s the truth about starting a small business whether online or off. It’s hard work. Overnight success takes years to happen. You will endure lots of failures (hopefully small!) along the way. But success will come to you if you define a path and take action.

But I know that many of you need help spotting what’s shifty and what’s for real so I was really thrilled when I happened upon Mark Cunningham’s site The Business Mindset. He wrote an eight part series called “How to Spot a Scam.” I’ve highlighted the topics he covers in the list below. It would be worth your while to set aside some time to read the entire series.

How to Spot A Scam: Part 1 — An overview of things to watch out for that scream scam like not telling you exactly what the business will offer and requesting money in advance.

How to Spot A Scam: Part 2 — Scamsters will play on your emotions. They tap into deep rooted fear and greed to push you to take action.

How to Spot a Scam: Part 3 – Scarcity and time pressure are two keys to getting you to dive in without doing your due diligence. These are common sales tactics.

How to Spot a Scam: Part 4 –Be wary of typical results. Yours may in fact be entirely different. Having the same results as someone else means you would have to do exactly the same thing they did.

How to Spot a Scam: Part 5 – Being dubbed the “chosen one” or invited to be a part of an “exclusive” club is something to be cautious about.

How to Spot a Scam: Part 6 — Hype about “living the dream” and working one or two hours a day for a start up are totally unrealistic.

How to Spot a Scam: Part 7 — Can you reach those people? Does their contact info look professional? Do they respond to you in a timely fashion?

How to Spot a Scam: Part 8 — If you here the term “turn key” business, be skeptical. Rarely is a business totally turn key. All businesses require hard work.

So there you go! Make sure you take the time to read all of the posts. It will provide you with a good education. Do you have any tips to add? Please leave a comment.

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One of the key aspects of decision management is a focus on taking action using insight gained from data – not just showing someone the data (BI) or just letting them create or update it (enterprise apps). Identifying the decisions that drive the behavior of your employees is crucial. If the mobile employee is a claims agent then the decisions that matter are ones like “is this claim fraudulent”. If the mobile employee is an account manager then the decisions that matter are thinks like “is this prospect entitled to a credit account”, “will this account get these products in time”, “what’s the best upsell or cross-sell for this account” and so on.

If you focus on managing and automating these decisions then you can use the information the phone has (position), insight from the data the company has (fraud likelihood of this claim based on analysis of similar claims, predicted wait times for a product delivery based on analysis of the supply chain, propensity to buy of the account for highest margin products based on analysis of similar accounts and products) to take an action (tell the person using the phone to do or not do something).

I don’t see traditional BI vendors having much to offer here – the whole reporting/OLAP infrastructure they have developed is predicated on knowledge workers doing analysis. If you want to take advantage of mobile devices you need to think about automating decisions for the person holding the device. For instance:

• Use mobile phones held by maintenance engineers to track their location and then use analytics to predict which pieces of equipment are most likely to fail soon and rules to assign the nearest, qualified engineer before sending the directions on where to go to the engineers phone.
  • Don’t show them reliability graphs or travel times, tell them where to go to make best use of their time
• Use the mobile phone of a real estate appraiser to find out which risk zones a property is in and what the predicted difference is between a house inside and outside that risk zone
  • Don’t show them a picture of the risk zones
• Use a doctor’s mobile phone to route them to the most useful hospital during an emergency based on predictions of patient load, the hospitals they know and their specialties
  • Don’t show them graphs of wait times and pie charts of specialties needed
• Use a customer’s mobile phone to make them an offer at a store that is nearby having predicted that they are likely to buy it, checked that is in stock there and estimated that they are more likely to respond in person than to an email promotion to the website

And so on. Automate decisions and use mobile devices to provide context for those decisions and to deliver decisions to people out and about. Don’t send them reports. Please.

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Open source support provider OpenLogic reports over 330,000 open source software packages for enterprises to choose from. Finding the right open source project, with the right license and the assurance of a viable future for the project can be difficult for enterprises to say the least.

Finding the right open source product:
OpenLogic mines through these 330,000 packages to certify and provide direct support subscriptions for over 500 of these open source packages. OpenLogic uses a 42 point certification process to reduce the risk associated with a given open source package. By narrowing down the field from 330,000 to approximately 500, OpenLogic helps enterprises focus their open source selections to projects with, amongst other things, a viable community, well understood licensing, documentation and active maintenance by the project leader.

New to the open source project evaluation arena is SOS Open Source, an automated methodology from open source strategist Roberto Galoppini. The tool enables companies to determine the level of risk associated with using any given open source software. SOS Open Source uses 24 metrics and information collected from open source project directories, forges and meta-forges. Galoppini explains that SOS Open Source is keenly focused on the project strength, measured by the stability and maturity of the project and whether the project is backed by a predictably viable community. Related to the quality of community, Galoppini’s methodology also measures the level of community or vendor support available. Finally, the methodology attempts to rate the possibility of project evolution, whether by the current project committers or third parties. Funambol, an open source provider of cloud synchronization and push email, was recently rated highly using Galoppini’s SOS Open Source evaluation.

Ensuring compliance with open source licensing:
But what if your developers are already using open source without of your knowledge? Well, there’s an app for that. Amongst others, Black Duck Software, OpenLogic and Protecode offer services that can crawl through your enterprise and report back the use of open source software. In fact, these vendors can even crawl through the source code in your internally developed applications to ensure that open source libraries or code fragments are not being used in contravention of their associated licenses.

If your company hasn’t already set an open source usage policy, there’s no better time than the present to start down that path.

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A larger percentage (23%) of technology executives are reining in personal use of social media than are placing limits on social media use for business (15%). A previous study found more than half (55%) of companies have social networking policies that ban the use of social networking altogether.

“The challenge for companies is balancing the benefits of social media in the workplace with the risks,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology.

“Firms are evaluating how to help employees use social networks to keep pace with developments in their industries, stay connected with business contacts and promote their organizations without sacrificing information security or employee productivity.”

CIOs were asked, “As social networking has become more of a business tool, how have you had to re-evaluate your IT policies surrounding its use by employees in your company?”

More strict with respect to personal use 23%
More strict with respect to business use 15%
More lenient with respect to business use 10%
More lenient with respect to personal use 7%
No change 55%
Don’t know/no answer 2%

“There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to social networking policies,” said Willmer.

“To be effective, guidelines should include input from stakeholders throughout the organization, including IT, legal, human resources, marketing, public relations and front-line employees.”

It’s one of those very interesting, and thought-provoking, articles that touches base on the rather delicate issue of employers monitoring the online social software interactions of their employees during working hours. Goodness! Isn’t that something like opening Pandora’s box? And not knowing the full consequences of venturing into something that in the long run could turn out to be rather nasty? Well, I hope I am wrong. Very wrong.

Joshua develops some very interesting insights with regards to a new service released a few days back by Teneros which “makes it much easier for companies to keep tabs on their employees’ social networking activities“. And when one keeps reading the article throughout to the end, one cannot stop thinking how much longer will companies keep trying to control & monitor their knowledge workers; or, even worse, when would they realise that a command-and-control attitude in today’s knowledge economy is everything, but *the* ultimate competitive advantage. Rather the opposite!

There are lots and lots of things I could say about the subject of monitoring and controlling employees’ online interactions in social networking tools and perhaps a single blog post would not suffice. Even the latest episode of The Sweettt Podcast, where we spent over an hour and a half talking about this very same subject, was not enough! We probably needed a whole lot more time to cover all of the various different implications with initiatives like Teneros’.

Without entering the realm of European privacy laws, and whatever other privacy related issues, which, by the way, I am not an expert on the topic, but I can imagine how there would be plenty of controversial discussion on this new service (If you do have the skills & knowledge on this very important item on privacy laws and monitoring employees’ activities I would love to hear from you through the comments detailing what some of those challenges may well be, at least, in Europe…), I would like to spend a few minutes developing further on some of the main consequences that implementing such kind of service would create on *any* corporate environment: trust and employee happiness. Amongst several others that I will probably touch base on at some point in time on this blog, as I am sure this topic will be a recurring one…

Right, instead of me putting together a couple of paragraphs on those potential consequences, let’s look into it from the perspective of a couple of businesses and their interests; let’s come up with Company A, that will make use of such new service to monitor the online social networking activities from its employee workforce; and then let’s have as well Company B, which is well known for its rather open policies on using social software tools while at work as their business tools.

So, which company would you rather work for? Company A, the one that still, in 2010!, tries to monitor and control who you are, who you connect with, who you share your knowledge across with? The one that decides what your productivity should be like, because you don’t seem to know better, in the first place? The one that decides what’s best for you, and for the business, not allowing you to make conscious professional decisions, because that’s what you were hired for in the first place, right? Remember?

In short, would you want to work for Company A that doesn’t seem to trust you as a knowledge worker to behave like the professional you were hired for in the first place and make use of all of the various Web resources available out there for you to keep innovating, sharing your knowledge and collaborating across the board using social software tools with other knowledge workers? Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Or would you rather work for Company B, where ALL knowledge workers (No exceptions!) have been encouraged, throughout the years, to spend time on the Web, hanging out in various social networking tools, specially those where your customers and business partners are already spending a good amount of time!, talking and connecting with them in meaningful conversations where you can co-create your company’s next generation of great products by keeping up with the rampant innovation happening in multiple levels established by those social networks?

Would you rather work for Company B, that trusts you would get “to decide what you do each morning” as a knowledge Web worker and be the responsible professional you were hired for in the first place? That company which understands that “Happy People Produce Quality” and that having the right tools to get your job done is not only necessary, but essential? That being happy at work connecting with your social networks across the board, where your knowledge resides deeply, delivers big results time and time again? Well, maybe, maybe not.

Which of the two companies would you rather work for? The one that doesn’t trust you as a talented, responsible and professional knowledge worker who wants to have an enduring career in that company? Or the one who fully understands what major benefits there are out there by unleashing the knowledge, expertise, know-how, experiences and informal networks of the entire employee workforce? You tell me…

Then, finally, I would ask you to ponder something else that most people seem to keep forgetting, but that time and time again it’s becoming a growing pain in the corporate world, and most of us don’t even realise it. What happens to that growing corporate pressure, known as the baby boomer generation about to start retiring in the next two to three years? How do you think Company A and Company B would be able to not only retain some of that knowledge before it goes away, and, most importantly, how do you think Company A and Company B would be capable of attracting new talent (Those younger generations who live in social networks) to slowly, but steadily, replace that maturing workforce.

Do you think that monitoring employees’ social networking activities out there is surely going to guarantee you that next wave of talented, amazingly interconnected, rather innovative knowledge workers that will pick up the baton of the maturing employee workforce on their way out and retain successfully part of that knowledge and keep your business thriving?

Right! I didn’t think so, either! Thus be careful with that headache. It’s coming…!

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