Mark shares how SAP’s community of 2 million members from 200 countries is organized around business roles (such as developers, IT professionals and business process experts) to better engage with customers.

You’ll find out how SAP puts together content focused on specific needs to build their community. Listen to the tips to learn how you can get customers to participate in your community.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to get your customers to participate in your community
• The value in providing a platform where customers can get answers to their questions
• Why you need to look at customers as individuals and not brand accounts
• How to use Twitter to build your community
• How to use social media to give customers a platform for discussion
• How Twitter can improve your event marketing

And listen for these hot tips to get your customers involved in your online community:

• Find a problem, focus on solving that one issue and expand from there
• Do a lot of listening and responding; use the feedback to move you forward
• Expect to have a learning curve

Connect with Mark on Twitter @markyolton and check out the SAP Community Network which everyone is welcome to join.

Do you use social communities to connect with your customers? What tips do you have to share? Please leave them below.

The answer is to reward your customers.Want to know how? Keep reading…

Why Rewards?

It’s easy to see that social media and other digital technologies are making a huge difference in the way brands interact with customers and how customers perceive a brand’s image.

With so many new business owners testing the waters of social media, it can be easy to forget what our focus should be. Just like any business situation, the customer should be our first priority, always.

Social media is another great way to drive traffic to your website, people into your stores, and ultimately, money into your bank account. One of the best ways to grow your customer base is to reward them.

Social media and online communities are the perfect playing fields for a customer rewards scheme, and can offer new possibilities to business owners in any field. Let’s take a look at six ways you can reward your customers online.

#1: All the world’s a game—stickers, badges and pins

Commonly seen on “check-in” applications like Foursquare, GetGlue and Gowalla, collectible stickers, badges, pins, medals, stamps, items or trophies add a game-like competition to the user experience.

Not only does this create an urge to collect all the items available, but also a competitive spirit is aroused, as users compete against friends (and “enemies”) to collect more items, more quickly.

As evidenced by Foursquare, users flocked to the location-based app because of the appeal it held by using a leaderboard and creating competition among its user base.

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Stickers make a great collectible reward for customers. Photo: GetGlue

How can you use this strategy?

Depending on the size of your customer base, you may want to start your own collecting competition—stickers or digital stamps are cheap and easy to acquire, and if you take the time and effort to design rewards for specific user actions, the “game” becomes more challenging and more interesting.

This strategy is perfect for businesses that thrive on frequent repeat purchases. It could be used to reward repeat purchases, similar to the idea of “buy 5 coffees, get 1 free” you might see at your local café, or to reward customers for recommending friends to your business.

For smaller businesses, jumping on board with an established brand dealing in collectible rewards may be the best way to go. Many small- and medium-sized businesses have started promoting their physical stores as Foursquare check-in points, and many better-known brands now offer exclusive stickers to collect using GetGlue.

The more possible ways a customer can interact with your products, services or staff, the more opportunities you have for developing an engaging, collectible reward system using either of these methods.

#2: Digital discounts: Online-only offers

With discount sites like Groupon growing in popularity, consumers are not only hungry for discounts, but they’re beginning to expect them. Offering discounts, exclusive offers and coupons is nothing new, but focusing this effort on your online audience is a fairly recent idea.

You can choose what you want to offer, the discount you want to give and how long you want the deal to last.

How can you use this strategy?

Whether you’re looking to reward the online customers you already have, or increase the size of your online customer base (or, more likely, both), discounts and special deals that are exclusively available online is a great approach.

You may want to offer coupon codes for a discount in your physical store, which users can print from your website, which will drive traffic to your site and sales to your store. Or you could offer regular discounts or special offers to your email subscriber list. This will encourage new customers to sign up, and give you a bigger and more receptive customer base to send news and information to.

To make this process simpler, you might like to sign up with Groupon or a similar service to offer a special deal to your customers. However, remember that you need to find out where your customers spend their time online before you start, so you can meet them on “their turf,” and reach more people.

#3: And the winner is… Content-creation competitions

Competitions are another tried-and-true way of engaging new customers and rewarding existing consumers. While giving away free prizes can be a great way to reward your customers, content-creation competitions have recently become a popular way for brands to use social media and digital technology to involve consumers, while achieving free publicity.

Any competition that requires a user to create content of some kind in order to enter is a ripe opportunity for brand publicity. A recent example is Microsoft’s Cannes 2011 competition, which required users to create “an entertaining and engaging 60- to 90-second film that shows how a Windows 7 PC is at the core of a student’s life.” This is an obvious example of a competition that led to user-created content promoting the brand and one of its main products.

The grand prize winner received $8,000 in cash and a trip for two to the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival in France.

How can you use this strategy?

A great prize will encourage people to enter a competition, but it’s also true that the majority of online customers are content consumers, not creators. Therefore, to have a content-creation competition be successful, the prize needs to be more impressive to encourage more effort from users. The Microsoft competition offered thousands of dollars in prize money, as well as a trip to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and a meeting with Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg.

For smaller businesses that don’t have film stars and international flights handy, giving away free products or services may be enough to encourage consumers to make a short video or take a picture, and ask their friends to vote for them.

#4: Say cheese: Involving your customers in advertising and promotions

Another great way to get customers involved in promoting your brand is to directly involve them in your advertising.

Doritos has a great example of a successful campaign called Make an Ad, Make a Fortune, where users created a commercial for Doritos corn chips, with the most popular commercial (voted on by the public) broadcast on prime-time television.

This is the second year that Doritos has handed creative control over to the Australian public to come up with the next TV ad for Doritos.

Another great example is the Vauxhall Corsa billboard competition that ran through a Facebook application. The winning design was professionally painted onto a London billboard, advertising the car.

Graffiti billboard for the Vauxhall Corsa designed by the Facebook competition winner.

How can you use this strategy?

Whether it’s as a billboard designer, a spokesperson in a television or radio commercial or a model for your poster advertisement, offering customers their own “15 minutes of fame” is sure to be just reward for their efforts in promoting your brand.

Ensure that you make the requirements clear and simple and encourage customers to involve their friends to grow your customer base. Choosing a winner based on the most votes received online is a great way to encourage word to spread about your competition, and ultimately, your brand.

#5: Hand ‘em over: Collecting suggestions and ideas

Starbucks is a brand that immediately comes to mind when thinking about businesses that have succeeded in showing customers that their ideas are truly appreciated.

“My Starbucks Idea” is a platform designed to collect ideas and suggestions for improvement from Starbucks’ customer base, and allow other users to vote on suggestions they agree with. The most popular ideas are then implemented throughout the coffee chain.

Customers can make suggestions, other customers can vote on and discuss them, and Starbucks can see which ideas gain popular support.

Dell’s Idea Storm works in a similar way, and both companies have taken ideas from their customers and implemented them. This not only rewards the customers who made suggestions or voted for those they liked, but offline customers win as well, as the company develops in a direction driven by its customers’ desires.

The goal of IdeaStorm was to hear what new products or services customers would like to see Dell develop.

#6: Gracias, Merci, Danke, Xiexie: Thank you goes a long way!

Perhaps one of the easiest, yet most often overlooked, ways of rewarding customers is to simply say thank you.

This may come in many forms—recognition of the competition winner who designed your poster or new slogan, a discount or freebie for repeat purchases or even a simple “thank you” in-store. A simple thanks makes for a more enjoyable visit, and a feeling of appreciation, which will leave your brand with a positive sheen in that customer’s mind.

How can you use this strategy?

Remember those customer feedback forms that were once so popular? Perhaps you still use them in your stores. If you don’t, you should. You can also implement this online—set up a simple feedback form on your website; monitor conversations on Twitter and Facebook about your brand, your industry and your product; and most importantly—listen.

Listening to your customers and implementing their ideas is where the real magic happens. If they’ve taken the time and effort to get in touch with you and tell you what they think, reward them by taking their suggestions onboard and find a way to execute them.

If you send out an email newsletter to subscribers, add a freebie, a discount coupon or an exclusive offer now and then to thank them for subscribing. Perhaps you could set up a discount or special deal for your customers on their birthdays, or even just an email to say “happy birthday.”

If your customers can collect tokens, stickers, points or add currency to their accounts on your website, encourage them to persuade their friends to sign up by giving them bonuses for recommendations.

Using Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools, you can thank your customers personally by reaching out to them, responding to their feedback, and following up on any suggestions they’ve made to you.

As social media and the digital world continue to grow, increasingly more opportunities are available to businesses, which enables interaction with customers at a level we’ve never seen before.

What do you think? What do you do to reward your customers and make your business stand out from the rest? Leave your comments in the box below.

LaSandra shares insights into how Cisco reached 90 times the audience at one-sixth the cost on a recent social media product launch and how they did this compared to a similar launch using traditional marketing. You’ll also hear about other ways Cisco uses social media to deepen relationships and connect with customers.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• Use blogger outreach for your social media product launch to connect with a wider audience
• Show a lighter side on Facebook to get more engagement with customers there
• Adapt to your social media audience: Cisco uses MetaCafé in addition to YouTube due to their global reach
• Identify the channels you want to target so you don’t spread yourself too thin
• Follow how B2B companies are integrating the Facebook Like button

Connect with LaSandra on Twitter @LaSandraBrill and with Cisco @CiscoSystems.

How is your company using social media to connect with customers? What tips do you have to share? Please share them in the comment section below.

Sounds like something from one of Shakespeare’s plays, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s a quote from Pedro Calderon de la Barca, a 17th-century Spanish playwright.

You may wonder where I found such an obscure quote. It was a comment by someone named Vigrx on my blog post titled “Using Social Media to Market Your Business.” He or she was promoting the site vigrxdeals.org. The fact that the quote had absolutely nothing to do with social media was a sure sign that it was spam.

And someone named How to Play Guitar Chords left a comment on a post I wrote titled “Is the Traditional Publishing Industry Becoming Obsolete?” He was promoting the site instantguitarist.com.

That same post about the future of publishing also attracted the following comment: “Cats can be spayed or neutered so you never have to worry about them getting pregnant.”

And someone named Oral Piss who was promoting the site peeingmovies.net commented on that post also.

Like many of you, I started a blog to promote my business, not to talk about anyone’s personal peccadilloes. In other words, I have a business blog.

But when you’re a sole proprietor and you’re the entire business, it’s hard to find the time and the topics to blog two or three times a day, five days a week. I’m so busy using more direct ways to market my business, I just haven’t spent much time on my blog.

And when 99.9% of the comments on your corporate blog are spam, you begin to ask the following questions:

• What am I doing wrong?
• Will I ever attract my target market?
• How do I write about the same products and services three times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year?

Have You Given Up on Blogging?

Because I’m still struggling to use a blog to promote my own business, I was so glad the Social Media Examiner editors sent me a copy of Corporate Blogging For Dummies by Douglas Karr and Chantelle Flannery as my next book review.

When I got the book, I immediately looked up “spam” in the index. I was disappointed that it was only one page. In addition to comment moderation, Karr and Flannery recommend a spam-blocking technology such as Akismet, a challenge question or CAPTCHA form, and email verification.

So if you already use anti-spam technology on your corporate blog, that’s one page you can skip! But the rest of this 400-page book is packed with information. In easy-to-understand “Dummies” language, you’ll learn how to:

• Develop a corporate blog policy
• Choose a blog platform
• Select and manage a team of bloggers
• Find the time and the content
• Use content that drives search engine traffic
• Promote your blog
• Design calls to action and landing pages
• Measure your success

That sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? So you may be wondering if blogging will really help promote your business. If it’s so much work, why do so many people recommend it?

Here’s why Karr and Flannery recommend it: “According to Nielsen, folks perform over 10 billion searches on search engines each month. That’s about 33 searches per day per American! Search engines want to provide relevant content to search engine users, so they identify sites that are relevant, updated frequently, and are popular.”

So as you can imagine, search engines love blogs. And you should be thinking about using a blog to establish your online presence. This is definitely an inbound marketing strategy. When people search the Internet for a solution to their problem – as more and more people do these days – you want them to find your website.

But be forewarned! “Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint,” write Karr and Flannery. “Compared to short-term marketing strategies such as pay-per-click and e-mail marketing, blogs are slow, methodical, long-term solutions.” So you may not see results for a year or more. It takes time to establish your company as an authoritative source of business solutions on the Internet.

Corporate Blogging the Easy Way

To address the most common complaint about blogging – “What will I write about?” – can you spell the word “repurpose,” ladies and gentlemen?

That’s right! You can reuse information you already have. Such as:

• Emails to customers
• Press releases
• Speeches
• Industry news
• Customer testimonials
• PowerPoint presentations

If you work for a fairly large company that has been around for a while, you’ll find plenty of existing information you can repurpose and post on your blog.

And you don’t have to do all that work yourself! If you have more than 25 employees, you’ll probably find two or three who can write fairly well. A blog post doesn’t have to be the next great American novel. Your blog team can write one major post once a week, and one 150-word post each of the other four days.

And you won’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to put a one-time, 30-second commercial on TV that most viewers will mute.

You can still do that if you want. But as long as your blog team keeps writing, your blog will grow into an authoritative collection of useful information about your products and services. And it will be available to potential customers 24/7/365, when they just happen to be looking for a solution to their problem at three o’clock in the morning.

Do you really believe that person will think, “Gee, let me turn on the TV and see if they show a commercial that will help me with my problem.” I don’t think so.

And remember another major advantage of a blog over a website – you can interact with your customers. You can engage potential customers and convert them into actual customers.

So if you’re one of those companies that abandoned a corporate blog after a few months, you may want to reconsider. A blog can bring potential customers directly to you, with minimal work on your part. Let Corporate Blogging For Dummies teach you everything you need to know to attract people who are looking for your solution to their problem.

Social Media Examiner gives this book a 5-star rating.

Learn more about corporate blogging:

• 14 Attention-Grabbing Tactics for Launching a New Business Blog
• 3 Simple Ways to Repurpose Your Blog Posts for More Exposure
• How to Use Your Blog to Drive Social Sales

A major component of answering those questions effectively is understanding in which social outposts your customers are concentrated, because there really is no benefit in beating your customers to the punch. Companies should follow, not lead, their customers across the social web.

At conferences, I’m often asked something along these lines: “My boss thinks none of our customers are on Facebook, but I think they are. What do I do?”

Here are 4 ways to find out where your customers are in social media:

#1: Hire a Spy

Update: Since the publication of this article Flowtown no longer offers these services.

Flowtown and Rapleaf are two of the leaders in the emerging field of social anthropology. It’s ingenious and a bit freaky (like Cirque de Soleil).

You provide a list of your customers’ email addresses and these services figure out how many (and who) among your customers are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and niche social networks, what their “likes” are and other important details.

Flowtown is perfect for small- and medium-sized businesses (see my review here). Rapleaf is for larger companies. My friend Kyle Lacy does a lot of consulting in this area, helping organizations with Rapleaf analyses.

#2: Ask

Perhaps the most obvious way of finding out where your customers are hanging out in social media is unfortunately the least utilized. Ask them.

If you have a “Contact Us” form, an online lead generation form, an email newsletter signup or a shopping cart, why are you still only asking for name, address and email address? Add data collection fields for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (at minimum).

#3: Email Behavior

Have you added links to your social outposts in your emails? Have you added the ability for email recipients to share content on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and elsewhere? If you send email routinely, you need to integrate email and social immediately.

Most quality email service providers give you the option of easily adding sharing tools, and you can then run a report showing which of your subscribers clicked your Twitter link and/or shared content on Facebook. Presto! Now you know that person is active on those social sites.

#4: Gmail Stalking

Twitter, Facebook and other social outposts have incorporated functionality that allows you to see whether your Gmail contacts are using the services and invite them to connect with you. While this integration is intended for personal use, you can use it for your business, too. Here’s how:

• First, create a .csv file from a list of your customers’ email addresses (you only need email addresses, not names, mailing address, etc.).
• Next, create a free account on gmail.com specifically for this purpose (you don’t want to be doing this on an existing account).
• Third, upload the .csv to your Gmail account.
• Now, go to Twitter and create a new account using your special new Gmail email address.  On Step Two “Find Your Friends” of the Twitter signup process, select Gmail. Bam! Twitter automatically reads all of the email addresses of your customers stored in Gmail, allowing you to track the number on Twitter and/or follow them immediately.
• Now, set up a new Facebook account using your new Gmail address. On Step One “Find Friends” of the Facebook signup process, indicate that you have a Gmail account, and follow the simple instructions. Bingo! All of your customers on Facebook are presented to you, and you should be able to become their “friend” with a single click.

I uploaded a list of approximately 2,000 subscribers to my email newsletter, and was able to track down more than 1,000 on Twitter and 500 on Facebook. Total cost? Zero dollars and about 30 minutes.

Create a free account on gmail.com specifically for this purpose.

On Step Two “Find Your Friends” of the Twitter signup process, select Gmail.

On Step One “Find Friends” of the Facebook signup process, indicate that you have a Gmail account, and follow the simple instructions.

As the social web becomes more interconnected, understanding how your customers are connected (or connectable) to your brand in social media is a sizable part of the success equation.

Are you a social media detective? Let us know your thoughts and ideas below.

Do you want to improve your Twitter listening skills? Here’s a closer look at how to monitor your brand, yourself or your competitors using Twitter (and you don’t need to be a big business!).

Why Is Twitter an Ideal Listening Tool?

Here’s why Twitter is one of the best social media platforms for listening:

• Real-time results. We’ve all heard examples of how breaking news spreads immediately on Twitter. Because of Twitter’s real-time search engine, you can get a quick pulse of public opinion.
• Wide reach. Twitter is useful to many different types and sizes of businesses.
• Direct feedback. You hear what people are saying as they say it.

With these points in mind, simply follow these guidelines to grow bionic listening ears.

#1: Decide What You Want to Monitor

Decide which information you want to monitor.  Common types include your brand names, industry keywords, customers and competitors.

A daily listening routine gives you more value over time. Spend the time you need to find the right mix and create a routine that works for you.

# 2:  Find the Best Real-Time Monitoring Tools

Real-time market information is valuable to many businesses today. Here are Nathan Hangen’s suggestions for using Twitter tools. But as professional blogger Ching Ya says, “there’s no such thing as the perfect search tool.” Have a look at Twitter monitoring tools in the decision tree below that Ching Ya put together:

Twitter Monitoring Tools. Image source: http://www.wchingya.com

A good place to start looking for the right people to monitor on Twitter is Twellow.  Also check out Twellowhood for location-based searches.

# 3: Track With URL Shorteners

Use URL shortening tools to monitor the links you share on Twitter and help you find out what’s popular with your audience.

As Jeff Bullas says, the popular URL shortener bit.ly “allows you to track how many people are clicking on the shortened link with a set of metrics that displays it in a visual format as well as textually.” This makes it easy to track your important links and monitor the interactions you have on social media.

#4: Follow Hashtags

Hashtags are a simple search tool. People follow hashtags for Keywords, Events and Trending Topics.

You can simply use Twitter search on a hashtag.  You can also go to Hashtags.org for statistics.

Found a hashtag, but don’t know what it’s about?  Look it up on What The Hashtag, a user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags.

There are also many tools to help you monitor hashtags such as Monitter and Twitterfall.  Have a look at how John Haydon uses multiple hashtag searches on TweetGrid to make sure he doesn’t miss parts of the conversation relevant to him.

Be sure to watch the above video!

# 5: Monitor Trends When It’s Appropriate

Twitter is the best social media platform for real-time search. If staying current on what’s happening in the world is important to your business, you also need to stay current on the latest tools for monitoring trending topics on Twitter.

Hashtags are also used for trending topics, so the tools you use for hashtags can also help you to monitor trending topics.  In addition to the hashtag tools mentioned above, there are a few other tools to keep in mind when following trends on Twitter:

• Trendistic provides a variety of graphs to follow and compare different trends.
• Tweetmeme reveals popular retweeted content.
• Follow @twithority and @TweetingTrends for up-to-date tweets on current trends.

#6: Use Twitter Lists to Monitor People on Twitter

You might find it convenient to create your own Twitter lists and monitor people through these lists.  Remember, you can set up a private list to follow your competitors and you’ll be the only person to see this private list on your Twitter profile.

You can also set up an RSS feed to follow someone else’s Twitter list using Twitter Lists 2 RSS.

#7: Set Up a Listening Plan

A simple listening plan can involve these simple procedures:

• Check your keywords on Twitter Search.
• Sign up for RSS feeds of the search results you need.
• Sign up for email updates for your most important keyword results using tools such as SocialOomph.

You might lose the edge of real-time search but you’ll find more value in a regular routine. With clear objectives on what you need to monitor and by drilling down to find what you’re looking for, simple monitoring tools can give you great results.

#8: Build Relationships

As Olivier Blanchard says, you’re listening to people, so remember to be human. Listening is the first part of creating real relationships with people and it’s only one part of using social media for your business.  You still need to connect your Twitter listening to other social media activities to cultivate and nurture relationships in social communication.

As you proceed to connect and engage with people on Twitter, here are a few words from Olivier: “Engagement doesn’t have to be a perfectly designed and executed PR program where every bit of interaction is carefully crafted and weighed against all possible outcomes. Let it be a living, breathing, imperfect thing: Wing it a little.”

To develop your bionic ear you’ll need to interact and adapt your approach based on what you learn when listening on Twitter.  Follow these 8 steps to listen more and learn more about the people you want to connect with on Twitter.

What are you doing to develop your Twitter listening skills?  How is it working for you? Please share your comments below.

Here are two current studies that show how the integration of social media marketing is changing the way marketers connect and engage with their audiences—online and offline.

#1:  Marketers Ditch Silo Campaigns and Report Social Media as “Critical for Success” (Alterian)

As digital and social media marketing mature, the demand for greater integration is evident. Marketers are quickly realizing that operating in a one-way marketing tunnel makes success impossible in this social media–saturated world.

Listening first and then communicating and engaging have become “musts” for any successful social media campaign. Results of a 2009 survey by Alterian indicate that social media is becoming an integral part of most companies’ marketing campaigns:

• 50%+ direct at least “a fair amount” of effort toward integrating social media marketing into their overall strategy
• 66% will be investing in social media marketing in 2010
• 40% of the 66% plan to shift more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget toward funding their social media marketing activities

eMarketer’s report on the findings of the Alterian study pointed out, “[Social Media] is yet another channel to be incorporated into an integrated communication strategy, rather than addressed on its own. And it can provide unique insights into the consumers who can now use earned media to build brands alongside marketers.”

As with earlier reports in 2009, marketers still feel a need for education and training with social media, as more than one-third reported only being “minimally prepared.”  The good news is 37% planned to invest in training in this area.  In addition to training, the survey also found that 36% are investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools.

It will be interesting to see how marketers begin to use not only Facebook and Twitter to reach their audiences, but also start to take even greater advantage of podcasting, message boards, forums, video sharing and the many other social media tools consumers are using today.

#2:  Online Forum Users Transcend Online and Offline Worlds, Becoming Influential Brand Advocates (Synovate/PostRelease)

Word-of-mouth has always been vital in building loyal customers. Friends—whether online or offline—and family are trusted sources when making purchasing decisions. As mentioned in my previous article, a recent study from PostRelease showed how online forum users are enthusiastic brand advocates and are taking their online activities to the streets, telling others about products and services they recommend. Not only are they recommending brands to their family and friends, they are also more likely to publish blogs and organize meet-ups, compared to non-forum users.

The PostRelease study focuses on consumer’s organization offline. Consumers are merging their online and offline influences, and this could be a huge opportunity for any savvy marketer who sees these new possibilities.

Marketers are becoming acutely aware of the need to integrate new media activities into their existing marketing plans and consumers are demanding greater social media engagement from the brands they follow most.  This could be a win-win situation if carried out strategically.

Now it’s your turn.  How have you seen the growing integration of social media marketing change your company’s marketing strategy? As social media matures, what are some ways you see this integration taking shape? We want to hear from you, so start talking!

Yet, how do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message?

It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week‘s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries?

At IBM, it’s about losing control.

“We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation.

“We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”

Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company. Such an approach might be surprising for #14 on the Fortune 500.

Edgy at 114

At 114 years old, IBM seems to be the Madonna of the corporate world, staying relevant from decade to decade. The first company to build a mainframe computer and help NASA land a man on the moon still holds more patents than any other U.S.-based technology company.

As it turns out, its decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation.

IBM lets employees talk—to each other and the public—without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM’s, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense.

“We’re very much a knowledge-based company. It’s really the expertise of the employee that we’re hitting on,” Christensen says.

No Policing

IBM does have social media guidelines. The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information.

But the document lacks any mention of brand messages or values.

Nor does IBM corporate regulate employee social media activity. Only three people hold social media roles at the corporate level, and oversight isn’t part of their jobs.

“We don’t police. The community’s largely self-regulating, and so there hasn’t really been a need to have someone go about and circuit these boards and blogs,” Christensen said. “Employees sort of do that themselves… And that’s worked wonderfully well.”

17,000 Inside Blogs

IBMers use tools such as Twitter and LinkedIn for external activity, but take advantage of mostly IBM tools inside the company. Internally, 100,000 employees have registered on the blogging platform to rate and comment on posts across 17,000 blogs.

In this vibrant forum, employees exchange ideas, advance conversations and do a little self-promotion of their projects.

An internal wiki serves as a hub of information, drawing well over a million page views every day. Additionally, downloads in the company’s user-generated media library now total 11 million.

An IBM tool called Dogear functions like Delicious, a social bookmarking site. Blue Twit mimics Twitter. A tool called SocialBlue acts like Facebook, helping employees stay connected with former colleagues and get to know new ones.

Like Facebook, the 53,000 or so SocialBlue members share photos and status updates. In IBM’s widely dispersed environment, family photos mimic cubicle-decor and dialogue mimics water-cooler interaction.

Thousands of Voices

Run an online search for “IBM blog” and you’ll find countless IBMers posting publicly on everything from service-oriented architecture to sales to parenthood. If you want to blog at IBM, you simply start.

IBM lists all of its blogs in a simple directory sorted by the name of the blogger.

They share thoughts, ideas, presentations, photos, videos, you name it. In 2006, the IBM mainframe blog hit the big time for posting a series of videos on YouTube that linked back to the blog. The Art of the Sale mockumentaries, in The Office style, lightheartedly poke fun at IBM and corporate sales in general.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSqXKp-00hM

Additionally, an estimated 200,000 employees are on LinkedIn, with another 50,000 former employees in alum networks on LinkedIn and Facebook.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Christensen ties IBM’s social media explosion to company “jams.” In 2003, IBM conducted its first jam, not unlike a band jam, bringing employees together in an online forum for three straight days.

“It was a big, online collaborative experiment,” Christensen said. “The first 8 to 10 hours, it was very negative. Over the next 12 hours, the conversation completely changed to being very constructive. By the way, there was no intervention by corporate to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s be more constructive.’ It was completely employee-led.”

“We realized we could trust employees to engage. Employees realized, ‘if we’re within reason, we’re going to be trusted’.”

A couple of months later, IBM opened blogging platforms inside the company.

IBM now includes much bigger and more diverse crowds—as many as 500,000 people in some cases. An innovation jam in 2006 brought together employees—and friends, family and clients—to discuss more than 50 research projects within the company.

From there, they voted on the 10 best, which became incubator businesses that IBM funded with $100 million, all based on “crowd” discussion.

Smarter Planet

A few incubator businesses—intelligent utility systems, smarter transportation systems and electronic health records—were the start of what is now a major IBM movement, Smarter Planet. The initiative puts IBM computing power and problem-solving toward issues like rush-hour traffic or natural disaster response.

It really began as a grassroots movement among employees.

“There are communities that, long before IBM started talking about it, had already congregated online and were talking about these areas. We are very focused on understanding where those communities are and how we can appropriately play with them.”

Christensen himself is one of several authors on the public “Building a Smarter Planet” blog, which highlights ideas and initiatives on the topic, not just within IBM.

Here is a screen shot of the Building a Smarter Planet Blog.

But all the public IBM Smarter Planet discourse is not just about amassing IBMers. Sometimes Smarter Planet projects—which can impact millions—need public support.

“There are communities that are passionate about this, and maybe we can help to amplify some of their voices and really make some of this just happen,” Christensen says. “So social media plays a big role in it.”

The Payoff

IBM invests in creating its own social media tools. But it’s earning that back by monetizing some of those as part of the IBM product portfolio. The other part of the investment equation—employees’ time—doesn’t seem to be a concern, according to Christensen.

That’s because collaboration and knowledge make IBM what it is. And that’s a company with $12.3 billion in earnings on more than $100 billion in revenue with a 44.1% gross profit margin in 2008.

Christensen says to date there’s not an effort to tag a return on investment to its social media efforts.

“I think if you’d ask any senior executive at IBM, ‘How important is it for our employees to be smarter?‘, inherently they understand that these tools can play in helping with that,” Christensen said. “I don’t see myself rarely or ever having that hard conversation on the value of engaging employees in these spaces.”

What do you think about IBM’s social media program? What level of control have you found most effective for your company’s social media efforts? What are your favorite crowd-sourcing tools?  Leave a comment below.

Imagine marveling at Peru’s Machu Picchu ruins, and a guy nearby asks if you’ll take his picture. But it’s not just him; he’s proudly holding a paper cutout of a smiling tomato.

What, exactly, inspired this traveler to carry a cartoon tomato to one of the wonders of the world?

In a word, fun.

He’s just one of nearly 140 people who vacationed with the tomato, named “Sweetie.” These fans of the restaurant Souplantation, or Sweet Tomatoes in some markets, were enthusiastically participating in the chain’s latest social media promotion, “Where’s Sweetie?”

Each month, a new, creative Facebook and Twitter campaign inspires customers to do something equally interactive, from constructing faces out of salad to photographing their best lemon pucker faces.

“There is definitely an element of fun that’s really required,” explained Crosby Noricks, social media strategist at Red Door Interactive , the firm that coordinates the company’s social media activity. “A campaign itself doesn’t need to be supremely complex, and oftentimes it’s better to do something that requires just a guess at a number or a quick photo snap.”

The creative approach has paid off. In just eight short months, the company’s social media recipe has netted nearly 30,000 Facebook fans and 8,500+ Twitter followers – along with social media-driven revenue.

In one month, the restaurant’s tomato mascot, Sweetie, saw more of the world than most people see in a lifetime!

Open Your Wall

Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes, owned by San Diego’s Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp., runs 112 company-owned restaurants in 15 states. It’s known for its fresh, made-from-scratch foods: produce and salads, soups, pastas, freshly baked breads and muffins, frozen yogurt, and more.

Fueled by increasing awareness about healthy eating, the restaurant chain adds about half a dozen new locations each year. Regulars include everyone from babies to their great-grandparents.

Launched this past spring, Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes’ social media presence includes a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account. It serves two goals: To get fans more involved with the brand and to learn more about what customers want.

“Our primary goals all along have been to increase engagement and get loyal customers excited and participating with us, not only in promotions but helping make decisions for the company with feedback about new locations,” said Brandon Zelasko, who serves as business manager for the Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. account at Red Door Interactive.

Initially, the fan and follower bases expanded by customer word-of-mouth, or rather word-of-status updates. One fan would post a funny picture related to a promotion, which would inspire their friends to join the Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes fan club.

More recently, the company started offline promotion of its Facebook and Twitter presence using in-restaurant signs and table cards.

Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes doesn’t merely broadcast information to the audience, but truly interacts. On Twitter, they follow more people than follow them, and frequently retweet followers’ comments.

The same goes on Facebook where the company does what most do not. “We let people write on our wall, unlike other brands that hide that,” Noricks said.

Yet, comments are largely positive. Take a quick look at Facebook or Twitter and you’ll find lots of unsolicited love letters to the restaurant:

• “I’m so thankful for Sweet Tomatoes!!!”
• “My daughter introduced me to Sweet Tomatoes….love at first visit….”
• “When I eat at Sweet Tomatoes here in Tucson it feels like I’m at home with family”
• “The soup is outta this world”

For the occasional not-so-positive comment, fans such as those above defend the restaurant, “carrying on the conversation for us,” Noricks said.

Fans Show Their Pucker Faces

But what really keeps fans and followers connected are creative monthly promotions like “Where’s Sweetie?” Each promotion ties into what’s happening at the restaurant, where the menu changes each month:

A young customer displays his best pucker face for April’s lemon promotion.

• Show your Pucker Face – In April, when lemons were the focus, the promotion brought in a 400% increase in Facebook fans and pics of lemon-inspired facial contortions.
• Guess How Many Strawberries – For strawberry month in May, customers were asked to guess the number of strawberries in a jar or basket twice on Twitter and twice on Facebook, with the latter generating more than 700 fan comments each time.
• Celebrate Salad – July’s campaign got customers’ creative juices going with dozens of salad works of art.
• Where’s Sweetie? – In September, Sweetie saw the Mona Lisa, Machu Picchu, Venice, and the Galapagos Islands, as well as hiked Mexico City’s Pyramid of the Sun, water skiied, rode a roller coaster, snorkeled and swam with giant turtles – all documented on the restaurant’s Facebook pages.
• What Are You Thankful For? – In November, customers submitted their thankful thoughts, pictures and videos on the Facebook page.

Customers rolled up their sleeves and got creative for “Celebrate Salad” and then posted their art on Facebook.

For promotions, all participants are entered into a drawing for items such as Visa gift cards and free meal passes, or fans vote on winners. The restaurant and its agency quickly learned that customers prefer to pick winners themselves.

Throughout the month, Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes keeps fans/followers thinking with smaller quizzes and questions about their favorite restaurant items, what’s their “salad personality,” or even their best childhood memories.

Regular followers also know that they’ll be rewarded with coupons offered exclusively to Facebook and Twitter customers – a major draw.

3-5 Hours/Week on Social Media Management

Depending on the promotion, Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes staff and the account team at Red Door Interactive spend about 3-5 hours every week watching and engaging with customers on social media.

On an average day, they post about 5 times on Facebook and see about 65 customer comments. On Twitter, they might tweet once a day and then respond to followers “@” comments about a dozen times.

Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes and its agency have made it a priority to be aware of comments and Twitter replies, and respond as quickly as possible – a task that both the restaurant marketing staff and agency share.

With Red Door as the company’s creative agency for more than 5 years, the social media strategy and management were a logical next step, and one that’s worked well. “We know almost as much about the brand as they do in-house,” Zelasko said.

Exclusive Coupons Drive Sales

Through in-store signage and viral momentum on social media sites, the chain adds about 1,800 new Facebook fans and up to 1,000 Twitter followers each month. Individual campaigns boost numbers quickly.

All this isn’t just fun and games; it does monetize the business. Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes knows that a growing online fan base pays off in sales. Used strategically, a coupon announced before lunch encourages customers to visit that day.

“We see really good return rates for our Facebook- and Twitter-only coupons. They definitely drive higher sales,” said Tracy Marks, public relations coordinator for Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. “It’s a short-term coupon to inspire action.”

And fans have been genuinely thankful for those coupons – as evidenced by numerous thank-you wall posts and Tweets.

Not as quantifiable, but equally valuable, are menu or new location suggestions, which the restaurant seriously considers.

Marks points out that social media has not replaced any of the company’s traditional marketing or reduced its marketing budget – some customers still look for newspaper coupons. However, it has boosted revenue.

For now, those results and increasing fans/followers provide the justification for continued momentum. The next step for the company includes starting a blog.

“We’re providing consistent, fun value and responding to people,” Noricks said. “That shows that we’re accessible and available and here for the long haul.”

How have you used fun and creativity to engage your social media audience? What are your thoughts about the ideas presented here?