This Week in Social Media: The News You Need to Know
Are you struggling to keep up with what’s happening in social media? We’re happy to introduce a new weekly column where we review the hot social media news items of the week.
To help you keep up-to-date with social media news, here are some of the links that caught our attention this week.
Click through the links to get the full story and then be sure to come back and share your comments below. 
How to Create Social Media Business Guidelines
Social media policies and guidelines provide your business a framework to carry out your social media strategy and implement your social media tactics. They can also have a direct impact on the success of your social media endeavors.
In this article, I’ll introduce you to social media guidelines for all your employees and your social media management team, and for crisis management and specific platforms. I’ll also take a look at important considerations for big and small businesses.
9 Ways to Sell Social Media to the Boss
Conversations are happening online with or without you. This is one of the most frequently used social media sayings. If you’re engaging with social media for your company, it’s almost second nature.
However, there are still many who are struggling to ‘sell’ social media to their executives. And as Doug Frisbie, Toyota National Marketing Manager says, “The price of inactivity is greater than the risks of anything we’d be doing in social media.”
Let’s explore 9 ways you can make a good case for social media programs.
The Inside Scoop on How Intel Manages Its Facebook Page
Have you ever wondered how mega-corporations manage their social media initiatives? Keep reading for a fascinating inside look at Intel Corporation’s sophisticated social media initiatives.
I interviewed Ekaterina Walter, a social media strategist at Intel to better understand how the company is using Facebook.
For the last two years, Ekaterina has been part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence. In addition to developing social media policy for their 80,000 employees, the center is also responsible for strategy, training and monitoring. Ekaterina manages Intel’s Facebook page.
Reaching Millions With Twitter: The Whole Foods Story
Have you ever wondered how a business handles more than a million Twitter fans? Want the inside scoop from the largest retailer on Twitter?
Even if you’re a small business, there’s some great insight to be gained from Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods Market. Marla was instrumental in creating Whole Foods’ acclaimed social media program and the results have been phenomenal! For example, in the first year, Twitter.com/Wholefoods gained a million Twitter followers. It has now surpassed 1.75 million people.
If you’re not familiar with Whole Foods, it’s the leading natural and organic food store in the world with nearly 300 locations in North America and the United Kingdom.
Whole Foods Market is the most popular retailer on Twitter and is a leading example of Twitter’s power to build millions of relationships a single customer at a time. Here are key excerpts from our interview (you can listen to the entire exchange at the end of this article).
How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation
“Be yourself.” It’s one of the rules of social media. If you’re blogging, tweeting or Facebooking for business, be real—or you won’t be followed.
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.
