Question for Discussion: What are your Facebook Policies? Do you enforce them?

Creating a Facebook Policy or Guidelines for an organization can prove to sometimes be difficult. Mashable has a great article from 2009 about creating a Facebook Policy and has all the typical general ideas about strategy and how your staff should or should not use social media. They have recently updated it with some ways to update your policy. These are good practical suggestions for the policy. The clif notes version of their articles are keep it short and sweet, engage your audience, and protect your brand.

In an ideal world, you have two main objectives in your policy. I am going to focus on the Protect your Brand. In order to do this it is essential that your employees do not share on their social media outlets anything about your organization's business plans that are not available to public consumption. It is also essential that your staff does not speak poorly about your organization as that can speak poorly about your brand.

I often see my friends trash talk about their jobs and their places of business as being dirty, gross, or awful to work at. I am also not surprised when I see these same people get let go later on and not really understand why.

What kinds of policies/guidelines do you feel are essential to your company? How do you enforce these policies/guidelines?

Messaging on Facebook and Twitter

I saw a terrible post today on Facebook. One of the pages I follow, said thanks @blahblah and @meme for the follow. I don't really want my Facebook feed to be clogged down with a Twitter Post like this. Something like this is really meant for Twitter not Facebook.

If you have linked your Twitter Account with your Facebook Page, then you should probably undo this. I would suggest using a scheduler like HootSuite, Buffer, etc. that allows you to compose messages for all of your social networks and customize them per network. This way your viewers on Facebook aren't bothered by irrelevant twitter chatter and continue to follow you.

Have you paid attention to who you are following on Twitter and Who is Following you Back?

If you haven't yet built up your following on twitter, then you should know that Twitter has limitations on the amount of people you can follow. Once you hit 2000 people you cannot follow any more people until more people are following you. So if you are following 1900 people, but only 300 are following you back, then you need to clean up who you are following.

A good way to do this is by looking at who is not following you back. There are a lot of paid services that will help you do this, but I like Friend or Follow. This site will look at all the people who are not following you back.

I usually begin by going to all of the egg pictures. These people are usually ones who created an account and never really followed up on it.

Then I sort the friends by people who have not posted in a while. I start unfollowing them. This is how I do my cleanup on Twitter, what about you? Do you have other free services you use?

IFTTT

Have you heard about this new program IFTTT? It means if this then that. Sort of sounds like one of those word problems from middle school that I never seemed to really understand. I attribute that to my creative way of thinking of situations.

IFTTT is a great way to automate digital tasks. In order to do this you create a "recipe".

Perhaps none of this makes sense to you yet. Start by thinking of all the time you spend on just one blog post. You write it, then you post it to twitter, then you post it to Facebook, and on and on. By doing this with IFTTT, then you can set it up so that every time you post a blog post it will then feed it to your social media outlets.

They have a "recipes" already created, but here are some ideas:
Everytime your tagged in Facebook save the picture to Drop Box
When you make a Blog Post post on Social Media Outlet
When you star a Google Reader item, save to Evernote.

Moving out of a school

We recently moved from Baltimore to New York. As such, I needed to find a new job and am working for a small non-profit in New York City. While I'm no longer working in a school full time, I find that much of what I'm dealing with as the Associate Director of this non-profit is about how we communicate, what our message is, and how we can reach our constituents.

It seems vaguely familiar to what I was doing when I worked in a school. Our life has definitely been turned upside down with trying to figure out commuting, daycare, and creating a new community of friends for our family.

When we put our house up on the market, I really understood how much the way you present yourself really matters. No one wanted to see our messy bedroom, so it meant that the whole house would need to be cleaned up every day before we left for school. If you don't have small children (or maybe this applies to those with older children as well), this is not an easy task. We created routines and figured out how to put our bedrooms on display for those walking in.

While I was really aware of the messaging beforehand, this really influenced how I thought about our house and the way it looked to outsiders. My experience working through a database conversion and then a major overhaul of our website, I began to realize how important it is on how you present things both internally and externally.


With the experience of Student Information System, Point of Sale, and Website Projects, I began consulting with independent schools and non-profit organizations in across the country about how to think about their internal structure and systems in order to deal with their external message. While I no longer work in an independent school, I am very familiar with the issues that independent schools and non-profits face. It is the reason I began consulting, so I could help schools and non-profits make better and more informed decisions.

Listening to Stakeholders

One of the most important parts of managing a project is making sure that all of the stakeholders buy in or are at least supportive of the project. The problem is Stakeholders change often and the people making decisions may not be the same people sitting in the room when you finish the project. In fact, no one may be left when you finish from initial group of stakeholders.

As the person coordinating the project the most important thing is to listen to everyone even before you get everyone to sit together in a room. If one of the stakeholders hasn't been listened to early enough you could face adoption problems later one. You could also face thousands of additional costs related to customizations that could have been addressed earlier in the process.

Here is one strategy to engage stakeholders and help them support you through the lifecycle of the project.

1. Meet with each stakeholder individually
Ask them questions, learn about their processes, learn about their work arounds.

2. Meet with users of the systems even if they aren't making the decisions
They often understand the systems better

3. Find a product that will meet as many of the needs possible.

4. When presenting options for the decision
Present both what the systems do and address the needs that are not going to be met. Address how you plan on addressing those needs or why that need will no longer be relevant with the new system in place.

What I have learned about RSS Readers

I'm an android phone user. So I figured it would be easy to figure out what kind of rss reader to use, but that was not the case. There are ones that are visually very appealing, but only have a pre-set list of major feeds and there are other ones that are rather clunky. I tried a bunch of different readers and I think the one I like best is Google Reader. It's not very fancy, but there are some nice features.

It's a pretty basic reader and allows you to stream all of your messages in one place. I can star articles I like and go back to them later on. It also is great that I can read articles on my computer, my phone, or my tablet. I love the suggestions of feeds to read. What I don't like is on the phone if I click that I read them all, there's no quick undo.

The biggest benefit over using an RSS reader is it's on in one place and doesn't require me to have a cluttered inbox with blogs that I may or may not have time to read. It also doesn't require me to remember which blogs I want to go back to and read.