Kelly Ripley Feller will be speaking about “Social Analytics” at SearchFest 2012, which will be held February 24, 2012 at The Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?
After leaving my role at Intel, where I was a senior strategist & founding member of the Intel Social Media Center of Excellence in May, I joined Citrix as their Corporate Director of Social Media. In this role I am responsible for operationalizing social media at the corporate level which includes guidelines, training, risk mitigation, crisis management, corporate-wide social tools, social metrics, and corporate social media strategy. I also manage a team responsible for managing key corporate social media sites including the Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube, & LinkedIn.
2) How do you teach employees to be “social media responsible” in a corporate setting when many are used to “anything goes” away from work?
When an employee engages in social media for a brand, they take on a new level of responsibility. It’s important to have clear guidelines and training; training that allows for tracking of individuals who have taken it. Then there must be some level of random audits to ensure employees are following the guidelines. My team also hosts monthly best practice sessions where we teach others at the company how to leverage social media to accomplish their business objectives. For example, our next training is on the topic of using social media for events.
3) What steps would you take to handle a corporate social media response to a “crisis” situation?
We have developed a comprehensive crisis management process that categorizes issues into two buckets: issues and crises.
a. Step 1: Determine if it’s an issue or a crisis.
b. Step 2: If it’s an issue, we simply log it & continue to monitor to ensure it doesn’t turn into a crisis.
c. Step 2: If there is an actual crisis we activate a crisis response team who works to determine the severity of the crisis.
d. Step 3: Define response strategy, if there is one. The severity of the crisis helps guide our response, whether it’s by one spokesperson or we call on all our social media practitioners.
e. Step 4: Issue a social media alert internally guiding employees on what you want them to do. If level 1 crisis, they are directed to stand down & not comment on the issue at hand. If it’s a level 2 crisis we provide messaging that helps them communicate with their networks about the issue.
f. Step 5: Severity of the issue also determines how frequently the crisis response team meets to stay on top of issue. It also directs which executives to inform.
g. Step 6: Ongoing monitoring—a MUST for any issue or crisis.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.