ARTICULATED

I spent a good portion of my career working for the communications departments of big corporate trade associations. For those less familiar with Washington, industrial trade associations are an important cog in the DC wheel. They speak on behalf of entire industries, particularly industries that are heavily regulated or that otherwise seek legislative ends that would be beneficial to their member companies.

This post is the first in a series for trade-association communicators who are trying to figure out what on earth, if anything, you should be doing with social media.

I’m going to try to make the sum-total point that social media strategy can help you do what you’re tasked, sometimes dramatically. And while social media can be difficult to form into something that’s perfectly suited to the unique corporate trade-association environment, it can be a logical component of what you do.  It can enhance your overall objectives.

Challenge 1: Engaging member-company employees.

The desire but inability to engage member-company employees in legislative campaigns has vexed just about every corporate trade association I’ve ever worked with. Want to see a grimace on the face of a VP of communications at the Federation of Carrot Peelers? Say, “What we really need is to be able to talk directly with all 647,010 employees of your member companies.”  The grimace will be accompanies by a groan.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is the nation’s largest industrial trade association. It represents 11,000+ companies employing somewhere near a gazillion people. But like most big industrial associations, it has no real relationships with anyone at its member companies other than the handful of executives it reports to. (You can become one of its 314 fans on Facebook here.)  While I don’t know the organization’s communications people, I’d be willing to bet they’d sacrifice a digit to be able to directly reach and have conversation with the organization’s mass of member-company employees. But if NAM is like 99.999% of all corporate trade associations, that desire is severely limited by the inertia of the traditional association/member-company executives relationship.

Addressing Challenge 1 through Social Media.

Social media can help trade association communicators surmount the traditional barrier of lack of access to member company employees. A good social media strategy can empower the association to make member company employees part of the broader industry dialogue and thus make the trade-association voice in Washington far more persuasive.

At risk of putting it a little too plainly, here’s what ya do:

 Find and gather member-company employees on the large and well-known social media sites (for starters). There are plenty of great resources (which I and others can point out) that explain how to use Fan Pages on Facebook and how to establish an organizational face and proper participation on Twitter.

 Use those gatherings to facilitate conversations on industry issues. Ask for a lot of input and feedback. Point conversation participants back to an association-authored industry blog and ask them to comment there as well. Track the trends within that feedback. Make sense of all the input and take it back to your legislative strategists.

 Help your legislative strategists incorporate some of that input into the organization’s government affairs plan for the year. Be sure the incorporation of that feedback is demonstrable, because next you you need to …

 Report back to your online community with specifics on how its voices have been heard and its input has been incorporated.

 Then – and only then – when the time is right, you can ask your online community to act by blogging or updating Facebook profiles or calling on government officials to say “yes!” to something that’s important to your industry and its jobs.

Start now because – of course – you’ll have to do all those trade-association things to get ready. You’ll need to map all of this out as a strategy.  You’ll need to sell you CEO and other senior executives.  You’ll need to secure the buy-in of your relevant member-company committees and probably your board.   And all of that work will simply be a warm-up for the quantum harder task of getting buy-in from all the lawyers in your midst.

But your mission is to “speak in one powerful voice for your industry.”  The definition of “one powerful voice” has changed. A good social media strategy, one that is bought-in t0 and supported, will enable you to stay with the evolved definition andmake a much more persuasive cases in Washington for the issues your member companies — and all of the people they employ — care about most.

Keep your eyes peeled for how social media strategy can help corporate trade associations address Challenge 2, which is “Keeping tabs on what’s being said about your industry.”

A gentleman I know named Doug Bailey, who’s a bit of a legend around Washington, DC, has a knack for which he is well known among friends. Every holiday season, he rewrites Christmas carols with a clever, uniquely Washington twist. And he’s really, really good at it.

Below is my favorite one I received from him this year.  Enjoy…

…..

AWAY IN A MANGER

Away in a manger

No crib for his bed

The baby Obama
Lay down his sweet head.

But is there a danger
The certificate said
It wasn’t Hawaii
But Kenya instead.

Suppose that a Commie
Who wants us all dead
Snuck into Oahu
A lei on her head,

Claimed she was his mommy,
And thinking ahead,
Faked a birth notice
To the papers they read.

Then fifty years later
Feeling nothing to dread
Like innocent lambs
To the slaughter we’re led.

If he is a traitor
Are we being bled?
Are we already pink?
Will we soon be all red?

Twas a Nairobi manger
With no crib and no cred
Where the baby Obama
Was born and was bred.

So we’re all in danger,
We’ve all been misled
By a conspiracy theory
The media spread.

I’ve got a lot of friends in B2B marketing.  I want to make the case to you guys to regularly read the blog SocialMediaB2B.   It is rich, rich, rich with content “exploring the impact of social media on B2B companies.”  The advice is non-technical and user friendly. The updates are regular and really good.

A small sampling of great recent posts includes:

– Exploiting social media monitoring for B2B lead generation

– 11 B2B social media predictions for 2010

– 14 B2B thinkers to follow on Twitter

– 5 ways to expand B2B blogging beyond the marketing staff

– How to handle B2B content when it’s not worth your time

Check it out.

I love this post on the Story Assistant blog from Matt Batt (@StoryAssistant on Twitter). YouTube is still growing like a weed, he writes, so he argues for “vitching” … video pitching. Get it?  Typically I’m not wild about newfangled made-up words.  The responses to his blog post find “vitching” particularly disagreeable.  But I like it, probably because it sounds so much like “bitchin’.”

So today, I vitched Vanessa Mizzell at the Vashington Vost. I very vell could have simply called her. But I told my colleague Scott Varner that I thought vitching her would be more vun.

He didn’t laugh. And she didn’t respond. But vhat a good time I’m having.

I’m a counselor to an upstart, relatively small issue-advocacy nonprofit that will be watched and quite critical to the community it will serve. My little role is to urge the organization, since it’s largely building itself from the ground up, to seize its fresh slate-ness as an opportunity to capitalize on the power of smartly thought out social media strategy to contribute in a substantial way to the achievement of the organization’s loftiest goals.

Most small nonprofits, cash-strapped and overworked, remain woefully left behind by the social media bandwagon. So this project got me thinking. Let’s say a small nonprofit organization advocating on an issue you care about could start from scratch and think fresh about community engagement and how it does its work? What if it could entirely set aside inertia and those pesky organizational and cultural barriers? What five things would you have the organization do?

Below are my five things. They aren’t really social media ideas or tactics as much as they are principles for setting up the organization to let creativity flow in the area of today’s best movement-building. They are:

1. Recognize that “engaged community members” has become a more powerful measure today of capacity for issue-advocacy impact than more traditional notions of offline “dues-paying members,” “email address databases,” and the like. Think very carefully about what successful outreach really looks like now and tune the organization’s definitions of success accordingly.

2. Invest the time and resources to develop a sophisticated social media strategy. (Indeed it merits a full-blown strategy, the kind that takes time and effort to craft.) Define success explicitly and measurably. Make that success fundamental to the organization’s mission, goals, and measurable objectives.

3. Commit meaningful staff time and resources to the implementation of that social media strategy, with a heavy emphasis on individual content creation, active listening to influencers, and community management.

4. Incorporate social media-engagement metrics into the performance goals and objectives of staff members, including the executive director, and ensure that reward and compensation systems reflect those metrics. Develop incentives for board members and other committed volunteers to become community evangelists, replete with guidance on what success looks like.

5. Make the organization’s web strategy a component of its social media strategy, rather than vice versa. (How radical we can be when we start with a clean slate!) That means rethinking everything about the organization’s website. Chances are, far more real estate on that site should be devoted to real-time community-member activity and engagement, at the cost of static bits of pre-approved copy. No one is reading that stuff any more, anyway.

In a clean-slate scenario at the dawn of 2010, if an issue-advocacy organization wants to knock it out of the park, I believe it really has no choice but to make social media strategy integral to what it does. (That’s true even if social media strategizing and implementation are far outside the comfort zone of very smart, very qualified staff, board, funders, and consultants.)

My first job in Washington was in a law office with stark white walls and ornate furniture. New to office environments, I was asked to make a photocopy of a page in a legal book. I laid the book on the copier glass, but the book was so thick that the copier lid wouldn’t close. Certain the device wouldn’t work with the lid at such an angle, I forced the lid down. This maneuver shattered the copier glass, exploding a million tiny shards and pieces into the machine.

Embarrassed but not deterred, a few months later I was tasked with stuffing hundreds of envelopes. I did so on the firm’s conference room table, the length of a car covered with a beautiful sheet of beveled glass. Hours into the project, bored, I planted my elbow on the table with a dramatic sigh. I heard a slight “tink!” When I parted the stacks of strewn papers, I saw that I had split the huge sheet of glass perfectly down the middle.

We’ve learned five things from Tiger Woods in the past couple of weeks. Let’s enumerate:

1. How to get the girl. Be wealthy, powerful, and a bad ass. And if behind your steely exterior lay a secret need for affirmation, all the better.
2. How to perpetrate stereotypes. Pursue the dated, narrow American ideal of the “beautiful” woman. Fail to make a single choice that’s not tall, blonde haired, blue eyed. (See the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who’s brilliant on this topic today.)
3. How to get caught. Send texts and leave tragic voicemails. Use your real name. Fail to offer even a cursory nod to discretion or stealth.
4. How to make things worse. Allow your wealth and power to render you clueless, or worse, convince you that you’re above the rules. Then underestimate the resourcefulness of online news and citizen journalists.
5. How to make things much worse. Fail to be swift, sure, and utterly thorough. Convince yourself that the other 85% of your sordid details will stay hidden even though the first 15% is already making headlines.

I don’t particularly like infidelity, Tiger. But I figure you’re like most other professional athletes. I can’t be judging everyone. But you’ve gone and insulted my intelligence, all while revealing a wimpy side that’s distinctly at odds with the inspiring determination you show on the course. I wish you hadn’t.

I’ve been asked a number of times by colleagues and friends why and how I use Twitter and Facebook.  My participation in social media is for very precise reasons, which vary by outlet.  Here’s my best attempt to explain them:

Facebook:  Personal branding.

I love Facebook for the same reason everyone else does – to stay connected to friends and family. But well aware that everything we do online contributes a thread to the fabric that is our “personal brand,” I try to keep my updates to a set of thought-out tones and topic areas. No updates about what I’m having for dinner. I seek to put forth the aspects of my life for which I want to be known – being witty, smart, principled, in love with recreational sports, etc. It’s my objective that any post illuminates at least one of those things, and to do so in a somewhat clever or interesting way.

Twitter: Professional development.

Of the just over 1,000 people who follow me on Twitter, I probably know only 75 of them. The rest are complete strangers. It’s an around-the-clock cocktail party where new best practices in PR is the constant discussion topic. I join in when I can, and I pick up gobs of tips and resources. When I participate, I follow the quirky rules of Twitter, which is to respond and retweet more than I blurt out. And occasionally I offer glimpses into my personal life to show I’m human. But the purpose is all about being a better PR pro.

LinkedIn: Connect to high-value former colleagues.

I keep my LinkedIn profile up to date for the same reason I might keep my resume up to date (if I bothered). It’s a place to go to find credentials. But more importantly, I’m connected to many former colleagues on LinkedIn, the kinds of folks who over time have proven to be far and away the richest sources of new business. So every month or so, I send an email to those people pointing out recent posts on my blog that they might find interesting or entertaining. This is probably my single highest-value activity in social media. (And it’s the one I spend the least amount of time on … hmmm.)

Blog: Reveal what makes Kinkennon Communications uniquely me.

The primary purpose of this blog is to remind folks whom I’ve known and worked with for years that I’m still here, I’m still me, and my gears are still contantly turning. It’s a place where I can show them a bit of thought leadership on topics I care about and show them how I’m engaged in the most current of PR thinking and practices. The blog doesn’t have a huge following, and that’s fine, because the primary audience is people I know. Most of them don’t read blogs, as a rule, including mine — but will when I suggest a specific post I’ve written that they might find useful.

The blog’s secondary purpose is for people in the PR world who I don’t know.  When I blog, I tweet that I’ve blogged.  Some of the people who follow me on Twitter actually read some of my posts, and for better or worse get a better sense of who I am.   For folks who might have heard my name and would even considering hiring Kinkennon Communications, this blog also helps me reveal a bit about me.

…….

Do any readers see this the same way?  Think of it differently?  If so, I’d love to hear it.

By the way, the sum total of this activity resulted in my two largest new clients in 2009. Both were significant projects from people who I’ve known for years, but they thought of me for these particular endeavors only because of the “currentness” of all of this activity and the possible “top-of-mindness” that may flow from that.  Lucky me.

As I write this post, my elderly mother is having a bad travel experience. All I can do is sit here seething … and put on the Internet how I feel about American Airlines right now.

When I hugged her goodbye at DIA security check-in at 7am this morning, the flight was scheduled to depart on time. Then the airline delayed it in 20-minute pieces until a good four hours had passed. Had the original or any of the revised departure times been remotely accurate, I would have gone back and gotten her. American’s flight-status notification system is entirely broken.

(They did ultimately upgrade her to first class, without prompting, which quelled my anger for about an hour.)

She missed her first connection in Dallas. When she finally got to DFW, it seems her revised connection had been canceled.

As I write, she’s sitting and waiting on yet a different flight that’s now delayed for weather. That’s not American’s fault, other than if they’d gotten her to Dallas as scheduled, she’d be home already. But right now, she’s at a remote gate, sees no plane, and there’s no staff of which she can ask questions. This has me genuinely wrapped around the axle.

She’s not in the best of health, and she’s tired. She’s now been “traveling” for 10 hours today, which exceeds her limits. She hasn’t eaten because she’s nervous and afraid she’ll miss her opportunity to get home.

I fly a lot and can handle these turns of events, though I may not like them. But it affects me in an entirely different way when the elderly are involved.

My mom is neither whining nor complaining, the trooper that she is. I, by contrast, am about to blow a gasket. This rant is doing nothing to get her home faster, of course. But I feel slightly better.

If you’re a newbie to a place and you want the respect of that place’s elders, you have to pay your respects. It’s true for jobs, organizations, churches and neighborhoods, right? It’s even true for families. If a young man wants the respect of his beloved’s father, he’d best ask that man for his daughter’s hand. It’s the way it works.

For instance, I’ve learned that this dynamic is true in the movement for LGBT (plain English: gay and lesbian) rights, which I’ve become involved in as a volunteer over the past year. I have ideas big and small. But it’s clear to me that the smartest way to spend my early days is listening to those who’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. That’s the only way my ideas will ever get audience. More importantly, it’s the only way those ideas can ever be refined enough to be relevant in the context of what has come before.

I think it’s also true among the community of people who seem to be the smartest thinkers on how to “use” social media. I’ve advised a few folks that this particular community, which constitutes its own high-energy chattering class, is not particularly kind to newbies, certainly ones that make sweeping claims about expertise in this weird new space. It’s hard to create your own credibility without this community’s validation, because they are so looked-to. And they have vast networks of devoted, connected audiences. If they take a shot at you, people will know it and take heed.

But it occurs to me lately that this is no different than any other community or club. You cannot claim a place at the table unless you first invest lots of time learning and paying your respects. Is it, in fact, the same?  Is it merely human nature?

(By the way, I’m far from a “social media big thinker.”  I just like watching and learning.)