Those far-reaching tentacles of Shel and Neville over at the FIR Podcast picked up an informative new document from the Social Media Group titled ‘Social Media RFP Template’. As more and more agencies from across the marketing spectrum (and in particular SEO and PR) now offer social media services, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
Apart from dealing with the obvious stuff you’d cover with any agency engagement, such as agency background and their past experience in this area, the RFP also covers the following areas:
- Integration of social media across marketing/communications functions
- Social media channels employed
- Reputation management and social media monitoring
- Establishing social media profiles
- Influencer outreach
- Crisis management
- Social media training
- Compliance with legal requirements
- Metrics and measurement
I’d say this list is equally valid if you are in the situation of having to prepare a job description for a social media manager or associated role.
Download the report
SMG also run the hugely popular Social Media Today blog aggregator. If you write in this space, you should definitely hook up your blog!
In their latest report on the State of the Twitterverse, the Hubspot team note that most posts occur on a Thursday and Friday, with the most common time for posting being between the hours of 10-11pm. This would suggest that a significant amount of Twitter activity is generated outside of the workplace.
So, how do businesses make the most of this medium for their purposes?
This Thursday, Hubspot will be running a webinar addressing this subject. Registration details:
Title: How Businesses are using Twitter
Time: Thursday, January 21, 2010, 1:00 PM ET
Register now
Unfortunately I have a prior commitment so won’t be able to attend but hopefully will be able to catch up with what happens on Twitter. 
It’s getting easier and easier to add those nifty social features that make it easy for anyone to Tweet a post, grab your RSS feeds, visit your Facebook page, and all the other features that supplement a bulk-standard blog.
Wibiya is a service that allows you to add all this functionality to a toolbar at the foot of your blog within minutes. Literally minutes.
I run WordPress and the steps were this simple:
- Setup an account on Wibiya
- Choose your theme
- Choose which applications you want on your toolbar
- Download the WordPress plugin
- Upload the WordPress plugin to your blog
- Activate the plugin and enter the ID in the settings (under ‘Appearance’)
- View your blog to see the new features you’ve now added!
At this stage, you can go back to Wibiya and change the theme or add any new features as necessary. You can see it in action at the foot of this blog.
One big advantage of using a toolbar like this is that if you relegate these elements to this footer toolbar, you can save some real estate on your navigation: all those links to the RSS feed, Twitter, and other services can be dropped (I’ll keep mine for the time being).
One thing that would be nice to see is some kind of API so that the applications listed on the bar could come from popular services such as ShareThis or potentially Disqus. It will be interesting to see how this service develops…
(BTW, I should point out that Wibiya is not a new service in 2010 – however it is a new feature on CagedEther 
