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!

Cornelius Puschman is undertaking some interesting research into corporate blogging and computer-mediated communication. He’s published his formidable bibliography. Great if you’re looking for academic literature around corporate communications… now where’s that extra time I put aside for reading?
Read more

News highlights

Why Should I Create a Business Blog? | Chief Ingredient, Inc.
A nice concise round-up of the key features and benefits of corporate blogging. Kind of techie but does offer benefits like ‘easy social networking’.

Would You Trust This Blog? – CopyWrite
CopyWrite goes to town on the issue of blogs and corporate trust.

Fibre optic cable to pave way for corporate blogging – Business Daily Africa
“Borrowing from the West, far-sighted private sector CEOs and government leaders are gradually turning to corporate blogs to connect with their constituencies, further strengthening an emerging culture of openness.” the corporate blogging revolution is making strides into the developing world.

Company Blogs: Most Valued Social Media Tool | WebProNews
When considering different social media tools, blogging generates most leads. 31% of respondents (by far the highest percentage) said they find corporate blogs critical to their business.

Setting Strategy, Goals and Targets for your Corporate Blog
Goals for your blog: mission, vision and objectives. Do we sometimes forget about these?

Fanboy.com ” Blog Archive ” Social Media “Experts” are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)
A contrary opinion on those providing info and building networks on Twitter. The service is so open it really can be used for anything. I’m sure this debate is going to keep on running.

TwtQpon Helps Retailers Push Coupons Across Twitter
This service helped Dell make a $1 million over the holiday season. I’m sure we’ll see more in this line of innovation: companies using Twitter to communicate direct marketing messages. Obviously measurement of the results of this approach is also key.

Twitturly – cagedether’s Twitter Linking History
See which sites you’ve linked to and how viral these are ie. total tweets for each link.

181 Free Twitter Buttons, Badges, Widget and Counters to Help You Find Followers
If you link a corporate blog to Twitter, why not let your users know? This is a great collection of some of the best buttons and badges out there. This is my fave.

Twitter improves service and base; next steps, revenue
SFGate in San Francisco covers the rise of Twitter as a serious communications tool and the moves over the next few months to turn it into a profitable enterprise.

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It seems like no online marketing seminar is complete nowadays without at least one session on social media. SES San Jose was no exception – social media optimization is definitely creating a buzz in the industry (as it has been for at least the last year).

Moderator:
Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch

Speakers:
Andy Beal, Consultant, Blogger & Author, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
David Snyder, Search Specialist, JRDunn.com
Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek

Andy:

Twitter
Make sure you secure your company name – even if you aren’t going to use it.

Basic symbols:

• @andybeal directs a message to that user (public)
• d andybeal sends a direct message that is
• #olympics are used for tagging tweets
• favorites are used to bookmark tweets you want to revisit
• delete: this is possible but beware, Tweets can get syndicated in different places so even though you may delete a Tweet, it isn’t necessarily gone

Be selective with who you follow. You’ll realize why after a while. With Twitter it is easy to receive a lot of noise from people or subjects you don’t care about. Some people you might want to follow:

• Peers
• Press
• Influencers
• Customers

Look out for interesting conversations. The medium really supports these when they happen. Don’t send Twitter spam – this is such a conversational medium, any attempts to use it solely for commercial gains looks transparently salesy and just doesn’t go down well.

If you want to get into someone else’s network, think to copy your message into their thread using @[username] at the beginning of the post.  Their network of followers will see you message.

Use services like Twitterfeed to cross-promote blog content on Twitter (everytime you blog, all those following you on Twitter are automatically notified).

Your Twitter reputation IS your reputation so don’t get pulled into negative conversations – in most cases you can just let them play themselves out.

Use search to find those with similar interests (who you can choose to follow).

Brian:

As a journalist, I use Twitter to develop sources and find out who is writing on certain issues. Comcast and Zappos are good examples of companies using Twitter to manage their reputation online.

Neil:

Facebook
Some Facebook stats:

• 73% of people are white
• 30% make over 100k
• 43% didn’t go to college

David:

Friendfeed
The best way to describe this service is as RSS on steroids – brings all social network data to one place and allow you to interact with that data. The big problem with social media is that it is so diverse. If you post images on Flickr, post on Blogger or leave content in any of a number of places across the web, then bring all your activity into one place with Friendfeed.