As more businesses start to think about using social media, a common question (especially for the already busy small business owner) is: How much of their social media can they outsource or delegate?

Some businesses don’t have the time to manage their social media or just not sure how to manage it all efficiently.

So what social media can you outsource and what social media needs to stay in-house?

1: Social media set up – It can hours and hours (and hours) to set up your social media profiles and accounts. Customising that twitter background so it fits; adding in a landing page to Facebook, adding the right plugins to your blog… Never mind setting up some automation, adding in ‘like’ buttons, and tools like Tweetdeck. Figuring out all this takes time.

Answer – yes outsource setting up your social media – save yourself time, frustrations and get set up properly. Whoever sets up your social media accounts will need access to some of your passwords, so remember to change them later.

2: Social media monitoring and listening – Keeping an eye on conversations via twitter search or mentions via Google Alerts can be managed by others if you have chosen the right key words and have a good reporting system in place. How and when do you get notified? Right away (so you can jump into conversations); via email or report format?

But adding search feeds to a feed reader like Netvibes makes monitoring at a glance easy anyway.

Answer – possibly yes outsource or delegate to another team member.

3: Social media moderation – Moderating your Facebook pages and blogs for spam comments not filtered by your spam filters takes time and is a job someone else can do.

Answer – yes, moderation can be outsourced; if someone else manages this for you they can separate out the gems and forward them to you to reply to.

4. Social media engagement – Replying to tweets and Facebook posts and adding blog comments can really only be done by you and your team. The whole point of social media is to build relationships and trust – and you can’t outsource that.

Answer  – No you shouldn’t outsource engagement.

5. Social Media content generation – A huge part of social media is creating content; conversations, dialogue, tweets, blog posts, facebook posts…. and then there’s the ebooks, white papers, videos…

The conversations and dialogues are part of building relationships and trust and again they can’t be outsourced, while creation and production of ebooks and white papers and videos can be. Blog and facebook posts are part of the conversation – and give your business a personable ‘voice’ so these need to come from you and your team.

Answer – some of your content creation can be outsourced.

6. Social media measurement – Someone else can monitor whatever metrics fit with your goal, whether that be an increase in media mentions, an increase in leads, the number of followers and fans and subscribers and so on. This will save you time collating information.

Answer – yes you can outsource measurement. This information can be easily tracked  and presented as a report to you with recommendations, trends, summaries – whatever you need.

7. Social media optimisation – Promoting  your various social media activity, ensuring you have landing pages, repurposing content… all takes time (and know-how) and can easily be outsourced to a professional.

Answer – yes, you can outsource social media optimisation.

The final word – social media is about giving your business a real ‘voice’ and joining in and engaging in the conversations; and only you and your team can do that.

If you’re a blogger, then you’ll be hoping for comments from readers on your blog.

At least you know someone is reading your posts, right?

So it’s rather exciting when you receive a rush of comments and it can be tempting to publish them all.

But have another look at those comments. Do they mention your name at all? Does the comment actually relate directly to your post (eg they’ve agreed or disagreed on a particular point). If they don’t, then chances are the comment is spam.

As a moderator of lots of blogs and a blog community I read LOTS of spam comments. They’re unfortunately a sad fact of blogging – and now comment spammers have got smarter; they don’t pack their comment full of links anymore, they actually write a comment and get past all the spam filters.

Why do they do spam blogs with comments?

Who knows… most blog software marks comments as ‘no follows’ , meaning the link doesn’t  give the link’s owner any SEO credit to help their google rankings. Sure you can click on the link – but who would bother? So the spammers are wasting their time because they don’t receive any link juice.

How can you stop the comment spam?

Make sure you have a spam filter enabled (like Akismet ) to stop the obvious spam. Ensure your comments are held for moderation before published and that you receive an email notification of comments held in moderation. Then moderate comments quickly and ruthlessly.

But the comments look impressive on my blog.

Trust me (and I’ve seen it) 90 spam comments on one blog post doesn’t look good. One real comment is better than 90 spammy ones. And the number of comments on your blog is just one measurement of your blog’s success; track traffic, subscribers and links back to your blog.

So what do spam comments look like?

Like this;

This post doesn’t make any sense, you should add more details, it may help the readers.

(Don’t be offended – it’s spam; delete it!)

Why have you deleted my post? It was very helpful information and i guarantee at least 1 person found it helpful unlike the rest of the comments on this website. I’ll post it again. Sick and tired of getting low numbers of useless visitors for your website? Well i want to tell you about a fresh underground tactic which makes myself $900  daily on 100% AUTOPILOT.

(Again, don’t be offended or reply; it’s spam – delete it!)

Wow this was doubtlessly one of the best blurbs I have go over on the subject so far. I don’t understand where you learn all your data but keep it coming! I’m going to send some folks to this site to take a look at this post. Awesome,  totally fantastic.

(Great for the ego – but it’s spam. Where’s the direct comment to your post?)

Intimately, the article is actually the sweetest on this precious topic. I harmonize with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your future updates.

(yes, yes… but it’s SPAM)

I do not have time to read it all at the moment but I have bookmarked it and also added your RSS feeds, so when I have time I will be back to read more,

(This adds nothing to the dialogue on your blog, it’s SPAM).

So – cull those spammy comments and let the real comments shine.

Your intern or office junior or your PA set up your business’s Facebook Page and it’s flourishing nicely… then they leave – and suddenly no-one else in your company can access your page (and worse still, what if the departee leaves under a cloud and they close the page down or add defamatory content or responses to it?).

When we set up clients with a Facebook business page we ensure that at least two people from the business (and preferably the owner being one of them) are ‘admins’ of the page. (To assign admin roles, the person must be a friend of the page first, then the original admin person can add others as admins).

This means if one of the ‘admins’ leaves then the remaining admin still has access and can remove the departing person’s admin access to the page.

Have you considered who has access to your company blog, your twitter account, your google analytics account, your domain registry details…. in many cases it will be your staff or web developer or social media manager, or who-ever set them up  – what if they leave or move on? Do you still have access? Definitely worth some consideration (and requesting copies of access details).

Social media is evolving lots of ways we communicate and engage – and that even includes the innocuous press release. The new equivalent (or complement) is the ‘social media press release’ or SM release.

From my editor / publisher point of view I say about time too. This is why…

For one of my clients I edit their print magazine and blog and manage their Twitter and Facebook account. I receive a press release – a PDF – about new survey results relevant to my client’s audience.

I won’t be including this news in the magazine as it has missed deadline, or just outside the parameters of what we’d include, or we don’t have space – whatever. But still, I know my client’s audience would get lots of value from knowing about the survey results.

I ask the PR company for a SM release. I receive a word document in return. Huh?

A PDF or word document is of no use to me – I’m not going to regurgitate an article out of it (old school). What I want is an online press release – or at least one that has a URL address I can tweet or link to if I make a reference to the survey in a blog post.

I want to provide my client’s audience value by offering a snap shot of the survey – and if they want to know more they can go to the source – and click thru to the organisation’s online press release (hey… great traffic for them too!).

So this organisation misses out on a valuable PR opportunity to reach out to their target audience.

So what is a SM release?

A social media press release has the same elements as a blog post, really. It’s social and interactive. It’s not ‘broadcasting’ info (here’s our news, our comments – which is all very one-sided) but ‘pulling’ you into the conversation and spreading the conversation.

The post The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases by Brian Solis is comprehensive and well worth checking out.

He says these are the elements of a social media release;

• Headline
• Intro paragraph, rich with key words, relevance and context (summary)
• Supporting facts
• Quote
• Embeddable Video (The new VNR)
• Embeddable Audio
• Embeddable Images
• RSS for the company news
• RSS for product info
• Post in “insert social network of choice” (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, or a relevant social network for sharing)
• Blog this (links to blogging platforms)
• Share on Twitter, Jaikue, Pownce or Tumblr
• Bookmarks
• Relevant links
• Digg, Reddit, and other relevant news aggregators and communities.
• Comments – Maybe also include a link to a hosted network on Ning or even a discussion forum on Tangler or Google Groups
• Contact: hcard, vcard, LInkedIn, Facebook

And here’s an example of a social media release template: http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/smprtemplate.pdf

Using this format makes it easy for bloggers, journos, reporters and editors like me to spread your story – on lots of different platforms – and that’s got to be a good thing.

Lastly as Brian Solis points out the SM release isn’t a silver bullet though;  “A crappy press release is still a crappy press release regardless of multimedia or social bling. Writing the news in a way that’s helpful, informative, and relative is a critical starting point for any release”

Are you sending out social media press releases yet?

If you’ve built your blog, your twitter account, your Linkedin account, your Ning community, your Facebook fan page…. then now you need to be telling people about them.

But not in a spammy way.

Adding your addresses to your email signature is a perfect way to spread the word – with your kind of audience – without being in their face about it.

If I receive an email from a colleague or client, it’s good to discover they’re on Twitter (or Linkedin etc) by reading their signature – and it’s easy just to click on the link and follow, fan, connect, or subscribe to them.

To add your addresses to your email signature in Outlook, go to Tools / Options / Mail Format / Signatures.

Click on ‘new’ – call it a name eg business, and then in the formatting box type in your signature. You can change your font size and colour. And you can highlight your addresses and add a link to them (click on the insert hyperlink button and add in the URL). These links won’t work in plain text emails but they will in HTML emails.

You can add in your logo, your social media addresses with links, format the colour of your signature text – or whatever you’d like to include in your signature.

You can even add in Twitter or Linkedin buttons. Download the icons from sites like this and import using the ‘Picture button’, then select your button icon and click on ‘Insert Hyperlink’ button and add in your relevant social networking address.

You can create different signatures for the same email account. For example, you might have a personal signature and your business signature. When it comes to sending your email, simply click on signatures from the tool bar and select which signature you’d like to use for that particular email.

You can also select which signature is your default signature and if it appears on new or replied messages, back in the Signatures screen.

Now your emails are helping you spread the word about your social media activity.

At a recent social media workshop this was the second most asked question (after how do I find time for social media?).

This is such a huge topic… where to start? (eg grabbing your twitter name is a good start)

The first step is to have a plan (who is your audience, what are my objectives/strategy, what platforms will I use, how will I measure it? etc), and to listen to your audience (using google alerts, twitter search, social mention, read blogs etc).

But attendees really wanted the nitty gritty ‘how to get started guides’ on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook, so here are just a few;

Twitter

-          Check out twitter’s own guide for businesses covering what it is, getting started, learning the lingo, best practices, case studies and more resources.

Linkedin

-          Similarly, Linkedin provide tips to get you started. They have modules here and the three steps for new users here on creating your profile, getting connections and then leveraging Linkedin.

Facebook Business Pages

- Facebook have some basic info about their business pages here.  But the fabulous people at Hubspot have the best info; a video on how to create a Facebook Business Page in five steps.

Enjoy getting started with these social media guides!

One of the biggest obstacles for business owners engaging in social media is the time factor. At my workshops the most commonly asked question is – How do I fit in social media? How do I find time for social media?

So here are my five tips to help you fit social media into your already busy day;

1. Decide how much time you will spend on social media a day.

Sounds simple – but this is the golden rule. If you don’t have a time frame you can get sucked into the wonderful world of blogs, tweets, viral videos and search stats and not surface for hours…

Decide whether you will spend 15 minutes, half an hour or an hour – and stick to it. Block it out in your diary – just as you would an important meeting. And when your time is up; stop.

2. Set up a routine

Your routine could be that first thing in the morning, with a coffee in hand, is your social media time. (This works for me – but for others it’s after lunch or in the evening).

During this time you might scan all the blogs you subscribe to, read the interesting ones, tweet them, or comment on them. You might scan through all your friend’s tweets; retweet the good ones and reply to others, and add your own tweets. You might scan through all your search feeds and jump into relevant conversations. Or you might spend the time writing a blog post on a particular day; whatever it is, make it a habit.

3. Use social media management tools

There are two very useful tools that will help you manage your social media immensely; Tweetdeck and a Feed Reader.

-          Tweetdeck is like a dashboard – at a glance you can view your friends’ tweets, your direct messages, any mentions of you, you can add in your searches – or customise it to suit your needs. As well as making it easy to tweet and retweet, you can post to multiple twitter accounts, your Facebook Business page and your Linkedin status from here.

-          Feed reader – a feed reader like Pageflakes or Netvibes as your internet browser homepage means at glance you can view all the updated blog feeds you subscribe to, and all your search feeds (eg Google alerts, twitter search, etc). You don’t have to visit every blog or website – definitely a time saver.

I’m not a fan of automating your social media – it’s hardly ‘social’ then; it’s more robotic or spammy – but a tool like twitterfeed allows you to feed your latest blog post to your twitter stream (and you can even add in a prefix to appear on each tweet like; New blog post), which does save you time.

4. Give up something else

Is there an area in your business that you could divert your time away from? For example, instead of creating an ad campaign, use that time for social media, or instead of travelling to, and attending, a networking function use that time for social media.

5. Get some help with your social media

Many hands make light work. Be open to your employees contributing to aspects of your social media that interest them, whether it’s monitoring mentions or tweeting.

Invite guest bloggers to contribute to your blog; they could be colleagues, suppliers or customers. Create some guest blog guidelines so they’re aware of the tone and preferred content of your blog. Their contributions could add a new dimension to your blog – and your contributors get to feel part of your community too.

This is my favourite viral video of the week – an ad for a well known dog food brand.

This is a stunning video (but then I’m a biased dog-owner and aspiring movie maker). Though everyone else agrees (apart from the fact that the concept was stolen from Pleix  – which is worth a watch too; though it looks like they are throwing the dogs around) the video is striking, very cute and has that wow factor. I sent it viral.

But interestingly, all the comments on YouTube repeatedly mention how the dog food itself is actually rubbish. I haven’t seen one comment say yep, and the dog food is the healthiest, most nutritional dog food around. (They actually say; “this brand is one of the worst foods for dogs out there. So if you love your dog, buy something else”)

So the video worked but the product still sucks.

LESSON: Social media won’t save you if your product sucks. It will help your word of mouth marketing (good or bad ) though.

(BTW if you liked the sound track it’s here )

I recently came across this checklist of how to drive traffic to your website using social media. (Probably from the same people that Snipe parodies here)

To me, this kind of checklist is the ‘dark side’ of social media; because it misses the whole point of social media entirely. I’m on a mission like Luke Skywalker to highlight the ‘light side’ (except I’m more Princess Leia).

So these were the points;

Decide what you do

(Good starting point… though just not what you do, but what problems you solve for people.)

Figure out your key words

(okay..)

Set up gmail account so you are not inundated with junk

(Why not be authentic and include your real business email – you have spam filters anyway)

Set up a Twitter account. Set up a Facebook account and make friends

(A Facebook business page I think… but do we have a proper plan yet? Or is it just ‘get traffic?’ What about figuring out who our audience is, listening to them first…?)

Set up a blog account -www.blogspot.com is one idea and it is free

(WordPress is better, and you can host it yourself and customise it. A blog is a powerful and serious extension of your brand and does require planning and thoughtful implementation.)

Go to Word and write a blog post (make it brief, using your brand at the beginning, middle and end of the post, and a weblink to your website). Cut and paste text from Word to blogspot and publish post

(Sounds riveting.)

Go to www.twellow.com. Look up as many people that are interested in your industry and ask them to follow you.

(Why, why would they follow you? What are you offering? What relationship have you built? Asking me to follow you is like spamming me with invites to share my email address to receive my inheritance or lottery prize.)

Blog fortnightly, tweet four times a day (you can automate this) facebook once a day

(Automating… *sigh*… this is like the phone call I received today… I answered, there was a pause (I was wondering if I had a heavy breather type of call. No.) A guy launched into saying he was from such and such company and carried on – he didn’t stop – it was a recorded message! The horror. What company in their right mind would think that completely out of the blue, interrupting my day, their recorded phone call (not even asking my name or making any attempt at building a connection – other than I answered their call) would convince me that gosh yes I do so need such a product from this stranger spamming me on the other end of the phone???

I do feed my blog feeds to my twitter, yes, – but that’s it; and that just saves me typing it in. Social media is SOCIAL not robot media.)

A week later go to www.huitter.com and clear out anyone not following you. Do this fortnightly.

(I so don’t get this. And I so hate this advice – it screams that you’re just using twitter for your own superficial means. If I’m following Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan and Scott Monty – and they don’t follow me back – I’m not going to unfollow them!! I’m following them in the first place because they are interesting to follow. It’s not about getting them to follow me. It’s about being interested in other people – not pushing my stuff! And if they did follow me back it should be on my merit of being a worthy twitterer not to do the “if you don’t follow me back then I’ll unfollow you.” This isn’t the school yard… this is SOCIAL media not spammy game playing media)

The idea is to get the brand name out there, exposure. Nothing else.

(Actually it’s about building relationships. If you want brand exposure – use a billboard. Really.

Social media is listening, engaging, creating good content and measuring – and a whole lot more.)

When you get good at it, it takes about ten minutes out of your day once it is set up, it is set up and away you go.

(Actually it will probably take longer to listen, to engage, to moderate, to create content and measure it all – but it’s worth it. Because you’ll be building stronger relationships- with people that like what you’re about (instead of them adding you to their spam box). And you can’t set it up and forget it; social media is a long term relationship that requires your energy and interaction.

Sure you might get lots of traffic – but will they come back? Have you engaged them? Have you offered anything of value? Has your brand reputation increased?)

Now don’t worry if you don’t understand any of this, just monkey see, monkey do.

(I believe if you don’t understand or can’t be bothered to learn how to engage and offer valuable content – then why bother. If you’re learning and making mistakes – that’s okay – but to follow like a sheep to cheat the system on a quick rich track, that’s just lazy. If you’re going to follow a cookie cutter formula to ‘drive traffic’, then you’re just another spammer with no soul.)

Seriously. (And I lay down my light sabre now.)

As everyone winds down to the Christmas holidays and looking for any excuse not to do any work, I’m sharing my favourite video picks for the year. Enjoy!

Best social media viral video

Fabulous message, stirring soundtrack and smart visuals… I play this at the beginning of our social media training days.

Best staff sing along

Don’t you wish your Friday night drinks were as inspired and fun as this?

Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.

Best chuckle of the year (and feels Xmas-y too)

My Dad, an ex-farmer even enjoyed this one and sent it viral. (According to the reporter on MSN Video, the farmer says he received help from his well-trained sheepdog)

Best example of a viral video

This is a fun video – for Volkswagon, without a car in sight. I love it when advertisements aren’t all ‘we’re so amazing, buy me’.

Best love story video

I’m a romantic and I watched all 12 minutes of this to see if the guy got the gal. Fabulous.

Best thought provoking video

I don’t ‘do’ Xmas shopping. I don’t even own a TV. Here’s why.

http://www.youtube.com/user/storyofstuffproject

Best New Zealand video

I’m a kiwi. The making of this vid is worth checking out too.

Best social media love song

Love for the 2000’s – social media style. A cute ditty.

Another classic viral video

What guys do when they’re bored? Or a stealth brand campaign? (what brand comes to mind when you watch this?)

Best customer strikes back video

Cleverly crafted, with just the right balance of jocularity and outrage, this video got the attention of the airline, who took the message on board.

What has been your favourite video of the year?