First consider the basics – spec out your hopes for your community.  Consider these questions: what do you want the community to accomplish? How big do you see it growing? How often will users visit? How inclusive do you envision the community to be? Answering these questions before you dive in is crucial because it impacts the choices you make from a design perspective. For example, look at how you handle user identity on your site and what opportunities you give you the community for content creation. Consider the measures you have in place to indicate an individual’s user influence (number of posts, highly ranked by fellow users, length of time as a user, etc.) and how much control you offer them over their posts (can they only post text, or can they include photos, links, videos, etc.?) – how does that affect the quality of content your community will produce?

Let the users do the hard part. As your community grows, place more trust in your users to manage the community themselves. Reddit does this by utilizing a voting function – users can vote up content they like, and vote down content they don’t like. Crowdsourcing also falls here. Reddit has been translated in to several other languages simply because users asked for it and offered to do it themselves.  (Dave Olson at Hootsuite also discussed a similar situation in his talk, Crowd Sourcing Community Projects Like Tom Sawyer). By placing some power in the hands of the users, encouraging your major community evangelists (the fanboys and girls), your community builds more trust in itself.

Resist the urge to remove content. Reddit has a strict policy over not removing content from its site, unless is overtly racist or spam. Founder Huffman said this was one of the most challenging things to overcome (especially when it came to seeing negative posts about himself posted on the site) but something that has been crucial to making the community feel tight-knit and highly regarded. By taking the good with the bad and relinquishing control, Reddit was able to build solid trust and respect with its community. Users understand Reddit as being an honest and transparent place where they can feel free to openly share ideas without fear of being subdued or censored.

Looking for more advice on how you can design your community to be more user-friendly? Get in touch with Text 100′s design experts today!

Not wanting to do the really smart, one-hour discussion injustice, we’ll be featuring a series of posts covering off the major points that were discussed. I’m starting with the million dollar question: how in the world do you build, implement and grow a social media strategy without endless resources? In following posts, we’ll cover off the challenge that is ROI, the potential that gamification holds for B2B organizations, how PR across countries and regions can be managed and encouraged, and finally, why internal communications mustn’t be ignored when considering social media.

Resources: finding the right people, helping them find the time

When asked about the most pressing challenges they face with in their roles, our panelists – responsible for driving social media and brand strategies for Cisco, IBM, Xerox and NVIDIA – all had a similar thread: it’s all about resources – people and time. It’s about finding the right people to take up the mantle – those with a passion for social media and the expertise their audiences are seeking, convincing leadership that these people need to focus on social media, and then enabling those people with the time and support they need to commit to a long-term engagement. And not necessarily in that order.

Playing on people’s natural inquisitiveness is a great way to generate interest in understanding the basic tools of social media and in how a brand and industry is being discussed. At NVIDIA and Cisco, you’ll find large screens placed in high-traffic locations throughout their campuses, showing different searches for their brand names and the hot topics/trends  of their industries. These screens drive home the point to all employees, including executives, that their customers are using social media to connect, to gather advice, and to discuss their brands and the industries in which they compete. Cisco has a social champions program, where active employees are rewarded internally. To inspire their workforce and potential subject matter experts, IBM has started sharing stories of those that are leading by example with an internal series called the Digital IBMer.

The panelists shared that it’s a continued process of education in order to get people on board, from the C-suite on down. After all, as Susan Emerick with IBM shared, “If we’re not [present], competitors will be.” All panelists agreed that while they no longer feel the pressure to convince their executive teams that social media is a must do, there is now pressure to show that they’re doing social well. And for that topic – ROI – stay tuned for my second blog post.

Finally, assuming there may never be enough people to do what an organization needs to do from a social media standpoint, they all agreed the best starting point is with listening. Figure out where your target audiences are, what they’re talking about, what they care about, who and what they’re influenced by. Focus on your audiences and where they’re active – a scattershot approach is not only a waste of time, but with good and consistent listening, it’s completely unnecessary.

Regardless the size of an organization, whether it’s a Mom and Pop shop or a Fortune 100 company, the people are the truest representation of a brand. What these organizations shared with us is that with a consistent and supportive effort to get the right people engaged and to support them with ongoing education, the result is a more engaged brand, not to mention consistency in voice and image for their brands. Powerful thinking from these B2B powerhouses.

We focus on finding the digital social natives that won’t implement marketing 1.0 behaviors and will change the marketing shift in their teams. Duane Schulz, Xerox

For now, tell us: what do YOU do within your organization to get the right people on board with social media and supported accordingly?

Panel: Social Media in the Underground World of B2B

Hashtag: #SMB2B

Moderator: Melissa Chanslor, account director, Text 100 @chanslor

Panelists:

• Jeannette Gibson, director, social media marketing, Cisco Systems @jeanetteg
• Duane Schulz, VP, Brand & Social Marketing, Xerox, @duaneschulz
• Susan Emerick, Program Mgr, Social Business Enablement, IBM @sfemerick
• Shanee Ben-Zur, Social Media Strategist, NVIDIA @sbenzur

More details about the panel : http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9756

• Preparation: Before leaving, look through the conference schedule and note speakers and sponsors you want to connect with. Follow them on Twitter, connect with them on LinkedIn and take advantage of networking tools offered by show organizers. In the case of SXSW, SXSocial came in very handy to message attendees before and during the show.  Also, make sure you Like your favorite brands on Facebook before going to the event.  There’s a greater chance to get an invite to their parties if you’re part of their community.
• Leverage social media at the event:  The Text team downloaded several apps to help us connect with SXSW attendees, clients, media and just people of interest.   One that took SXSW by storm is Highlight.  The Highlight app, once you sign in through Facebook, automatically notifies you when friends or friends of friends are nearby. It also tells you what mutual Facebook friends you have in common with someone, as well as other mutual interests. The idea is to help you find people with similar interests or meet new people. And, with thousands of people at the show, we also used GroupMe, a group text messaging app, to stay in-touch with colleagues during the event which was spread all over Austin.
• Don’t forget the old fashioned way: There’s an art to networking and you need to practice it. It sounds simple – introduce yourself to everyone you meet because you never know what you’ll learn. I watched a friend – small business columnist for USA Today, Rhonda Abrams – work the room at the Text 100 Cocktails & Connections event and she didn’t leave a stone unturned. Everyone knew her by the time the party ended and she made some valuable connections.  We can all learn from Rhonda and hone our networking skills. The Text team spent the next several days talking to everyone…. so much so that many of us lost our voices!

What other tips do you have for networking at SXSW?

Rhonda Abrams, right, from USA Today, networks with fellow attendees to the Text 100 Cocktails & Connections event on Friday.

Perhaps it's time to reconsider the infographic about infographics?

As with any “hot trend” in digital, there are people who jump on the bandwagon and beat a dead horse. These people that are ruining worthy infographics that contain information and data, and tell a story. My blog post from June 2011 about the increasing use of infographics was one of the top 10 viewed Hypertext posts in 2011, and we continue to work with a slew of clients to develop and leverage multiple data-rich infographics, such as Cisco, AMEX, Gartner, Xerox, etc. In fact, Text 100 secured coverage of an American Express-generated infographic centered on mobile payments in Om’s GigaOm with Ryan Kim just a few months back in December.

At SXSW today, I attended a session called Branded Content: We’re All Publishers Now, and Shane Snow, co-founder of Contently spent some time talking about infographics. Shane emphasized that the best infographics are data driven and have a story flow that reads from top to bottom as a traditional story would. He called out that infographics are the one time when it’s interesting for companies to talk about themselves when it comes to data, sharing OK Cupid and FedEex as solid examples.

Main takeaway? The infographic isn’t dying; just the lame and/or worthless ones are. If you’re a brand creating an infographic or a PR person pitching one to reporters or thinking about an infographic from a broader content strategy perspective, don’t stop because of this. Sure you may want to reconsider pitching it to Om, but just be sure as with any other form of content that it’s solid – meaning your infographic tells a story, is data-rich and well-designed, and ultimately adds to the reader experience. Branded content is on the rise, and when used strategically to tell or amplify a data-driven, compelling story, infographics are still a successful means for storytelling.

This morning, Melissa Chanslor moderated a session about B2B social media with panelists Xerox, Cisco, IBM and NVIDIA. Full details of the panel are available here, and a full debrief of this panel can be expected very soon, but Melissa and Jessica Casano-Antonellis wanted to come back on this panel and share the first fresh insights and conclusions on a quick video.

Lots more content coming up from the Texties onsite, but make sure to keep an eye on our SXSW video playlist to see what we’re up to and who we’re chatting with. We were fortunate to have a great guest list at our event on Friday and snagged a ton of interviews with the leading digital minds at some major brands (fair warning – the videos are a bit dark; it was down pouring and we were outside!).

Think you have nothing in common with a food truck? Think again. James, Stephanie and Daniel shared their best advice on how any kind of business can (and must) use social media to build their brand, which I’ve shared here in two main points:

1.       Engage to build an experience. If you’re not engaging on social media, what’s the point? Stephanie, a vegan food truck owner focused on spreading a message of responsible and sustainable framing, shares photos of her at farms with her suppliers, with the produce and crew – all to provide transparency about the part of her business that sets them apart. James shared, “The biggest mistake you can make is not engaging with customers… it’s meant to be a conversation, not an advertising platform.”  As they all pointed out, if you’re just using a platform like Twitter or Facebook to talk at them – in their case to tell people where they’re parking — you’re missing the boat. The truck?

2.       Tone and consistency are key. Stephanie shared, “My brand is an extension of me, my personality, so I do all the social media myself.” All brands, regardless of size or audience(s), can learn from this point. Any touch point with your brand should tell a story, paint a picture, of your brand’s personality – what you stand for.

Building a brand is not something that happens overnight. For start-ups, it takes persistence, consistency and a commitment to get to know your customers.