Tease Dance and Fitness is a new concept in fitness and feminism.  It was founded 6 years ago by Kristin Hubbard who was struck by the power and personal transformation she experienced after trying pole dancing for fitness she was driven to share her passion with friends and other women.  With that Tease was born.

As a new concept in a new business environment, traditional marketing would not fit with Tease’s vision or its market share.  While Tease gets a large number of referrals and connections via current students.  By implementing a social media communications strategy, Tease has been able to spread the word about their mission to scores of new women and gain many new clients.

Tease utilizes several platforms to maximize their social media exposure.  Tease maintains a blog, a Facebook profile, a Twitter feed, a YouTube channel, and recently took part in a Groupon deal.   The development of an online presence has allowed Tease to move from a ‘secret’ shared among friends to something women are sharing proudly with one another.  Each social media platform has its own purpose and has different goals.

As Social Media Mistress, Erin Erickson is in charge of managing the various outlets for Tease and measuring their success in reaching and maintaining contacts.   She points out that determining the metrics for measuring success or failure for a particular platform is just as important as any other aspect of her job.  She also indicated that the goals and the success measurements can be, and often are fluid and dynamic.

While using the number of views on YouTube, the number of “Likes” on Facebook, or re-Tweets of Twitter posts is a concrete and basic way of evaluating success Erin prefers to look at the interactions that have occurred to gauge how well Tease is reaching and communicating with women.

Tease Dance and Fitness considers its Social Media Marketing Plan to be a success.  Through the variety of platforms Tease is able to connect with women worldwide and develop strong personal relationships with its students, current, former, and prospective.  As an organization that focuses on nurturing one’s self, these relationships are crucial- as they highlight how the company cares for the whole person.

One of the most common problems I see my clients having to deal with is jumping into the social media real without a solid plan in place. By not crafting your social media strategy in a thorough and holistic manner, they often miss key components that, even if they seem minor, can spell the difference between success or failure of your campaign.  To help you understand what should be included in your social media plan, I have included a list from John Rodgers, a social media expert at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, from SocialFresh.com

The 5 Core Principles Of Any Social Media Plan

Wherever you are in the execution of your social efforts, I think it’s important to take a step back and examine how you’re measuring up to some basic principals and goals you may (or may not) have laid out when launching your Facebook page, Twitter account, blog, etc.

Plan, What Plan?

If you didn’t lay out an official Social Media Plan before diving into using social tools for your business, you’re not alone. A recent report from Digital Brand Expressions indicates that up to 50% of companies are diving in to social media without a plan.

Regardless of what industry/market/segment you’re in, there are some basic principles that will help you identify key strategies for engaging with your customers in the social space. The list below isn’t meant to be an end all be all, but rather my personal take on key elements that I think are essential to any social media plan.

1. Find the Right People

As with everything else your business does, your employees are the key differentiator between you and the next guy. Before launching any social media plan, I think it’s important to identify who’s going to be managing these efforts.

Don’t try to outsource execution as these team members are the heart & soul of your brand’s voice. By first identifying the right people to lead these efforts, they can help drive key decisions moving forward.

Check out Olivier Blanchard’s (The Brand Builder) post on the different roles required for a successful Social Media Plan: Best Practices for Social Media: The basics of program planning

2. Listen First

No one likes the annoying guy from work that talks about himself all day long; don’t be that guy.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of tools to monitor what’s being said about your company or brand.

This can be as simple as setting up Google Alerts for keywords related to your brand/company or even using search.twitter.com (or searching from the site/various twitter apps.)

Both of these methods are can become quite tedious, so I recommend outsourcing some of this to a social media monitoring company.  More on that in a minute.

3. Engage Early & Often

There’s a reason Brian Solis recently published his book entitled Engage!  It’s the bread and butter of any successful social media effort.  And it takes dedicated, passionate people to achieve engagement with any community.  If you’re going to simply push out one way messaging, there’s plenty of traditional media channels for that…take your pick.

4. Measure Everything

Unlike people, I think this is an area that you should certainly look to outsource (unless you’re a whiz with tracking, analyzing, and reporting on every online conversation about your brand.)

I’m a big fan of Radian 6 myself, but Jeremiah Owyang (Web Strategy) shares a snapshot of the larger social monitoring industry: Brand Monitoring, Social Analytics, Social Insights

5. Learn & Adjust

While traditional brand communication models might have delivered similar results year in and year out, social tactics involve conversations with real people. Dialogue changes everything. You must be willing to learn and adjust your tactics based on your community.

Of course, it never hurts to have a plan in place at the beginning of the fiscal year but I’d include a big asterisk on the front when sharing with leadership: *Subject to change!

Your Turn

What do you think?  Are there basic principles that guide social media efforts at your company?  If so, I’d love to hear what key elements you have found essential to your success.  Leave a comment below and let us know.

Livestrong is hoping to leverage social media for good and beat its own Guinness World Record for “Most Widespread Social Networking Message.”

The record was set last year with 209,771 unique mentions in 24 hours using the #BeatCancer tag. Starting at 12 p.m. ET Friday and going until 12 p.m. ET Saturday, Livestrong is encouraging users to send a tweet, update their Facebook status or write a blog post including the #beatcancer hashtag. The best part is PayPal and SWAGG will donate $0.05 for every mention with the hashtag to cancer charities.

Last year, the campaign not only set the record, it also raised more than $70,000 in the process and garnered some 100 million impressions. The donation pledge for each social mention was upped from last year’s $0.01 for each mention. Also, people can visit beatcancereverywhere.com and pledge to donate more money to charities like Stand Up To Cancer and Bright Pink.

You can see a screenshot from Mashable’s live stream of Twitter mentions using the #beatcancer hashtag below, and can participate by simply retweeting this post or posting to Facebook using our share buttons.

I was recently interviewed by Michael Estrin of iMedia Connection for an article on Social Media Disaster Planning.  Below is Michael’s article – REALLY great read, if I do say so myself

Your social media disaster kit

Brand meltdowns are as old as brands. In the past, we called them public relations disasters — usually because the brand had somehow become ensnared in an epic controversy that would require the entire might of the PR department to spin like mad before the bad news swallowed the brand’s message, equity, and just about anything else the marketing team had spent years building.

Sometimes the meltdown could be laid at the door of the marketing department or the agency (think of an ad campaign gone wrong and you get the idea), but more often than not the meltdown’s origins came from elsewhere inside the company or from a public source. Regardless, the response was usually a PR problem first and an advertising problem second (aside from frantically pulling media). But that was then, and this is now.

The days of putting problems in neat, little boxes to be fixed by the appropriate department are long gone. Digital media in general, and social media in particular, have collapsed those traditional boundaries. When a brand is in peril, reporters, pundits, politicians, internet users with serious followings (say, a few thousand Twitter followers), and just plain regular folks will all kick your brand and your message around for as long as the topic is trending. And they’ll likely do that kicking in various social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, where the probability of amplifying the conversation increases dramatically.

Consider how JetBlue handled (or in some ways mishandled) the Steven Slater incident. Back in August, the internet went into overdrive almost immediately after the airline’s disturbed flight attendant popped the hatch on the plane’s emergency exit, and — cold brew in hand — slid down the ramp, becoming yet another Warholian celebrity.

In the wake of the story, The New York Times blasted JetBlue, calling the brand slow to respond: “For the first 48 hours, JetBlue said nothing about the matter, an nusual course of action — or inaction — for a company known for skillfully cultivating the public through social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.”

Two days after the Aug. 9 incident, JetBlue did respond on its blog. In part, the response read: “While this episode may feed your inner ‘Office Space,’ we just want to take this space to recognize our 2,300 fantastic, awesome, and professional Inflight Crewmembers for delivering the JetBlue Experience you’ve come to expect of us.”

But if The New York Times was rough on JetBlue for being slow to respond initially, the blog post itself did get good reviews from MediaBistro’s WebNewser blog.

“It is a funny, brief, and appropriate response to an issue that probably has been blown out of proportion,” Alex Weprin wrote. “Companies could learn from this: Social media is your friend. Even when the PR isn’t positive, using Twitter, Facebook, and blogs to address issues head on can help make the situation better.”

In the final analysis, it’s probably fair to say that JetBlue did some things right and some things wrong in terms of how it responded to Steven Slater. But if there’s one thing all marketers should takeaway from Steve Slater, it’s this: The fight to get your message out and protect your brand will be waged first and foremost on Facebook, Twitter, and your company’s blog. It’s now 2010, and we’re beyond the point of debating whether or not brands should have a social media presence. Customers already answered that question in the affirmative. The question today is how do you use that social media presence when disaster strikes? It’s a question we put to several social media experts.

Set alerts
The speed of life has never moved faster. By now, we’ve probably all had the experience of walking away from our computer for a cup of coffee and returning 10 minutes later to find that something has blown up. Well, whether it’s an office uproar or a full-blown internet phenomenon, the crisis does not start at its zenith. Yes, it may look like things got out of hand from the start, but there’s always an evolution, albeit a superfast one. That’s why Pete Scanlon, an account coordinator at Strategis, says the first order of business is to set alerts.

“In social media, as in all media, being the first to address an issue during a time of crisis is crucial,” Scanlon says. “You can stay on top of all potential crises by setting flags through tools such as Google Alerts. It would be impossible for agencies to have employees constantly viewing your social networks. Alerts will notify you anytime a name, product, competitor, or any other specified term is mentioned on a social media platform, blog, or the web.”

It’s a good idea to set alerts for your brand name, key executives, products and any terms closely associated with your ad campaigns.

But does setting alerts mean you’ll be able to avoid all crises? Sorry, that would be wishful thinking. What alerts do is cue you to a problem at a time when the problem is small — or better yet — still taking shape. You may still find yourself in a crisis, but the beauty of alerts is that they allow you to enter the conversation when the noise level is relatively low and your brand’s voice is most likely to resonate.

Hold your fire for a second
Ok. You’ve set your alert, and you’ve managed to spot a crisis in its infancy. If you were a firefighter, you’d hose those sparks down before the flames spread. But you’re not a firefighter, and those sparks may not be the only thing burning. So before you press “Send” on your response, you must ask yourself if you fully understand the issue, says Connie Bensen, director of social media and community strategy at Alterian.

“Listen to get the whole story first before jumping to conclusions,” Bensen says. “And if it’s serious, don’t jump into the fray without having a plan that legal has given their nod to.”

Pre-plan
You may not be able to plan specifics in advance of a crisis, but you really don’t want to “wing it,” says Lauren Candito, cofounder of Social Media Solutions.

“In the chaos of a crisis situation, messages can seem frantic, desperate, or defensive if not planned ahead of time,” Candito says.

The key to putting out polished messaging when a crisis strikes is to make concrete plans in advance. While plans may change quickly once a crisis is underway, Candito advises clients to detail a chain of command and to plot out messaging points and platforms today. True, it’s hard to plan for unknowns. But consider the fact that you already know at least some of the disasters you’re likely to face. For example, if you’re a food brand, you can plan in advance for massive recalls or negative studies that say your product is bad for health. Likewise, if you’re a retailer, you should have a pretty good grasp of the kinds of customer service problems that come up — and which ones tend to gain traction.

Taking it off-line
Once you’ve spotted a crisis and determined the parameters of the problem, you may want to take a counter-intuitive step by discussing the matter “offline.” It’s a tactic that works well when you have a dissatisfied customer, especially if they have a large social media following or your brand is being slammed on a well-trafficked forum. Of course, going offline can be a little outside the comfort zone for most marketers who traditionally have worked in a brand-to-all world, rather than a one-to-one conversation.

“It’s extremely difficult to resolve a conflict in an open forum like a blog or social media site, says Matt Kucharski, SVP, and Tony Morse, director at Padilla Speer Beardsley. “It’s a little bit like the parents arguing in front of the kids — nobody looks good. Instead, it’s often best to take the conversation into a private forum: a phone call, a face-to-face meeting, or at the very least a one-to-one email conversation (not ideal). Then, when the issue is resolved, go back into the open forum to share what the resolution was. Often times, the person who made the complaint in the first place will volunteer to post information on how the issue was resolved.”

Rally your enthusiasts with lots of information
Not every crisis is a brand-against-world fight. In fact, most of the time, a brand will have supporters. Consider the Toyota recall not so long ago. While some customers shot arrows at Toyota, others offered passionate defenses of the brand and their cars. But how can a brand leverage those loyalists? Consider what Chris Pitre, social marketing strategist for IDEA, believes Toyota could have done better.

“In the case of Toyota, they had several groups on Facebook and elsewhere that were passionate about the brand before and after the recall, but Toyota waited for a long while before communicating with these groups after their recall issues,” Pitre says. “By over-communicating with this crowd, Toyota could have benefitted from saving face with this group.”

According to Pitre, bigger brands often tend to overlook their own employees as loyalists. During a crisis, the tendency is to clamp down on potential leaks, keeping both employees and the public in the dark.

“[But] instead of operating in fear of a leak during crisis, brands should consider that perhaps leaking the truth is not a leak at all,” Pitre says. “Arming employees (such as internal enthusiasts) with the right information that they can share with their networks is an incredibly smart move that can be easily overlooked.”

How’s your tone?
Remember when BP CEO Tony Hayward said, “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do, I’d like my life back”? That was a pretty stupid thing to say as the world watched oil spread across the Gulf of Mexico. While Hayward didn’t tweet it, the statement’s length was perfect fodder for Twitter, and the phrase became emblematic of BP’s indifference.

But for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, try giving Hayward the benefit of the doubt. Ask yourself what would have happened had he simply stopped at: “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do”? Omitting the offensive part about wanting his life back might have helped the statement connect. The message would have been empathy, not indifference. In effect, he would have been saying: We all want this to end, especially BP.

Of course, BP didn’t do a very good job of managing the crisis (although to be fair to their PR and marketing teams, there weren’t any good moves on the table). But one thing they should have asked themselves before issuing each statement was whether the voice was genuine, says Richard Harmer, Brand Strategist at Brady Media Group.

“Be real and be open, especially about situations that come up,” says Harmer, adding that the key is to build trust.

“When [shit] hits the fan, say so,” Harmer says. “You want to be the voice of trust. If you build up credibility with the audience by saying, [for example], ‘OMG!!! [shit] just hit the fan!! Our CEO got fired!!!!!! I’ll keep you updated,’ you have the audience and press waiting on your next tweet.”

Of course, the tone and words you choose should connect to your brand’s voice. So while Harmer’s example included some colorful language, other brands may opt for different words.

Social isn’t the only game in town.

While you certainly want to be an active player in the conversation during a crisis, brands shouldn’t ignore others channels, says Eric Papczun, VP at Performics.

“Don’t limit yourself to Facebook and Twitter,” Papczun says. “Many options to own more of a brand-related conversation exist. Consider ways to own more real estate on search engine results pages… video, images, and other multimedia resources can provide brands with high ranking listings and valuable visibility in their efforts to sway negative public opinions and perceptions. [Brands in crisis] should do more than release a written statement and work with the editorial press. They should also leverage social resources like YouTube and Flickr to release and optimize images, videos, and other multimedia resources that help to tell their side of the story.”

Michael Estrin is a freelance writer.

On Twitter? Follow Michael Estrin at @mestrin.

From Jackie Jimenez at Social Media Solutions LLC

Universities are turning to social networking to create online learning communities that mix serious academic work, and connections among working scholars, with Facebook-style fun.

At the City University of New York, a new project called Academic Commons is connecting faculty, staff, and graduate students across the system’s 23 institutions. The CUNY-only network allows its more than 1,300 users—out of a potential user base of 10,000 eligible students and faculty and staff members—to write and share blogs, join subject groups, and participate in academic discussions.

“We’re trying to create a kind of online virtual community that is open and organic in its nature,” said Matthew Gold, Academic Commons’ director.

Another effort, at the University of Pennsylvania, is connecting online learners in a similar fashion. And unlike the original Facebook, celebrated in the movie The Social Network, these platforms build scholars and administrators in.

As Mr. Gold put it, “You may not want to friend your dean on Facebook, but you still want to be connected to your dean.”

At CUNY, registered members of Academic Commons get their own publicly accessible profile, where they can post information about themselves and link up with friends in groups online. Such groups focus on topics that include open-source publishing, graduate admissions, educational games, and—on the nonacademic side—New York City pizza joints. “It allows members of the CUNY community to find one another,” Mr. Gold said.

In the fall of 2008, the university’s Committee on Academic Technology, which includes faculty and administrators from each CUNY campus, met to figure out what a systemwide social network should look like. Rather than setting the Academic Commons in stone, the committee decided that it would leave the platform design—and the source code—open for user input, allowing it to evolve over time.

Monica Berger, a technical-services and electronic-resources librarian at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, said the site has helped her connect with faculty members and fellow librarians she otherwise might never have met. “It really is about networking,” she said. “It’s a way to see what your colleagues are involved with, what they’re doing, what they’re interested in.”

Online and Global

The University of Pennsylvania’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies used its social-networking platform, Open Learning Commons, to foster student communities in online learning courses. The site lets faculty members post course material online and allows students to download, blog, and discuss the curriculum in forums.

Since the platform made its debut in the spring of 2009, it has hosted close to 2,000 students in 44 online courses. The college has also made some course material and class discussions—including a course on global environmental sustainability leading up to last year’s climate-change talks in Copenhagen—available to the public to read through and comment on.

“We’re really excited that we created an online space that a global audience could come together and interact around with Penn content,” said Lisa Minetti, a Penn curriculum design and assessment specialist who helped build the Commons.

According to Nora E. Lewis, vice dean of the college, faculty members have also been receptive. Ms. Lewis said that a music professor teaching an online course found the platform especially convenient for collecting feedback from students to guide the curriculum. “The student-to-student interaction drives the teaching,” Ms. Lewis said. In traditional classrooms, students “don’t get to extend the conversation in between the live sessions,” she said.

Mr. Gold and Ms. Lewis said they had been in contact with a handful of universities interested in setting up social-netwoking sites of their own.

Academic Commons users have been posting open-source code written for Academic Commons, allowing it to be adapted by Web developers at other university networks.

Ms. Lewis says that universities seem to be exploring new ways to incorporate social learning into the curriculum. “Everybody is excited about the fact that user-generated content is driving the learning community,” she said.

Source: http://chronicle.com/article/New-College-Networks-Unlike/124871/