Do you need to establish Social Media Guidelines for your company? Establishing a Social Media Handbook, Online Communication Guidelines, and Training employees on the appropriate use of social media within those guidelines, are fundamental in running a successful company. The following provided Social Media Policies and Online Communication Guides are meant to be used as a starting ground for your organization to ensure you are protecting your companies integrity through Social Media efforts. As you know these guidelines will continue to evolve as web participation and interactions evolve.

American Red Cross

One of the most admirable published Social Media Handbooks and Online Communications Guidelines was created by Wendy Harman of the Red Cross. They have divided their guides into two parts which include the Communications Guidelines and Social Media Handbook but actively reference each other within the documents:
The Social Media Handbook for Local Red Cross Units

The American Red Cross Online Communications Guidelines

Gartner

Gartner Public Web Participation Guidelines

Greteman Group

Greteman Group Social Media Policy

IBM

IBM Social Computing Guidelines

Intel

Intel Social Media Guidelines

Kodak

Kodak Social Media Tips and Guidelines

Mayo Clinic

Participation Guidelines
Comment Policy
For Mayo Clinic Employees

Porter Novelli

Porter Novelli Blogging and Social Media Policy

SAP

SAP- Social Media Participation Guidelines 2009

Telstra

Telstra (Australia) – Social Media Guidelines

Please let us know if there are any that you feel are left out of this list?

The last few months I have been running into more and more companies that have a so-called Social Media Rockstar or Expert on their team which seems very intriguing. One of the first questions that I always ask them is what their daily routine looks like. I get a few different answers but most revolve around different Social Networking Platform tactics and creating conversation/engaging their target audience blah blah blah. But a commonality with the more successful Social Media campaigns always involves a minimum of two people, which fit into the following categories: The Builder and the Nurturer.

The Builder:

The person who develops the framework and overall Social Media strategy.

The Nurturer:

The person and/or people who promote/engage conversation, drives the brand and generates awareness.

If you have one person in your company that holds both of these positions then chances are they are lacking focus. In order to effectively create a voice for your brand online you must leverage a minimum of two people no matter how great of a rockstar you may have on your team.

The term Socialnomics was coined by Erik Qualman @equalman who also wrote a book this year titled “Socialnomics”. It talks about how social media transforms the way we live and do business. If you haven’t picked up a copy of the book you should, as it does a great job of describing the massive socio-economic shift that is fundamentally changing the way consumers and companies communicate/interact with each other. We all understand how everyone leverages Social Networks to post comments, updates, upload pictures, videos, etc etc but many younger people truly lack the understanding of the amount of power Social Media has on businesses. Socialnomics inevitably will be one of the next classes added to accredited school curriculum but the time is now for students to learn how to leverage social media as it relates to business. This allows this generation a clear opportunity to leverage Social Networks that they are already familiar with and taking that to the next level of engaging audiences from a business prospective. Time to put together some curriculum for Socialnomics 101.

(Don’t worry we are not tooting our own horn…) If your looking for all of the top headlines from topics around the web, look no further than Alltop.com.  From Social Media, to SEO, to Photography- AllTop.com is by far one of the best places to find the information you are looking for. Guy Kawasaki created Alltop to help answer the question, “Whats Happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. It is different than a search engine as it gives you a new perspective on the question “what is happening now?” It is thought of as Online Magazine Rack of some of the best content you can find. Buzzshift.com is proud to be Best of the Best on Alltop.  Feel free to check it out at http://social-media.alltop.com .

Mashable is holding its first ever Social Good Conference on Friday, August 28 at the historic 92nd Street Y in NYC. The event is being covered on Livestream and BuzzShift.TV is your exclusive behind the scenes live pass.   The Conference is celebrating the finale of the Summer of Social Good charitable campaign. BuzzShift.TV will be covering the event Live with some of the biggest names in social media and fundraising including Pete Cashmore (CEO, Mashable), (Adam Hirsh, Mashable), Randi Zuckerberg (CMO, Facebook), Beth Kanter (Beth’s Blog) and more. Mark you calendars now for Friday August 28, 2009 9am-7pm and join us Live on BuzzShift.TV for full coverage and interviews.

What is Link Building and why does it matter to your site?
Link Building is the action of creating inbound links to your website.  Inbound links are hyperlinks from external websites linking to pages on your website. This is VERY IMPORTANT because Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines grade your website heavily on inbound links.
Inbound Links not only can drive more traffic to your site, but also affect the Page Rank of your site. Your Page Rank usually goes hand and hand with the organic ranking in search engines.
This next part is most important concept to understand. QUALITY MATTERS, you want Inbound Links from sites that have a higher Page Rank than your site. Google and other search engines also watch for relevant links. For instance, if your site is dedicated to Ford Mustangs then you probably are not looking for links from Cat Fancy magazine.
Link Building Benefits:
1. Link building brings QUALITY traffic from relevant sites.
2. Quality traffic typically means that your site is seen as a valuable resource.
3. Link building helps create brand awareness, visibility and credibility of your site.
4. Higher Organic Ranking in search engines (Free Advertising.)
Overall link building is one of the most important steps in promoting your website.  Quality Inbound Links from high Page Rank sites to your site is SEO Gold. Link Building is time consuming and no simple task. However, Link Building can give your site the trump card over your competition.

If you are like most other companies you are looking to find a way to promote your product/service/campaign in order to turn your web presence into a revenue-making machine. The fact is there are tons of Social Networking sites out there.. Leveraging the proper Social Media Marketing techniques and space though is the trick. As you can see by looking at  Brian Solis’s Conversation Prism above there are many outlets you can leverage that can help you drive more traffic and gain natural search engine optimization. Find out how BuzzShift can help drive quality traffic and conversions by signing up to receive our Free Site Assessment.

BuzzShift is an Online PR and Social Media Agency.  Much of what we do is Content Creation, Content Optimization, SEO and Social Media Tactics.  We don’t follow trends but as much as staying in the Pulse of what is going on “Now”. BuzzShift uses a variety of Rockstar quality marketing techniques to help you influence and engage people.

What are we good at?

Indentifying, Engaging, and Influencing Online Conversations.

How do we do it?

How else, other than our Tasty Bag of Tricks:  Using Social Media Intelligence, we identify and monitor the influencial communities that you need to be a part of. Our job then is to encourage them to do the things that you want them to do by engaging the right people. Causing them to fall head over heals in love with your product or cause. This is what we call Generating Effective and Measurable Online Buzz.