With the new social network Ello getting 30,000-40,000 signup requests per hour, the platform has attracted our interest at Brandle. As you may know, our Brandle Presence Manager helps companies discover and track points-of-presence on the web where their enterprise appears to be represented, so this mad rush to create accounts made us wonder "who is really on this network?"

Taming Your Enterprise Social Media Presence

Your boss has just asked you to inventory all the social media accounts used across the enterprise. On the surface, enterprise social media account management may sound simple to your boss but you know it's nothing but.... That's because social media points-of-presence (POPs) can be created by anyone at any time without any form of control or oversight by you or your team.

To successfully use social media in an enterprise often requires support from the C-Suite. However, when it comes to getting buy-in from the C-level execs, the argument is often "What's the Social Media ROI?" That's certainly a reasonable question but it should not be the only question that is asked. Here's why.

This morning I awoke to a private message from an old and distant friend. I don't hear from her very often so this caught my attention. Why was she reaching out to me?

It turns out she had just received a friend request from me via Facebook. I thought this was odd since we're already "friends". I mean, we were talking over Facebook at that very moment! Fortunately, she was skeptical enough to double check with me as this didn't seem right.

HIPAA - those are five letters that keep healthcare compliance and risk officers awake at night.

As we've explored before, a business of any size is going to be challenged to stay on top of its social footprint. When we've run social presence audits for hospital networks, we usually find a multitude of social media "points of presence" including those for the corporate brand, individual hospitals, specialty centers, departments, programs, campaigns, doctors, nurses and even the gift shop!

Quickly! Think about how you manage your social media.

I bet what came to mind was some collection of content publishing, listening, or analysis systems. If you're in a regulated industry then perhaps a content compliance or archiving system might have come to mind.

What's the common denominator? Content. That's not a bad thing since sharing content is why we're on social media. However, we're overlooking a fundamental component – Presence!

Dear Big Retail CMO, is Social coming between you and your stores?

Does it feel like employees are reading from a different social play book...working at cross purposes?

As the CMO, you probably see social as something best left to the team at HQ to communicate the big brand messages. You may even consider social media at the store level as something unruly, that "doesn't move the needle," and which brings unwanted brand risk. However, your store managers probably look at it differently. From their point of view they are responsible for driving sales to their stores and who knows your local customers better than the local team? So, your store managers probably see social media as something which can "move the needle" for their store.

It predates the rise of "social business" but one of the most compelling and useful business books I've read is Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company". I read it when it came out in 1996 and its wisdom – particularly around "strategic inflection points" – has never left me:

In social media, what is a "point of presence" (aka a POP)?

Simply put, it's a general way of trying to reference the various sites, blogs, accounts, pages, boards, channels, streams, etc. that can represent someone or something online. In trying to reference all these various places where a brand – personal or corporate – may be be represented, it was challenging to find one word that can stand in for all those thingumajigs.