If your CEO is something short of Lauzon-esque in his or her mastery of the medium, here’s the best advice we have.

1. Start with empathy.

Business is tough on us middle-aged white guys these days. We’re just cavemen. We don’t understand your “retweet,” or what all this “Like” stuff is about. Facebook is something we worry about our kids using. Your ways are strange to us.

But we’re not about to admit that to your punk-ass. Remember that odds are you’re dealing with somebody who’s just a little embarrassed to be out of the loop at this point. Make them feel at ease. Take the edge off by breaking the ice in private, offering to sit down over coffee, and just help get them “set up.”

Be helpful, and be patient. Don’t judge.

2. Build a personal channel.

Social media starts with listening, and one key to getting a CEO rolling in it is to create a feed worth listening to. We start with and focus on Twitter, just because it’s easy and the behaviors are so universal once you adopt them.

So what’s your CEO interested in? What magazines does he/she read? What celebrities is he/she into? Which competitors is he/she worried about? Ask a bunch of questions like that, sit down together at a conference table, and after creating a basic profile just start following the best sources for that information. Make it easy, demystify the process. But really focus on creating a feed they see value in, and want access to.

3. Get the plumbing sorted out.

Next up is to provide that access… from their browser, and from their phone. Not “a” browser, and not “a” phone. Modify their browser home page to drop them in every day. Add a Shareaholic plug-in to it, and make sure the username and password are stored in it. Do the same with the phone, even if it takes some fumbling and effort.

Stupid little problems with the plumbing of social media end up derailing senior people from the medium, because they hit a roadblock – a forgotten password, an unknown function – and have no idea how to get around it. Anticipate and neutralize those problems, before they happen.

4. Help do it, do not just watch it.

Remember not to show him/her how to do things, but to let him/her struggle with the little details about how to tweet, reply, DM, RT, use hashtags, indicate location, and post a picture. These things seem easy because you’ve done them a thousand times, but you’ll need to coach your CEO through them patiently, and resist the temptation to take over the keyboard.

5. Reinforce the behavioral change.

If you take this approach, I promise you’ll have a great meeting, and that all will be unicorns and rainbows at the end of it. But as is so often the case… if you don’t follow up, the fragile sprout of social proficiency will perish in the stale manure of old habit.

Promote your CEO’s new Twitter address across the company, so he/she starts to see people following. @ and D him/her periodically, and check in if you don’t get a response. Ask for questions, ask how things are going. Suggest topics, and reinforce the idea that in the end it’s just about sharing whatever he/she finds interesting during her day, in a way that benefits the people interested in her.

It ain’t rocket science, people. But it is a change in behavior, and as any Biggest Loser contestant can tell you, changing your behavior takes some work.

If you need a little more help, check out the below, which we produced for our CEO Series a few months back. And if you’d like a printed copy, hit me up on Twitter.

7 Habits of Highly Effective CEO Tweeters

This post originally appeared on bostinno.com on January 24th, 2012.

She’s got a gig in a play up the street and had stopped by the restaurant for dinner. Afterward, she shared this from her Twitter account…

Guy Niel, Post390′s GM, picked up the thread on HootSuite, and the restaurant responded with this:

She said something nice in return, this time with a link to Post390′s Twitter account:

And the restaurant responded:

The whole thing took an hour. By morning, Post390′s banana cream pie was in the Boston Globe, and in New York Magazine popular food blog, Grub Street Boston.

There’s so much to be learned about how marketing has changed from this silly little exchange.

First, the spark that ignited this whole episode was banana cream pie worth talking about.  We say this all the time… but your product is your marketing. If it’s not good enough to inspire advocacy, measured by the creation of net promoters, you need to focus on that first. If it is, your marketing should flow organically from that.

Second, listening is no longer optional. There’s a conversation happening on the web that you care about. It might be about you. It’s probably about at least one of your competitors. It’s definitely about the problem your product solves, or you wouldn’t be selling enough of it to care.

Finally, the power of digital media lay in it’s potential to create scalable intimacy. A conversation between a local brand and a genuine celebrity took place in real-time last night, in front of the 90,000 people that followed both. That was inconceivable 10 years ago, but it’s how smart people do digital today.

Kudos to the good folks at Post390 for embracing this model so fully in such a short time. You guys earned what happened last night and this morning, and I’ll be stopping by for some banana cream pie myself a little later today.

For starters, the profile looks a lot more modern and polished than the current version. An image you can add as a banner dominates the visual impression, a nice and Twitter-like change from the dull sameness of the current version. There’s an updated 3-column layout, bringing more content above the fold and shifting the emphasis from the old, single-threaded feed to a more modular representation of your interests, tastes, and activities. Scanning the page gives you a sense of who someone is, not just what they’ve been up to. A secondary navigation in the right-most column even lets you follow the milestones in someone’s life from birth to the present. It’s pretty cool, actually, and I find myself looking forward to scanning the life histories of people I know only in the present.

Status options have been expanded to let you more easily indicate life events with just a few clicks, a clear effort to encourage habitual lurkers to jump in and participate. The music I listen to on Spotify now hits my profile directly, for example, neat until I was outed as a Barry Manilow fan by an attentive “friend.” Overall, the new profile embraces the lifestream concept in a much more tangible way, finally showing the fruit of Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition back in August of 2009.

That was 2 years ago, though, and the word “lifestreaming” seems both pretentious and dated now. In the same way distinctions like Mobile and Location-based are ideas past their prime, lifestreaming is just life now. It’s all mobile, all local, all social… all the time.

So how does this new design change the game?

My take is that Twitter is becoming more and more about real-time attention, and Google Plus all about content sharing and distribution. A lot of people (including me) think G+ is actually a better platform for sharing content than Facebook ever was, and in a way Facebook may be ceding that ground to them to move in a more mass-market direction. Facebook may be moving beyond content, indicating with this interface that it really wants to be about people. Facebook seems to want to be about life itself, and the implications of that could be profound.

Imagine a world where you check in to a hotel, and learn that your parents had stayed in room 301 25 years earlier. Maybe you could browse their photos from that trip, or get their recommendations for restaurants in the area, as they wrote them then. Imagine pointing your phone at a menu and seeing an augmented reality overlay of what your closest friends had ordered and enjoyed there recently, or entering a car dealer and calling up a sentiment analysis of references made to the brand by anyone you know, in just a few clicks.

Imagine, on your wedding day, hitting a kind of real-world “easter egg” in the form of a shared reflection from a long passed grandmother, left in anticipation of a future she knew she would not see. Powerful stuff, all in the line Facebook has just established.

There’s a scene in one of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles where Lestat emerges into the modern world after a hundred-year rest. Hearing jazz alongside classical music, The Smiths and Wagner over the course of his first day in this strange new place, he marvels that in the 20th century, musical past and the present mingle and coexist in ways that are strange and magical to an 18th century vampire.

Reflecting on the new Facebook, I wonder if we might not see the same thing a hundred years from now… Not just for music, but for the very lives of of people we are and were connected to.

Heady stuff, indeed. But when 800 Million people are already addicted to your product, I guess the need to think big takes on a whole new meaning.

Related articles

• Facebook Resurrected The Lifestream and Killed Your Personal Blog (newcommbiz.com)
• Facebook Ushers in Lifestreaming for the Masses (lifestreamblog.com)
• Glossi Takes a Fresh New Approach to Lifestreaming (lifestreamblog.com)
• Two More Ways To Hack Facebook’s Timeline Cover (allfacebook.com)
• Leslie Hendry: Facebook’s Timeline Sells Emotion (huffingtonpost.com)

Our own Mike Troaino reported early on that its Google + vs. Twitter, not Facebook, Jeremiah Owyang later agreed and provided 5 Ways Google + Can become Mainstream, only to be outdone by 6 Ways Google + is Winning and Losing. Then, only a month after launch we learn that Google + hit 25 million visitors, at which point we acknowledge having Social Media Fatigue or maybe just Circle Fatigue.

The core differentiator and value proposition of Google + is circles. The idea is that I don’t want to talk or listen to everyone in my social network at once, just specific circles of individuals at a time.

It sounds easy right, make some circles put the right people in the right circles and you are ready for “real life sharing.” Not so fast.

If you have ever participated or better yet led the Information Architecture (IA) phase of a website redesign project, you will understand that defining what content goes where today is difficult. Planning for tomorrow, requires professionals. Taking from those experiences, here are a few ways to think about circles:

• + add new circles as new things come along does not require any planning but will eventually result in dozens of redundant and overlapping circles. Google already responded to this problem by adding a new feature.

• + create a circle for each of the groups in you life is easy to align to the real world today; work, friends, family, etc., but managing the overlap of the individuals within these groups will be difficult going forward.

• + create a circle for each type of content you want to share is a better approach because it is less important that I play soccer with a group, than it is that I want to share “personal” content with some individuals and “soccer” content with others.

• + limit Google + to a specific group or content type is the most common approach I have heard, probably because we have all been trained by bad Facebook experiences. It will keep things tidy, but using Google + for just a specific group or content misses the point.

There is no question that leading with circles is a big idea, but only time will tell if Google + is a revolutionary platform or just another social network.

How are you managing your Google + circles? Share your tips below.

Related articles

• Google+ Usability Shows Promise, but Still Has a Few Hitches (nytimes.com)

Here’s my thinking.

Before Google Plus, Facebook was mostly for personal, LinkedIn was mostly for professional, and Twitter was in the middle:

I think G+ will make people focus Facebook all the more on their personal lives, and LinkedIn all the more on their professional ones. I’m already considering de-friending all of my professional contacts on Facebook, so I can post family and political stuff there without having to master the Byzantine administrivia of Facebook’s “privacy controls.”

I’ve already started to interact more with my professional contacts over on G+, which has become the default among the digerati crowd with remarkable speed. But while the Circles feature is brilliant, simple, and useful in clustering groups, I’m not going to get my Aunt Lala to dump Facebook and master G+  at this point, so home base for family etc. will stay in Facebook.

G+ is actually more about Twitter’s franchise, in the great middle of indiscriminate social networking. But while the feature set in G+ is much more robust than that of Twitter, in the end Twitter works because it’s simple, and it will win the shootout for the center because of two other important factors in this dialogue: Apple and Microsoft.

Apple has already embraced Twitter in it’s new OS, and I predict Microsoft will make a few more lame attempts at a consumer social net before realizing it’s franchise is in Office and setting it’s sights on LinkedIn by acquiring Slideshare. With that said, the OS wars will keep Google at bay, and ensure Twitter’s franchise as the mass market social medium of choice.

The result will be this:

That’s my take, anyway. What’s yours?

Related articles

• Google biggest competitor isn’t Facebook but integration. (cadecase.wordpress.com)
• Is Google+ really a big deal? 8+ things everyone should know about Google+ (thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com)
• New Rival Facebook and Twitter : Tulalip Social Services from Microsoft (arenaremaja.wordpress.com)
• Facebook vs. Twitter vs. LinkedIn vs. Google+ (pcworld.com)
• Start G+ Extension: Google+ + Facebook + Twitter (johndierckx.wordpress.com)

7 Habits of Highly Effective CEO Tweeters

Did we miss anything?

We chose “Social Media for CEOs” as the topic for our first event, and Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith opened the festivities with a few personal thoughts on the need to overcome one’s own cynicism and continually “Innovate Yourself.” Scott was also kind enough to share the story of personal growth that came from his successful bout with cancer many years ago, and it set just the right tone in getting an initially skeptical crowd to open up to some new ideas.

After that we started through the deck below, though we never made it through given the steady stream of questions, anecdotes, and other personal insights from the audience. In the end we were glad to stimulate that kind of dialog among a group of smart people just trying to figure this stuff out, and taking comfort in the fact other smart people were still struggling to do the same.

Anyway you can see the slides yourself here, please consider sharing them with you CEO if he’s someone you’re trying to get on board with the program.

Be sure and subscribe to the blog at upper right… I’ll be posting a special eBook we made for the event later, title “7 Habits of Highly Effective CEO Tweeters.”

I learned a lot at the event, and many of the nuggets from it were captured in the steady tweetstream to the #ack2011 hashtag. A few highlights for me:

• “A billion dollar valuation is not cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars in revenue.”
• “It’s easy to start a company. It’s hard to build a business.”
• “Be passionate. But not religious.”
• “There’s more innovation happening at big companies than at small companies. They’re just bad at bringing it to market.”
• “IPO investment bankers are all pretty much all alike. Pick the one you like the best personally, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time with him.”
• “Don’t stare at the other guy. Stare at the problem. Or the customer.”
• “There is no such thing as permanent human disability. Only limitations of the technology to overcome it.”
• “Don’t make the first thing when you start a company raising money, find a way to make progress every day.”

On and on and on. And the offline conversations were sometimes even more engaging and valuable than what was happening onstage.

What I found really exciting, though, was the sense that the walls were coming down in Boston.

I had lunch on Friday at a table of people that wouldn’t have come together 10 years ago, let alone 20. Established power-brokers and up-and-comers. The accomplished, and the accomplishing. Guys known by name at the front desk of the White Elephant, and others who pocketed dinner rolls because they’re still not taking cash out of their businesses.

The club of people who make stuff happen in this town was closed and not accepting applications for a long time. The people in it did well, in politics and in business, and did good for the city when it served their interests. Things were “fine.”

But the 9 zillionth time we asked what Silicon Valley got right and 128 got wrong, the idea occurred to somebody that the two most important factors of production – capital and talent – might do better if they got to know each other on a first-name basis.

There seems to be a considered effort underway right now to break down the barriers to innovation and commerce. I feel it from the NEVCA, in initiatives like CriticalMass. It’s behind the Globe’s protection of the Boston World Partnership. Even Mullen’s advocacy for The Next Great Generation blog feels, in a way, like the guys who made it helping the guys still trying to do so… not out of charity, but out of the sense that we’re all in this together now.

We all know Ideas and Passion eventually need Power and Money to sustain themselves. Lately we seem more attuned to the fact that the reverse is also true.

Another conference nugget:

• “Make the pie big enough, and everyone will be happy.”

Indeed.

1. How do you define ‘influence’ and ‘influencers’? Can influence really be measured?
2. How much time, attention and money should companies spend relative to marketing to influencers?
3. What are the specific tactics companies can use to reach influencers?
4. Which tactics used to influence customers, partners and prospects should (and/or should NOT) be used to influence influencers? Where do Influencer and Social strategies intersect – and where do they diverge?
5. Tell us about some success stories – and some failures.

Here’s a recording, you can grab the podcast at the link.

Focus Marketing Roundtable: Influencer Marketing – The Key To Social ROI? by miketrap

Related articles

• Worth the read: Identifying Influencers on Twitter (cuene.com)
• Content Marketing Case Study: Eloqua $2.5m Sales Boost With Grande Guides (pr.typepad.com)
• Social Media – Influence, Importance and Identification (visibletechnologies.com)

Hence the need for a kind of “minimum protocol” for Facebook marketing, a clear and specific list of the absolute bare minimum you’re going to need to do within the Facebook ecosystem to have a Facebook fan page that does more than check the box in terms of accessibility to your target audience.

Let’s start with the basics… it’s important to get your Facebook profile right and promote your page once you’ve launched it. These issues are pretty well covered on the links above.

As for the protocol itself, here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

I’d like to give props to Michelle McCormack and eMarketer, both of whom helped shaped our thinking on this.

We’re having pretty good luck with this approach so far…what’s your take? What would you add, and what would you take away?

Related articles

• Laziness: The Facebook Brand Page Killer (blogs.forbes.com)
• Garin Kilpatrick: How To Implement Facebook Open Graph Protocol On your Website Or WordPress Blog | Website Design & Development (websitedesign411.com)
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• How To: Customize The Way Your Facebook Like’s Look (facebookflow.com)
• Adding the Facebook Like Button Revisited (ducttapemarketing.com)
• Facebook Now Allows Profile Pages to Become Business Pages (hubspot.com)