This week, we asked: Do you tie your social media marketing efforts into your traditional marketing campaigns?

• Sometimes: 44.3%
• Always: 41.61%
• My brand doesn’t use social media marketing: 6.71%
• Never: 4.7%
• My brand doesn’t use traditional marketing: 2.68%

Everyone hates organizational silos. They poison innovation, fuel miscommunication and hamper efficiency. You will never* hear your boss say, “What this department needs is become more insular and secretive — only when we’ve destroyed all semblance of coordination with the rest of the company will we really start to perform at out best.”

Marketing silos can be just as dangerous. If all your company’s marketing is all done in complete isolation, you’re not only duplicating effort, you’re potentially weakening your brand with mixed messages and definitely missing out on ways to improve targeting and deepen customer engagement.

Good news, everyone! It looks like more than 2 in 5 SmartBrief on Social Media readers feel the same way — since they say they always find ways to link their social media marketing with their traditional campaigns. And an additional 40% say they sometimes coordinate their marketing efforts. Fewer than 5% say they never bother at all.

In practice, it may not always make sense to fully integrate social and traditional marketing for every campaign. Certain campaigns may only work properly in one medium or another, or perhaps technological or budgetary limitations make it difficult to roll everything into one ubercampaign. What’s most important isn’t whether or not you can always achieve perfect alignment; it’s whether or not you’re taking integration into account during the planning process. Are you looking for ways to coordinate and then branching out as your campaign needs dictate? Or are you working in complete isolation, not knowing or caring what the rest of your organization is doing? Because if you’re not even looking for ways to use social and traditional marketing in tandem, you’re just leaving money on the table.

How are you making social media and traditional marketing work together at your organization?

*If you ever do hear your boss say this, just go ahead and quit on the spot. The company’s not going to be around much longer. You might as well beat the rush.

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This week, we asked: If a social media public relations crisis were to hit your brand tomorrow, do you think you would be prepared to respond effectively? The results:

• We have the capacity to respond, but there’s no formal plan in place: 63.81%
• We wouldn’t know it was happening until we read about it in the media: 15.24%
• Yes, we have a well-documented social media crisis-control strategy: 15.24%
• We’re monitoring social channels but lack the capacity for a response: 5.71%

If it can happen to McDonald’s, it can happen to you. The fast food chain recently found itself in hot water after its promoted trend on Twitter was turned into an opportunity to mock the company. McDonald’s pulled the trend after two hours. Some people have criticized the brand for ending up in that position in the first place, but think about how much worse things could have been if the company hadn’t been aware of how users were responding to the promoted trend and willing to take quick, decisive action. Two hours is long enough that pulling the trend isn’t a knee-jerk reaction, and the company didn’t make the mistake of trying to feed the trolls — engaging in rational debate with people who are out only for attention. But the company acted early enough to keep the abuse from truly going viral — and its response since then has been consistent and appropriate. You can argue about whether the company should have used the promoted trend at all, but once things began to go south, its response was right on point.

But what about you? If your social media presence were hijacked or a damaging news story broke about your company or a customer service complaint started to go viral, would you be prepared to respond in a cool, disciplined manner? Most of you say you’ve got the means to respond but no plan for how you’d react. And that’s a problem. Because when it comes to social media, he who hesitates is lost. Speed is important, but so is consistency and calm. And those are attributes you can get only from having a well-considered social media crisis-response plan.

Maybe it’s the word “plan” that frightens people. This doesn’t have to be a major undertaking: Having a social media crisis plan means everyone knows his or her role. If you don’t have a plan yet, try asking yourself:

• Who is supposed to be monitoring social channels for signs of trouble? How is the person doing this?
• If something went wrong, who would have the authority to respond?
• If that person is unavailable, how is that authority delegated?
• What kind of negative reaction does the company need to respond to, and which ones are better left alone?
• What’s the official company line for common complaints about the brand?

Now, knowing the answers to those questions isn’t the same as having a social media plan. But it’s a start. You can hammer out the answers to those questions in an afternoon meeting and use them as provisional guidelines while you work on a more formal plan. That way, you won’t be caught flatfooted, even if trouble comes looking for you.

How are you preparing to respond to negative publicity on social media channels?

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This interview is with Dave Gowel, who has been recognized as a “LinkedIn Jedi” by Inc.com and The Boston Globe. He is the CEO of RockTech and the author of “The Power in a Link: Open Doors, Close Deals, and Change the Way You Do Business Using LinkedIn” (Wiley, December 2011). Gowel co-founded RockTech with Mark Rockefeller to build software that helps corporations increase productivity through quicker adoption of underutilized technology. The interview has been edited for clarity.

A lot of people see LinkedIn as a recruiting or job hunting network. What are some of the other ways professionals can put LinkedIn to work, once they’ve landed that dream job?

I think one of the key ways to think about it is really a relationship filter, that when you put in all the relationships that you already have, it allows you to see the ones that you could have more easily, or get information about potential ones. That’s the real element of LinkedIn that I think is not really utilized as well by primarily senior executives still looking to figure it out, as well as either sales or marketing-minded folks who are outwardly looking: Trying to have that differentiable element that gets them to the person they want to get to.

How I can I turn second- and third-degree connections into valuable first-degree ties?

Well it all starts with your first-degree connections and the quality of them. So we recommend that people create a litmus test and think actively about who they’re connecting to — because then those second- and third-degree connections actually mean something. If you, say, connect to 5,000 people or you just connect to anyone for no reason, then what that does is it might increase your ability to have e-mail address for those people you connect to, but then it doesn’t accurately reflect who those second- and third-degree connections are. So the way to convert them is to start with a really high quality first-degree connection pool that fits your litmus test. The one I generally use is: I’m confident that if I reach out to them, they would either respond to me via e-mail or phone and then they can help progress my business goal.

Where [LinkedIn] really gets useful is thinking about what your business goal is, in terms of who you’re looking to meet, and then you create your advance searches and save them, which basically automates the. So then the search engine automatically looks through those second- or third-degree connections without you even being in LinkedIn and sends you an e-mail with the people you want to get to.

What makes a great LinkedIn status update? How is it different from a great update on Facebook or Twitter or some other social network?

I think every social network has a target audience and people know the dynamics are different for different networks. Twitter is not necessarily mutual acceptance; Facebook is much more social, perhaps more fun. In my mind, in LinkedIn people generally have one key professional focus … and therefore I think it makes sense to think about, before you send a status update, a couple of things. One: Who are you connected to and who do you want to actually see your status update? And also, what you’d want them to do? … And then, the frequency which would be overwhelming to those people — because a lot of time people get excited with that ability to send lots of status updates. But it’s really [important] that you don’t overwhelm them, because LinkedIn does have the ability to hide status updates.

How much does an employee’s profile reflect on their employer’s brand? Are there ways companies can use their employees LinkedIn presence to improve the way a brand is perceived?

That depends on the kind of business. So a consulting firm may have more person-to-person interaction with clients and employees whereas other businesses may have less interaction. But, in general, what we’re seeing is that the customer of any … product or service has more access to see who’s actually responsible for building or delivering that. So without a doubt, if somebody wants to do business with a company, they’re going to look at the company page, which has a lot of information about that company, but what’s even more valuable are the people that are in there. …

In terms of how a company can use the individuals’ profile pages, I think it’s important that companies recognize that the individual owns their LinkedIn profile. If any company tries to infringe on that, then that starts messing with the dynamic of who people will connect to and how they’ll use it or how they won’t use it. … Don’t send out a boilerplate thing that’s impersonal — because this is still a socially inclined network — but provide some guidance. ‘To be consistent with the message that we want to project as a company, to align us all, we’d appreciate these keywords, these messages.’ Maybe give recommendations for your peers or request recommendations from your clients.

What’s the biggest mistake you see people making on LinkedIn?

Depends on the person. Generally, I think it’s over-excitement about the potential. And either trying to say too much and including way too much information in a profile that’s overwhelming, or doing too many status updates or group postings too often. Or not thinking about who their target market is and what they’re trying to accomplish.

I think it’s important to think of LinkedIn as a business tool that is going to accomplish a goal for you. Now, that goal can change throughout the lifetime of your career. So for instance, if you’re job searching now and you get that job and you become a salesperson, well then you want to … use LinkedIn in a way that’s going to help you do lots of sales. And now, leading a bunch of sales people, you have to think as a leader hiring other people.

Is there a big difference, in terms of best practices, in terms of how job seekers use LinkedIn and sales professionals use it?

I would say the basics are generally the same. It’s always important, whenever you’re in a networking situation, you don’t want to be seen as ‘that guy’ who’s just looking to do something for themselves. … Generally, the way I break it down is: Actively look to give before you receive — which I think applies to both. If you can provide some value or some information to a client when you’re selling, that’s equally as valuable as when you’re trying to meet somebody and get an introduction to something that can get you a job, the mutual contact is someone you might want to try to make an introduction for, do something of value for. …

The difference is that when you’re job seeking it’s a lot harder to know who has the relationships that are about to open up a position. There’s a lot of knowledge about those job that are out there now — but the really valuable ones that you can get to are the ones that haven’t been posted, that when someone who you know happens to be like ‘I just talking to my friend and he said that they’re going to be opening up a position. I think you’d be a good fit for’ — obviously the earlier you can get in, the better chance you’ll have of getting an early interview and maybe even getting the job before they post it.

What’s your take on Facebook apps such as BeKnown that are trying to offer a LinkedIn experience within Facebook?

I think it’s still a very much evolving ecosystem. There’s a lot of data out there, there’s a lot of relationships and there’s a lot of motivation for people to use their relationships to help other people find jobs, either because of their job or because they’re friends. So it’s a very interesting market for me, because I think it still has a lot to be proven in terms of how people are going to be most comfortable sharing knowledge, making introductions and referrals, etc. I think it’s important to watch them all if you are a job seeker.

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1. Social marketers get a guide from Facebook
2. 7 signs that a social media “expert” doesn’t know what they’re talking about
3. Why Pinterest is a big deal for marketers
4. Facebook overhauls the “Like” button
5. The year’s 10 worst social media meltdowns
6. StumbleUpon overtakes Facebook as top social-traffic source
7. 9 commandments that no social media marketer can afford to break
8. Bank of America falls prey to Google+ “brandjacking”
9. The Facebook gaffes you can’t afford to make
10. Twitter redesign gives brands a page of their own

Of course, we also run original posts here on SmartBlog on Social Media — and the top 10 most popular original articles of the year say a little something about the state of social media as well.

The top 10 original posts here on SmartBlog on Social Media:

1. The 6 best free Facebook apps for businesses
2. How to use LinkedIn to jump-start your job search
3. How to be funny online — without getting fired
4. 9 tips for building a Facebook fan base from scratch
5. 6 tools to measure your personal branding efforts
6. 10 tips for social media introverts
7. Are you ready for the second wave of social media?
8. The power of touch: How we misunderstand social media engagement
9. 7 questions every social media strategy must be able to answer
10. Live from Social Media Week: The Suxorz picks the worst social media moves of 2010

What do these lists tell us? Let’s see…

• Lists are as popular as ever. It’s almost a cliche to mock list articles (or “listicles”) as being cheap cop-outs on the part of the author — or at very least, a sign of over-reliance on a formula that by it’s very nature makes deeper analysis difficult, if not impossible. But the numbers don’t lie. People like easily digestible, well organized content. I wonder if that means that this article (a list of lists) will shoot straight to the top of the charts?
• Facebook is essential. But alternatives are more than welcome. The No. 1 story on both lists is about getting more out of Facebook. That makes sense, given that Mark Zuckerberg’s baby takes up 1 in every 7 minutes spent online. But when we talk about someone challenging Facebook in some area (Pinterest, StumbleUpon) it gets everyone’s attention.
• Google+ is a snooze. There’s only one mention of Google+ on that list — and it’s not exactly positive. For the most part, social networking’s new kid got precious little love from SBoSM readers this year. The network has a lot to prove before business audiences start taking it seriously.
• Failure is a winner. Schadenfreude is alive and well within the SBoSM community. You guys love reading about other people’s missteps. Of course, it’s not just about  laughing at other people’s pain. It’s about learning from their mistakes.
• Rules matter. Social media is supposed to be old news by now — right? Facebook is about to turn 8. Twitter is already half a decade old. We should have a handle on this by now. But we don’t. Because the truth is that social campaigns are messy, organic things. We continue to search for the tools, the strategies, the insights that will allow us to tame the beast — even if a pat series of guidelines has eluded us so far.

What were the social media stories and ideas that mattered to you in 2011? How did social media change for you during the year?

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This week, we asked: What social media technology are you most excited about for the coming year? The results:

• Integration between social platforms 36.99%
• QR codes, augmented reality and other real world-based tools 23.29%
• Established social networks on mobile devices 13.70%
• Location-based social networks 11.64%
• Niche social networks 8.90%
• Open-source social networks 5.48%

It’s worth noting that this poll isn’t so much about what our readers expect in the new year, so much as what they’re hoping to see in 2012.

More than a third of SmartBrief on Social Media readers say they’re most excited about increasing integration between social networks in the coming year. That’s hardly surprising, when you consider the amount of time social networking eats up. In years past, we were looking forward to new, whiz-bang tech toys to play with — now we just want ways manage it all a little easier.

That isn’t to say that new tools are of no interest — about 40% are excited about taking their social experience out into the real world, through mobile, QR codes and other real-space tools.

Whatever you’re looking for in 2012, SmartBrief wishes you the very best of luck in your pursuit. See you in the new year!

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When you look at the kinds of content that have gained popularity in the past year, it’s easy to come to some mistaken conclusions about what makes content spread. You might think it has to be funny. Or that it should be ironic or post modern.

And, of course, viral content can include those elements. But they’re not requirements. No, I think if you really want to understand why some content goes viral, it helps to look a certain holiday classic:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This clip from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” debuted in 1965. It’s been a holiday tradition ever since. Clips of that speech have been floating around online for years — I first watched it on a computer in 2001 — and despite its age, it still draws a crowd each Christmas.

But I’m not pointing it out because of its own popularity. I mention it because it perfectly embodies principles that can be used to explain the success of a majority of viral videos, even though it’s 46 years old and there’s nothing funny or ironic about it.

So why is this clip so important after so many years? Let’s take a look:

It has an amateur vibe.
The actors in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” are all children. They speak in a halting cadence. The artwork has a loose, almost unprofessional vibe. The special doesn’t have any fancy visual effects or even a laugh track, even though it was produced for network television. In other words, it feels real. We respond to home videos of children and animals not because they’re cute, but because those videos have a straightforward, amateur quality that is disarming.

It has a strong point of view.
Linus doesn’t equivocate. He doesn’t say, “This is what Christmas means to me.” He goes all in. Say what you’ve got to say and don’t apologize for it. Fortune favors the bold.

It tackles a persistent problem.
It’s not hard to find a pundit complaining about the dilution of the Christmas message on cable news today. But fighting over the true meaning of Christmas is a much older argument. And the staying power of that argument has helped sustain the popularity and resonance of the above Peanuts clip over the years. You don’t have to aim for anything as grand as religion versus commerce in your content. But consider that a lot of viral content taps into something deeper than “hey, watch our new product demo.” For all its goofiness, the Old Spice Guy campaign is successful not just because it’s funny or visually inventive, but because men wanting to be more “manly” is a worry as old as mankind. The Old Spice Guy pokes fun at that worry, but it also suggests that a certain scented bodywash brand might be the answer. Are there ways you could tackle a bigger issue in your content?

It builds on existing work.
Many pieces of viral content build on existing properties — whether we’re talking about the image macros from vintage Spiderman cartoons or unexpected covers of popular songs. We call these extended riffs, “mashups” now, but they’ve gone by other names in the past — it’s an idea as old as storytelling itself. “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” uses a reading from the Gospel of St. Luke as a touchstone. Linus could have summarized the reading or told Charlie Brown that Christmas is a religious holiday without mentioning scripture at all. But instead the special reaches back for something older and more powerful — and it’s that tie that so many people find memorable. The reading doesn’t just give the special its essential message, it gives it a flavor and gravity that the Peanuts gang doesn’t have on it’s own.

It makes its point quickly.
The clip is less than two minutes long, culled from a program made to air in a 30-minute time slot. Linus says he’ll explain Christmas, gives his reading and then says, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown,” and walks away. Knowing when you’ve made your point is essential.

How are you incorporating these attributes into your content?

P.S.: I said the Charlie Brown clip explains most viral content. But there’s one category it can’t account for: clips like Rebecca’s Black “Friday.” Those videos derive their popularity from people’s love of laughing at failure. I can’t say I’d recommend trying to imitate that, but if you want to try, be my guest.

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This week, we asked: Are you adjusting your social media presence to include holiday-related content? The results:

• We might do a few holiday-related posts or tweets: 51.28%
• Yes, we talk about the holidays extensively during December: 24.79%
• We tend to avoid any seasonal mentions in our social media presence: 18.8%
• We’ll do a best-of feature for New Year’s, but that’s it: 5.13%

Seasonal content is like a spice — a strong one. Let’s say chili powder. In appropriate contexts and sensible amounts, it can be a worthwhile addition. But if you introduce holiday content in a context in which it doesn’t make sense or you blow the dosage, you’ll end up with something about as appetizing as chili apple pie.

The key is knowing which seasonal events matter to your audience and why. Hearth-and-home holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas are huge for business-to-consumer marketers that focus on products and services related to entertaining or gift giving.

The business-to-business crowd is going to feel differently. Regardless of individual preference, the B2B space is simply the wrong context for holiday cheer. Even if an enterprise buyer celebrates Christmas on his or her own time, that doesn’t mean the person wants to talk about it with a router provider — any more than I want chili powder in my apple pie.

Thinking about seasonal context is important year-round, not only during December. In that sense, seasonal content is an untapped goldmine for many marketers. Maybe your audience doesn’t want to talk to you about Christmas, but it wants to talk about tax season or Earth Day or back-to-school or any number of official or unofficial holidays. Knowing your audience — and what they expect from you — is key.

That said, I think there is one exception to that rule: New Year’s Day. No matter your business, religion, country or tradition, everyone is affected by the passage of time. Some people are more interested in nostalgia for the recent past or predictions about the near future, but it’s never unseemly or inappropriate. New Year’s content is like salt — you can definitely overdo it, but a little bit is almost always appropriate.

How are you celebrating the season with your social media followers?

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Social networks tend to place a high value on quick reaction times and informal, off-the-cuff comments. You need both of those qualities if you’re going to produce engaging content for your audience. But quick doesn’t have to mean reckless; informal doesn’t have to mean ill-considered.

Every company is different. A one-person consulting shop has different needs than a multinational corporation. But while I can’t give you ironclad rules to live by in this instance, I can give you a few things to think about that may help you decide which approach makes the most sense for your company.

Keep your business separate. Don’t use the same system for publishing work tweets, blog posts, etc. that you use for publishing personal updates. Having a separate interface gives you a plethora of visual cues that you’re about to send the post to the wrong audience — and can save you a lot of heartache.

Use the buddy system. If you don’t have an editor, then you can use a partner. Think about using a client such as CoTweet to assign potential tweets to a co-worker or boss for review before they go out. Your buddy can act as a screen against ill-informed comments, tasteless jokes and other things said in the heat of the moment.

Look for professional help. The longer a piece of content is, the more important it is to have someone look it over. This post is relatively short, but it will still get a thorough inspection from SmartBrief’s copy desk, because so many things can go wrong in the space of 400 words. Blog posts can live forever, so make sure you’re not pushing out content laden with typos or confusing sentences that could embarrass your brand. Even if you’re an excellent writer, it can be difficult to catch mistakes in your own writing. If you can’t justify hiring someone full time, you can find people willing to do piecemeal work for reasonable rates on services such as LivePerson. The price of paying someone to look at your post is certainly going to be less costly than the embarrassment of realizing too late that you’ve misspelled your CEO’s name.

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What does it mean for an organization to be “human”?

It means the organization has a culture and processes that are more compatible with what human beings are like — creative, social, changeable. For centuries, we have been intentionally creating organizations that are machinelike — rigid departmental silos, detailed policies and procedures, strict roles and responsibilities, detailed strategic plans, etc. These were our efforts to manage and control organizations in a mechanical way. Human organizations still have departments, policies and plans, but they are created and managed in a different way, based on more human principles — for example, being open and decentralized, trustworthy and authentic, generative and collaborative, courageous in the face of risks.

What are challenges organizations face in being human? Why is it so hard?

Becoming a human organization is hard mostly because you’re going against centuries of tradition that have a track record of success. We accomplished amazing things in our mechanically inclined organizations, yet becoming more human requires that we change the way we have been doing things. This challenge is common to innovation in general, so it stands to reason it would apply here, because we are trying to innovate the way we manage. It’s also hard because it is so deep-rooted. Becoming human as an organization requires changes from the 30,000-foot culture level, down through processes and structure and into individual behavior. We’re still at the point at which it’s easier to stay with the status quo than to change, but little by little those ways of working are crumbling, notably exemplified by the challenges inherent in successfully integrating social media into your organization.

What are ways organizations can use social tools to overcome those challenges?

Social media were built for experimentation. Because the tools are free and easy to measure, it’s the kind of thing that can start small, or in one department, then grow based on measured results. (You have to be careful what you measure, though.) In that way, it’s perfect for introducing human elements into organizational behavior, processes and culture. You can use social media to be more transparent or to keep information flowing to the lower parts of the hierarchy that need the information to take action. Social tools can greatly enhance employees’ capacity to learn on the job. Social tools can make it easier for people to collaborate, inside and outside organization walls. Transparency, ownership, learning and collaboration are some core elements of human organizations. Social media let you try them out without having to make a disruptive transformation at the beginning.

How can organizations make sure their use of social media actually enhances communication, instead of adding another layer of red tape?

This is where using social media helps you become more human as an organization, but it takes work. If you try to implement social media using a strictly mechanical mindset, it is going to struggle mightily. We’ve heard complaints about that. So instead of trying to force social media efforts into your existing structure, use it as an opportunity to make shifts in the way you do things. They can be small or subtle at first — requiring less approval for blog posts or comments on social networks, for example. As the social media get more active, you might have to change other processes internally, down to things such as how you structure and facilitate staff meetings to ensure the right people are sharing the right information at the right time. But be ready to make those changes, because embracing the human-centered power of social media within a strictly machine-centric organization spells trouble.

How do you build executive buy-in for these kinds of initiatives? How do you make a business case for being human?

The most glaring part of the business case is the amazing performance of social networks, numbers that most surely trounce any business on the planet. So ask your executives whether they added 200 million customers in nine months. Because Facebook did. Do they think their business could benefit from 1 billion hours of passionate volunteer work, for free? Because that’s what happened with Wikipedia. Social media are actually getting some credit for supporting democratic revolution across the globe.

These are not numbers or trends we’d associate with a fad or a particular bubble that is about to burst. And, more importantly, social media accomplished these incredible feats by being more human and less mechanical. That’s the reason it is so attractive to us. We can’t help but be drawn to things that let us be more human. It should be a wake-up call to business-case advocates that so many people have become more productive during their free time, outside of work. By running our organizations like machines, we’re leaving money on the table. Companies that start to tap into this power and can provide opportunities for employees to be more human through their work will gain a competitive advantage.

Are there organizations you look to as models of humanity? Were they designed that way, or did they evolve over time? How?

We’ve seen bits and pieces of being more human in lots of organizations but not one particularly complete case study. This is all evolving so fast that we’re not sure it’s a good idea to wait for the perfect case study. And we think that should that case study exist, it would be designed and evolved over time. The idea of looking for a complete “model” on how to run your organization has a mechanical ring to it, doesn’t it?

It is important to learn from others, of course. Whole Foods Market has done some interesting things in the way it is strategically transparent, allowing employees to see compensation data of all employees to determine which teams are performing best, allowing them to share what’s working. W.L. Gore & Associates, maker of Gore-Tex, among other innovations, has done amazing things with a decentralized structure, in which the only title in the company is “Leader,” and it is given to an employee by the person’s team, not by someone higher up on the chain of command. But one of the human principles we talk about is being generative: constantly creating and re-creating to generate value. So look at these examples not as models but as inspiration for you and your colleagues to create your own human organization.

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SlideShare is akin to Flickr or YouTube, in that it’s a network built around sharing a particular type of content, but instead of sharing photos or videos, you’re sharing slides from a presentation that was created with Microsoft PowerPoint or a similar business tool. These slides are often used to accompany presentations at conferences or even at internal meetings. These slides are often seen as pure distillations of thought leadership, since they’re designed to inspire others and are composed of easily digestible chunks of information. For B2B firms and other companies that are trying to use their expertise as a way of attracting and enchanting followers, a SlideShare deck can be an easy way to share your message with your target audience.

During her presentation, Watterson shared a few of the SlideShare best practices that HP has developed.

• Get permission. Don’t assume every deck is equally shareable. Make sure you’re not disclosing any proprietary information in your deck before posting it.
• Have a target audience in mind. Who is this deck for? What problem does it address? Craft your decks so that they take on a particular topic in a way that naturally appeals to your ideal customer segment — whether that’s chief information officers, HR chiefs or some other professional group.
• “Further their thinking.” Great decks challenge assumptions and get people talking.
• Put SlideShare’s lead form to work. You can upgrade to SlideShare’s professional version and ask viewers to fill out a contact information form to see your entire deck. That form can let you know who you’re reaching with your thought leadership and give you the means to follow up with them later.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that a social media campaign has to be conventional to be successful. It’s easy to look at the other companies in your marketplace and ape their efforts. It’s tougher to really look at which tools your prospective customers are using and then design a campaign that surprises and captivates them.

What tools are you using? How are you connecting with your audience on its level?

Image credit: RBFried, via iStockphoto

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