There’s a 96-inch long white board in my office. It is where I collect my thoughts for specific projects as I’m writing, planning or producing them. It is currently full of lists and reminders for a client’s digital marketing and social media strategic plan. I go through notes from client meetings, make lists of potential strategics or tactics, throw broad concepts and ideas up, enumerate client concerns, brand values and relevant research and then I study the board for a while.

As I was doing so last night I realized a picture of the board might be helpful for those of you out there working on strategic plans for your organization. No, we don’t all think or process information similarly, but when I see how someone else does it, I always get an idea or two. So here’s my board:

For obvious reasons, I made the image small and even blurred some of the words, but look at what you can read:

When I see the image, the first few things that pop off for me are these words:

• Goals
• Target
• Business Goal
• Primary Concerns
• SEO
• Insights
• Core Values
• Content
• Needs

No, you can’t read all those because of the resolution of the image, but those are the items that pop off the board to me. There are other ideas and concepts there, tucked away in the greens and oranges and blues. (No, there’s no system to my color coding other than to separate ideas from one another.) But the important things I think about have little to do with blogs or Facebooks or even monitoring solutions. I’m focused on the task at hand: what are the client’s goals, who are they talking to, what do they want to say and what does success look like for them?

Whether or not analysts, social media bloggers or even my friends on Twitter think my client work is innovative or pioneering or even good at all matters not. The only person whose opinion does is the client. This is what I focus on when I’m writing strategic plans or thinking about overall strategies for the people I work with as a digital marketing consultant.

What about you? What do you focus on? How do you think and process? Do share. We’ll all be better for it.

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There’s lots of buzz around “social CRM” software, strategies and programs these days. It’s getting the kind of play “social business” did about this time last year when the analysts at Forrester jumped ship for Altimeter and Dachis. They had to invent new phrases to sell their services to the C-Suite. If you don’t have an innovative-sounding name for what you do, then I guess you don’t attract as much attention.

Social CRM is being hawked by monitoring services, market research firms, traditional sales software and — if you can believe it — Twitter applications. Brand managers, marketing managers and agencies everywhere are anxious to get them some of that social CRM, by golly. Sadly, most of them don’t even know what CRM stands for.

Before you go and plop down money for software that does nothing if you don’t understand the purpose for it, let’s look at what social CRM really is. (It’s customer relationship management, in case you were wondering.)

Fanscape has a nice report out called The Value of a Social Relationship in which they put some mathematics around the value of a customer. It’s worth the download, even if the math is more complicated than ObamaCare. In it, they say:

“The aim of CRM is not only to maximize the revenue from a single transaction, but to build a lasting relationship with the customer, thus increasing the customer lifetime value.”

I would generally agree that is the goal of a CRM program: to increase the lifetime value of a given customer to a company. By building stronger relationships with your customers, you can foster and encourage more purchases over time that the one-and-done method of straight sales. The part that makes it work, though, is the relationship building. Good CRM has to be customer focused, not company focused.

CRM software was (ironically) created to try and automate some of that relationship building. Instead of the labor- and time-intensive act of one-to-one communications, technology allowed marketers to build in automatic direct mail pieces, emails and even telemarketing calls to prospects, customers and advocates around campaigns, calendar dates or issues to keep those audiences invested in the brand at opportune times.

But a lot of CRM software is really just sales management software that tracks how many times you ask someone to buy stuff. That’s not really CRM. CRM is about tracking all communications, gathering information and informing your decisions around a particular customer. It’s not always about the sale.

When most companies say they sell “social CRM” software, what they’re really selling is a contact database that includes fields for a customer’s Twitter handle, Facebook account and other social media profiles. They don’t actually do much to allow you to build relationships in manual or automatic fashion. They just have the links.

True “Social CRM” systems not only help you know where your contacts are, but allow you or, even more importantly, those contacts, to manage how you communicate with them, how often and for what messages. Think of a good Social CRM system as email opt-in on crack.

Then the system allows you to leverage your contact’s public social data and even private communications with you to better inform your timing and decisions to communicate with them. Many thinkers in this space also think of Social CRM as allowing you to pull collective intelligence from your customers to improve products, etc. I don’t discount that possibility, but a forum will do that, too. Besides, that thinking is company-centric, not customer relationship-centric, so I tend to not focus on it as a primary function.

There are a lot of companies out there who claim they have a good Social CRM tool. I’m sure several of them will jump in the comments and lay it on thick. But one that I’ve been experimenting with I really like is JitterJam.

JitterJam allows your company to import your email lists, Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers and more into a database. You can tag each individual or groups of individuals anyway you like, making filtering and custom outreach by group easy. As you have contact with each person, those conversations are captured into each person’s profile. The system allows you to track and gauge when someone moves closer to your funnel, going from contact to prospect to customer to advocate.

The above graph shows the progression of contacts, prospects, customers and advocates for World’s Best Cat Litter, which is using JitterJam with and through its agency partner, MicroArts. (The big jump midway through represents awareness brought about by a DirecTV campaign … yes, traditional advertising! Oh my!) Anytime someone interacts with WBCL on Twitter or Facebook, joins its email list or otherwise has a connection to the brand online, they’re brought into the JitterJam platform. From there, the brand can reach out to the person in the medium in which they connected and give them what JitterJam calls a “Make Me Happy” ask where people can opt in to company communications and specify which mediums are acceptable. (See JitterJam’s Make Me Happy page here.)

Seeing the rise of the customers thanks to their efforts, you can visualize how effective your outreach has been.

“We needed something that was going to be more than a reporting solution,” explained Drew Schulthess of MicroArts. “We needed a better context to the relationships we’re building with our customers. We need to know who our customers were, who our evangelists were and how we were connecting to them.”

But JitterJam has much more to it than managing contacts. You can create and post social messages, emails, text messages and more, distribute those to everyone or filtered lists of your contacts, monitor the social web for conversations around your brand or your chosen keywords then funnel the individuals in those conversations into your system as new contacts, too.

When I think of a good Social CRM platform, I see one that has a little bit of everything … social media monitoring, influencer identification, email marketing, SMS capabilities, social outpost management, list management, segmentation ability, contact assessment and measurement and so on. JitterJam has almost everything in one package.

The challenge for using a platform like JitterJam is similar to the challenge of using any robust platform: You have to really master the software to get the most out of it. Yes, it’s one of the most powerful platforms out there, but you’re going to need to learn the ins and outs before you can really milk this thing for all it’s worth.

Still, all its worth could be golden for your company. Imagine communicating with 50,000 people at once. Now imagine communicating with all 50,000 in the medium or mechanism they choose to receive messages from you in and powered by intelligence that allows you to cater the message to customer groups in more relevant ways. JitterJam accomplishes this.

Yes, there are competitors out there that have nice platforms (I’m diving into Shoutlet next, which has some cool DIY tool creation with it) and do a lot of the same work. No, this review is not meant to say that JitterJam is the end-all and be-all to Social CRM. But it’s awfully powerful and worth a look-see.

And with tiered pricing starting at $290 per month, small businesses can afford the tool, too. Sure, the more sizable your lists or volume of your keyword searches, the more you’ll pay, but the pricing seems awfully fair for the functionality to me.

What does Social CRM mean to you? What software have you used to accomplish that and how did it fit your needs? If you use JitterJam, tell us about your experiences. The comments are yours.

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For the better part of the last five years, companies, agencies, consultants and managers have been sifting through all sorts of different platforms, softwares and programs, looking for that one social media tool that will solve their company’s or client’s problem. I have personally wasted about 57 aggregate days of my life sitting through hour-long demos on everything from Twitter clients to social media monitoring platforms and CRM solutions to WordPress plugins.

For the record, and for all you sales and marketing tools out there … er, um … people who sell and market tools, let me give you a few suggestions for your demos. First, keep it to 15-20 minutes. We’re busy. Second, get rid of the company background slides. I don’t care who founded or funded you. I care about the thing your stuff does that I can’t do better without it. Third, show me a real use case using a real client that outlines their problem and shows how your tool solved it. If I can’t connect your tool to a real solution, I won’t remember it.

But then there’s the age-old paradox of tools. They really become useful when someone figures out a different reason to use them.

It’s like my Cousin Johnny’s method of getting rid of a ground hog. To rid his backyard, garden or farm of a pesky ground hog, he uses three tools: a shovel, a five-gallon bucket and a six-pack of beer. Think about those tools for a moment and make assumptions on how he would use them.

To get rid of a ground hog, Cousin Johnny places the bucket, upside down, beside the ground hog’s hole. He drinks the six-pack of beer. By the time he’s finished, the ground hog pop his head up. He whacks the varmint on the head with the shovel.

Social media tools, too, can have a paradoxical nature. Social media purists have claimed for years that you blog to engage your audiences. Compendium Blogware (a client) has proven time and again that you can also use a blog to win search results and drive leads to your business, even without any measurable level of engagement. Those same purists claim Twitter is a conversational platform and one-way blasting of messages doesn’t work. Still, many mainstream Twitter users enjoy the fact they can follow feeds of companies or media outlets to just get the news of the day. (See @cnnbrk, @NBA, @MarthaStewart or @GStephanopoulos, all top 100 Twitter accounts, or even a feed like @BayerUSNews, which keeps media and pharma industry folk updated on the corporation’s goings on.)

More importantly for brand managers and companies buying tools, there’s the paradox of expectation. You expect a social media monitoring tool to monitor the Internet and take that burden off your shoulders. But the tool monitors nothing. It only presents information in an organized fashion so that you may monitor it more efficiently.

You expect a market research firm to tell you how to run your brand or make marketing decisions for you. But it only presents information about your audience, brand, market or competitors that enable you to make smarter decisions. An enterprise management system like Valuevine will not manage the Facebook and Twitter presence for the 150 separate locations for you. It will give you a mechanism to manage them, however.

The tools, in and of themselves, are not important. What you do with them is.

So the next time you’re suffering through a product demo, listen through the sales pitch and propaganda and ask yourself, “How can I use this tool? Who will manage its use on my team? Can I afford it in both fiscal and human resources?”

Those answers will help you pick the right tools for your social media marketing efforts.

NOTE: No actual ground hog was harmed in the writing of this blog post. While you’re welcome to complain about the violence Cousin Johnny uses to get rid of ground hogs, he hunts deer, too, so your concerns will probably fall on deaf ears. Sorry if his methods offend you. For good measure, here’s an article that explains more humane ways of ridding your property of a groundhog.

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I joke that Dan Zarrella has too much time on his hands. The “social media scientist” has been researching the social behaviors behind many social media tools long before HubSpot noticed and gobbled him up. The insights that he’s produced from that research over the years has been a mixed batch of awesomeness that has helped build better tools and refine social media marketing behavior for more efficient use of the tools.

Now Zarrella has turned his attention to conference presentations and, more specifically, how to amplify the effectiveness of them through social media. Since I give a lot of talks, I am interested in his insights. Since many of you may either presently, or in the future, take your social media expertise to the podium, I wanted to share some of those with you. I asked Dan for a sneak peek at his research, which he’ll present with a free webinar on August 19, and he was kind enough to share a nice takeaway with us.

From Dan:

In my research, I found that how often your audience can Tweet about your presentation is limited by how much time they have (labeled as “trying to focus” in the graph above). If they find your talk engaging and interesting, they will probably want to pay as attention and can have some difficulty in pulling themselves away for a few minutes to mention you on Twitter.

I also found that 6.5% of people who took my survey only Tweeted “pithy” soundbites. Soundbites that are under 140 characters and can be understood on Twitter, outside of the greater context of the presentation.

One easy way to add a bit of contagiousness to your presentation and take advantage of my findings is to use “Tweetable Takeaway Slides.” I gave a webinar in June about Facebook marketing that was the 8th most Tweeted about topic, and I credit the takeaway slides for part of that success.

My takeaway slides used the format shown above. I included my username and the webinar’s hashtag as well as Twitter bird logo to really drive home the fact that these were “Tweetable.” Slides like these will allow you to pause for a second to let your audience Tweet about your without losing focus or missing anything, and it they will for you to write pithy sound bites perfect for Tweeting.

The takeaway slide insight is just one of the many cool ideas Dan will share on the webinar and in the ebook (also free). You can download the eBook now and register for the August 19th Science of Presentations webinar. See you there.

Oh, and Dan is also the author of The Social Media Marketing Book (affiliate link) which is well worth your investment.

What ideas do you have leading into Dan’s talk that might help make your presentations more conducive to Tweeting, sharing and generating online buzz? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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If you subscribe to my monthly newsletter, you know when it comes to location-based services, I’m quite partial to Whrrl. Unlike Foursquare or Gowalla, there’s more to Whrrl than checking in and getting coupons. Whrrl allows you to annotate your visit with notes, images and more to create virtual scrapbooks of your event or visit. (Think a child’s T-ball game.) When there are more Whrrl users at an event, you can tie the stories together on the location’s page and see what other users are adding to the scrapbooks.

But the system is more than checkin and build content. There’s a full gaming component, recommendations and referrals and even real world activation for businesses and corporate partners. (Yes, Whrrl has opportunities for you to partner with them to drive real foot traffic to your location and take the concept of viral spread off-line. Watch the video. You’ll get it.)

During my recent trip to Seattle, I visited Whrrl’s offices and sat down with parent company Pelago CEO Jeff Hoden and product manager John Kim to talk about Whrrl.

Check out Whrrl. And if you’re close to a Murphy USA, give that a spin too. You could win free gas and more. Nice!

Two weeks from today I will help kick off Blog Indiana for the second year. And I want you to join me there. It’s in Indianapolis August 20 and 21 with a neat Social Media 101 course on Thursday, August 19 for those in need of some basic knowledge. Frankly, Blog Indiana has a little something for everyone.

I’ll be opening the event with another exploration of the Art of Conversation. Yes, I’ve given this talk before, but it’s an evolutionary discussion and changes each time with each audience’s input. I’m diving into the issues of building trust and relationships and marketing through conversations from a brand perspective. It’s a fun talk and I want you to be a part of the exchange because I learn as much about the topic as you do. We are smarter than me.

But when you look at the other topics and speakers, it’s hard to believe this is all had for a few bucks in two days. Chuck Gose will talk about seducing your customers with a blog, Ryan Cox is diving into mobile to help us learn more about why and how to be thinking along those lines. There are sessions on publishing, marketing, business, blogging, SEO, technology and more.

My buddy Doug Karr will tell you why your website sucks. Another pal, Compendium Blogware CEO Chris Baggott will dive deeper into our joint study on blog visitors and talk about the myth of your website audiences. Bill Dawson will go over the email marketing lifecycle … and that’s just halfway through the first day.

Other speakers include Kyle Lacy, Erik Deckers, Chad Richards, Duncan Alney, Carissa Newton, Heather Sokol and Lindsay Manfredi whose session on ghost blogging will no doubt get a rise out of a few folks (and may even point fingers and call me names).

But more importantly, you’ll get to meet and hang with these folks and the other great people who will be attending. I remember vividly last year, sitting in the lobby at IUPUI with my friends Chris Brogan, Krista Neher (who hijacked my TweetDeck while I took a client call), Jason Bean and others, just talking shop, laughing hysterically and enjoying one another. I even met Sonya Beckley and chatted about my new Volkswagen. Six months later, I’m freezing my ass off in a Louisville ally doing a photo shoot for Das Auto.

Indianapolis is a great tech, web and social media community and Blog Indiana is a banner event for them. Noah Coffey and Shawn Plew do a great job and make it an top-notch event for you. So come, wouldya?

Visit the Blog Indiana Registration Page and sign up. Use the code “”SPEAKTOME10″ and get 10% off, just ‘cuz you know me. And then come see me in Indy.

(And I hear there might be a surprise drop in visit from Jay Baer, too. Trust me. Come. It’ll rock.)

Everyone has Facebook fever. Especially companies trying to find that secret social networking viral sauce. Every client I have asks me how to market their business on Facebook. Chances are, you’re looking to learn more about marketing on Facebook, too.

My buddy Michael Stelzner has a solution for you that I’m confident will make you infinitely better at Facebook marketing. Stelzner, the man behind Social Media Examiner and the unbelievably successful 2010 Social Media Success Summit (for which I was a speaker), has put together the first-ever Facebook Success Summit.

It works just like the Social Media Success Summit. You pay a fee that is significantly less than what you’d spend at a big, three-day conference and get access to live (or recorded for on-demand viewing or reference), exclusive webinars from a bunch of incredibly smart people. The Facebook Marketing Summit lineup features Brian Solis, Mari Smith, Jay Baer and more, plus a handful of brand-side folks who have had a great deal of success marketing on Facebook. The lineup has a bunch of theory and planning smarts mixed in with case studies and practical how-tos, plus a little bit of technical wizardry mixed in there to help jump start what you’re doing on the network.

There are about three events each year that I tell you about and say, “You shouldn’t miss this.” This is one of them. I’m not speaking at this particular virtual conference, but not for the reasons you may think. I want to sign up and learn myself. Join me, won’t you?

Visit the Facebook Success Summit site to sign up. If you do so soon (it’s one of those limited time deals and I’m not sure what the limit is), you get the whole lineup, access anytime and what-not for just $297. (Yes … less than $300 for about $4,000 worth of almost one-on-one time with really freakin’ smart people.) And yes, the links on this page are affiliate links. If you don’t want to buy me a cheeseburger as part of your sign up fee, you can just go to http://socialmediaexaminer.com/fbsummit10. But know that if you do, Mike gets my cheeseburger. I can assure you I like cheeseburgers better than he does. Heh.

We’re all going to be smarter for taking these courses. And you won’t find a better value for the learning out there.

Managing social media content and conversations can be difficult and time consuming. You’ve got a company blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube and Picasa accounts for multimedia, perhaps do some participating on industry message boards … even for a small business, the time and effort can be overwhelming. Now imaging you have five locations, each with its own distinct need for outposts and content. Or that you’re a national brand that needs to be consistent and efficient with social media content, but you have franchisees who want their own Facebook pages.

Social media management for the franchise or multiple location businesses can potentially be a nightmare. Gavin Baker, formerly of Ruby Tuesday, and I talked about the Franchise challenges not too long ago. My friend Joel Libava (a/k/a The Franchise King) recognizes the challenges of social media and the franchise business but says the desire for social media is changing there.

“Last year, it was ‘well we should probably think about doing something with social media,’” he told me. “This year, it’s ‘Let’s do this social media thing!’ Franchise company executives are reaching out to me instead of the other way around.”

As those executives look to folks like Joel (or me, humbly) for help with strategy, training and implementation, they’ll also need help from a technology standpoint. I’ve been looking at potential stress relief for social media content management for the franchise business in enterprise-level management systems lately. Here are five tools I’ve found that make managing social media content in multiple-location and franchise businesses easier:

Valuevine

There are “enterprise” social media management tools and then there are “franchise business” social media management tools. Valuevine stands out as the clear leader in the franchise-specific space with regards to social media marketing management. It’s because that’s the segment of the enterprise they’re focused on. This tool, which actually releases a new version in the coming weeks, has everything a franchise or brand with multiple locations needs in a social media management platform. Then they go above and beyond and try to help those businesses get better by leveraging each client’s network of stores to help one another.

Valuevine offers clients the ability to setup and manage hundreds or even thousands of social outposts; load users and set permissions according to the organization’s hierarchy; post to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and interact with those platforms from the tool and measure all the insights you typically would want from the interactions. You can create custom coupons, complete with branded landing pages, promote and track each of those and even govern the valid dates, expirations and so on to protect you from viral coupon onslaughts.

But they also allow each location to set up custom, location-based searches on Twitter (and soon Facebook) for potential customers talking about industry keywords that might trigger the store managers to reach out and offer a coupon or opportunity to invite them to come to the location. Someone tweets they just got done working out and are famished and your store manager can fire off a Twitter message with a $1.00 off coupon for a power shake at your health food store.

The newest version of Valuevine’s platform applies some of their newest collaboration and recommendation technology to insure that every user has instant access to successful social media content. (Yeah, what worked one place will be recommended to you, empowering less experienced social users within your organization.)

With the exception of the need for more social platforms (Foursquare, blogs, etc.), Valuevine has everything I would have on my checklist for a tool for the franchise. Then it makes my disparate store managers smarter by using the intelligence from across my organization to help them pick up their performances.

And that’s not all! Most company needs are different, so pricing is generally customized to your particular situation, but the average cost of ValueVine is in the neighborhood of $50 per month per location. The tool has it all and at a price I would even say is unfair for them. CEO Neil Crist doesn’t mind. “We know we’re leaving money on the table, but we’re okay with that,” he told me.

Expion

Expion is the other tool I found that was built specifically with franchise and multi-location businesses in mind. It is Twitter and Facebook focused, with integration for YouTube and Picasa for media. While more networks are promised on their website, there are more robust publishing options on this list. But Expion’s franchise business setup is outstanding and the Twitter and Facebook management is second to none here.

Brand managers and franchisors can manage the social outposts of hundreds of locations, disseminate company-wide picture albums, videos, events, content and updates or they can drill down at any level of their hierarchy and post to clusters of stores, making regional promotions and events easily manageable. Store managers also have access and permissions for their specific social outposts to allow for local flexibility while providing brand oversight.

Just looking at the Facebook Event and Photo Album management features of this tool made me think it was well worth the cost to use Expion. It’s powerful, allows for easy monitoring and response to posts on company pages from the platform and is simple enough in its design that store managers don’t even need to be on Facebook or understand how Facebook works to use it. Yes, they could be more robust with additional networks, blog posting and the like, but for $100 per month per location you are managing, you get great value and some media functionality most of their competitors don’t have.

Awareness

The Social Marketing Hub from Awareness really is the all-in-one dashboard for managing social media content and conversations. The Hub was built with big brands in mind, but more from a large team managing lots of content perspective. Still, the user permissions management offers exactly the granular level control brands and/or franchisors need.

The Hub allows you to publish content (blog posts, videos, images, tweets, wall posts, etc.) in many channels or multiple outposts on those channels. (The basics are covered – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Foursquare, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) You can manage the comments and responses right there in one dashboard. The sentiment scoring gets really granular, giving you overall sentiment by individual influencer if you want it.

All the power and functionality a franchise business needs is packed into the Hub and Awareness is a thought and action leader in the social space, so you can guarantee quality and consistent improvements with the tool, too. Pricing starts at $1,000 per month.

Spredfast

Spredfast is a tool with a lot of potential. It’s yet another enterprise platform that isn’t really positioned as a franchise-franchisee management tool, but can accommodate that need. You set up “initiatives” then attach business objectives to them. (C-Level folks will dig this.)

You can add as many social profiles as you like and manage posting to them rather intuitively. You can add team members and set permissions, so setting up store managers with limited publishing rights makes it franchise-friendly. You can also monitor and respond within the tool.

While Spredfast touts a robust reporting mechanism and one you would think ties into the business objectives you set, my cursory exploration didn’t find more than just some base metrics of friends, clicks, replies, etc., that are fairly common among these tools. But co-founder Scott McCaskill let me peek at a few items not too far from launch and a full set of powerful reporting mechanisms is close.

For franchises, there will likely be a painful setup process, (though I’m sure the bigger the need/budget, the easier Spredfast will make it … they’re not dumb) but the functionality and basic reporting is there. Plus, the tool is fairly well designed, intuitive and user-friendly. Pricing starts at $375 per month for five initiatives and a white label version of the platform is available at $1,000 monthly.

Vitrue

Vitrue‘s Social Relationship Manager focuses solely on Facebook and Twitter, so it limits you right off the bat, though those are the social networks most people are using. It provides unique Twitter-integrated pages where the links you drop drive fans to your more-than-140-character content, which is useful for promotions, coupons and other targeted calls-to-action.

The Social Planner portion of Vitrue’s offering allows you to add teams to your content management team, and the service bills itself as built for the franchise. While a Vitrue rep told me their costs can be as low as $50 per month per location, they are also focused almost solely on Fortune 100 companies. One potential customer (a large customer) who had reviewed the tool told me they liked the offering, but the price tag was, “five times what we’d expect to pay.”

Vitrue’s reporting appears to be solid. Even the snippets on their website appear to be attractive, but they’ve tied themselves so closely to Facebook and Fortune 100 customers that they don’t appear versatile or cost effective. And for a social media company, their responsiveness left a bit to be desired. Three days after filling out an online form requesting information I questioned their responsiveness on Twitter. It took people in my network who knew someone at the company to reach out before anyone responded to me. While I expressed no urgency, I would have expected a social media company to pay more attention.

Thoughts On Implementation

Keep in mind that all of these tools are just that: tools. How you use them is really the important factor in whether or not your social media content for the franchise or multiple-location business is effective. (Think about a hammer trying to drive a screw. The tool doesn’t make the decision to hit the wrong thing. You do.)

You still have to train local store managers, dealers or location content providers to be smart about communicating in social media circles, be good stewards of your brand and comply with your content strategies. You still need a content strategy that drives engagement, click-thrus or whatever ultimate goal you’ve set for your social media marketing efforts.

Paying to use one of these platforms thinking the platform alone will solve your social media marketing problems is a big mistake. You still need a strategy, content and a system in place to ensure the tools are used effectively.

There are other platforms out there that do similar things to the five I’ve listed. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list. In fact, I encourage anyone reading this who is aware of alternative solutions to jump in the comments and point us to similar platforms. But these five are contenders for your franchise social media management platform dollars. Each will be happy to demo their products for you so you can decide which is right for your business.

Thoughts on the platforms? Did I leave others out? What other considerations must franchisee-franchisor businesses focus on for social media marketing success? The comments are yours.

IMAGE: iQconcept on Shutterstock.com.

I spent a few days in Seattle this week and was sincerely overwhelmed. Though I was jokingly told I came for its annual one week of summer, the weather, the people, the Social Media Club, the community … everything about the trip was perfect.

Typically, I don’t blog about the trips I take. I take far too many of them, am not a travel blogger and me talking about what I’m doing has to be monumentally boring for you, as Twitter-esqe as that concept might be.

But Seattle is one of those communities that when you walk away, you think, “I’ve got to tell people about this place.”

I was there to speak to Social Media Club Seattle, a local chapter of SMC that was started by my friend Kevin Urie. At dinner on Monday with Joann Jen, Shauna Causey, Eric Berto and Urie, they told me that the 225-seat event sold out in eight hours and they had 110 people on a waiting list to get in. (Clearly, they don’t realize how unimpressive I really am, my wife was quick to remind me.)

It’s not the number of people that’s important here, it’s actually the quality of the people. SMC Seattle has grown to perhaps one of the more active chapters in the umbrella organization’s network. I was assured several times that the audience wouldn’t tolerate 101 content. This was a 301 audience. They needed to be pushed.

Thank God!

And I was told they would push back.

Double Thanks!

I was asked a tough question or two from the crowd, which I appreciate. When everyone walks away with, “Great talk.” I get frustrated. I want people to push back, get uncomfortable and maybe even be a little mad. It makes them think about the issue more which produces more clarity of thought moving forward. You don’t have to like me for me to be useful to you. Often times, I’m more useful if you don’t.

One question I was asked had me perplexed. I’m still chewing on it and will probably blog it soon. More later.

Perhaps its the fact that everyone seems to have some Microsoft connection in Seattle. They either worked there or work for someone who works with them. Perhaps its because they have Starbucks here like most cities have fire hydrants. But there exists in Seattle an awesome tech community. And those here who are passionate about social media are passionate AND knowledgeable. There’s also a cohesiveness in Seattle’s social media enthusiasts you can sense. The people I encountered unknowingly showed me how it ought to be done. Ironic since Urie insists my co-founding of SMC Louisville inspired him to do the same here.

I walked away from SMC Seattle wishing SMC Louisville could be more like them and that we could all have the benefit of such a passionate, smart community just outside our door. Maybe you have that in your community. Cherish it.

From my hour talking to Neil Crist and Pete Mannix from ValueVine to hanging out with Jeff, John and the gang at the Whrrl offices, to getting a Windows Phone demo at the gdgt event I crashed, to the chic and social media hip Hotel Max, to Shauna Causey trying to cheauffer me around town in a car the size of my left thigh, every bit of Seattle made me smile.

I even got a big-time save from Alaska Airlines when my crazy schedule put Wednesday’s PRSA Independent Practitioner’s webinar (of which I was a speaker) butted up against my return flight. Elliott Pesut, Bobbie Egan and crew snapped a few fingers and booked me a board room in their elite traveler’s lounge so I could be on the call and not have to race to the airport after.

Thank you, Seattle. You reminded me this week what it means to have a community that oozes its essence. I got a little on me. And it’s nice.

Note: I have to give a shout out to Blake Cahill who really started the ball rolling to get me to Seattle. Blake, you’re a saint. Thank you for inviting me.

Follow-Up: I knew I’d forget someone important (and ironically unforgettable). Brian Westbrook was not only Mr. coordination for all I was doing in Seattle, but is the emcee and host of SMC Seattle’s live streams and events. The guy is the bomb. Hopefully, he won’t blow me up for not mentioning him on my first run through. Watch the stream below. He steals the show.

A video of the event (SMC Seattle live-streams their events and run them like a TV show … very cool) is online at UStream.There are some great pictures of the SMC Seattle Event taken by Berto here. Tac Anderson recaps my talk on his blog as well. And I uploaded my snapshots from the trip to Flickr.

This is Frank Eliason‘s last week at Comcast. The poster boy for leveraging social media for customer service and, in the process, turning around a struggling company’s image, will no longer be @ComcastCares on Twitter. Eliason is moving on to Citi where he will head up their social media efforts.

On the surface, it’s a neat, new plum job for a great guy who is a leader and pioneer in corporate social media. But there’s a lot more to the story because it writes another chapter in the personal vs. company brand playbook.

Yeah, Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang left Forrester and are now reunited at the Altimeter Group. But those two were analysts at a tech-oriented company who branched out to be analysts at their own tech-oriented company. (Yes, they serve non-tech clients, but they’re tech/social analysts.) Robert Scoble? Same thing … tech to tech. Different deal.

Eliason leaves a cable company to go to a financial services company. It’s a bit different when it is out of the tech bubble. Eliason is also, intentional or not, the face and voice of Comcast customer service, not just a shining star on a team of content providers.

Frank Eliason is many people’s personal connection to Comcast. Losing him will be a blow to the cable company, and one more impactful than other personal brands moving on have been. You would think that Comcast would realize that and make every effort to keep Eliason in that position. Not so says a friend in the know at the company.

I’ll also be watching Eliason’s move to Citi because the position there, as I understand it, reports to marketing and isn’t a delineated customer service initiative. Eliason is a customer care and quality assurance guy, so he’ll stir the pot at the financial services company, I’d bet.

More importantly, though, I’m interested to see how @FrankEliason evolves as a face and voice on Twitter. Will Citi position Eliason as an employee handling social media or a personal brand speaking for the company?

Ford’s Scott Monty oversees many social media efforts, but is perhaps most effective for the company on Twitter as himself. Yet, in many ways he has leased his name to Ford. (Not a criticism. Ford is his job. And it’s not my opinion. Look at his Tweet cloud.)

What happens if Monty were to leave Ford? Yes, their social media efforts would go on, and perhaps largely unaffected. Monty has wisely built a robust social presence for the Ford brands there and the company isn’t as dependent upon him as Comcast is on Eliason. But what about the Scott Monty brand? If he moves to, say, Sony, and suddenly becomes Sony fan boy number one, I worry that his personal brand may become the Rent-This-Space of the social world.

What happens to Frank Eliason’s personal vs. company activity is going to be interesting to watch. What could happen if Monty ever leaves Ford might be more interesting, but we may not see that any time soon. My guess is that Ford won’t let him go easily the way Comcast allegedly has Eliason.

But this new chapter in personal vs. company brand is being written now. How will the chapter end? What challenges do you see Comcast facing in the coming weeks? What challenges does Eliason have before him at Citi in terms of him vs. the company? The comments are yours.

NOTE: Frank Eliason and Scott Monty are both friends but also semi-public figures in this space. I did not contact either of them about this issue before writing it. I only offer the questions and scenarios here as what-ifs for us to consider about personal brands and company presences in the social media space. I wish Frank the best at Citi and know he’ll be as terrific for them as he was for Comcast. I love Scott Monty like a brother and, though I’m perhaps more critical of him as a result, think the world of what he has done at Ford and before. I also consider him perhaps the best corporate social media lead on the planet.

In the past two weeks, I’ve been asked a version of the same question about four times. The questions came from decision-makers at three companies/brands and one advertising agency. The question was generally this one:

Why on Earth would we allow our employees to openly represent us online?

Yes, all you social media purists out there, there are still non-Kool-aid drinkers amongst us. In fact, 90 percent of the world is still old school about marketing and communications. Keep on Kumbaya-ing with your “l love your blog” crowd. The rest of us will do the hard work.

While the answer to that question varies by client, environment and more, I generally answer it with, “If you are afraid of what your employees will say about you online, then your problem is not your employees, it’s you. Hire smarter.” There are nuances, though. Employees don’t have to be “official” spokespeople and so on. But, generally speaking, people with the “can’t do that” attitude are afraid of their hires, not the principal.

To give you an example of what empowering your employees might look like, I need only show you this chalk board from Java Brewing Company in downtown Louisville. Jamie, Ashley, Suemi, Arielle and Laura work for the company. As patrons enter, they are introduced to their baristas.

If you ask any of them a hard question, they’ll answer, “Let me check with my manager.” If you complain about the quality of your coffee, they apologize and give you a new cup or extend an offer for you to talk to the manager. If you ask them something they don’t know, they even say, “I don’t know.”

My guess is that if they are asked those same questions on Facebook, they’ll say the same things.

Jamie, Ashley, Suemi, Arielle and Laura aren’t just baristas. They are community managers. Just without computers.

More importantly, though, Java Brewing Company proactively introduces them to you, tells you a few things they like and what their favorite drink is. This gives you suggestions on what to order, but also comfortable topics to use in conversation with the baristas as you get to know them.

I want to ask Jamie how she got to Louisville from Spartanburg, S.C., and how she likes being a Duke fan in a state that appreciates Duke as much as it does Kim Jong Il. It’s an ice-breaker, and entree to further conversation. And immediately makes me think I’m doing business with someone I know, not just some company that takes my money.

This humanizes Java Brewing Company.

So think about how you would react to buying coffee from such a place if you “knew” the staff, had talking points to strike up conversations (Not even about their company, just random, life-fulfilling conversations.) and saw it as more than just a store where you spend money for a cup-a-joe.

Then tell me about your company’s baristas.