Whether you are a CEO, college freshman, pastor, domestic engineer or anywhere in between, social media is likely an increasingly important communication tool. In the future, social networking will become so integrated with all our communication tools that it will be just another part of our regular processes. Until that time though, we must struggle with a variety of platforms. We have one site for personal use, one professional and still others for jobs, hobbies or specific focus areas. Until we see the tightened integration of social media platforms though, I find that knowing your social media hierarchy and following some basic principles will keep your messages clear, effective and aligned with the right platform.

With so many platforms available to us, we spend too much time updating status messages and too little time interacting. To solve this problem, most tools have enabled integration with other services for status updates. This works well, provided you keep the status flow one-way and know your hierarchy. The image above reflects my own social media hierarchy. Here are the guidelines I followed in creating my own:

1. Twitter Feeds All: To keep it simple, I have Twitter feeding all social networks. Some tools offer the ability to update only sites identified by hashtags in your post (#fb for facebook and #li for linkedin, as an example). However, given the limited characters, I just feed them all and keep my twitter posts more professional.

2. Feed Twitter Selectively: To avoid any loops, I chose not to feed Twitter from other sites, unless the feed is intended to update all sites. For example, I enable Foursquare and my Blog to post to Twitter, because I like to update all sites with with these feeds.

3. Target Your Platforms: With the above exceptions, each platform I leverage has a primary purpose. I use Ning for the Servant Leadership Network (professional), Facebook for friends and family updates (Personal), LinkedIn for business networking (Professional), my blog for Servant Leadership content (professional) and other sites for similarly targeted areas.

One of the benefits of social media is to allow us to be ourselves more in professional settings. In fact, I enjoy that my colleagues can learn more about my personal interests as well – if they so desire. As a result, the intent here is not to say you have to be careful about crossing your messages. However, the more appropriate and focused your message is on each platform, the better I find the reception and resulting influence. Therefore, if you struggle with too many status updates or fear your messages are not as clear or strong as they could be, I suggest setting up your own social media hierarchy.

Question: Do you have a social media hierarchy? How do you leverage each platform?

I am fortunate to be guided by some of the best and brightest minds. My mentors include a sizable list of “who’s who”. For example, counted among my mentors are Michael Hyatt, Tony Dungy, Ron Edmundson, John C. Maxwell, Max Lucado, Marcus Buckingham, Jim Collins, Patrick Lencioni, Laurie Beth Jones, Max DePree and more. The best part is they can mentor you as well. In fact, they may have already started.

I am sure you’ve figured out that I am talking about mentoring through published works. Admittedly, this relationship is one-way. Therefore, this may not be considered by many to be mentoring. Yet, when you have input from so many of the greatest leaders, there is much to be said for even this one-way relationship. Social media and modern technology provide us a wealth of opportunities to learn from the leading experts in our fields and leadership development. Here are some tips for establishing and maintaining your own core of virtual mentors:

1.       Blogs: Subscriptions to blogs are an excellent way to receive regular updates, insights and ideas. These regular updates often include advice on current events and trending topics. Some of my favorite leadership blogs include:

• Michael Hyatt
• Ron Edmundson
• Seth Godin

2.       Networks: Using LinkedIn, Ning, even Facebook and other, more socially-focused networks is a great way of connecting with like-minded individuals in the same, or similar, fields and industries. Some of my favorite virtual networks include:

• LinkedIn (especially the Servant Leadership Group)
• Ning’s Servant Leadership Site

3.       Books: Naturally, reading books by thought leaders in your chosen field are a great source of information and guidance. There are too many favorites for me to list here.

4.       Audio: Generally speaking, I purchase the matching audio version of any book I like. This enables me to “freshen up”  up on some of my favorite content, This is particularly useful given a long commute and / or when something comes up and I remember, “that one author had a great point on this… let me find that again.” Alternatively, podcasts and many other audio formats are excellent for those who travel or during exercise.

5.       Search: Of course, there will be occasions when something comes up and you do not recall a reference to the challenge from your existing team of virtual mentors. When that happens, it may be time to expand your board of virtual advisors. Start with an online search and you may find an advisor focused on that particular niche.

So why aren’t you being mentored by these or other leading experts? Perhaps you are now – great! If not, I strongly encourage you and your teams to pick up some of these tips and start receiving advice and mentoring from the best in the field. It may be one-way, but in the end, one-way mentoring from the best and brightest is better than no mentoring from them at all.

Question: Do you have one or more virtual mentors? Who do you get your guidance and advice from and how?

Those of you in customer service know that, historically, a happy customer tells 5 people, while an unhappy customer tells 100. While that was true in the past and likely remains true for verbal communication, Web 2.0 functionality is leveling the playing field. In particular, through Blogging your customers may tell the same number of people – whether they are happy or unhappy.

A recent posting from one of the country’s leading ITIL consultants rained down unsolicited praise for FedEx. Although the source was a personal blog, the estimated 400 member readership contained many IT consultants, contractors and industry professionals – all of whom rely upon carriers for their business.

Now I can hear the naysayers already: “one could complain just as quickly” – and you’re right. That is precisely the beauty of this evolution in communication mediums. Like it or not, your customers will hear all the big customer service stories. It used to be that each bad incident was relatively self-contained. However, this is no longer the case.

Now, emotional (favorably or negatively) customers will log onto any of the growing number of vendor-neutral customer complaint boards, the Better Business Bureau, or industry discussion forums and distribute their thoughts. If customers Blog about it, you will see that incident quickly broadcast to hundreds of readers. The internet is undiscriminating and the communication is immediate. What are you doing to manage this environment? Are you:

• Monitoring relevant industry and consumer discussion boards?
• Surveying your largest customer’s for preferred communication channels?
• Researching customer service incidents online for “vent-sessions”?
• Offering your customers a direct online forum through your own site?
• All of the above?
• Something else?

Today’s leading organizations understand these benefits and challenges. Web 2.0 savvy-leaders are addressing the response in many different ways. You must be aware of these concerns and opportunities – leveraging the processes and related technologies for your benefit and avoiding greater detriment.

Business Week (BW) recently updated one of their hottest pieces from 2005. The article was on the impact of Blogs in the workplace. As a result, the June 2nd edition of BW highlighted the positive and negative impact of this evolution in communication on the workplace.

The metrics painted an interesting picture:

• 25% of U.S. adults online read a blog once a month (Forrester cited)
• IBM’s internal social network, “Beehive“, has 30,000 employees on it
• Twitter estimates 1 Million users now
• Dell’s service on Twitter has brought in $500k+, in new orders, in the last year
• Splogs (Spam Blogs) now account for 90% of all blog postings (though filters catch most)
• Technoratti now indexes 74 Million blogs (but only 5.2 Million are estimated as active)
• Best Buy’s social staff site, “Blue Shirt Nation” has 20,000 participants, most exited staff remain users

BW also had some good insights, both positive and negative, into the growing trends and impact at the workplace:

• “Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue or seeing what she is reading at the beach. It’s as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides”
• “This can be disturbing for top management who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense.”
• “…companies that don’t adapt are sure to get lots of (the downside)”
• “…we have developed top-down reflexes that are nearly Pavlovian. We have to reprogram ourselves.”
• “(employees) may see what technologies their competitors are putting into alpha tests and get the buzz on new rounds of financing.”
• “Work and leisure, colleague and rival; they all blend on these networks.”
• “…wikis raze traditional hierarchies: An intern can amend the work of a senior engineer.”
• “Managers have to make sure that quieter employees don’t lose out.”

The article sums things up nicely by stating “…the potential for both better and worse is huge, and it’s growing”. So not unlike other developments it is all about how each enterprise manages this evolution of communication. The question is, are you leveraging this evolution in communication for the benefit of your staff, customers and company? Your competitors are probably working on it now.

Whatever happened to those companies that didn’t put up a website anyway? Happy twittering.

It seems like the topic of Mashups is getting a lot of press again lately. Conceptually, it’s nothing all that new and mashups have been around for several years. Wikipedia defines mashups as:

… a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.”

With IBM’s announcement of the release of Lotus Mashups at Lotusphere in January, we have another example of how Web 2.0 and web-as-a-platform solutions are presenting solutions for the early adopting enterprises. Still, the majority of mashups today seem to focus on map overlays. This is where I liked IBM’s positioning at Lotusphere – while they covered the mandatory examples of map overlays, they also really emphasized data-to-data and other non-(geographic)map mashups.

I took a quick look around for some of the more innovative and popular non-map mashups and here some that stood out:

• Love-o-Graph: Don’t trust yourself, match.com or any other dating algorithms? Why not entrust the future of your love life to a mashup driven entirely off of your name and your prospective partner? I found the future for my wife and I is “open to interpretation”.
• LivePlasma: A cool visual representation of connections between musicians, actors, films, books and so on from the Amazon API.
• Secret Prices: A really cool site that combines data including online coupons and rebates with sales sites and opinion data.
• Similarity Web: This site takes Amazon.com’s “Customers Also Bought” logic and provides an impressive visualization of similar products.
• Google vs. Yahoo: With this mashup, you can compare the results of a search as reported by Google and Yahoo.

With IBM’s investment in enterprise mashups solutions, we move from one-offs and technically challenging solutions requiring programming expertise to a common business platform. Then we look at examples like those above that range from the entertainment to consumer focused. It is clear there are many great opportunities for mashups beyond the geographic maps and expanding solutions for average business person.

For more examples of mashups, check out Programmable Web. In particular, they have a somewhat dated article on increasing non-map mashups.