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Perhaps the single biggest change that companies have had to adjust to when implementing a social media strategy is the necessity to listen to online conversations, comments and rants that mention their company by name.

Mirroring the explosive growth of Twitter and Facebook has been the excitement  of companies eager to exploit what they see as another marketing platform able to reach targeted individuals at virtually no cost. Company after company set up Twitter identities and Facebook Fan Pages that immediately began broadcasting endless pitches for their products and services.

These clumsy and ineffectual efforts were summarily followed by claims that these social media platforms were a waste of time for companies trying to build their business and attract customers. But what these companies failed to recognize was that most consumers simply aren’t looking to engage most companies online. We’re already overwhelmed with marketing messages and have no desire to open another advertising pipeline right to our desktop.

That doesn’t mean that social media participants won’t interact with companies, but they’ll to it on their terms and on their time, not yours. This shift in the balance of power to the consumer necessitates a shift in communications strategy for your company. Your focus can no longer be solely on your outbound message but now must recognize and accommodate the need for two-way communications that integrates customer service, not just sales.

So, what are the new rules?

1. become an active listener. Conversations are going on all day that mention your company by name. You need an active listening outpost that captures these conversations and funnels them to the appropriate internal people to respond. Is someone having a problem with your product? Contact them to see how you can help. Send them a link to an owner’s manual. Put them in touch with your company’s 800 support number. Link them to their local retail outlet where they can get the help they need.
   Is someone ranting about your product and claiming that you suck? You have two choices: let them rant and spread their vitriol across the web or step in and attempt to defuse their anger. Will you convert all the ranters to raving fans? Probably not, but without an active listening strategy, these rants will occur without your influence and they will all end badly for you.
2. involve listeners throughout your organization. Most organizations plan only to listen with sales personnel, eager to jump on any mention of their company as a sales opportunity. However, most companies will find that customer service will be a larger priority for those mentioning your company by name. Make sure you have people actively listening and ready to respond from customer service, product development, your executive suite and even your legal and HR departments.
3. respond immediately. Your 800 number is staffed and answered at least during your business hours, and so should your social media channels. You can’t impose communications methods on your clients. They’ll let you know how they want to get in touch with you. Some will phone, some will email and some will contact you through Twitter. It’s your job to be ready to respond immediately no matter how they contact you.
4. empower listeners to resolve problems. If you assign an employee to monitor customer service issues on Twitter, it’s essential that you empower them to resolve the issues that they encounter. There’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with a nameless, faceless and voiceless person who does nothing more than take your name for someone else to deal with tomorrow. Responding with immediacy simply magnifies the customer’s frustration if you instantly tell them that there’s nothing you can do.
5. apologize. accept responsibility. tell them how you’ll solve their problem. Face it, there are times when your customer has legitimate complaints about your company, product or service. It’s unavoidable. Your customers don’t expect perfection, but they do expect you to apologize for their troubles, accept full responsibility and then tell them exactly how you’re going to make things right. And then do it. It’s not complicated, but it’s amazing how few companies get it right.
6. continue the conversation until the customer determines it’s over. I tweeted this week about problems I had with a Sony Reader ebook. A phone call to their support line that took nearly an hour could have been reduced to a minute or two if the support rep had simply asked the right question first: Do you have a Mac or a PC? I was annoyed and frustrated and vented in a tweet that was read by someone at Sony. To their credit, they responded:
   Sorry to hear you’re having a bad experience. What is going on? Can we help?
   I sent them a reply and then… nothing. But I wasn’t done yet. I still wanted to know how they’re addressing the issue of Mac users who cannot upgrade their firmware and therefore cannot use their latest Reader software. Instead I got silence. My conclusion: they don’t have the capacity to deliver exceptional user experiences and their half-assed Twitter response just confirms my perception of their company.
7. don’t forget marketing fundamentals. There is no better time to cement a customer relationship than after you reach out to help them solve a problem. Even if the problem wasn’t entirely solved, you have the ability to appease them if you send them a coupon for your online store, enroll them in your Customer VIP program or register them in your free online training program. You rarely have person-to-person contact with your customers, so don’t blow it. Do something to delight them and remain memorable for all the right reasons.

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It’s time to counter a growing sentiment among social media types – including some nationally recognized practitioners who really should know better  - that trying to justify your company’s decision to pursue a social media strategy based on ROI is somehow foolish.

Now, these same high priests of social media don’t ever suggest a better alternative or method to determine whether or not your company should pursue a social media strategy, they just insist that you’ve got to do social media because it’s just so darn important, and besides your competitors are.

If their argument sounds like your teenager’s argument insisting that you’ve just got to let him stay out til 2am because everyone else is doing it, well, you’re right.

However, unlike gullible parents, the executives who make investment decisions aren’t easily duped, they don’t jump on every trendy b-school bandwagon and they’re not scared of your newfangled technology. They want more than breathless claims. They want proof.

Twitter is that thing Ashton Kutcher and Oprah play with. Facebook is the place where their teenagers waste their entire evenings. And your preoccupation with these platforms doesn’t convey cutting edge marketing savvy as much as it does pointless obsession.

If you want corporate buy-in and investment, you’ve got to demonstrate how your social media strategy will generate positive returns for the company. In real dollars, with real timelines.

The ROI opponents claim that there’s simply no way to really measure ROI. After all, they claim, How can you put a dollar value on a blog post, a blog comment, or a single tweet? As if that level of granularity is the measure that anyone is looking for.

Or they simply attempt to redefine a financial metric that has been commonly defined and routinely accepted for decades.

Reading just a few recent posts by legacy ROI opponents, I’ve seen ROI redefined as:

• Return on Impact
• Return on Impressions
• Return on Importance
• Return on Influence

And, my personal favorite for its absurd complexity and impenetrable formula: ROI should really be referred to as Return on Conversation whose formula is:

(B • I) (m+s • r)/d] / [O/(b + t + e)]

Brand Equity times the Intent of Communication times (Message plus Suitability times Reach) divided by Sustainability OVER Outcomes divided by the Cost times (the Budget plus Time to Produce plus Experience)

I believe the result is actually measured in Schrute Bucks.

The reality is that ROI is much simpler than that. You only need to know two numbers: how much you gained from your investment, and the total cost of the investment itself. That’s it.

ROI = (Gain – Cost) / Cost

If you spent $1000 and saw an increase in sales of $1500, then your ROI was:

ROI = (1500-1000)/1000 = 50%

I think I know where the disconnect is. Social media engagement typically generates an action that is non-financial in nature. You collect Twitter followers, generate retweets, get comments on your blog, add new Facebook fans, attract YouTube viewers or generate click-throughs to your website.

However, These aren’t ROI. How do I know? Because my banker won’t take Twitter followers in lieu of a check. Clear enough for you?

I don’t want to diminish the importance of engagement with your clients and your prospects. I’m a huge adherent of social media and I recognize its transformative potential, but only if it’s used strategically, with specific objectives that you can track and measure.

ROI doesn’t become ROI until it does one of two things: increases revenue or reduces costs. Those are financial impacts that are real, measurable and put a grin on your CEO’s face.

Determining ROI isn’t a laughing stock metric in the corporate world. Calculating potential ROI demands that you create a strategic plan, consider alternatives and project likely actions and returns from your program. It compels you to define precisely your plan’s objectives, put them down on paper and support them when challenged.

Simply saying that we need a social media program because our competitor has a social media program is absurd. What if their program is drains their  marketing budget without any noticeable effect? Do you want to copy that?

If you want funding, you need to justify your program with more than intemperate claims that we’ve just gotta do something. What’s your goal? To increase revenue or decrease costs? How will you do it? Who will be involved? How much time is necessary to invest? What technology platforms will you support? How will your program fit into your current operational structure? What do you want your conversational partners to do? How will your success be tracked and measured?

If you don’t know the answers, you don’t deserve the funding. Social media marketing is no different from any other marketing, it just uses new channels and has interactivity built-in. If you can’t tell me how you intend to leverage the medium and generate a positive return you can always try again next quarter after you learn.

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Marketing has historically been a godsend for lousy companies. With an effective marketing team, even the surliest, most incompetent and inattentive companies could create an illusion of excellence, caring and success.

They could write a powerful and inspirational mission statement professing their devotion to essential core values and tout their commitment to clients and community.

In a word, they could lie.

They were able to craft their own deceit because there was no simple, inexpensive and effective way for any single customer to counter their message. What’s a wronged airline passenger to do when the airline bumps you from a flight, loses your luggage or confines you for hours on a frozen tarmac? Before social media, you simply had to take it. Grudgingly, angrily and frustratingly you simply had no ability to counter the beatific corporate message.

Not anymore.

If there’s any aspect of your business that sucks, you can expect these deficiencies to be magnified, not eliminated, through the effective deployment of social media.

While many large companies believe that they can continue to manage and control their message through social media channels, they’re in for a rude awakening. The explosion of social media platforms and their rapid embrace as a tool of retribution by an increasingly savvy and knowledgeable public means that they control your message, not you.

Want proof? United Airlines – with annual revenues of $17 billion and a massive marketing budget – could not control their corporate message when confronted by a single implacable passenger with a broken guitar. When Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician, could not get satisfaction from United for their baggage handlers breaking his guitar he wrote a clever song, shot a video and posted United Breaks Guitars to YouTube where it has accumulated over seven million views and nearly 25,000 negative comments from similarly disgruntled passengers.

While Dave Carroll’s effort received international attention, there are thousands of similar stories emerging every day on blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. Legitimately unhappy customers who are simply fed up with poor service, lousy products and an uncaring or inattentive company and who decide to let everyone know exactly how rotten you are.

Social media has permanently shifted the balance of power from deep pocketed corporations to passionate and sophisticated social media participants. Got flaws? You’d better fix them.

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Although Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the other major social media platforms have enabled job seekers to reach an enormous network of people during their job search, these same tools – improperly used – also have the potential to derail and destroy your efforts if you don’t carefully manage your online persona.

The explosive growth of Facebook and its use for both personal and professional networking has revealed some cautionary tales from individuals who didn’t anticipate the damaging potential of too-familiar, vulgar or offensive profile content.

The destructive potential of an artless profile was revealed last week in a post written by Cleveland blogger clevelandsaplum. Her post detailed a candidate search for an addition to their public relations staff. After the first round of interviews, one candidate stood out as the clear favorite. But when the staff did a quick Google search and checked out his public Facebook profile, he lost any chance of being invited back.

Visible to anyone with access to Facebook, and shielded from no one was this stunning paragraph:

About Me:
I am awesome. I run sh**. I had relations with your girlfriend, and yes I got it on tape. I scoff at those less fortunate than me (read: everyone else). I tend to laugh at the handicapped as well as foreigners. I am a firm believer that women are without a doubt the weaker sex. I know more than you. I am a ridiculously huge deal. I’m utterly gorgeous, you (most likely as a result of terrible genes or an unfortunate run-in with the business-end of a shovel) are not. I make fun of ugly people, because they are ugly and they deserve it. My social life is clearly something that you will never experience because you are ugly, unpopular, or a severe combination of the two. I throw sh** onto my neighbor’s porch because I am better than them and they can’t do sh** about it. My friends are also better than you and they will let you know it. I break other people’s stuff. I do whatever I want without any regard for the repercussions. I intentionally ruin the environment via littering, not recycling, and other harmful action. I am an ass****.

Although it’s likely that this individual was attempting to be sarcastic and humorous, his description was highly offensive to those who viewed it within the company and it raised flags concerning his judgment and discretion. And in a heated competition with a dozen other qualified applicants, this was reason enough to eliminate him from consideration.

Now, go check out your own social media profiles and see if you’ve written anything that could offend or concern a potential hiring manager.

Then read these instructions to sanitize and protect your online reputation. Customize your privacy settings to restrict access to your personal information. Segregate all of your contacts into different lists, each with differing levels of access to your updates and photos. At a minimum, you should have a Personal list for your closest friends and a Professional list that allows you to connect with professional contacts but doesn’t grant access to all the intimate details of your life. Prevent photos tagged with your name from appearing in anyone else’s feed unless you specifically approve it. And restrict your personal updates solely to your close, personal friends.

Take control of your personal brand and online reputation before you become a cautionary tale yourself.

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David Meerman Scott garnered attention this week with a 3 minute rant deploring the fixation of corporate types who insist on justifying social media marketing expenditures with Business 1.0 anachronisms like ROI (that’s Return on Investment folks).

He attracted dozens of comments from supportive readers who share his distaste for the MBA scourges who dominate corporate America and insist on facts, data and analysis to support requests for capital investment. After all, we all know that social media is good, strong relationships are beneficial, and any effort we can make to become closer to our clients should be pursued. Unless you do it wrong.

You see, there’s a burr under this social media saddle. If you do it wrong, you can irritate your prospects, alienate your clients and permanently damage your personal and company reputation.

When your CEO asks for an ROI of your social media marketing program, what he is asking for is a strategic plan and analysis of likely outcomes. Without the plan, you and your marketing/social media staff may simply leap into the social media void and flail around aimlessly, without clear objectives or measurable goals. Sure, you’ll be able to brag about the number of Twitter followers you have and the percentage of retweets you generate, but what have you really accomplished?

I admire many of the marketing activities that David has pursued over the past several years. And I agree that his approach – creating interesting, entertaining and highly useful content and then giving it away – is successful for many people and companies. But not all.

It obviously works for David. How do we know? Because he tracks the ROI of his activities. He knows that when he posts a controversial blog entry that gets commented upon across the web he generates more traffic, increases his search engine visibility, receives more comments, and sells more books. Activity = increased revenue. ROI.

The straw man in his argument is his assumption that establishing ROI requires that one track the value of every tweet, blog post, Facebook entry or YouTube submission and then generate a value of that singular activity. No one is asking that anyone do all that to prove the effectiveness of a social media program. No company can get that granular in their analysis.

However, we can demand that marketing departments have a strategy in place and mechanisms established to measure the success of that strategy. If you are going to produce and disseminate free content, you need to know what type of content you need to produce. Videos? Podcasts? Slideshows? Webinars? White papers? Interviews? And where will they be available? On your corporate website? On your blog? On your Facebook Fan Page? On all of them? Then you need to track, analyze and adapt. If the downloads of your white papers overwhelm the views of your online videos, then get busy producing more white papers. But how would you know any of this if you didn’t prepare to measure the effectiveness of your efforts?

And then what are your next steps? How do you extend the relationship with the individual who downloaded your white paper? Do you ask them to become a Twitter follower so you can engage them online? Do you ask that they join your Facebook Fan Page so they can gather even more useful content? And to what end? At some point, your actions/their reactions/the non-financial impact must convert into a financial impact or what’s the point? (hat tip to Olivier Blanchard at http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/)

If you can’t convince your CEO that you have a plan to increase revenues or reduce your costs, then you don’t deserve the investment. Don’t blame their fear of your social media prowess or resistance to trying something new. Their understanding of business fundamentals hasn’t changed. Prove the value of your ideas. Something David’s Harvard Business School audience should understand, even if David doesn’t.

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Someone should create a mission statement for any company attempting to create a mission statement. Something like this:

We will critically examine our company to determine why we do what we do. What inspires us. What drives us. What excites us. Then we’ll write a brief statement that accurately, and singularly, describes our company. That can fit on a t-shirt. It will not contain the words: best, leading, biggest, profit, diversity, growth or exceed expectations.

Now, if you really, really feel that a mission statement is essential to understanding and guiding your business, you have the rules. My question is: Why do so many companies break these rules and create irredeemably awful, platitudinous and ultimately pointless mission statements?

My ire was inspired by an article I read on the Smart Business Online website this week detailing the efforts of Staffmark CEO Frederick Kohnke to rebrand his national staffing company around a unified vision, mission and values. The project took nine months and resulted in one of the most useless, generic mission statements I’ve ever read.

Really. That’s not just hyperbole. Although the resulting mission statement wasn’t included in the article (wtf?) I found it on the Staffmark website. Their mission:

To always strive to exceed the expectations of our employees, business customers, and external stakeholders.

How’s that for exciting? Really gets your juices flowing, doesn’t it? Strive to exceed expectations. What’s the matter, think outside the box was taken?

If you spend nine months creating a mission statement, odds are that it will be created not by the company founder or CEO, but by a committee tasked with the job of creating an inclusive mission statement. One that will take into account all their stakeholders, will be legally benign, generally inoffensive and ultimately uninspiring. One that will be guaranteed to include no distinctive or compelling voice, no descriptive or detailed verbs and certainly nothing that will differentiate it from any other staffing company. Staffmark succeeded spectacularly on all these counts.

What’s so terribly disappointing is that genuine, heartfelt mission statements can be inspiring and unique. Consider Ben & Jerry’s mission statement:

To make, distribute & sell the finest quality all natural ice cream & euphoric concoctions with a continued commitment to incorporating wholesome, natural ingredients and promoting business practices that respect the Earth and the Environment.

There’s not another ice cream manufacturer that could claim that mission statement. Euphoric concoctions. How wonderful is that phrase?  The precise wording matters because it captures the essence of Ben & Jerry’s. It could not be transferred to Briar’s website, or Edy’s or Haagen Dazs.

Or consider Coca-Cola’s mission to refresh the world. It captures their company spirit in a way that PepsiCo’s mission to be the world’s premier consumer products company focused on convenient foods and beverages doesn’t.

Being the premier, leading, biggest, most profitable company isn’t a mission, it’s an objective. It’s not inspiring to anyone outside of the company boardroom. Not one of your employees will get out of bed tomorrow and say to themselves “How am I going to make Company X bigger today?”  But I’ll bet there are Disney employees who get up and ask themselves “How can I make someone happy today?” And I’m certain that there are Apple employees who can’t wait to get to work to do something insanely great.

But apparently Staffmark is content with their employees exceeding expectations. Whose expectations? We don’t know. How are the expectations measured? We’re not sure. How will anyone know when they’ve exceeded expectations? They won’t. But, gosh darn it, it’s better to exceed expectations than fail to meet them, right? Then that’s the goal.

And I’ll bet that if I were to call 20 of Staffmark’s employees today, not more than one or two would be able to recount their company’s mundane mission statement. Anyone want to take me up on that?

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One of the most frequent and irritating faults of marketers is their belief that if a little personalized service is good, then an overwhelming amount of personalized service must be better. No. It’s not.

Let me freely acknowledge right up front that I love Chipotle and think their iPhone app is one of the most thoughtfully designed and easy to use online ordering apps. In fact, if I intend to eat at Chipotle – even if I’m in my car outside – I’ll order on my iPhone because it remembers my last order and I can complete the entire ordering process with a few taps on the screen.

Chipotle has eliminated pain from my life. The pain of waiting in a snaking line in the middle of the lunch rush, having to yell your order over the din of the crowded restaurant, and having to juggle food and money when finally arriving at the register. The entire exercise to obtain my food is time consuming and generally annoying.

Recognizing this, Chipotle released their iPhone app, allowing customers to order from their phone (or online) and proceed directly to the register to pick up their pre-paid lunch. Annoyance eliminated.

Or so I thought.

Then the phone calls started. Every time I ordered from my iPhone, I’d receive a phone call about an hour later asking if my food was ok. Every order, another phone call. Another intrusion. Another unwanted and uninvited interruption of my afternoon. With no apparent way to get them to stop.

After the first call, I was understanding. After the sixth I was aggravated. After the tenth I was pissed.

I elected to order from my iPhone precisely because I did not want to call and speak with their employees. I elected convenience and privacy. I never elected to chat with the Chipotle staff. I never opted in.

Chipotle never asked me if I wanted a phone call from their customer service staff. I never gave them permission to contact me on my personal phone. They simply assumed that their definition of good customer service would be met with gratitude and understanding. They were wrong.

So, to test their ability to deliver real, personalized customer service I sent them an email. I complained about their intrusive phone calls and asked to be removed from whatever contact list is generated after an iPhone order.

And Chipotle came through. They responded the same day, apologized, acknowledged that they should have incorporated some type of opt-in button or check box, and assured me that I wouldn’t receive any more calls. And then they followed through. After placing two more orders last week I anxiously awaited a follow-up phone call that, to their credit, never arrived.

So, what’s the lesson for your business? The definition of excellent client service is defined by your customer, not by you. And your service delivery processes have to be flexible enough to adapt to differing definitions. I have no doubt that Chipotle still calls many of their iPhone ordering customers, and that’s fine with me if it’s fine with those customers. They just needed to know that my definition of outstanding service never involves calling my mobile phone. I just want tasty tacos with extra salsa, hold the phone call.

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During last week’s BusinessWire sponsored panel discussion at the City Club in Cleveland (video above), every panelist agreed that determining social media ROI should be a distinct component of any social media campaign. So why do so few companies track any form of ROI?

Because it’s boring.

There, I said it. The cat’s out of the bag. Determining social media ROI is tedious, dull and boring. It requires you to read reports, check analytics, create timelines and check data against specific activities and website minutiae that are profoundly uninspiring, yet absolutely necessary.

Getting a social media program off the ground is fun. It requires strategic planning, creative execution and active engagement. Everything is fresh and exciting. Every new conversation is an affirmation and every relationship is a success.

Tracking the results of this activity, however, is considerably less fun. Although there are excellent software tools, like Radian6, that will measure the success of your social media efforts, most of these cost money. Social media is supposed to be free, isn’t it? So, most small companies will likely develop some home-grown, spreadsheet based tracking mechanisms to determine their ROI.

And then, they’ll be largely ignored or neglected, like 84% of social media programs.

Because tracking ROI requires you to know what you’re measuring, how to measure, how to interpret the data, how and when to establish a baseline, how to measure impact and requires you to track specific transactional activities.

And where’s the fun in that?

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The Palm Pre was one of the most highly anticipated smartphone launches this year. They primed the media for months with photos and detailed specs of the unit, ensuring reams of coverage for their iPhone-killer.

On June 6th, Palm released the phone to collections of eager fans who could have all assembled in the lobby of their local Sprint store without disturbing the regular patrons just there to complain about their monthly bill.

Without an established collection of Pre fanboys committed to camp out for hours in front of every Sprint store, the groundswell of Pre passion seemed rather demure and underwhelming.

No matter. Palm announced that they realized record sales nearing 500,000 units during their first weekend, dampened only by Apple’s release of their own new 3GS iPhone, which sold over one million units in its first weekend.

Now that the smartphone dust has settled, it appears that Palm’s Pre will never become the iPhone killer they had hoped. Total sales for this year will finally settle between 1 and 1.5 million units, compared to Apple’s total iPhone installed base of over 40 million. Not much of a comparison really.

So, what went wrong? Why didn’t the technical tour de force that is the Pre stumble so badly? In a word: marketing. Or, to be more precise, lousy marketing.

Palm ran a series of ads introducing the Pre that have been universally panned, frequently eliciting adjectives including creepy, eerie and confusing. Great adjectives if you’re Rob Zombie, introducing Halloween 2. Not so great descriptions for a cutting edge smartphone trying to gain traction in a market dominated by Apple and RIM’s Blackberry.

Take a look for yourself at YouTube. Creepy, right? And nowhere in any of the ads does Palm provide a single reason why you need a Pre. What does it do? How is it better? How will it improve my personal/professional/sex life?

Come on, people, these are the fundamentals.

When Apple released the iPhone, their simple visuals set against a plain white backdrop focused all the viewer’s attention on the phone and its remarkable touchscreen. They showed precisely what you could do with the touch of a finger. They conveyed a Wow! factor that generated interest and desire bordering on lust. In contrast, the Pre ad suggests that if I have their phone, I may encounter nothing but green lights on my way to work. Really? That’s your pitch?

The truly disappointing factor is that the Pre is a remarkably innovative phone. It’s the only touchscreen device capable of genuine multi-taking. But Palm never tells me why I need to multitask. What can I do with a Pre that I can’t do with my iPhone or Blackberry? Besides making concentric circles of orange-clad Asian men dance in unison?

Don’t make the same mistake Palm made. Understand what makes your product/service essential and then clearly communicate your distinct value. Sure it’s fundamental, but even the big guys forget to focus on the blocking and tackling sometimes. Like Palm.

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This past week saw the public release of three of the silliest attempts by professional sporting associations to manage and control the use of social media channels. The NFL, the SEC (who count as professional in my book, since three of their teams could beat last year’s Detroit Lions) and the USTA all published social media guidelines intended to control the dissemination of information by players, coaches, media representatives and even fans.

The SEC was first out of the gate with their near universal prohibition on any and all social media communications during a game. Yep, their first draft even prohibited college gameday fans from tweeting about or, heaven forbid, sending a photo of, their team’s gridiron splendor. To their credit, the SEC revised their published guidelines and acceded to the desires of rabid and frequently gun-toting fans to celebrate through concise tweets the magnificence of their student-athletes and their impressive SAT scores 40 yard dash times. As long as there are no commercial interests attached to their 140 character broadcasts.

The NFL, in all their controlling authority, were next to publish a set of draconian restrictions on social media participation. This time, the league’s prohibitions were directed at players (and anyone representing them), coaches and officials from engaging on any social media channel from 90 minutes before gametime until after all media interviews after the game’s completion. The media were also put on warning about sending any tweets or other messages that could compete with the broadcast of the game. So, a fan sitting a row below the press booth can tweet the score, but the reporter sitting six feet above him cannot. Makes sense to me.

The USTA released the silliest and least enforceable social media policy, warning against the dissemination of “certain sensitive information” that could be considered “inside information” about a match. Even Andy Roddick commented on the lameness of the USTA’s efforts. Specifically, the USTA is concerned about:

“information about the likely participation or likely performance of a player in an event or concerning the weather, court conditions, status, outcome or any other aspect of an event which is known by a Covered Person and is not information in the public domain.”

But, once someone tweets about court conditions or weather, doesn’t it immediately become public domain? Are there really any super-sensitive tennis secrets that, if revealed, would alter the fundamental nature of the sport itself?

I can understand the league prohibitions on tweeting during games. Players, coaches and officials should be focused on the game itself, not on satisfying their Twitter followers or Facebook Fans with status updates. But prohibitions on media members and even fans is both ridiculous – do they really believe we won’t tune in to watch the game if we can get a Twitter update instead – and utterly unenforceable.

Want some reasonable social media guidelines?:

1. explore ways to engage online before, during and after the games. Post a scrolling Twitter feed on the scoreboard with a scrolling feed of all comments that include your team’s hashtag. I did this during the Final Four, and the Twitter feed was more fun than the game. There are some hilarious tweets flying through the ether that could be shared with the entire stadium.
2. toss up a twitter poll during the game to make the game more interactive. Twitter poll question: Will Tom Brady throw for more yards today than the entire Cleveland Brown offense generates? 63% say YES.
3. put a highlight YouTube video up on your Facebook Fanpage at halftime and again after the game. Tweet about the video so fans can click a link and watch in the stands on their iPhones and Blackberrys.
4. sponsor contests that spectators can enter via Twitter
5. publish online stats, again distributed realtime via Twitter and Facebook
6. accept the fact that you cannot control this social media phenomenon. You can continue to publish more and more specific prohibitions and narrowly defined exceptions in a vain effort to wrestle control of these assorted publicly directed channels, but you are tilting at online windmills. Embrace the brave new world of social media, and learn how to harness its power to fulfill your own goals. They shouldn’t be too different from your fans’.

Social media can be your friend. If you play nice.

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