Ink Foundry - Social Media Marketing and Word of Mouth Marketing

If you are running a business today, whether you’ve made the conscious decision to participate in social media or not, guess what? Your brand is either participating in social media by design or by default. The conversation is happening; bloggers are using your products and posting about them; your staff are talking to their friends on their blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube and other social media channels about their day in the office. You can protect your brand with a few simple tools.

The four social media marketing documents every company must have today:

Internal Social Computing Guidelines
Social Media Training For Employees
FTC Guideline Compliance
Blogger/Brand Agreement

Ink Foundry can help guide your team through the questions and concerns about your brand and your employees’ participation in social media. Based on your brand’s internal culture and social media objectives, Ink Foundry will develop the core documents and internal communication matrix to navigate social media channels.

Social Computing Guidelines & Training
Even though employees may not be tasked with communicating in an official capacity on behalf of your brand, most employees on their off-duty time are writing in blogs, have a Facebook and/or MySpace page, comment on Yelp, and have Twitter accounts.

Providing social media guidelines that fit in with existing company policies that outline expectations is no longer an option but a necessity to keep both your brand and its employees from facing legal ramifications. Social media training for all employees can further enhance the effectiveness of the guidelines and help to answer any questions.

Social Media Training For The Employee is a 90 minute social media training seminar that covers what employees need to know about social media channels. It works in tandem with the social computing guidelines.

FTC Compliance and The Brand / Blogger Agreement
On December 1, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) instituted guidelines that require mandatory disclosure of any material compensation between a blogger and a brand. If your brand has ever comped a dinner at your restaurant for a digital influencer; provided a bottle of wine to a writer with a review site; gave a travel blogger a free room or flew them to your destination; both the brand and the blogger are responsible for disclosure. And according to the FTC, the brand bears the bulk of the responsibility.

Ink Foundry will help your brand develop its core set of principles which will guide relationships with bloggers and influencers. We will also help your internal team to create the necessary agreements for working with digital influencers that will satisfy the FTC requirements.

This is a simple, low cost way to help protect your brand and its social media marketing efforts.

For more information call Carin Galletta at 415.508.5796 or shoot us an email: carin [at] InkFoundry dot com, and we’ll get right back to you.