Just as companies develop their business plan to define their markets, strategy to compete, and operational structure to succeed, it is also a great idea for companies large and small to develop mission and vision statements. Done right, they can provide alignment and direction across the enterprise and inspiration for all employees.

I will discus these benefits more in a moment, as well as share a few examples. First, however, let’s define what they are and how they are different.

A mission statement defines the fundamental purpose of your organization. It is not measurable, per say, but rather a statement defining your company’s reason for being. It’s best when kept brief, long-term oriented, and inspiring. For example, the Intel mission statement is to: “Delight our customers, employees, and shareholders by relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work and live.”

Where a mission statement defines a company’s purpose, the vision statement describes what the company wants to achieve in the future. It is your long-term dream, concentrating on the future, and outlining what the organization wants to be, or how it wants the world in which it operates to be.  The vision statement is more often a source of inspiration than the mission statement, and also can provide clear decision-making and behavior expectations.

For example, the first part of McDonalds vision statement reads: “McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience.” And Nike’s is “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the World.”

So why take the time to do create these statements? Well, as I mentioned up front, the first is alignment. Merely doing the work to get agreement on what a company’s mission and vision statements are can be a powerful exercise in getting everyone on the same page about the purpose of the organization and where it wants to be in the future. In addition, it can be a compass for company behavior. For example, with Southwest Airlines emphasis on customer service in their mission statement, they let all stakeholders know that the behavior they care most about is being friendly and service-oriented to their customers: “The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit”,

Similarly, in a post on Harvard Business Publishing’s blog and republished at BusinessWeek, The Leading Edge blogger Michael Watkins says of vision statements: “It crystallizes an emotional connection between employees and the business.”

In addition to providing alignment, creating your mission and vision statements can be inspiring to you, your employees, and your customers. For example, at Mr. Watkins points out, a unit of Johnson & Johnson that designs, manufactures and markets orthopedic implants, such as artificial hips and knees, has this as their statement of vision: “Restoring the Joy of Motion.” Wow – now that is powerful. Gives you goose bumps if you really think about the impact this company is having on the lives of others.

In another inspiring example, you see the mission statement of TREW Marketing community partner and educational leader, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) “…is to help educationally underserved students develop the knowledge, skills, and character needed to succeed in college and the competitive world beyond.” They clearly state their audience – underserved students – and their vision to prepare them for college and the competitive world. Straightforward and inspiring.

While not all companies and organizations may feel they need these statements, certainly companies who are innovating in engineering, science, and education, and truly changing the lives and lifestyles of so many, are missing an opportunity if they don’t.

Have we inspired you to create your mission and vision statements? Let us know how we can help you. As the TREW mission states,  “We create ideas to promote the innovation of our world’s technical and academic leaders” and we would love to serve you.

In Part I of this two-part post on social media (SM), I briefly covered the key features of Facebook and Twitter, and I gave some examples of their uses. Today, I want to provide another great example of a business use of TWitter, briefly review LinkedIn, and end with our recommendations and references of how businesses should and do use SM tools to achieve their goals. I also include other examples and a few really helpful articles.

A recent situation involving the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) provides a very real and effective use of Twitter. The CDC has been on high-alert since late April dealing with swine flu. In another post about swine flu, I talked about responding to the media during a crisis. Today, I want to focus on another aspect – the CDC’s very effective use of Twitter to communicate to the public. On May 5th, when I took the screen shot below, @CDCemergency, the CDC’s emergency response Twitter account, had ramped up to 51,139 followers. Two weeks later, they had 172,900.

Why? Simple – because, as in any other aspect of marketing and communications, content is king and timing is everything. The CDC focused on providing the facts to people, from FAQs to live press conferences, that dispel rumors and misinformation. For example, a post in mid-May simply states, “Update 5/18/09: 5123 total cases of novel H1N1 flu, 5 deaths, 48 states affected: http://bit.ly/9MRt3 #swineflu”. They provided regular updates so the information was timely – a must-do for any blog or social media site, and absolutely critical in a time of crisis. As proof, they tweeted about once a day leading up to the outbreak, but over the few weeks at the height of the swine flu outbreak, they had 127 tweets, equal to almost 5 a day.

This new channel provided the CDC with direct access to the public and helped ensure up-to-date facts were received quickly and easily. People want to help people and share important information…by leveraging Twitter, the CDC very effectively and successfully unlocked the power of the online network of others to help disseminate information factually and immediately. You can read more about their success in this recent Ad Age article (you have to register to read).

Now I’ll move on to LinkedIn, the third and final SM tool I’ll review here. LinkedIn is a free, business-oriented professional networking site. Emphasis on “professional” and “business-oriented”, which distinguishes it from Facebook and Twitter which are more mixed in focus. LinkedIn has a strong presence, with nearly 40 million users in 200 countries. It is, in essence, an online resume and contacts database whose best use is for connecting to others professionally. Similar to Facebook, you have to invite someone to “link” with you and they have to accept your link before you can see their full profile and begin interacting with them.

Your LinkedIn profile starts with your current job and title, lists past jobs you’ve held, your education, related websites and blogs, etc. You also have space to write a short summary of your work experience and areas of specialty and can ask others to “recommend” you, which is an online version of a short letter of recommendation. We recently found this nice blog post on five tips to taking full advantage of LinkedIn.

Like the other SM tools, LinkedIn is constantly adding new features. For instance, they recently added an Update feature identical to the “Share” feature in Facebook, where you can answer the question, “What are you working on now?” They also have LinkedIn “Groups” you can ask to join. When you are accepted, you can then post discussion topics that all others who are in that group can see and respond to. LinkedIn also has some nice applications you can take advantage of, such as a WordPress app that allows you to feed your blog into your page, as you see in this image of my LinkedIn page below. Similarly, you can use the Twitter app to feed in any tweets that include keywords into your LinkedIn page.

So now we’ve briefly covered what Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are. So now what? Should you start a Facebook Fan page for your company? Or a Twitter account? And what about LinkedIn? How do you decide which one(s) to use and how? Well, to start, we recommend you first go back to your business and marketing goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Let’s take the case of the United Way group I spoke to. Their challenge was trying to engage more of their members – getting more to come to events and starting an online conversation where they could grow the community dialog in between physical meetings. For other organizations, it may be trying to grow sales or increase web traffic.

Once you know your business goal(s), then you need to look at your marketing plan. What are your goals – awareness? leads? reducing costs? positioning in a new market space? If you have not first clearly articulated and agreed on your business goals and the related marketing goals, then you are not ready to embark on social media or any other type of media for that matter. Your money and your time will likely be wasted. However, if you have your business goals – to raise sales by XX% or to increase member engagement by YY% or to lower costs by ZZ% – and you have a solid marketing plan that outlines the goals you need to achieve to help support the business goals, then you are ready to think about what marketing channels – or media types – to use to best achieve those goals.

This may sound preachy, and OK, it is. But the fact is, we see many jump in to social media without a plan
or end goal. With the buzz around social media, they feel like they’re behind and they need to jump in, and figure out a strategy later. Bad idea!

Social media is an important new tool in the marketing toolbox. Just like paid media (aka, advertising)and earned media (aka, PR), now there is social media with its own new set of rules, best practices, and costs. To minimize risk and get up the learning curve, we recommend that you begin engaging in social media with one or all of  these three SM tools by listening first. Likely your company and/or industry and/or competitors are being mentioned online, so, an important place to start is to have a small team or one employee join in and begin listening and studying others. When we began our research on social media, we found out which companies and organizations were on the various sites, and we started watching them. We also followed the online conversations of our clients to better understand the online conversation about them, which was fascinating and enlightening.

If you are trying to build community, creating a Facebook fan page is probably a great place to start. And to maximize the tool, it’s best to have a diverse set of content including video, pictures, and links to your own or other sites for relevant information. Having regular updates to the fan page is key, so before you start, it will be important to create a 2-3 month editorial calendar of post ideas and content developers so you ensure a process is in place and the quality of content stays high. Here are some nice examples of brands using Facebook to meet a variety of goals.

If you are launching a time-based, lead-generating campaign or have a big news event, Twitter can be an effective tool. With the right call-to-action (free on-site visit by an engineer, limited-time product or service discount, etc), you can send out a tweet about it, and it will likely be “retweeted” (aka, forwarded) by others. As I mentioned in my part 1 post, Twitter can also be a great way to get feedback or do research. Southwest
Airlines used Twitter this way recently when they announced new service to Boston’s Logan airport. They tweeted ahead of the announcement asking their followers to submit questions online about the new service. Then, on the morning of the announcement, they did a live interview with a senior executive, where he answered followers’ questions.

They not only got great questions, they effectively used social media – Twitter and video and their corporate blog – as a medium to talk directly to their customers and the public.

Twitter also has some really nice third-party applications, such as Twtpoll, where you can create a simple poll, send a tweet with the question, and have your followers participate and retweet. It is a fast way to get great, anecdotal feedback about a particular topic.

The primary way for companies to take advantage of LinkedIn is for recruiting. By creating a company page on LinkedIn, you can then post job openings, job-related news, and research candidates and prospects. By creating a LinkedIn Group, you can also increase the visibility of your company as others join your group and you can efficiently communicate out news to the group with the discussion feature.

As with other areas of marketing, for social media, you’ll need to try some different approaches and over time, refine your SM strategy and implementation based on your goals. There are literally thousands of ways to take advantage of these and other SM tools, from YouTube channels to blogs. Mashable.com has a very helpful post on the 35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action, there is a Social media Case Studies Superlist including the social media awards list recognizing companies such as Whole Foods, Zappos.com, and Jet Blue. I liked this post, which lists alot of interesting and varied articles about businesses using Twitter.

The key to social media success is the same as with other tools in the marketing toolbox: know what your goals are, learn the rules of the game, and try different things until you find success. If you have other great examples of SM, we’d love to hear about them.

Yesterday, we had the unique opportunity of witnessing one of the great communicators of our time – the 44^th president of the United States, Barack Obama. No matter your political viewpoint, you can’t ignore the unprecedented millions who were personally inspired to get involved and ultimately succeeded in their mission to elect him president. President Obama’s followers truly trust him and they show it. From the 3,851,604 friends on his Facebook page to the record-breaking estimate of over 2 million attendees at his inauguration, it is clear President Obama is committed to communication – from traditional media to new media – and he has driven record-breaking results.

There are great lessons for all of us in business to take from President Obama and others leaders’ committed and innovative approaches to communication. Especially in these very uncertain times, business leaders have a unique and compelling opportunity to inspire employees and build trust, and as a result, lead their markets, strengthen their customer relationships, and beat their competition. Employees are at the heart of your company’s success – they are your most vocal and honest spokespeople, whether you ask them to be or not, and building trust and inspiring this community by empowering them to make the customer experience better than any other in the industry takes great commitment over a long period of time.

Herb Kelleher, co-founder and past president and CEO of Southwest Airlines said it best in an interview with Worth magazine in April 2001: “Employees come first, and if you treat them well, they treat customers well. That makes customers keep coming back, and that makes shareholders happy.” SWA’s performance shows how this commitment pays off, as Fortune magazine reporter Barney Gimbel said in March 2008, “Besides posting its 35th consecutive year of profitability, [Southwest Airlines] was the most punctual, lost the fewest bags, and had the least complaints compared with its peers.”

One of TREW Marketing’s most unique consultation offerings is executive and employee communications. We have led award-winning employee communications programs, and we know first-hand there’s not a silver bullet. We understand the best practices from years on the front lines and bring our collaborative, measured approach to customize programs for our clients, from new, innovative approaches employed by President Obama to the tried-and-true commitment of day-in and day-out global leadership communication.