Note: Kevin Kelly also has one of the best examples of lifestreaming I’ve ever seen. Check out his site: http://kk.org/ to see what I mean.

Don’t set unreasonable goals
This is worse than setting no goals at all. Stretching the team too far guarantees that Monday through Friday, everyone’s simply showing up to put in their time and go home. That attitude has eerie ways of showing up in online communication and people have a second sense for these things.

Don’t implement changes lightly. Or slowly
The only thing we know about change is that it will come. We don’t know how or when, but we do know it will happen (for example, blogs are now officially “old school”). Think hard before you adopt a (small or large) change. If you do decide to accept it,  go after it like your life depends on it because while you were thinking, someone else started going for it.

Don’t get greedy
The effect of a well executed idea has a way of multiplying in significance, but it’s also the same thing with mistakes. Dream all you want, but make sure your focus is on what can be achieved in the short term (along with the lessons you’re going to be learning constantly).

Don’t assume you can “catch up” later if you get off schedule
In the same vein, don’t expect you’ll stay ahead of schedule later because you’re ahead of schedule now. In fact, you’re probably better off without a schedule altogether. You’re dealing with people and they won’t always keep to your well-organized schedule, no matter how great your intentions are.

Don’t take shortcuts or relax standards
I’m going to assume you know all about this so there’s not much to add here.

This is the 3rd, and last, post on what it takes to have successful social media campaign (you can read the 1st one here and the 2nd one here).

(In a similar vein, don’t overdo the planning or it’ll end up hurting more than helping. Be like water.)

2. Empower campaign personnel
Who manages your communication channels? What tools do they need? Do they work in an environment that actually helps them work better? Thankfully, the tools needed to run social media campaigns are well priced (read: virtually free) and you don’t have to break the bank to get a top notch toolkit.

3. Minimize red tape
Bureaucracy slows things down, which is always ugly. Always. If you’re starting from the top, a successful social media campaigns will require contributions from a wide variety of people (design, writers, customer service, marketing, PR and a host of other little pieces. Please think carefully before you clog the channels of communication with unnecessary (and pesky) obstacles.

4. Establish baselines & manage changes to it
“Social media campaign” is just a fancy term that basically amounts to allowing people to communicate with others online. Because the keyword in that sentence is people, there are certain goals you cannot establish as requirements because people can (and will) make up their minds for themselves. Social media isn’t a magical pill that will change minds in 2 days, 6 months or even 5 years. Nothing in real life does (except maybe fear, but that’s another story).

5. Take periodic snapshots of the campaign’s progress. Replan if necessary
Things happen: a new tool comes out you can’t get into (just yet),  the “competition” comes up with a better feature, etc… In other words, real life happens and you’re better off learning from what did or didn’t work right now. Make sure you don’t go overboard on this one. Points #3 & #4 are your guiding principles on this one.

6. Re-estimate size, effort & schedules periodically
Yes, this is related to taking campaign snapshots (#5 above) and although they are similar on the surface, reestimating or replanning without first finding out why you need to do so waters down the effectiveness of your great re-organizational effort.

7. Foster Team Spirit
Content is king only when people enjoy it so pay attention to how happy the team creating the content is. Google provides world class food, 37signals give their employees credit cards and others use the time tested “Thank you” to keep the team spirit alive. Regardless of how you choose to do it, just make sure you are doing it.

This is the 2nd of 3 posts on the general framework of a social media campaign. Read the first one here and come back next week for the last post. Better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed and get posts automatically delivered to your RSS reader.

The list is based on three pieces of literature and I’d like to tell you a little bit about so we can establish some context:

The first is the article from Alternet, The Growth of Talking Points Memo: A Case Study in Independent Media, which has gone from teeny-weeny personal blog to independent media empire (which is what every well run blog really is). The article is an in depth case study of how technology & journalism can work well together. We can dabble about the semantics of “journalism” later.

The second is a list of Dos & Don’ts for building software productively from NASA’s Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL). I first came across the list in Steve McConnell’s Software Project Survival Guide, which has an excellent summary of the whole list. The next two posts were inspired by, and lean heavily on this list.

In short, the SEL list lays out the foundation for building sound software. And it works well: it increased the quality of their software 10 to 20 times at the same time it allowed SEL teams maintain comparable productivity levels.

Not only is software one half of the social media landscape, it is also the platform where online relationships are built on. It’s not too difficult to see how faulty software can affect the quality of the relationships (think Facebook vs. Myspace).

The third is Seth Godin’s best book yet, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. It’s hard to describe & communicate the potential of the Internet + people & the good ideas they keep coming up with. At it it’s most basic, this is what social media does and Godin puts it all into perspective in this book.

The main ideas in the book that have to do with the following posts are:

• Movements: the only way viable way to turn customers into fans is to start a movement. The fire of revolution dies, people get tired of causes, but movements are a head thing and it’s hard to throw those away. Just ask any Obama fan (better yet, ask a Bush fan and if you are that Bush fan, please let me know).
• Platforms: Movements need a platform, a place to call home. TPM, Google and Apple (to some extent) are places like that. These days, the Internet has the platform part covered so virtually anyone can start their own movement or ind one that fits into the context of their lives.

Admittedly, not much of it is new: the same people that are online are the same people you run into at the coffee shop or at home so the basic rules still apply. The Internet is just another context for these relationships.

Click on the numbers to read the 2nd & 3rd post in the series.

When the Internet became widely available a little over a decade ago, I doubt anyone had the slightest idea how revolutionary this thing would be. Obviously, that’s a different story now: in today’s world, it would be foolish to deny that this “series of tubes” (techno remix here) has had a significant effect on the way we think and live.

In fact, that last sentence is probably the understatement of the year. The Internet has so revolutionized the developed world that there are very few parts of our lives untouched by this force majeure.

The news reader no longer has to wait until morning to read the news, or wade through mind-numbing commercials to get the jist of the situation on CNN. Instead, the news is available to anyone who wants it, anytime and anywhere. All available in a dizzying number of customizable formats: email, text message, RSS reader, and the list goes on.  And not just read the news! They can share it with friends through email, recommend it to total strangers on StumbleUpon or reddit, and discuss it with a healthy vigor (Google even lets you make your case if you’re the subject of an article and there’s more on the topic in this NPR podcast).

Traditional media now has some very, very stiff competition. The behemoths are slowly catching on, lest the Internet leaves them in it’s dust. To be fair, there are exceptions to this. One of my favorites is the BBC, who have always provided excellent content for as long as I can remember, and continue to do so even today.

This radical shift is by no means limited to just the news: almost any topic you can think of will do. The accessibility of the the Internet now means music like Mongolian folk rock (video) is just as readily available as Paul Simon (an even better example might be Finnish band, the Leningrad Cowboy’s performance of Sweet Home Alabama, with the official Soviet Red Army Choir. I’m not kidding). It’s an open secret that the Internet is not so slowly eating up music labels profits (IMO, Janis Ians The Internet Debacle is still a classic on the topic).

The list goes on and on:

Wikipedia has made knowledge sexy again. In what other world can you carry a whole encyclopedia in your back pocket?

Traffic is getting more difficult to battle, and work sites are more expensive (and many other reasons), more people are beginning to working from home. Businesses are also finding that this is more productive (and cheaper), and so more are allowing their staff “telecommute“. Some have never even met their colleagues, even though they work together regularly.

Shopping too has become a lot easier (a slight understatement, I admit). From groceries to books, to shoes, and just about anything you can think of.

The Internet has also managed to destabilize the traditional balance of power of society by allowing everyone to participate. By bringing lots of small voices together, the little man is now making enough noise to make a difference. American politics (with Howard Dean, Ron Paul, and more successfully, Barack Obama) is a perfect example of this. Governments who have tried to control the volume can attest to the difficulty of doing this (Egypt had this experience a few years ago, and more recently is China’s experience with Tibet).

The Internet revolution is here to stay. Will you be a part of it, or would you rather be left behind?