Time and trust shouldn't be holding back business bloggers - get motivated and plan your New Year’s Social Media resolutions.I don’t know if it was the nagging sense of guilt or reading about the Computing IT blog awards that finally made me sit down and get writing this. I’ve been blogging away with and for clients, yet managed to neglect writing anything myself for an age. The problem with blogging or social networking for business rather than to pursue a personal passion or social life is that there never seems to be a time when it is the top business priority.  Blogging and social media activities undoubtedly have a real and significant role to play for today’s businesses. It doesn’t matter whether it is a large brand which wants to show that it is made up of real people with real ideas, attitudes and opinions or a small company showing that it has the smarts and capabilities to equal its larger competitors. In both cases blogging and other aspects of online social engagement are great ways to communicate with the wider world, and increasingly essential for any business. The IT industry is way ahead of the rest of us of course, but it has become a platform for almost all sectors to some degree. The trouble is often that matters online, unless in the hands of ‘the marketing department’ still seem to many business people to be slightly trivial and certainly far lower priority than ‘real’ work.  The marketing folks can talk until they are blue in the face about dialogue being key to customer relationships, the role that blogging and content marketing have in driving high value traffic and the power of integrated marketing thinking – it never seems to get through. For me, it shows up as the social media ideas always being dropped off the PR plan in favour of the traditional media by the client. For others it is in the jokes from the senior manager about messing around on Facebook all day, unsubtle reminders that a plan or other submission is rather more important than checking for chatter and an unwillingness to ‘let’ staff blog or tweet. Last, the good old trust issues still raise their heads for many, as managers fear what staff might say that is off-message, a bit over-revealing or downright dangerous… Believers unite - we all need to keep making the arguments and helping the business social media ostriches we work with extract their heads from the sands of traditional marketing and business models. However, if I’m anything to go by we also need to get a lot more consistency into our own blogging and social engagement activities before we win some of them over.  The reality is that many of us often fall into the very same trap ourselves in allowing ‘real work’ to trump what is actually vital communications activity that is increasingly underpinning our businesses. For those lucky enough to have won the battle and got time, resource and even money behind their online and social media work, congratulations – but for most of us we still need to lead by example or carve out precious time to fulfil blogging obligations. It’s certainly time to start to formalise the best practices for the social side of business communications, and that means scheduling, planning and integrating content, and measuring to prove our business case.  Lastly, every business owner/manager I know probably needs to trust their teams a little bit more, let them get going and get social media policies in place if they still feel a little uncomfortable. So, as the New Year rolls around, perhaps it’s time for a few social media resolutions!  Here are my own to get you started:

• Diarise time to sit down and create a list of business themes and content ideas to keep me going when inspiration fails to strike.
• Share the load but help it along – not just ask the team to get blogging but make sure they have time to do so (for some this will also mean ensuring they know how to do so, but thankfully we’re long past that bit).
• Have a good chat with the team about social media, the role it needs to play in our own business, what’s OK and encouraged versus not OK and unacceptable (if we were a bit bigger we would formalise this into a policy, but for small businesses trust is the best method).
• Plan a schedule. This doesn’t need to be regimented, but it would be a great idea to think back once a week at what’s been posted or tweeted which had any business relevance, and what next week’s activity might consist of.
• Measure it. Yes, I know, I tell my clients to do this all the time but am v v bad at doing for myself, despite having all the tools in place to do so.