Starting a Social Media Strategy

June 13, 2008 · Comments

blueprintsThis post begins a small series within the Social Media 100 series where we can start discussing the parts and premises of building a social media strategy. I’ll want your help with this. We can build this collaboratively, and I believe that the end results are that you’ll have some tools to build out your own social media strategies.

Consider this the warm up for the end piece, though I believe this piece has some value in helping you even begin to start your planning process. Tell me if you feel otherwise, and we can improve it together.

Begin with the End in Mind

Strategy isn’t the goal. It’s the path you plan to take to get there. So, let’s put some goals out, and then talk through how to build a strategy to reach them. Here are a few sample goals. Feel free to add some to the comments, if I don’t cover yours.

  • Increase customer base.
  • Generate leads.
  • Drive sales.
  • Build awareness.
  • Make money from your content.
  • Establish thought leadership.
  • Educate customers.
  • Customer-source part of your product development.
  • Reach new channels of customers.
  • Improve internal communication.

Did I miss any? Feel free to add some to the comments.

Questions Before the Strategy

Before we go too far down any one path, we should ask some questions:

  • Are your customers likely to be online? Note that lots of people are online these days, but it might be that you have a product or service that isn’t as frequently purchased via the web. What’s your story?
  • Are you ready to handle negativity? Platforms like blogs and videos allow for negative comments, and some company cultures aren’t ready to engage with those opinions.
  • How will you incorporate this into people’s daily jobs?
  • How will you measure results?
  • How long are you willing to give it a try?
  • What’s your willingness to experiment, take risks, and adjust your plans?

Just those answers might tell you a bit about your business, whether or not you decide to go forward with building a strategy using social media tools. Remember, it’s a lot easier to NOT listen to customers and just blast your messages out with no regard to how they’re received.

Strategy Starters

If we’re going to put a social media strategy into place, we need to align the path we’re going to take, and develop it with an understanding of how to reach our goals. Where are we going? How are we going to get there? Let’s get there. How do we know we’ve arrived? Simple, eh? Let’s start in on the “how.”

  • Listening: implement at least a rudimentary listening platform. We’ll cover this in a later post.
  • Communications: build a starting place to hold your conversations. And by this, I mean a blogging platform.
  • Methods: determine the mix of content you intend to create, and build workflow around it.
  • Community: most social media strategies have to address community and how you will embrace the people you seek to gather around your business.
  • Neighbors: develop a plan to reach out to others in your community, comment, and share.
  • Outposts: develop social network outposts where you can communicate with other communities, and also share the way back to your own platform.
  • Marketplace: if your strategy involves making money, build a marketplace external to your community. Keep these separate.
  • Attention: learn how to build awareness and encourage relationships with the media you’re making.

Are these all the basic regions of strategy that you might want to see covered? Am I missing any? Let’s talk about that in the comments.

What Comes Next

Once we discuss this a bit, I’ll build the next post in the series: Social Media Strategy for Businesses. I’ll build it with your input.

What do you think? What else should we work into the larger piece to make it more useful to your needs?

The Social Media 100 is a series of posts pertaining to the use of social media and social networks to build business. To make sure you receive each one, subscribe for free to my blog. Also, check out the completely different content that I produce in my free newsletter. Each is a separate piece of a larger informational product. And as always, thanks for your attention.

Photo credit, Todd Ehlers

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  • Incredibly useful post. Thanks
  • Easy to follow tips. Very sound strategy. Best of all it was fun reading! Nice post!
  • Chris

    Perfect timing as ever!

    As per you early point 'Begin with the end in mind' but get some clarity around it. If for example the business issue you are trying to address (one we are working on right now) what are current sales levels, from what kind of lines, and how much? We are at the stage where this is being documented (not a big job as they already have it being a retailer).

    The end results we will measure will be something like:

    £'s per store
    £'s online
    £'s from new services identified via collaboration
    £'s from supplier advertising on social network
    Improvement in better product launches and reduced POS waste
    Reduction in printed documents; more held electronically
    £'s saved from lower staff attrition due to better internal communication

    There may be more that come out of the project and not all will be measurable or fully attributable to any one thing but this is where we are starting; looking back from 3 years hence to define how the business will look in 3 years compared to today.

    Hope this helps.

    Peter
  • Exactly what I have been looking for.
  • Great primer on strategy development. A couple things that I would add:

    - For Goals: 1) Improve customer satisfaction.
    2) Reduce customer service costs.

    - Make sure that your goals are measurable.
    - Based on those metrics, establish some Key performance indicators (KPI)that can be easily tracked to gauge progress.

    There are some great free tools out there that can help in these efforts like the content and social technographics calculator on the Forrester Groundswell blog.
  • Another benefit to adding a social media strategy is that it could actually save your business during a crisis. Bad news spreads fast, even when it's not true, and old-fashioned crisis communications strategies that rely on press releases and even scheduled press conferences are simply much too slow in addressing negative events in a 24-7 news cycle.

    With an online community in place, those who care most about you and your brand have a place to receive your message directly and in real time without the usual worries regarding how the media will ultimately spin your story.

    Thanks for such a great and useful post!
  • Hey Chris - can't say this enough, particularly to the small business owners I encounter. This kind of questioning puts the confusion about which tool (blog or Facebook, Twitter or FriendFeed) in the right place. I recently wrote a post on this comparing the Hierarchy of Social Marketing to Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Need - I think strategy before tactics should be tattooed on every marketer's forehead.
  • Chris - a small example of this occurred this week with a company called Toluu. Toluu founder Caleb Elston is active with bloggers, on Twitter and on FriendFeed. When it came time to release new features this week, he was able to tap his established connections in social media to get great exposure for them. The result? He had a record week in terms of new members. Full story here: http://tinyurl.com/6o8v87
  • Excellent post Chris,

    Another goal: Gather market intelligence to support offline data- validation is always good

    Most clients think they know their competition in their market. Sometimes you may uncover surprises. The earlier the better.
  • Lori Siegel
    Chris - thanks for yet another useful post. I will most certainly be sharing this with my colleagues. Some of my clients are starting to really understand how soc media can benefit them and we're at the beginning phase of moving forward. This post couldn't have come at a better time for me!
  • Some really great advice, folks. I like to hear that we're all on the same rough track. Thanks for giving me some ideas to hone it all with. I hadn't thought much about the advertising mindset, but should give that another look.

    Thank you.
  • Wow. What a great post! I am forwarding this to our customer community project lead.
  • Chris, Really Great Post, Thank You
    I would encourage companies starting the trek toward Social Media and the transformation required, to abolish the fear associated with transparency, and the paradigm shift that occurs once you embrace it. The greatest customer connection opportunity emerges when things go wrong and should be viewed as an opportunity to really connect with your customer.
  • It's a great post. Every business should read this before they begin the journey.

    In your list of goals you mention "make money from your content". And Peter's comment builds on that with his emphasis on revenues generated and costs minimzed (loved his point about employee churn!).

    It should be reiterated. For business unit decision-makers, it really does boil down to the bottomline. Will [x] enhance it? Really? Then show me how.

    All the current metrics about social media's reach within the community are vital, critical, to measuring its power. And more businesses will embrace it, embrace it sooner, when the next iteration of metrics about driving costs down or revenues up, become more commonplace in the discussion.

    And that means more revenues for social media consultants, sooner.

    This may come across crass. But at the end of the day, it's how it's measured.

    Again, great post. I look forward to the series.
  • @Zane - thanks very much. I'm really grateful for your additional thoughts. Funny. I threw that "make money" one in at the last minute. It *used* to be the main goal for a lot of folks. Now? We see things differently.

    Thanks to everyone. Great work all around.
  • Chris, it would be great if you could talk more about measuring results from SM efforts.
  • Annabel
    @Eric I totally agree about transparency. I'm lucky that 60 per cent of my social media 'business life' is with small music clients who are not scared of transparency; and such reap the benefits. The other 40 per cent I work with are more traditional (tech) clients and they often have a massive problem with transparency.

    It makes me want to tear my hair out.

    They think they can't monitor it and they will be open to abuse. They also think it's a time vampire. They are correct on this point but if they learn to trust more employees to do it they benefit.

    If you can be a company that can respond to a negative comment quickly then your customers and future customers will love you.

    Great post Chris. Looking forward to hearing more and I hope I can collaborate something of use to the project.
  • Great post & great timing - I was just thinking of emailing you or searching your blog archive to see if you had any tips/pointers/rules for how to use Twitter vs. Facebook vs. LinkedIN as I'm getting my feet wet w/ social media and considering a customer oriented Architecture blog. of specific concern to me right now is the idea of accepting LinkedIN connection requests from headhunters, etc. that I'll likely never meet, interact with, or have any value to besides increasing their connectoins, or being followed by twitterers that never post but follow thousands of people. Both make me uncomfortable for some reason (LinkedIn particularly concerns me for some reason, because beyond the access it gives to me, which I willingly accept, it also gives some level of access to those who trust me enough to accept my connection requests!! & that's a trust that i don't want to violate).

    I look forward to following your future postings on this subject and reading any archived posts I can find, then working through your recommendations to refine/focus our goal and develop & apply our strategy, so that we have a basis for decision making on such issues.
  • Annabel
    @Joel H

    In answer to your post a couple of tips I would share.

    1. Don't be scared. Just remember never post anything on a SN site you wouldn't want the whole world to know.

    2.Don't post anything too personal that will make it easy for hackers to criminals.

    3. As Chris says have a clear goal about what you want achieve from your social networking. This will help you decide who to accept. While I don't mind accepting people who are trying to help grown their business in a participatory way, I deny anyone who is obviously just going to spam me.

    4. Don't forget you can always delete people if they become a pest to the rest of your group. However you can usually tell before you accept them they will be an issue.

    5. Don't be afraid to ask your 'true' evangelist friends to help spread your word. If people truly like what you do they will be flattered to asked in return for you doing the same. However don't lie and pretend to be someone you are not in order to grow a group. It won't work and you'll alienate the community you're trying to endear.

    6.Never use SN to hard sell. It 97 per cent of cases it doesn't work. Just become part of the conversation.
  • @Annabel:

    Thanks so much for your comments - very helpful. I look forward to reading more of your comments in the future.
  • Lisa Groomes
    I'm wondering if anybody else here has thought about *enterprise* social media, as opposed to the commercial version. I'm in the tech dept of a smallish company where the "customers" are our business-side co-workers. This makes them a sort of captive audience, if not always an enthusiastic user base for "new and improved" ways to do their work.

    We currently use -- extensively -- a chat system, but aside from email, that's the only even remotely social tool we have for all our users. The technology team (we're almost half of the company) has a very active wiki, the success of which has led management to agree to the expansion of social media tools throughout the firm.

    My team is in the process of developing the reqs for an enterprise-wide social media platform. Here are some of our general requirements:
    * Regulatory constraints related to the nature of our business
    * HR-related constraints
    * Record-keeping reqs
    * Specific management reqs

    On the technical side, we require a certain amount of interoperability with existing systems, including:
    * MS Exchange
    * SharePoint
    * Jabber
    * Enterprise databases
    * Proprietary software of various kinds

    It's not all constraints and regulations, however: for instance, the problem of pest users hadn't even occurred to me until I read Annabel's comment above on deleting them from the system -- that just doesn't seem to come up so often in an environment where everything is logged by your real name and your job is in the balance!

    Has anybody else here started implementing *internal* social networking in similar circumstances?

    I second everybody else in looking forward to further installments of this series, Chris!
  • Hi Lisa- I just got back from Enterprise 2.0, where that's pretty much the bread and butter of the conference. There are lots of people passionate about the enterprise social media space, including yours truly. Check out CommunityServer.com to see a neat SharePoint overlay created by Telligent.
  • Chris, interesting post, thanks, but the problem here in Europe (I run a web agency in Switzerland) is, that people/customers don't even know about social media and blogging is considered to be for freaks anyway (generally speaking). So what I wonder is, how to get the awareness of possible clients. If you could include that in your next post as well, that'd help.

    @Annabel
    Your last point says, that you shouldn't use SN to hard sell. Does it sell at all? I believe it only generates leads, intereset and the customer's confidence.

    Looking forward to reading the next post Chris.
  • Lisa Groomes
    Thanks for the suggestions, Chris. The Enterprise 2.0 conference site looks like it's packed with info!
  • Dynamite post. Begin with the end in mind is perfect, because it determines what tools you will need. BTW, not everyone "needs" a blog. Nor does everyone have to be on Twitter.
  • mark brodie
    A thought relative to Phillip Sauber's experience with European clients being somewhat resistant to blogging. Depending on the client, we will use a secured blog to keep the client and the assigned account manager and developer up to date on a web campaign. We found that it cuts down on redundant emails and phone calls, give the concerned parties a means to get up to date quickly as well as giving the client a taste of the positive attributes of blogging.
  • Thanks Mark, that might be a way to get them up to speed. We've been using Sharepoint for such communication and as the systems offers a blogging module too, we could try that next time.
  • OK, a little slow on the uptake here - but how about listening to develop a deep understanding of your brand/product through the eyes (voices) of your consumers? How about comparing how they think/feel about your brand vs. your competitors?

    TO'B
  • Great post, thank you :)
  • Hi Chris,

    Good post,

    I'd like to add as goal:
    *Increase retention and thus hopefully -> Increase Share of Wallet
  • good post
  • Great post on getting started with Social Media strategy. But one has to make sure that whatever they do is scrutinized by the social community. Different people have different views on every topic. So doing anything on the web under the name of social media might land you in trouble. Look here - http://vizedu.com/2009/02/social-media-goes-to-...
  • Barbara Young
    Thanks for outlining those thoughts, Chris. I 'll be referring back to this, and hope to a better participant as the week progresses!
  • Ian
    Along the lines of reaching new channels of customers, I would also think that watching for new trends in your industry can be accomplished via many of the social tools used to mine conversations
  • Really good quality thoughts and ideas here.

    In working with offline businesses, getting them to recognize these new
    opportunities is like speaking Chinese (to people who don't speak it).

    You've done a fine job of clarifying many of the absolute KEY points.

    It's a different world and anyone who intends to thrive in their business
    (not just survive) MUST learn some things and then put them into use.

    Thanks for the GREAT work.
  • zaidaflores
    I think it's great... this is the best that you can incorporate for anyone, whether a small business to voice yourself out in the local Market or your a big shot to expand your branding process. I myself am a stay at home mom who works also a home based business and I've see the great results on social media. It's necessary now a days if you want to be considered a pro! BTW for those who are interested on what I do...

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  • seowithfries
    I believe an important point to add would be the branding of your profiles across various networks in your social media strategy.

    With so many services one can incorporate today, it's easy to forget how important branding is in digital communications.

    Content, design, and even conversation starters should be driving users to relate the brand and message.

    Thank You for post.
  • uditshukla
    Its very very useful article about social media "Strategy Making" thanks a lot.
  • Very Nice! And the specialty is the simplicity of the article.
  • I don't think you missed any Chris, but recently I've liked to some up the importance of the set up stage of any social media campaign with the simple sentence WHY before HOW. Clear goals are essential to develop a successful strategy, you need to know why you're using social media before you figure out how to best use it
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