10 steps: start a social media strategy

All strategies I've seen sofar seem to be wrong.
No, I am serious. 97% of social media strategies are based on doing, rather than being.
And since social media are about people and communication, every brand ought to know that every strategy should start with the question 'why?'.

Exactely, just like Simon Sinek explained very convincingly.

1. Analyze the core of your brand
2. Analyze your internal communication value
3. Analyze your audience
4. Set rules of engagement
5. Set your social graph
6. Divide pesonal vs. product
7. Learn tools
8. Design a hub
9. Set goals
10.Go offline

Social media and organic communication are beyond doubt increasingly important. But as the proliferation of social media platforms grow, participating can turn into little more than a giant time suck without some sort of structure behind it.
With that in mind, I have put together a 10 step plan for kickstarting your company’s social media participation.

Before you do anything else, examine the reasons why you want to publish a blog or take part in social media. What is the purpose for the blog? How does the blog’s purpose relate to your business purpose?
What type of program is this? Awareness, Sales, or Loyalty? Pick one.

Then, start with a profound approach taking the next steps:

1. Analyze the core of your brand: why is in the market and what are the essentials of the brand?

What’s your brand's core message? This relates to the topic of social media and the niche you are focused on. What do you want your audience to learn or experience? I recommend creating 'cornerstone content'. This is a series of posts that articulates the brand's core message and provides new readers with an introduction and overview of what they can expect to learn.

What’s the soul of your brand? And what can be derived from that in terme of needs, wishes and dreams? What’s the one thing that defines you and it’s not features and benefits. Volvo = Safety. Apple = Innovation. Disney = Magic. What’s on the other side of your sign?

2. Analyze your internal communication value. Are there enough resources to start creating content?

Social media platforms help facilitate conversations between individuals, not companies. Once you have a sense of what people are talking about, it’s time to identify the appropriate people inside your organization to participate.

People want to have conversations with company representatives who are experts in their area, who are passionate about their work and who are empowered to act on the feedback they receive from the community. If you want to focus on the marketing vertical, then look to your marketing team. The same is true if you want to participate in social media platforms devoted to product development, engineering or package design. Part of this process should be to provide the proper training for these employees on social media participation.

3. Analyze your audience. Where are they online? And who is your ideal reader?

Who is your ideal reader? The ideal often similar to the ideal client, but not necessarily so. It might also be a critic or a group of critics. It’s important to know your audience so you can meet their needs and address their concerns, challenges and what they’re looking for to improve their lives.

Identify existing communities. Where are discussions taking place now? For consumer products, they may take place on Amazon or Facebook, while business topics may originate on LinkedIn or internal forums. But it’s also likely that most discussions will span multiple social (and traditional) channels and involve both user-generated and enterprise content. Your social business strategy will need to address all of these!

Use the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder to understand how your target audience (as defined by gender, age, and geography) uses social media. If your audience skews older, you may not want to engage in a lot of 'make a video' contests, since that segment indexes low on the 'creator' scale.

The soft factor

How do you want your readers to feel when they read your blog? This may seem like a weird question, yet it will help you tap into the emotions of your audience. Do you want your reader to be inspired, motivated, and moved to action? Again, tapping into this will help you focus your content on serving your reader.

4. Set rules of engagement

Make sure your company has a social media policy in place that offers guidelines to your employees on the appropriate way to engage in online conversations. Microsoft’s Channel 9 Doctrine is a good place to start.

How much time do you have to devote to your social media strategy? This is getting to the heart of blogging. If you can’t commit to writing and creating a lot of valuable content, then you’re doing yourself and your readers a disservice. Be honest. The most effective and successful blogs are those with fresh, new content posted at least two to three times per week. Is that reasonable for you to manage? Will you have a team of bloggers? Remember, there are many, many ways to create content.

Outline employee policies. Do you have a corporate social media handbook, with policies, style guides and guidance for employees looking to participate (on behalf of the company) in public forums and social sites? And as you roll out new social business tools, beyond creating awareness how will you encourage new behaviors and even innovative uses for these social tools?

5. Set your social graph. This helps to flowchart web properties so I can see the big picture.

Create a social business dashboard. What metrics will you use to show the ROI for your programs? In the customer service arena, reduced costs from avoided calls or email and higher customer satisfaction are two proven measures to start with. For enterprise use of Web 2.0 in other areas, improved information sharing and lower communication costs are additional benefits that could be measured and tracked.

6. Devide personal vs. product. Make your decisions about what you want to share and what not to share.

A crucial divide. Basically this comes down to understanding the difference between PR and marketing.
Many marketeer go wrong at this point. The either imagine openness is a funadamental principle that works for both people and products or they (worse) imagine PR is a different ballgame than product marketing and shut up the voice of the company in critical times.
In all honesty; there is no golden rule. If there is one, it is to be very aware of the major differences that people and products have if it comes down to sharing.
be very selective in defining topicsm and don't overwhelm your audience with general information. Moreover, make sure every blogpostings that goes live contains news or entertainment.

7. Learn tools. Knowing each individual tool to work and when to use it is crucial.

This is the fun part! Start leaving comments on blogs, uploading images to Flickr, building a community on Twitter or FriendFeed or whatever else that strategy entails that helps further the discussion and illustrates your company’s commitment to developing these online relationships. It might also be useful for employees to create a social media editorial calendar so that it’s easier to structure time to participate. You never know what might happen, as this example from Blendtec illustrates.

8. Design a hub. It’s best to have one website to serve as the central place. All profiles syndicated.

When thinking of online media stop thinking 'websites'. We live in an era of a dynamic, semantic web. That implies all information is scattered and all crucial and valuable social content and feedback should me centered somewhere. That is called your hub. Your hub should be homebase of all your other social media efforts and should be easily monitored by one analysis account.
That is the only way to keep track properly of your learnings and function as a basis for all other online marketing afforts out there. The hub should be the heart of your social corporate identity.

9. Set a goal, choose your media, define team and select in- and internal partners.

What do you want your readers to do when they read your blog or content? This relates to the goals you set for your blog. If your blog is a lead generator, then you must have very clear steps for guiding your reader to subscribe to get blog updates and/or get your lead generating content.

Make sure you identify the right partners to achieve your goals, both internal and out there. Not every fan of internet knows his ways around and not every fan of a car brand knows why.
Define who will take the mission, build the team, and secure the budget, And make clear who will own each channel, like LinkedIn, Twitter, your blog, ..etc. as you scale up the program.

Before you begin, commit to worrying about social media tools last, not first. Why? Because tools will change. They always do. There was a time when Netscape seemed invincible. Yahoo, too. Myspace also. If you fall in love with tools, you’ll constantly be changing directions, with no real plan to guide your way.

10. Go offline. Go out looking and creating truly remarkable information, content and fun to share.

As stated in step one, social media is simply a group of tools that help facilitate conversations, but there’s really no replacement for face-to-face interaction. Use trade shows and other events as opportunities to build even stronger relationships with the members of your online community. This could be in the form of an exclusive session, an informal breakfast or even a group picture on the event floor.

Create an editorial calendar. It’s no secret that content rules on a blog, so it’s helpful to have a content plan going into the game. A key element of a good blog is having a list of 7-10 keyword-rich categories. Once you determine the categories (or subtopics) of your blog, you can plan your content calendar. If you plan on posting three times per week, then plot out post ideas for each of your categories. Make a list of 5 topics for each category. Then, fill in your calendar. Five topics times ten categories and you’ve got 50 blog posts in the pipeline.

Create a marketing plan. How will you promote and roll out your new (or existing) social capabilities? Will word-of-mouth marketing be sufficient? Also, a training plan, incentives and recognition programs for frequent posters to communities and moderators will be needed.


Evert Jan Koning