Some of my recent posts offered seemingly contradictory advice regarding getting started with social media at the organization level.
My post Is ROI Overrated? questioned the need to prove ROI and advised against getting caught up in planning paralysis. In Don’t Become Social Media Roadkill in Your Organization, I said that one needs to take a methodical approach and set the right expectations.
I truly believe that it is possible to accomplish both goals; to proceed decisively and without lots of fanfare yet do so in a rational way that boosts the odds of success.
Defining Success
First, what does it mean to be successful in term of implementing a social media program?
At the most basic level I suggest that worthy goals are to help spread the good word about an organization’s products, services, and to defend the brand and build corporate image. I know these are the kind of things that many of my clients are looking for.
They are all very fuzzy concepts. PR has struggled for years with measurement and social media adds a few new wrinkles.
Suffice it to say, there are ways to do this. I suggest not getting too caught up with measurement and ROI tracking in the early stages. You can help set expectations while taking some of the pressure off to prove results by starting out on a small scale that does not threaten to “break the bank.”
Defining Scope
Social media is not just another IT project or corporate initiative that needs to be managed and controlled with a vice-like grip. It involves new ways and styles of communicating. Success, to an extent, means letting go.
This means letting your employees know that is OK to blog and Tweet (my wife works for a large company that runs tight control over all PCs, prohibiting use of Facebook and other social networking applications – I think this is incredibly shortsighted).
It means equipping them with tools and education and letting them know what the company is doing in the social media realm. It means setting and informing about policies but not making these too restrictive or onerous.
Where to Start
There is a myth hat social media is free. While it is true that you won’t need to make major investment on par with the cost of significant ad buys or technology acquisition, there is a cost in terms of time, whether incurred by internal staff or in working with external agencies/consultants.
Here are some quick tips.
Look for low cost, high return areas, such as:
- Brand and reputation monitoring
- Customer service
Using social media to be a better listener is a no-brainer, and there are a range of free tools (some covered in an earlier post) that can keep you up-to-date in near-real-time about topics that are relevant to your brand, customer service and PR efforts.
The next level of commitment involves becoming active in using social media tools to engage. This means getting involved with online conversations and responding to relevant Twitter streams, blog posts, online articles, chatter found in social networks, etc. Doing this can either be an overwhelming or trivial task depending the amount of buzz in your space. We work with clients to determine the types of forums, mentions and situations that should merit a response – the conversations that count – and an agile process for engaging.
Influencing the Conversation and Setting the Pace
The next level is to develop a process and platform for marshaling your content and intellectual capital (meaning experts) and using social media to increase your digital footprint, educate and in general communicate with customers, potential customers and other influencers.
The same general approaches can be used to drive a content marketing effort that could augment demand generation and result in very real payback (as much as I had admonished to put ROI aside in the early stages, it is not a four letter word and does not hurt of course).
This can become involved and tends to take the most time. But tools such as blogging and Twitter are very well understood and in general not difficult to put to work.
If you are part of a large company that has many products and divisions, it could help to choose one area as a starting point. Do not think about your organizational or product management grid – think of the audiences you are trying to communicate with and topical areas that they should find compelling. Launching one or more blogs that focus on these areas would be a good way to get started. Add Twitter into the mix (see my post Blogging and Twitter: A Powerful Combination) and you will be off to the proverbial races.
Then, you can go on to build from early successes.
