The 5HITS

With Twitter going mainstream and the number of social media experts, strategists and consultants on the scene, I thought it was high time to interject with some thoughts, seen as everyone else is. If you read my previous post “Brands on the rise” this ties in closely. Getting your brand socialised will become increasingly important in the future, for Internet Marketing.

So what should you consider for your business from a social media strategy, other than the need to show a return and the potential difficulty in measuring a return, be it financial or otherwise?

Also, while many agencies use social media as another channel for creative ideas to generate brand awareness or sales, this is not about campaigns using social media as a channel. This is about companies engaging with social media in a well thought out strategy. Setting up processes with the objective of increasing brand awareness and sales through ongoing relevant and value adding interaction with customers and potential customers. If you do have a campaign, you would these social media processes to deliver on the campaign and own them, not let your agencies own them.

Key activities to include in your social media strategy include:

1. Social media policies
2. Social media audit
3. Social media strategy
4. Social media operationalisation and ongoing monitoring

1. Social Media Policies

Have you got any guidelines, advice, communication for staff as to how they may or may not interact with online media while on company time, through the company network or as an ambassador of your brand. If you have people in your workforce under 55 years old, in fact if you have people in your workforce, trust me they are engaged somewhere, be it LinkedIN, FaceBook, FlickR or Twitter.

Do you have formal advice for them on:

• Whether they can represent the brand, e.g. commenting on an industry issue n a blog as a member of your company
• Whether they can mention customers, e.g Twittering about a new pitch or a customer experience
• What internal information can be discussed, e.g. Blogging about staff cuts
• Privacy e.g. including pictures from the office party of drunken colleagues in fancy dress in their public FlickR account
• Competitive information, e.g. changing their status on Facebook to indicate they are travelling overseas on specific business

The trouble with common sense is that it is not always that common. People do not always see when they are sharing their details, the fact that other than being supposedly interesting, they could be affecting their employers brand, competitive positioning or liability levels.

Having common sense policies around the use of social media as it relates to your brand is critical. Don’t wait until there is an issue to resolve this. Also think about partners, suppliers and business alliances and how these should be governed from a social media perspective.

2. Social Media Audit

Have you actually spent some time looking at who is talking about you and where. Actually spent some time looking at who owns these properties. Chances are, if you are in a large company, there will be numerous, many will be small “home-made” websites and some of those behind these online properties will actually work for you.

To do your audit, gather as much data as possible and go through the following:

• List domains, names, emails and other relevant data of anything and anyone online where there is a point of focus around your industry or your brand. Also note which are positive, neutral and negative.
• Where you have names, check to your payroll for matches. Where there are no names, fill in the blocks, there is alwasy a trail
• Build a schedule of Internet properties categorised as above and map them to each other, seeing who feeds who and where. Build a mud map on your online presence not including your own domains

Once complete develop an action plan, from sponsorships, to monitoring, public relations to legal. Put these actions into a plan. Remember, thing take time, so these should feed into your overall strategy

3. Social Marketing Strategy and Objectives

You haven’t set objectives yet, or a strategy. The reason being, to date you have managed your risk and understood your position in the online space, which is not controlled by you. With this knowledge you can now build your online strategy and objectives:

Objectives:

• Build positive online brand mentions around key target markets or demographics
• Increase traffic to controlled online properties (Conversion will be measured from there)
• Build a line of defence to protect your brand in the search engines, especially around key queries which generate sales

Strategy:

• Platforms will come and go, your strategy should not be platform dependent
• Be clear on areas of focus and the intended results. Internal resources will drive the amount of effort. Trying to be everywhere all the time will no doubt spread you thin
• Use the power of the people. Think about how your employees and customers can get involved and be online ambassadors in innovative ways
• Get senior management on board
• Set a baseline and clear KPI’s (Key performance indicators)

4. Operationalisation

How you implement will be dependent on your budget, your strategy and your business. No one size will fit all. Allocating sufficient budget and resources is important to ensure the final agreed strategy is delivered on. Until you operationalise, all you really have are some ideas and a plan.

As social media is a constantly moving feast, make sure the strategy document and measures are reviewed regularly and that there is a watching brief on new platforms as they emerge.

The responsibility of Marketing and Senior Management

As with search engine marketing, you need to understand social media marketing. Do not leave this to your agency, remember they will use social media as a channel for campaigns in most cases (I generalise here), but like your website you need to have a plan to manage your extended family of online presences.

As Bruce Clay in Australia, our business is search engine optimisation (SEO) and as many are realising, SEO is not a media buy, it is an engagement or project which cannot be ignored as a valid channel to market, and which involves many parts of the organisation working together. As we have more and more discussions and engagements on social media, optimisation is still core, how these properties are linked together and the process engaged to manage them.

Also, this is a new area, everyone is an expert. Make sure you understand clearly and in detail exactly what your strategist and consultant will do and deliver with respect to social media marketing and/ or networking, and make sure they know something about SEO.