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Social Media Strategic Planning

Guest post by: Scott Van Wagner

Article Overview: This article proposes a process for strategic planning related to social media.

Social Media Strategic Planning

Social media is unique in terms of the versatility and opportunity it offers. It is easy to become captivated by the buzz surrounding social media and either leap into action unprepared, or suffer from social media paralysis. Either of these situations is problematic if you have not considered the development of a sound strategic plan to support your social media efforts.

In creating a social media strategic plan the first step is to recognize that it must exist within the overall marketing plan. This concept is highlighted in the following quote from Brenda Hurley SVP of Goodwill of Greater Washington DC; "I finally figured out my problem: I was trying too hard to develop a social networking strategy instead of incorporating social networking into my marketing strategy."

Understanding the connection between social media and marketing helps, however, there remains a challenge. How do we develop a social media strategic plan when overwhelmed by the scope and diversity that is social media? To assist with this dilemma I propose the following steps for developing your social media strategic plan.

Initiation

As I stress in my presentations "All good marketing starts with the customer." Social media is no different. Blindly jumping into content creation is a mistake. Start your social media strategic planning by listening. This concept is supported by Paul Chaney in his book "The Digital Handshake." Low cost Reputation Management tools such as Trackur or Brands Eye can provide information on the volume, sentiment, and location of online conversations about your company, competition, or industry. So take the time up front to listen and learn before you act.

Detection

This is the analysis of your listening efforts. Your listening efforts should have produced one of the following results:

1. There are limited or no conversations about you.
2. There are conversations about you.

Objectives

Based upon the results of detection analysis you are now ready to establish your objectives. If there was little or no conversation about you taking place, then your objective should be to create such a conversation.

Conversely if there were conversations taking place about you your objective should be about joining them. Joining the conversations allows for the opportunity to gather information and understanding for use later in creating your own conversations. Social media objectives should adhere to the S.M.A.R.T. model for establishing objectives whereby they are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time Bound.

Strategy

With your objectives established strategy must be considered based upon the "Four Pillars of Social Media" as detailed in "The Social Media Bible," these being:

• ¨ Communicating
• ¨ Collaborating
• ¨ Entertaining
• ¨ Educating

For example, let's assume that by listening you found that your objective needs to focus on creating conversations. Educating is one possible strategic direction to pursue to help create those conversations.

Tactics

Social media tactics involve selecting an appropriate social media capability, from a broad list of such capabilities, to support our new education based strategic direction. An example of such a tactical capability would publishing.

Tools

With publishing now set as our tactical approach we now need to choose the publishing tools we wish to use. There are a wide variety of publishing tools available including Blogs, Newsletters, Slide shows, etc. Your choice of tool should be guided by your knowledge of the tool and your customer, and the time you have available to manage the tool selected.

Business Applications

Social media can be highly engaging but you are still running a business so deciding upon which business function to address is important. While the list of potential business applications for social media is lengthy let's consider Branding for our ongoing example. In this case we may want to publish information concerning our products to support our brand and generate interest.

By following this step by step approach we now have social media strategic plan framed by the objective below:

"We will create conversations by publishing a Blog to educate our customers about our products with a target of an average of 200 views and 10 comments per day by the end of 2011."

In this example the actual choices made are unimportant, rather it is the process followed to get to the final result that matters. Embracing the process and making it your own is the key to developing your own successful social media plan.

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Article Tags: marketing strategy, social media, strategic planning
Referred by: http://www.connectuscanada.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff
Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":gvtxsu7g]Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff[/quote:gvtxsu7g] Hi Jeff, Thanks for the suggestion. Why don't you start a new post (with a poll) to see if there's enough interest in your idea for a social media section?
Different Hats - CEO Sales & Marketing & Leadership Development Company Strategic Vision 10 Alliances & Growth Strategies 10 Hiring & Managing People 8 Mentoring 8-9 Strategic Planning for Clients 10 Execution of Marketing Campaigns 9-10 (i have great people who do the nitty gritty) Financial Management 9 Bookkeeping 3 (outsourced as I really hate the fine details like GST0 Administrative Follow Up 6-7 (again have great staff) Writing & Publishing 9 (getting better all the time!) Speaking 10 (so I have been told) Self Promotion 9-10 Web development & Promotion 6-7 (learning more and have brought on players who are 10+) Babysitting Employees (1 - wont do it, that's why I work so hard to hire and motivate the people I have) Great topic Kevin!! Jude
Re: UPDATES: New Campaign! New Layout! New Ideas! - GT - thanks for the FYI - I'm not sure if we'll put a link back. Something to consider though! Trent - the new category is "Social Network and Media" which was put in to compliment the Online Businesses category that currently exists. Overall the new categories are: - Looking For, Networking and Events - Review My... - Social Network and Media - Brags and Rants These came as a result of Ringo doing research on other forums and thinking about what could be improved on ours to give a better experience for everyone. I hope you enjoy them! David, I'm looking forward to reading your Brag / Rant!
Re: Marketing 2.0 - What Are Your Thoughts - Hi Shri, Thanks for posting this. I also read it and I believe Social Media is here to stay, until the next best thing comes up. Social media proved to be useful for me many times and I think everyone should use it for their business.


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