Building Your Strategy
Do Take Time to Listen, Don’t Just Jump In—The first step in putting together an effective strategy is to understand the dynamics of the landscape. With social media, it is more important than ever to listen to what is being said before participating. What are people saying, how is it being said and where are they saying it?
Using a comprehensive monitoring strategy will help you define your online corporate brand identity and help ensure you are engaging with these new platforms effectively. Monitor the social media platforms for discussions on both your company and the competition to determine the value of the platform and the discussion and to help understand what is impacting your brand. Look for the platforms that your customers, prospects and the industry influencers are using. If you find your brand or industry discussions are focused on one or two platforms, you can concentrate your efforts.
Monitoring will not just help you understand which platforms are the most important for your brand, but also the style and tone of the discussions. All social media platforms are different. While some lend themselves to a more formal tone, such as Linkedin, others are about more informal conversation and thoughts, such as Twitter. Both may be equally valuable to your overall strategy but require different approaches. By listening to the discussions on each you will understand how to best approach the different audiences. Some may be used as a way to promote company activities and others may be more useful in interacting with your customers, uncovering potential sales opportunities and learning more about your industry. Be careful not to use the forum as a means of selling your products and services, some groups may consider this to be a form of spamming.
In addition to determining which sites to monitor, you need to define which areas to monitor. There are three key areas you should be tracking—company, competition and industry. This will help you see how your company is perceived in the social media world and will also provide context and comparison to your industry as a whole. You will be able to see how your competitors are positioning themselves and what’s actually resonating. Using this intelligence, you will be able to define a social media strategy that will give you an advantage over the competition.
Once you’ve had an opportunity to monitor evaluate the landscape, a great way to start establishing your social media foothold is through Facebook. You can create a Facebook page for your company for free and use it to share information about upcoming events, latest news and industry insight and start tapping into more than 53 million people who are already using Facebook.
Do Identify Spokespeople, Don’t Dilute the Message—As with traditional media strategies, you must also determine spokespeople for your social media strategy. You wouldn’t pull just any employee to speak to The Times and social media should be no different. Despite the informal nature of the conversations on some platforms, the person responding is still a company representative and the image of the company is reflected in those discussions. Unlike traditional media, social media puts you in direct communication with the public and different company representatives may be better for these audiences. While your traditional media spokesperson may be the CEO, your customers and prospects will be best served by a company representative who deals with more everyday tasks and not the overall company strategy.
You need to take the information you have gathered from monitoring social media and determine your ideal spokespeople. Identify a spokesperson to respond to corporate questions, customer feedback, support services, sales opportunities and other industry trends. Be sure you spend time training your spokespeople just as you would for traditional media so that they know and can communicate your company message effectively. Be sure to keep the channels of communication open to gauge feedback from your spokespeople. As the business climate changes, there may be opportunities to change your message so that it accurately reflects the needs and concerns of your customers.
Once you determine who will represent the company, come up with a plan to respond that fits the needs of your company. Depending on frequency of requests and availability of resources, you may decide to designate an initial responder who can identify the needs of the situation and route the inquiry to the appropriate person. While it is also an effective strategy to have each designated spokesperson respond individually, be careful, as too many voices in social media can be confusing to your audience and also dilute your message. Whichever strategy you choose, make sure the company message is very clear both externally and internally.
