It’s undeniable that the new world of social media can have a dramatic impact on your organisation. All it takes is a quick scan of today’s headlines to learn the effects of successful – and not so successful – social media campaigns. While it seems that social media presents an endless amount of opportunities to build awareness, it also presents risk, which means that creating an effective strategy isn’t just nice to have – it’s an absolute must.

Creating an effective social media strategy is as much about what to do as what not to do. Before you jump in, it is important to develop guidelines to not only help you understand the current landscape but to help shape it.

Evaluate the Potential

An important thing to consider when creating an effective strategy is the potential impact social media can have on a campaign.

Perhaps the most powerful example of a highly successful social media programme was used by Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign.

David Plouffe, Obama campaign manager, integrated a host of social media tools in his strategy to engage, monitor and measure his social media strategy. Through careful monitoring of social media sites, blogs and other online news sites, the Obama campaign was able to see potential negative publicity before it reached traditional media sites. The campaign was able to use measurement tools that would be able to gauge the tone of a story about Sen. Obama and the campaign.

Using social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the campaign engaged voters and allowed them to grow the campaign by creating an opportunity for them to create groups of supporters, participate in grassroots advocacy campaigns and make and solicit contributions for Obama’s campaign. Campaign organisers also kept their audience updated and engaged through constant e-mails and mobile alerts about the candidate and his campaign.

In another recent example, Skittles redesigned their homepage using a social media overlay – a Twitter feed including all of the sweets mentions. The Twitter feed was not edited and all Tweets – favorable and not so favorable – were posted directly to the Skittles homepage. While many conversations simply related to the validity of the campaign, the unedited feed allowed for pranks involving more controversial and offensive postings to appear. Fortunately for Skittles, the actual damage to their brand was very low and many say they were able to use this to build awareness, but the experience demonstrates the unpredictability of social media. There is risk with engaging in social media. There are no guarantees and your strategy needs to recognise the risk to help you reap the benefits.