Strategic Social Media Integration

We talked a lot, well, maybe a little, about social media during the Advancement Summit yesterday.  People are definitely interested and I think just about everyone is participating in this form of communications.

But man are there lots of questions.  How do you do it? What tools do you use?  How do you create, disseminate, control your messages?  How, What, Why seems to dominate the discussion.

Came across this list of things to do with social media on one of the sites I frequent; http://brandmindblog.com/.  Check it out.

1. Listen and educate internal stakeholders
   • Invest some time and energy in learning about social media.  Listen to the social web for sentiment about your company, and also learn from competitors and other categories.
2. Understand your audience and how they currently interact with social media
   • Using simple techniques and tools, learn which topics are important to your customers.  Find out how your customers are engaging with other companies.
3. Determine social marketing objectives
   • What do you hope to achieve with social media?  Are you interested in using it for customer service? To create a closed customer-feedback loop?  To provide product information?  To promote your products?  To build your brand?  Make sure that internal stakeholders agree on objectives and how to measure against them.
4. Set social media strategy and platforms
   • Develop a plan that identifies specific platforms and a strategy for each platform.  Select only those platforms to which you can commit time and energy.  Align audiences with appropriate platforms.
5. Determine support structure and resources
   • Set leadership responsibility and be sure to develop a cross-functional team.  It will be important to establish guidelines for employee engagement and identify how you will incorporate and distill feedback.  You may need to engage creative and/or technical resources for initial set-up and ongoing content creation and measurement.
6. Inventory existing content
   • Assess not only current marketing content that can be re-purposed for social media, but find the people in your company who are passionate and let them help you connect with customers.
7. Create and distribute new and re-purposed content
   • You will want to distribute content across platforms according to your plan, but don’t be afraid to continually explore new opportunities and platforms.  It is also important to drive interaction between existing online and offline marketing content and your new platforms. Determining a content schedule and editorial calendar are keys to success.
8. Measure and report
   • If your objectives for social media were to increase web traffic and online purchases, you need to be measuring against that objective.  Regular reporting and review are essential to leveraging an ongoing social media presence.  Understand which responses (i.e. views, posts, comments, etc) lead to the desired action.

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