An Open Letter to Marketers Who Abuse Social Media for Selfish Gain

Okay, show of hands.

Who else is sick and tired of marketers who view social media as nothing more than a source of free traffic?

You know the type.

• They have dozens of niche blogs, pumping out an endless stream of crap content they pay writers five dollars per post to produce
• They DM us all kinds of lame affiliate offers on Twitter
• They have a gang of buddies who help them push inappropriate content to the front pages of Digg, Delicious, and Reddit

No, they’re not going to destroy social media or anything as dramatic as that, but it’s still pretty ugly. These marketers have become like leeches, bleeding people of trust and contributing nothing in return. And it’s time for it to stop.

So, I decided to take a little time off from our usual marketing tips and write a good old-fashioned open letter (a.k.a. rant), telling them how it is. No, I don’t think it’s going to change the minds of any hardened spammers, but it might open the eyes of a few businesses who don’t know any better.

Let’s get started:

Dear Mr. Marketer:

The Social Web is not your "traffic honey hole."

Yes, we understand you’re just trying to run a business. Yes, we know social media is the biggest marketing opportunity in the history of mankind, and you’re just trying to get your piece of it. Yes, we are aware that social media marketing is endorsed by many top Internet marketers, and they’re making millions off it every day.

But we’d like you to stop, or at least change the way you’re doing it.

We’re not going to give you another self-righteous argument about how you can’t make money with social media. We’re not going to sermonize about the pitfalls of sleazy marketing. We’re not going to tell you you’re ruining opportunities for all of the other marketers out there who are trying to do things the right way.

You’ve probably heard enough of that, and it doesn’t matter anyway.

No, the honest truth is that it’s just a bad business strategy, and eventually you’re going to get burned. Sure, you can make a few quick bucks, but over the long term, trying to manipulate social media to get free traffic for your business just isn’t a sustainable strategy.

Here’s why:

1. Social Media Isn’t about Getting. It’s about Giving.

It’s tempting, I know.

Here you are, struggling to get anyone to pay attention to your product or service, and you hear that Facebook now has 500 million active users, twitter publishes over 2 billion tweets per month, and YouTube gets 2 billion views per day.

You think, "If I could only get a piece of that, my troubles would be over." You’d make a fortune, travel around the world, and enjoy the lifestyle of the New Rich.

So you design a marketing strategy around getting people to opt in to an e-mail campaign, friend you on Facebook, or follow you on Twitter. You dream about getting 5,000 Facebook friends, 10,000 twitter followers, 100,000 e-mail subscribers.

And when it doesn’t work, you wonder what you did wrong.

The answer: you’re trying to "get" with social media, and that’s not what it’s about. It’s about giving, about creating something stunningly awesome people can’t help talk about it, and then putting the tools in place to help them spread the word.

• Instead of jotting down a few thoughts for another quickie blog post, take several days and put together the most comprehensive guide in your niche for an important subject, and then give it away for free
• Instead of just talking about the theory of how to do something, prepare a video case study showing people in-depth examples of exactly how to do it
• Instead of just tweeting a few links to blog posts, set aside several hours each week to help anyone who asks you questions on Twitter, and then go out of your way to help them

In short, do something remarkable. Give people an experience they’ll want to talk about.

2. Social Media Isn’t about Algorithms. It’s about People.

Far too many bright people waste their time trying to figure out Google, Digg, and Twitter algorithms so they can game the system.

Sure, it might work… for a little while. Eventually though, algorithms change, and then your entire business falls apart. So then you have to find another exploit, another way to get around what it was meant to do, so you can resume making money.

It’s not sustainable. Every year, the algorithms get better and better, and it gets harder and harder to game the system.

If you’re smart, you have to ask yourself, "Is it really worth trying?" Why not just use the system the way it was meant to be used?

The purpose of social media is to give people information they want. If you understand the people, then you automatically understand the algorithm:

• Want to get to the front page of Digg? Watch it for a few weeks, get to know what the Digg community likes, and then submit something you know they’ll enjoy.
• Want to go viral on twitter? Browse around popular blogs, look at the posts that get more than 1,000 retweets, and then write content with a similar style, covering a similar topic.
• Want to release a popular product? Use social media to listen to what people want, and then create your product based on their ideas, not yours.

The data is all there, waiting for you to use. All you have to do is listen to people, and then use their feedback to guide your marketing.

3. Social Media Isn’t about Numbers. It’s about Relationships.

RSS subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook friends — when you’re just getting started, it’s easy to be obsessed with how many you have. You check every day, you brainstorm ways to get more, and you’re envious of people with a higher number.

But you shouldn’t be. Sure, numbers are important, but the real measure of influence with social media is the strength of your relationships.

You can build a following of 10,000 or more people on twitter, just by following everyone related to your subject, and waiting for a percentage of them to follow you back. The problem is, very few of them will remember who you are or actively watch your tweets, so it’s really like you have no one following you at all.

On the other hand, if you actively tweet great links and help people one on one, you may only have an audience of a few thousand, but all of them will know who you are, and all of them will be interested in what you have to say. If you have a new post, they’ll want to read it, and if you release a product, they’ll want to check it out. You’ll drive dramatically more traffic and sales.

And here’s the thing: relationships can’t be automated.

You can use different websites and software to artificially inflate your numbers, giving you lots of subscribers, followers, friends, or whatever, but there’s not a tool to build relationships for you. If you want to have influence online, then you actually have to take the time to talk with people, getting to know them and proving every day that you’re someone worth listening to.

You need to:

• Take the time to answer people’s comments on your blog. They’ll be grateful, and it’ll make them more likely to come back.
• Don’t just tweet about your products and services. Give your opinion on industry trends, tell stories from your business, and let people get to know you. They’re tired of buying from faceless brands.
• Actively listen to your most vocal customers. Follow them on twitter, subscribe to their blogs, comment on their posts, and do your best to keep up a dialog with them. It’ll pay off in positive press, and it’ll also help you build a better product.

Will any of it pay off in more traffic, followers, and subscribers?

Not immediately, no. Stick with it long enough though, and let people see that you’re serious, and it certainly can. You’ll get more retweets, links, comments, bookmarks — everything you could ask for to increase your traffic.

They won’t be doing it because you offered them a gift certificate or some other incentive. They’ll be doing it because they know you, like you, and want you to succeed.

And you know what?

You can’t buy that type of marketing.

Isn’t Doing All of This A Lot of Work?

Sure, but when is effective marketing not a lot of work?

One of the greatest myths about social media is that it’s an "Easy Button" for building a business. All you have to do is start a blog, create a Twitter account, or publish a few videos to YouTube, and you’ll have millions of people beating a path to your door.

But it’s not true. Yes, social media is revolutionary, both in technology and concept, but at its core it’s really about one thing: creating genuine connections with people.

You have to set aside the time to find out what people really want. You have to work at building relationships with both your customers and leaders in your industry. You have to create genuinely awesome experiences for people to talk about, as well as put the tools in place for them to help you spread the word.

Do that, and you’ll have all of the free traffic you can handle.

Don’t, and you’ll be just another annoyance, ignored today and banned tomorrow.

Who do you want to be?

It’s entirely up to you.

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HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

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http://internetmarketingsuccessful.com/

http://internetpowerful.com/

Josh Peters is a social media and Internet marketing consultant and the co-author of Twittfaced. He blogs at Shuaism and can usually be found hanging out on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

There’s nothing like the basics to help bring things back into focus when you feel lost. In “Marketing 101,” the acronym AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This is the most simple and rudimentary of sales and marketing funnels and is still incredibly relevant today when it comes to social media and Internet marketing strategies.

Each section of AIDA represents a section of your sales and marketing process and can help you set your expectations, decide what to monitor, and visualize the relationships between each part. Understanding the flow of the tools and tactics will also help you get your measurements and analytics in line with your goals.

Here’s a closer look at the breakdown of this marketing funnel, some tips on how to apply it to your social media strategy, and a look at how the model is evolving in the social media age.

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Awareness

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Awareness is social media’s bread and butter. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and other networks are built for this. You can’t easily display your inventory via Twitter, set up a shopping cart on LinkedIn, or fill orders through YouTube. These networks are not going to be your point of sale. Instead, they are your communication and outreach tools — the spokes that lead back to your hub (sales page, blog, site, etc.) where you will be making your conversions.

Awareness can take many forms, but its main goal is getting people to know you exist and that you can solve a problem they might have. At this level, conversations, interaction and content are king. A few metrics you might want to measure around your brand are conversation frequency, increased mentions and sentiment.

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Interest

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Now that you have their attention, you need to get customers interested in your product. You can bolster interest with offers and compelling reasons why you’re better than the competition, and how you can solve customers’ problems. Features and benefits weigh heavily in this level, and social media can help you kick their interest into high gear.

If you’re running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and have some targeted landing pages set up for your products or services, those are what you want to link to — not your homepage. Even if you’re not utilizing paid ads, the same strategy of linking to targeted pages through social media is applicable. A few of the metrics you will want to look at here are CTR (click through rate), retweets (of deals and links), and conversations about specific products.

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Desire

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Social media can help bolster desire through communication and engagement, but to fully satisfy someone’s desire to buy, you need to have a site that is streamlined and optimized. Recently, I tried using a popular car rental site to make a reservation, but it was so difficult to navigate that I gave up, despite having a great discount code. The unmanageable user interface killed my desire in two minutes flat, and my business went straight to the competition. Your site makes a huge impression, and people will judge your company by it.

Take the time to go through your site and optimize the presentation and the shopping cart experience. Testimonials gathered from linkable social profiles are a great asset.

Take the customer from interest to desire with a clean, easy to navigate, info rich, and functional site. Some of the metrics that matter at this level are bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed and incoming links.

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Action

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Now that your customers are itching to buy your product, and their money is burning a hole in their PayPal pocket, you need to seal the deal. At this point, your site is your number one tool, and while social media can influence the action through the previous levels, it’s not going to have the same influence here. You need to make it easy and obvious for your customer to complete your desired action (purchase, sign up, lead form, etc.).

The action is also where you can finally calculate some of your end metrics, like conversion rate and ROI. This is where you can see how everything is performing and the final impact your work is having. Often, these are the metrics that your boss (and your boss’s boss) are looking for.

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New Additions to the Marketing Funnel

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Over the years, the traditional AIDA has evolved and added two extra levels. These levels represent not only a shift in the technology and methods that are used to market, but the people behind it.

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Loyalty

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How are you getting your customers to buy from you again? One very simple way to stave off any buyer’s remorse is to follow up via the same social media you used to get customers in the first place. If you know they purchased via a link on Facebook, send them a Facebook message saying “thanks,” and provide them with your customer service contact info. 

Perform customer service on Twitter. Monitor the online conversations around people who are already using your product and see if they have any questions or problems that you can resolve quickly. You can build social loyalty programs and use the communities you create to keep customers coming back. This is where CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can play a leading role, and many social CRM solutions are emerging to fill that need. A few things you might want to monitor here are repeat buyers, the use of loyalty codes, sentiment of mentions post-purchase and sentiment of specific products.

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Advocacy

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Advocacy is the dream of any marketer. It’s the “sweet spot,” where your customers do your marketing for you. It’s when customers love your products, brand, services and people so much that they can’t help but talk about you. This is why you want to make it easy for people to share your brand. Any hindrance to this — be it a bad website interface or an anti-social company ethic — will really discourage this extremely valuable source of traffic and interest.

If it’s an option, I’m far more inclined to click on a “Tweet This” or “Like” button than I am to take the link, shorten it in bit.ly, and post it to my various social networks. Remove any barriers to advocacy and then both encourage and reward it. Some metrics to look at here are mentions, conversations and referrals.

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The problem with AIDA

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As you can see, the levels of our old friend AIDA can get a bit muddy, especially when it comes to the areas of awareness and interest. This has given birth to dozens, probably even hundreds, of fresh interpretations. The main thing to remember is how the funnels flow and to set your measurement and expectations accordingly.

You also don’t need to live and die by this funnel. People can easily skip a level or go through multiple levels at once. It’s not a perfect model, but then nothing is. But keep AIDA in mind as you shape your social marketing strategy. It should help you focus and prioritize your goals for success.

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5 Ways Companies Are Using Social Media to Lower Costs

In the last post, we talked about the importance of making the business case for your social media efforts to your boss.  A fabulous discussion has emerged in the comments to that post on how to track sales via social media, so I will invite you to check it out.

But there are two ways that social media can benefit your business: By generating sales, or by lowering costs.  I don’t think the latter gets enough attention, so in this post I wanted to highlight some ways that companies can lower costs via social media, with some examples of companies that are doing just that.

Ways to lower business costs via Social Media

1 – Lowering recruitment costs or employee turnover.  Anyone that’s had to fill any type of position can tell you that a lot of legwork is required to screen potential candidates to finally find the suitable person to fill a position.  There’s a big time investment, but if your company has a well established presence on social media sites, you can leverage those networks to find your next employee!  Either by targeting people you interact with naturally, or asking your networks on these sites to help you get the word out.  I believe I remember seeing @Ambercadabraclaim that all the hires she has made at Radian 6 have been people she connected with and knew from Twitter.  The cost savings here is obvious.

As far as lowering employee turnover, I found this interesting case study on the results from Best Buy’s socnet for employees, Blue Shirt Nation.  As of last year, roughly 25,000 of the company’s 160,000 or so employees were members of Blue Shirt Nation.  Turnover among those members was 8-12%, much lower than the 50% turnover among Best Buy’s ‘most youthful’ employees.  The article doesn’t attach a dollar figure to the savings, but it’s obvious that the site’s members are more likely to stay with the company, and this again, saves on recruiting costs.  BTW, here’s an interview I did with Best Buy’s Gary Koelling, who helped start Blue Shirt Nation.

2 – Lowering Customer Service Costs.  This is a great way for companies to lower customer service costs, by helping customers directly via social media!  What’s the cost of a customer service call overseas, versus the cost of helping a customer via Twitter?  Also, as you begin to use social media to provide customer service, customers begin to help each other out by pointing you out to anyone that has problems.  Remember how active @comcastcares was on Twitter?  How many of us saw a customer complaining about Comcast, and then told them to reach out to Frank?  I know I did several times.

Here’s a few examples of companies that are using social media to lower customer service costs:

InfusionSoft: The company provides web-based marketing automation software to small businesses.  The company decided to create a community site to help customers better use the software, but InfusionSoft saw that the majority of the customers had customer service issues.  So the company shifted gears a bit, and used the site to help customers with their problems.  The company reports that in 2 years time it’s gone from having one customer service agent for every 55 customers (with a 77% customer satisfaction rating), to as of early this year having 1 agent for every 172 customers, and a 87% satisfaction rating.

Cisco: The company needed a way to better organize product information/expert sources for Account Managers so they could handle issues for customers.  The company created the Specialist Optimization and Results (SOAR) initiative, which brings the company’s vast knowledge base together in one location that can be easily accessed by Account Managers.  It includes access to ‘virtual experts’, discussion forums, and marketing materials.  The results the company has seen from this initiative include:

• Every 100 specialists can now do the work of 120, saving the company $5 million a year.
• Travel expense for Cisco product specialists are down by as much as 60 percent in teams using SOAR tools, and specialists report saving 17 hours a week on average, and boosting their productivity by 22%.

Pitney Bowes:   PB also utilizes company-backed forum to provide customer service (noting a trend here?).  One interesting aspect is that the staff constantly monitors the forum for customer issues, but will wait a minimum of 24 hours before responding.  They do this for two reasons: First, to give them time to properly research the problem and give the customer a better answer.  And second, to give their fellow customers time to help out the other customer and offer advice.  Obviously, you need a strong community in place to make the latter feasible.

Results?  The company estimates that every 5 visits to a specific question on the forum, or every 25 visits to a general post averts a customer service call, and that Pitney Bowes has averted a total of 30,000 calls to their customer service centers.  At a cost of $10 per call, that means a total savings of $300,000.  Thanks to Mike Hardy from Pitney Bowes for clarifying that in the comments.  He added this: “While we don’t generally share hard numbers about our performance, I can say that we met all of our first year’s expenses, including startup, within 6 weeks of launching our forum.”

3 – Lowering marketing and product design costs via social media. Oh this area has a TON of potential for companies, and is often under-utilized.  If you can use social media as a way to connect with your customers, then the more FEEDBACK you can collect from them and integrate into your marketing and product design efforts.  This will make both more efficient, thus lowering costs.

An example of a company that did just that is Lenovo.  When the company IBM PC computing division, they immediately got all of the major departments on the same page and connected.  Marketing, sales, service, etc.  They created forums and blogs to address customer issues and help them, but in deciding what content to create, they paid close attention to what customers were already saying about the products.  They closely monitored blogs and 3rd-party sites and forums.  They talked to their call centers to see what the common issues were.  By listening to customer feedback, it was not only helping them improve existing processes, but it also helped them address FUTURE problems that customers might have with products.  Thus providing a customer service savings as well.

Results?  According to the Forrester case study:  ”This alignment lead to a 20% decrease in laptop service call volumes, an increase in customer service agent productivity, a shortened product problem-resolution cycle and an increase their Net Promoter Scores. The net-net is.. a reduction in customer service support costs and an increase in sales!”

4 – Lowering restocking fees and increasing sales via customer reviews and ratings.  This is another VERY effective tactic that makes the customer more likely to buy, and feel better about the product once they receive it.  It’s also a move that some companies are scared to make because they don’t like the idea of giving customers the ability to give a ‘bad’ rating to the products they sell ON their site.  They need to get over this fear, as the ratings are invaluable to other customers as a research tool, and actually leads to more sales.

An example of a company that boosted sales and lowered restocking costs via customer ratings and reviews is Petco.  Bazaarvoice worked with Petco to not only add ratings capabilities to its site, but they also created a ‘Top Rated’ product category and let visitors organize their search results via ratings.

Results? According to Bazaarvoice:

• The Top Rated Products category had a 49% higher conversion rate compared to the same products within their respective site categories.
• Within the Top Rated Products category, customers spend 63% more compared to all browsers who progressed beyond the homepage.
• “Sort by Rating” has driven 41% higher sales per unique visit and is now the #1 default sorting technique on PETCO.com.
• Overall, PETCO products with ratings and reviews have lower return rates (other case studies have shown that PETCO products with Ratings & Reviews have a 20% lower return rate than those without).

I can’t remember the source, but a study was done that found that when a product has at least one NEGATIVE product review, then the overall results are more trusted by customers.  More food for thought for any companies that don’t want to add ratings to their sites for fear of negative feedback.

5 – Lowering advertising and PR costs by using social media.  Let’s assume you have a company blog that’s popular within your industry.  A byproduct of that popularity will likely be increased coverage by media that covers your industry and space.  The amount of that free publicity could be enough to justify cutting back on some of your advertising expenditures.

For example, in the book Groundswell, GM claims that its Fastlane blog generated $240,000 worth of free publicity for the company by having the blog featured by the press.  This isn’t blog coverage, which GM estimated as being worth an additional $37,000 to the company in the first year the blog was published.

Those are some ideas to get you started, and if you have other case studies were company have cut costs by utilizing social media tools, please share in the comments!

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How To Develop a Social Media Strategy: A Roadmap for Integration

The problem with any new function in a business is deciding how it fits with existing operations. This could be the reason we see so many social media programs that operate in a sort of silo apart from other outreach.

The following list of questions and resources should provide a comprehensive roadmap for developing a strong social media strategy with clear organizational alignment. This is going to be a long post, so let’s get started!

The Foundation

1. Is Your Social Media Presence an Experiment?

If you’re not the kind of business that is open to experimenting with social media, skip to question #2. It’s really okay if you’re planning to experiment with social media in your business as long as the others in your business or client company understand that you’re experimenting. There are way different expectations when what you’re doing is clearly an experiment. There is also something positive to be said for exploring what is possible with something new and trying some different tactics before developing a clear plan with explicit goals and objectives. Having an experimental strategy is okay as long as everyone is on the same page. However, having a clear sense of the business strategy and needs of the organization should still help inform your approach.

2. What is Your Company’s Overarching Business Strategy?

Is your business about innovation, or being a fast follower in the marketplace? Is it about providing the best value or the best service? What is the overall value proposition? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, start digging. Or, if you’re the founder or CEO of a startup, think about the answers to these questions before launching a social media presence UNLESS you’re experimenting, but it’s good to know you’re experimenting (rather than failing). If you don’t know who you are, how will I know who you are? Beyond making sure there’s alignment, identifying the overall business strategy of your organization will help you prioritize where you should start — whether marketing could use some extension into social sites, or whether HR is struggling to recruit necessary talent.

3. What is the Parent Strategy?

Social media strategy should typically be a subset of an existing strategy — will yours be a subset of an HR, marketing, PR, customer service strategy, etc? Stand alone social media strategies tend to either operate in a silo — or naturally creep into other areas of business. The natural growth into existing areas of business can often create conflict over who should own, what budget should be responsible for operations, etc. If you’re experimenting, it’s good to think about how conflicts should be handled should this natural creep arise. If you’re planning strategically, it’s probably better to do your homework up front and clearly prioritize how social media will ideally spread into other areas of operations and make recommendations according to this prioritization schedule. Most social media proponents can readily identify several areas of business that can benefit from some form of social media integration — customer service, public relations, marketing, human resources, etc. Although there may be plenty of opportunities, it’s best to prioritize where to act first based on the dictates of the overarching business strategy. If your company prides itself on innovation, marketing might be the best place to focus social media integration, or maybe start inside the organization to speed up collaboration. Companies focused on superior service might naturally lean toward beginning with customer service. Companies with a long sales cycle may benefit from applying social media strategy to public relations as a way to soften the market and increase brand awareness, share of voice, etc. For companies in a short sales cycle, marketing would probably be a better fit… Make sense?

4. How Will Social Media Boost the Effectiveness of the Parent Strategy?

This piece done right should provide the meat of your business case for allocating resources and identify which budget should get tapped for this social media strategy. As a side note, this piece should also consider the internal audience. How social media savvy is your organization as a whole? Depending on the current level of understanding, you may need to include some guidelines for approach that may be considered industry best practices in order to clearly manage expectations and explain how the company’s approach needs to be different in social channels, and how it will remain the same. Other items to consider in this section:

• Include data to support your thesis that social media will indeed boost the effectiveness of the parent strategy.
• Explain the social dynamics at play here and how they will ultimately contribute to the success of the organization. A social presence often requires giving something meaningful to the public while asking for little-to-nothing in return. Explain the benefits of sharing, promoting others and reciprocity… even if it seems obvious.
• Put some skin in the game! If you want some of the budget, get ready to take on some of the work. Assign part of the parent strategy goals directly to your social media strategy
• Select the RIGHT parent strategy goals for your social presence and assign social media-specific sub-goals. Outline exactly how achieving social media goals will accrue toward the goals of the parent strategy. For instance, if you’re assuming a piece of the sales goals, make sure to outline how social interactions will accrue to an actual sale — and be clear about how the channel should NOT be used i.e. to solicit sales directly or pump marketing messages into social channels all day long.

Taking on responsibility for existing goals will also help determine how much of the budget your efforts should receive. Can you make that work, or will you need to negotiate to increase the budget of the parent strategy? Adding on extra budget specifically for social media might work best, but consider carefully whether a stand-alone social media budget will make sense in the long term as use of social technology becomes more integrated into existing business practices.

Defining the Scope of Conversation*

5. What feeling do we want to inspire in others through our interactions?

What’s the takeaway for them beyond a “positive brand experience.” Get specific. If your brand is fun, it’s probably a good idea to extend that spirit of fun into your social web presence.

6. Will we be proactive in our conversations? Reactive? Both?

If you’re using social media to address customer service issues, a reactive strategy might be best unless you’re incorporating a loyalty or rewards program into the strategy. This can be flexible, but there should be primary and secondary purposes for the presence on the social web for branded profiles.

7. What are the on-brand messages we hope to deliver?

These should account for fewer than 20% of your interactions, but this is an important 20%. Keep in mind that these key messages should be adapted (not copied word for word) for establishing a point of view on the social web.

8. How will changes and updates to the on-brand messages be communicated within the team?

Staying on the same page is important for establishing a consistent presence and preventing mis-communication or misinformation from spreading in social networks.

9. How will on-brand messages be adapted for conversation in social networks. Examples are helpful.

As Phil Gomes says, “Having a ‘message’ is fine, it’s ‘messaging’ that sucks.”

9. What types of messages or updates can we provide that are off-brand, but still relevant?

There is still a relevance quotient that needs to be considered with respect to a branded social media presence. When you open up conversation to anything other than your brand, or give carte blanche to promoting others in general, you’re no longer focused on the wants and needs of your customers, but on the interpretation of the individual responsible for interacting on behalf of the brand. There should be room for improvisation, but the purpose behind the presence should not just be open to anyone’s interpretation. People follow branded social profiles for different reasons than they follow people. Some of the same principles apply, but not all of them. The question for anyone manning the front lines of a brand’s social presence is to consider points of conversation that are a good fit with the brand’s image, company stakeholders AND meaningful to its consumers? These off-brand (but within scope) messages should account for more than 80% of interactions on the social web.

10. What types of updates or issues are off limits for discussion?

How will you respond if a customer/stakeholder/community member initiates a conversation around a topic that is off limits for discussion? Do you explain why you cannot engage in this type of discourse? Ignore it? How will you handle hecklers? Trolls?

11. Will the company seek to leverage personal employee profiles?

Word of mouth marketing and recruiting efforts in social networks often work best with employee support. How will you ask for employee support in social networks without making it a requirement? How will that communication be handled? How will you respect the rights of employees and encourage willful participation? Many companies still do not allow employee access to social media sites — is this something that will need to be addressed? *Scope of conversation should only be applied to branded presences on the social web (not personal social profiles)

Forrester’s POST method

12. People

Who are you trying to reach? Assess the social media use and conversation of your customers, potential customers or other stakeholders the parent strategy needs to reach. There is a lot of existing data about who uses social media as well as monitoring services that will help you get a clear snapshot of online conversations related to your parent strategy’s objectives

13. Objectives

Define a subset of objectives related specifically to social media and explain how they will be measured with respect to the goals of the parent strategy

14. Strategy

The missing ingredient in most social media strategies is actual strategy. Don’t skimp here. Outline exactly how the approach in the social strategy will bridge the gap between customer/stakeholder needs, existing online conversations and the company’s positioning. A well-conceived scope of conversation should come in handy here (see points 5 through 11). A good social strategy should work to increase the relevance of the brand, product or service for the people its trying to reach. How will yours accomplish this?

15. Technology

Select the technology that will help you create alignment between the people you are trying to reach. This is the place to identify specific tactics i.e. a Facebook page, a blog, a branded community, an ambassador program for influential bloggers, a Twitter profile, Foursquare loyalty program, etc. More on Forrester’s original POST method

Measurement and Reporting

16. What actions should your presence encourage?

Will you be looking primarily at increases in brand mentions? On-site engagement? Branded keyword search activity? More web traffic? Newsletter subscriptions? Pick two primary actions to focus on — they should be in natural alignment with the particular objectives of your social media and parent strategies. For more guidance on what to measure and when, see Amber Naslund’s three step series on social media measurement.

17. How will these actions accrue?

Increased activity is a way of showing early signs of life. Social media often pays off with a sort of balloon payment — short term growth tends to be spotty and small, with a bit spike in activity at a certain point that grows exponentially over time. Identifying the actions that will eventually accrue toward accomplishment of the social media strategy goals and objectives AND parent strategy goals and objectives will help keep everyone on the same page and prevent premature calculation errors

18. How will insights be shared?

How will social media insights be shared with others on the team? Department? Other departments? Executive leadership? Will you create a dashboard? Send out weekly reports? Monthly reports? This step not only keeps everyone on the same page — it helps facilitate natural discovery within the company. When presented with social media data, people in other disciplines and departments start to get curious, which inspires real learning beyond required training and professional development.

Creation and Deployment

19. Will you need development resources for launching a new site or blog?

What will the requirements be for site or application development? (don’t forget about mobile compatibility) Do you have in-house resources or will you need to put together an RFP? You may need to team up with a product manager, or a project manager to help create technical requirements and get on a development team’s schedule. Don’t forget, landing pages and other elements highlighting your social media presence may need to be incorporated into your existing company website.

20. Will you need creative resources?

A blog, new website, social profile background images, etc. may require some design work to customize the branded presence. You may also need to resize existing logos or re-orient them so they render properly on your branded social profiles. Many companies also create avatar badges for employees to use with their personal profile picture.

21. Will you need editorial content for your blog? An editorial calendar?

22. What is your timeline for launch?

Is there a natural lifecycle to this strategy? Is it long-term or short-term?

23. Prioritize needs vs. wants for launch.

What needs to be in place before launch, what elements are more iterative or okay to add later?

Education and Process Definition

24. Will there be a need for training?

How will training be handled to make sure everyone on your team is up for the task? Who will be responsible for training?

25. Are there company policies or regulatory processes that need consideration?

Many industries require prior approval for certain types of interaction as well as archiving and the use of legal disclaimers. How will you work within the rules? What will the workflow look like in order to adhere to these guidelines?

26. What about job descriptions and accountability?

If employees see social media responsibilities as something outside their actual job, how will accountability be encouraged?

Flexibility and Iteration

27. How will you re-evaluate your existing strategy?

Having a social media presence often has unexpected benefits, but to leverage them, you may need to be opportunistic, and up to date on current events and trends. How will you formalize the need to constantly re-evaluate your existing strategy without undermining its relevance?

28. How do you plan to adapt to the shifting demands of the social web where your company participates?

A social presence benefits from being responsive to the needs of the community stakeholders. This may require you to dig into issues outside of your department on occasion. How will the importance of answering these questions in a timely manner be prioritized in areas outside of your department or business unit?

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