Great article by Jeremiah Owyang about social media strategies. What makes Jeremiah worth reading is that he has walked the social media path, as he helped Hitachi develop its social media plan.
In his blog post, Jeremiah outlined his 12 strategies for organizing your Corporate Social Media Program. The top ones I thought were:
Recognize the new influencers: Like Media, Press, and Analysts, consider Social Media yet an additional influencer group to reach.
Track who’s who. Create an index of bloggers and influences in your industry, consider putting on an internal list, an internal feedreader or even on an industry wiki.
Be aware of the Bloggers and influencers in your community. Be aware of what they are saying and build relationships with you. Web2.0 is heavily influenced by the power that these new influencers have.
Prepare for all scenarios: Create an internal process or at least discuss how to deal with crises. (such as exploding products, embarrassing situations). Draw from classic PR strategies, but realize that acting quickly in a human way, and not hiding is key.
If your ever get into a JetBlue or KFC situation, have a plan in plan before something happens (its is called reputation management). Then be honest and truthful about what happened and how you are going to fix it.
Don’t shy away. Acknowledge deficiencies, no matter how shameful immediately. If you don’t have the answer, at least acknowledge you see the problem and will respond as soon as you have an answer. As a result you will become the first source of news, and will control any additional buzz. Stay relevant, address the issues.
Employees will blog, embrace. In addition to creating the corporate blog(s), be sure to recognize the natural employee bloggers that appear. You may find them in the product groups, support, and marketing departments. Have a discussion on how to include them in your strategy, even if it means to let them continue on their own. When it comes to trust, prospects and customers may trust employee bloggers that don’t have the corporate logo on their blog.
Use Social Media as Sales Tools. I’ve found that corporate blogs can be used for sales and marketing three ways: 1) A “living” white paper by your companies thought leaders, 2) A rapid response tool. Think about how long a press release takes to craft. 3) A Conversation Starter: encourage your sales teams to send along interesting or controversial blog topics to prospects and customers to elicit a dialogue –even if they don’t agree. Consider creating sales FAQs and upload to intranet, these are tools that can be used.
Basically Jeremiah is saying that you should engage and interact with your customers. Whether it is via employees blogging, using social media tools and tactics to generate sales and/or leads, just be honest with your audience.
Measurement. You’ll need to measure to prove worth in this new arena, get more budget and even get a raise.
Ultimately any successful marketing program needs to be able to show an ROI. Identify upfront what metrics you want to track and make sure that everyone in the organization understands and is focused on them.
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