Stop ticking boxes and develop an actual strategy for social media

The first step is to accept that your brand online is increasingly, only as strong or as weak, as the community it supports. This is something Simon Cowell discovered with the Xfactor vs. the  the 'rage against machine community' in the race for the UK Christmass number-one slot. THe community chose the top song in protest, leaving the xFactor/Cowell team red faced. So if this year you are to thrive you must have a comprehensive social media strategy. I dont mean asking Jim the intern to manage the facebook group once a week by deleting the negative comments, or the tweet-n-hope strategies of 2009. This year the strategy must be planned, it must get adequate investment and it must be measured against real commercial outcomes.

Social media, for the purpose of this article is broadly defined as any interaction between a company and its community via any interactive channels. Social media is simply a way to connect with existing communities, and if you are good, very good, you can create new ones for your brand. But to do it right, you want to step in and be a true member of a community so you must agree on a degree of loss of control and develop a thicker brand skin. Picture yourself as an intruder into an established clique. Be humble, enter the room and expect all to go silent, its human nature after all. If in doubt stick to these three simple rules;

a)    Be human and actually have a face, not a corporate logo
b)    Interact like a real person to real people.
c)    Be selfless and of massive value to the community.

Bottom line is no one gives a crap about you. They (the community) were doing just fine without you. What they care about is what you can do for them.

I suggest the following stages to any social strategy strategy

1. Generating importance for yourself by clearly standing for something: To stand out and generate any interest you must plant your flag firmly and stand for something. This stand will give people a reason to interact with you (read, watch, listed, believe, respond) and will determine if your brand becomes important in their lives.  

2. Get yourself out there: Dont expect the party to be happening at your place. Detach thinking from your site and distribute it. Become visible where people are already sharing their passions and interests. This “reaching out” should include syndicating your blogs onto major social sites, developing social apps or apps for the mobile channels.

As mentioned in the simple rules above, you must humanise the reaching out process. People like to talk to people via social networks, and not brands. So combine an image of a person for personality and your brand for context to address this.

3. Develop these listening posts: After picking out the prime spots where the community you are after already hangs out. Think of yourself as the stranger in a town who has just discovered where the cool kids hang. Make sure you have key listeners deployed to these key locations to contribute and manage the discussions. Note that they should be listeners first, then bloggers. As an old sales director once told me once 'Son, we have two ears one mouth, use them proportionally'. Your listeners (bloggers, socialnetworkers, dialogures or whatever you call them) should be able to maintain a consistent relevant dialogue that contributes to both the community and of course the overall brand positioning.

4. Create Activity Timelines: Don’t use up all your party tricks, best lines and jokes at the first introduction. Coordinate a central list of activities that will keep a constant brand voice for your within the community. All too often the urge is to burst forth all guns ablazing and then go quiet. Or worse just tell the community about every piece of bland marketing you are at. This process involves planning, careful selecting and the allocation of key personnel to listen, blog and comment about major events in relevant listening posts. Your activities define your conversation, which in turn defines your importance to the group.

5. Responding to comments: Your response strategy needs to revolve around respect. Respect for the community and your position within that community. Under no circumstances should you argue. I am not saying roll over on every insult, but don’t get overly sensitive and precious about your brand. From the perspective of the other members, like any group you have to be able to take some stick from the other group members. The overall approach should be as follows.
a)    Question, complaint, comment or inquiry – Respond immediately if possible, or if serious or complicated acknowledge it and give an assurance that we will respond within a determined time.
b)    Handoff – Determine who should answer the question based on the potential negative impact to the brand
c)    Response – clear and relevant in plain English with customer respect as the primary theme. Make absolutely sure that the message doesn’t get lost in the comment noise or shuffle or twitter river.
d)    Learn from these comments and use them to justify change  

For more serious incidents, including crisis management, we will need to implement a protocol on how to react.

6. Measurement : There are already free tools available to keep an eye on comments about you across the web. These include;
http://www.google.com/alerts
http://www.socialmention.com/  
http://www.peoplebrowsr.com/
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
http://techrigy.com/

Measurement is essential as it offers an argument on how much to invest into social media and where you should divert funds from. The direct benefits will be identified through increased traffic to the main site and appearance in organic search results. The more indirect benefits will include;

a)    New sales and new customers via increased traffic, including shop footfall.
b)    Customer Support; Immediate feedback and response leading to a cost reduction on customer support.
c)    Human Resources; More effective recruiting, online monitoring of employee behavior (risk management)
d)    Public Relations, Online Reputation Management and  improved brand image
e)    Customer Loyalty, increased interactions, better quality of interactions, deeper relationship with brand,
f)    Increased trust and importance in brand

Prior to commencement of the social strategy we would need to set a benchmark for comparison reasons. This involves looking at key metrics both on and off that we would like to influence, i.e. Sales, Shop footfall, transaction size etc. With these benchmarked, you can revisit and determine (or not) if there are any correlations between increases in social networking activity and the above.  

Once the social media strategy is in full flow invest in more dedicated tools to determine the volume of positive mentions vs. neutral and negative. Negative messages need to be addresses quickly (see section 5 above), in a relevant and comprehensive way. However they also give you invaluable market intelligence and expose areas where you may need to improve your offering to the community. Positive messaging have a positive brand impact and show you areas that you are doing well and should expand on.  In 2010 more companies will appear to do this, already BuzzLogic, Radian6, TNS Cymfony,  Buzzmetrics, seems to be making a name for itself but watch that space I am sure Google will have a free Social Media tool that does all of what Radion6 does, but is free, by mid year.

So armed with the knowledge above, you have the opportunity to join the community/group/collective conversation and influence it. Dont find yourself frustrated like Simon Cowell did when he slammed the Facebook campaign to get Rage to the top spot, calling it "stupid", "cynical" and "very Scrooge". He did add that he wants to hire the people who achieved this feat, accepting it as a marketing skill he needs in his team. So like Mr Cowell, you ultimately have to accept that it’s this community that determines your faith, and closes the deal. However you are never powerless you just have to recognise the new social networking decorum, the new behaviors, propriety, etiquette and manners.