Guest Post by: Andrew Spoeth
Where is my company really at with social media? And how can I move forward from a simple, experimental approach, to one where social media is impactful and fully integrated into the enterprise?
One of the highlights from this year’s Dreamforce conference was a marketing session titled, Setting Your Social Media Strategy. Jamie Grennay, Salesforce.com’s senior director of social media, and Kira Wampler, the former group marketing manager of online engagement at Intuit, walked us through their tips for building a social media marketing strategy.
The first step in the process is identifying which stage your company finds itself at. These are:
Stage 1 – Traditional, command and control, one-way communications to drive business outcomes. This is typical, e.g., traditional public relations.
Stage 2 – Experimental. Dabbling in social engagement occurs but is disconnected from business operations. There is fractured use of tools, siloed efforts and disparate measures reign. The company will have many different social media accounts. At this stage, you will get “mavericks”, who try to forge the path towards social media excellence.
Stage 3 – Operational. Social engagement becomes more embedded in business operations. Internal training, channel alignment and campaign integration deliver tangible results. Some would say the organization has become boring. You get common tools. You set up training. You figure out how to scale.
Stage 4 – Impactful. Social engagement drives real business results, with systems and tools fully optimized to support confident and competent employees.
Stage 5 – Fully Engaged Enterprise. This is the summit of our social media aspirations. We are able to assess demand and deliver new products to market more quickly. Business operations are more efficient because of social media. All employees have a strong understanding of our customers, and senior executives lead with customer engagement.
Keep in mind that some companies, by their very nature, already operate at a Stage 4 or Stage 5. For smaller companies, this is often easier because of a strong culture of openness.
In a future post, we’ll look at components of a social media audit: which departments within your company to engage, which social networks to consider, and what metrics to track.
Original Post: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2010/12/setting-your-social-media-strategy-part-1.html
