Comments and discussions must be evaluated for both tone and prominence. Whether you are using technology to identify and evaluate articles based on defined criteria or having individuals sift through the articles to determine their value, it is important to take the tone and prominence into consideration when determining ultimate impact.

Companies need to not only track where and how often their brand is discussed but assign a value based on the importance of the outlet to the organization and determine if the conversations are positive, negative or neutral to get an accurate read of their results.

Discover which platforms and techniques have had the greatest impact and who they have influenced. Use criteria that matters to your company to determine that impact – whether it’s the number of sales opportunities uncovered, leads generated or attendees at an event – measuring results is critical to determining your success with social media. By comparing your activity and effort against results, you can gauge what activities are most effective and concentrate your efforts on the platforms that will give you the maximum return. Use this information to determine whether your current strategy is working or if you need to make changes.

If you don’t track the results generated through social media outreach, it will be very difficult to improve upon your strategy and fully reap the benefits social media can offer.

Finally, don’t make the investment in social media without the commitment. Social media takes time. Establishing your network and leveraging the platforms may not happen overnight, but if you follow your strategy they can extend your reach and get the most out of your PR efforts.

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Social media’s ability to spread your message or promote a campaign can be very powerful. Be prepared for your social media campaigns to succeed and plan for a greater response than you are used to.

While not every campaign may result in high traffic or far reach, the potential is there. Not being able to deliver on that success, could turn into a PR nightmare. Some of the problems you could face when delivering your strategy include

• You choose the wrong media channels
• You use the wrong people to deliver the message
• Your content sucks
• Your team dose not believe in the strategy
• Poor execution
• No one trusts you

Make sure you aren’t overselling to your potential customers through your messaging. Know what your limits are and your strengths. If you can’t deliver, don’t try to make your customers believe that you can.

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Promotion is key to building your social media network. Make sure you share your Twitter handle, Facebook page or LinkedIn profile with your business contacts to help build your network. Add it to company promotions, include it in your email signature, list it on your website to let the audience you want to attract know where to find you.

Many social media platforms have created their own methods to promote valuable contributors. Twitter’s #followfriday, a designated day to recommend influential or interesting people to follow on Twitter, is a great way to get quality followers and establish your network.

Don’t be fooled by the “get hundreds of followers” scams – they do not work. You actually act as a mule to recruit others to these scams.

Once you begin using Twitter, Facebook and other platforms regularly you will build a network that will help you meet your goals. As people recognize the value you are providing, they will want to listen to you.

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Now that you’ve got spokespeople, guidelines and an understanding of the landscape, you are ready to engage in social media. Social media is about contributing to the conversation, not just selling your product or service.

It is acceptable to tout company announcements and activities, but participation means going beyond promotions. Share third party resources with your followers, fans and social media network. Offer them interesting articles and opportunities that will help them better understand the industry and see the value you can provide.

If you have a blog, tweet links to interesting articles that may provide valuable information on emerging trends or other educational materials within it and drive people back to your content. The more valuable your content, the more your audience will grow.

Commit to your social media network. Be consistent with your updates, while you may not be able to post your own content on every occasion, regularly offer general thoughts and opinions on other content. Staying involved with your network is the only way to really leverage the platform. Anyone can create noise in social media, it is up to you to provide valuable insight.

Staying on top of trends in your industry and having the ability to deliver well thought out analysis positions you as a thought leader, builds your organization’s credibility and can positively influence your organization’s online reputation.

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While knowing what conversations are taking place and using the valuable insight gained from them is important, understanding impact will help you define the priority to the company. Just remember, you may not be able to do it all. The world of social media is rapidly growing and changing, focus on what will help you meet your goals.

• Part 1 – Overview
• Part 2 – Take Time to Listen, Don’t Just Jump In
• Part 3 – Identify Spokespeople, Don’t Dilute the Message
• Part 4 – Communicate the Strategy, Don’t Allow for Confusion
• Part 5 – Set Priorities and Goals, Don’t Try To Do It All
• Part 6 – Provide Consistent Content, Don’t Simply Dabble
• Part 7 – Find Quality Followers to Engage, Don’t Worry About Numbers
• Part 8 – Be Prepared for Success, Don’t Forget to Plan
• Part 9 – Evaluate Impact, Don’t Continue Blindly

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While you may have created a strategy and identified the spokespeople who will participate in online conversations, if you do not share that strategy with the rest of the organization it will lead to confusion. Social media turns everyone associated with your brand into a potential company representative. Whether you are a large or small company, the nature of social media requires specific guidelines for conduct.

Make sure employees know their role in the discussion. Just as you communicate guidelines for media calls or other media activities, share guidelines on what is and is not appropriate for social media. While many employees are tempted to participate in conversations, giving clear directives on company policy will help you control the message. While 99% of the participation is likely harmless, in some cases, it may impact company brand and reputation.

Establishing guidelines will help you mitigate internal risks to your online reputation as well as potential organizational issues. Technology will help you comprehensively monitor and track social media conversations so that you know when and if your employees are participating to ensure your guidelines are being followed.

• Part 1 – Overview
• Part 2 – Take Time to Listen, Don’t Just Jump In
• Part 3 – Identify Spokespeople, Don’t Dilute the Message
• Part 4 – Communicate the Strategy, Don’t Allow for Confusion
• Part 5 – Set Priorities and Goals, Don’t Try To Do It All
• Part 6 – Provide Consistent Content, Don’t Simply Dabble
• Part 7 – Find Quality Followers to Engage, Don’t Worry About Numbers
• Part 8 – Be Prepared for Success, Don’t Forget to Plan
• Part 9 – Evaluate Impact, Don’t Continue Blindly

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The first step in putting together an effective social media strategy is to understand the dynamics of the landscape. With social media, it is more important than ever to listen to what is being said before participating. What are people saying, how is it being said and where are they saying it?

Using a comprehensive monitoring strategy, it will help you define your online corporate brand identity and help ensure you are engaging with these new platforms effectively.

Monitor the social media platforms for discussions on both your company and the competition to determine the value of the platform and the discussion as well as to help understand what is impacting your brand. Look for the platforms that your customers, prospects and the industry influencers are using. If you find your brand or industry discussions are focused on one or two platforms, you can concentrate your efforts.

Monitoring will not just help you understand which platforms are the most important for your brand, but also the style and tone of the discussions. All social media platforms are different. While some lend themselves to a more formal tone, such as Linkedin, others are about more informal conversation and thoughts, such as Twitter. Both may be equally valuable to your overall strategy but require different approaches.

By listening to the discussions on each you will understand how to best approach the different audiences. Some may be used as a way to promote company activities and others may be more useful in interacting with your customers, uncovering potential sales opportunities and learning more about your industry. Be careful not to use the forum as a means of selling your products and services, some groups may consider this to be a form of spamming.

• Part 1 – Overview
• Part 2 – Take Time to Listen, Don’t Just Jump In
• Part 3 – Identify Spokespeople, Don’t Dilute the Message
• Part 4 – Communicate the Strategy, Don’t Allow for Confusion
• Part 5 – Set Priorities and Goals, Don’t Try To Do It All
• Part 6 – Provide Consistent Content, Don’t Simply Dabble
• Part 7 – Find Quality Followers to Engage, Don’t Worry About Numbers
• Part 8 – Be Prepared for Success, Don’t Forget to Plan
• Part 9 – Evaluate Impact, Don’t Continue Blindly

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Unlike traditional media, social media puts you in direct communication with the public and different company representatives may be better for these audiences. While your traditional media spokesperson may be the CEO, your customers and prospects may be best served by a company representative who deals with more everyday tasks and not the overall company strategy.

As part of your PR strategy, you need to take the information you have gathered from monitoring social media and determine your ideal spokespeople. Identify a spokesperson to respond to corporate questions, customer feedback, support services, sales opportunities and other industry trends. Be sure you spend time training your spokespeople just as you would for traditional media so that they know and can communicate your company message effectively. Be sure to keep the channels of communication open to gauge feedback from your spokespeople. As the business climate changes, there may be opportunities to change your message so that it accurately reflects the needs and concerns of your customers.

Once you determine who will represent the company, come up with a plan to respond that fits the needs of your company. Depending on frequency of requests and availability of resources, you may decide to designate an initial responder who can identify the needs of the situation and route the inquiry to the appropriate person. While it is also an effective strategy to have each designated spokesperson respond individually, be careful, as too many voices in social media can be confusing to your audience and also dilute your message. Whichever strategy you choose, make sure the company message is very clear both externally and internally.

• Part 1 – Overview
• Part 2 – Take Time to Listen, Don’t Just Jump In
• Part 3 – Identify Spokespeople, Don’t Dilute the Message
• Part 4 – Communicate the Strategy, Don’t Allow for Confusion
• Part 5 – Set Priorities and Goals, Don’t Try To Do It All
• Part 6 – Provide Consistent Content, Don’t Simply Dabble
• Part 7 – Find Quality Followers to Engage, Don’t Worry About Numbers
• Part 8 – Be Prepared for Success, Don’t Forget to Plan
• Part 9 – Evaluate Impact, Don’t Continue Blindly

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It’s undeniable that the new world of social media can have a dramatic impact on your organisation. All it takes is a quick scan of today’s headlines to learn the effects of successful (and not so successful) social media campaigns. While it seems that social media presents an endless amount of opportunities to build awareness, it also presents risk, which means that creating an effective strategy isn’t just nice to have – it’s an absolute must.

Creating an effective social media strategy is as much about what to do as what not to do. Before you jump in, it is important to develop guidelines to not only help you understand the current landscape but to help shape it.

Most importantly, keep in mind that social media is about conversation and in many ways reflects the same basic tenants of traditional PR strategy and outreach.

From identifying spokespeople to researching targets and outlets to knowing when and when not to engage, this paper will help you learn how to build a successful social media strategy for your company that helps you enhance your PR campaigns by leveraging these powerful new channels.

Creating a social media strategy is really no different than building a traditional media strategy. However, unlike traditional media, social media presents far less barriers to reaching your ultimate consumer which may leave you vulnerable and more open to risk.

Be prepared to invest time and research into creating your social media plans to ensure its success. You need to know your audience, know your objectives, know your outlets and know your message.

Over the next few weeks, I will post each part of how to create an effective social media strategy from a whitepaper released by Vocus titled “The Do’s and Don’ts of Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy”.

Topics include…

• Part 1 – Overview
• Part 2 – Take Time to Listen, Don’t Just Jump In
• Part 3 – Identify Spokespeople, Don’t Dilute the Message
• Part 4 – Communicate the Strategy, Don’t Allow for Confusion
• Part 5 – Set Priorities and Goals, Don’t Try To Do It All
• Part 6 – Provide Consistent Content, Don’t Simply Dabble
• Part 7 – Find Quality Followers to Engage, Don’t Worry About Numbers
• Part 8 – Be Prepared for Success, Don’t Forget to Plan
• Part 9 – Evaluate Impact, Don’t Continue Blindly

By incorporating an effective social media plan into your overall strategy, you can leverage this new medium to take your campaigns further, gain valuable business intelligence and increase your overall PR results.

Remember, the most important “Do” in social media is “Do” get started so you “Don’t” get left out of the conversation.

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What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

What Is An Advanced Strategy?

The definition of an advanced social strategy is a technique that goes beyond the normal social media presence. It introduces or reinforces a marketing message while pushing a user to another profile or business site. Before moving forward with an advanced strategy, it’s important that your business understands social marketing, has experience engaging consumers, and that you possess a basic understanding of online marketing.

Strategy 1: Multimedia Usage

The term “A picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer. Consumers are now using the web to look for product pictures and videos; they want more information and want to see what they’re considering buying. The good news is that it’s easy for a company to create and publish videos and pictures.

Social platforms each have an ecosystem of their own. What might be acceptable on Tumblr () might be considered spam on Facebook (). A specific style of writing might spread on Twitter () but fail on FriendFeed (). Understanding that each site is different and then customizing your message ensures they do well on each respective site.Not only does customizing messages across sites help the message spread but it keeps users from receiving multiple identical communications. Be sure to maximize your potential by sending a user that follows the business on Twitter and Facebook two different messages, instead of the same thing.

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Strategy 4: Local Social Networks, Beyond Yelp

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For a small business, local search can be a big win. Being visible to consumers looking for a business in their area is extremely important. Make sure your site is included in local business directories in order to help ensure that consumers find you when they need you. Sometimes finding that many sites can be difficult, however.

First, make sure you check your competitors. Where are they listed? Check their inbound links to check for business directories you can add yourself to. Also, make sure your business has been added to Google Maps (), using the Local Business Center.

Take the time to include all the information you can and update any old news. For many consumers, this will be their first interaction with the business.

Example: Bella Napoli in New York

Bella Napoli is a small pizzeria in New York that has done a great job of making sure they appear in as many local searches as possible.

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Strategy 5: Contests and Discounts

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Building a community is only the first part of social marketing. Using that community to drive sales, propagate marketing, or crowdsource operations is the true power of social media. One way to excite the community is to collectively do something to create a contest or offer an exclusive discount (i.e., the contest can create competition between users). Not only does a contest build buzz organically but if contestants need to, for example, publish an article that gets the most comments in order to win, the contest itself becomes viral.

A good social media contest should include some sort of sharing or virality as a requirement for winning.

Discounts are also a great way to connect with your community. By giving exclusive coupons to your social community, you’re rewarding and reminding them that you are not only a brand to engage with, but also to buy from.

Example: NetFirms.com

NetFirms.com decided to make it easier to register a domain by allowing people to do it via Twitter. Those who participated or spread the word by tweeting, were also entered into a prize drawing.

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Conclusion

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Creating a basic social media presence is easy enough, getting your community to actually do something is more difficult. Taking advantage of these strategies can help you build your community, make your marketing more effective, and incentivize buying.

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