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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Here are 5 additional simple ways, some obvious and some obscure, to help small businesses leverage social media to provide stellar customer service. The social web is a place for everyone, but with the right tips, tricks and tools, savvy small businesses can redefine the nature of customer service.

1. Always Be in the Know

Ask any community, social media, or branding expert what you should do first, and every single one of them will tell you to listen. It may sound cliché, but the reality is that you need to understand the landscape of the space you’re contributing to before you do anything else.

So, for a customer service strategy that leverages social media, the first thing you can and should do is set up a tracking and listening system that works for your business and hinges around mentions of your product, services, and those of your competitors.

Given that Twitter is just one of many places for mass social expression, you can’t rely just on Twitter search services to do your work for you, though it definitely can help. You can grab the RSS feed for your favorite search queries from Twitter Search, or install TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client, to keep an ever present eye on Twitter’s always updating stream. Even if you’re averse to tweeting, you should set up a few columns with custom search queries and filters for everything involving your business. You’ll receive automatic notices every time there are new tweets that match your results.

Even if you do nothing more than read tweets, you’ll start to learn a wealth of information about your product. Plus, if no one’s talking about your product or service, you should be checking out broader searches related to your space. Let’s say your product is a data analytics software for the enterprise, you need to be searching for more than just your product name and pinpoint what does get mentioned. Maybe it’s a hot new online tool that does something similar, or a single person searching for data analytics software, finding the information that is getting talked about is the key.

You should also be doing everything in your power to keep up with the blogosphere. So find a reader you like, Google Reader and Netvibes both work well, and start subscribing to feeds related to your industry. You should also register an account with comment tracking site Backtype – it boils down to a Google Alerts service for comments. Even if you don’t plan on leaving a single comment (which is a missed opportunity), Backtype is essential for keeping up with conversations happening in the blogosphere in the same vein as Twitter Search. Take the keywords you’re tracking on Twitter and use them in Backtype for automated alerts. The service will send you an email with highlighted mentions of search terms as they happen, or on a daily or weekly basis.

You should also check out Yacktrack for comment search, Social Mention to query the entire social web, and Filtrbox for relevant and credible mentions of your company. The bottom line with listening is to make the tools do the social media tracking for you, so you can have the information come to you as it happens.

2. Talk Back

This is the simplest method of customer service that’s often underutilized. Now that you’re using tools to stay in the know, you should invest time in using that information to put out customer service fires and address business related matters.

This isn’t a blanket invitation to tweet your marketing material or trash a competitor in blog comments to make your business look better. The vocal contributions you make on behalf of your business should always be informative and helpful; otherwise they appear spammy and will ultimately make your company look bad.

Simple, honest, and straightforward responses on social platforms like Twitter, FriendFeed, and blogs is always the right way to go, especially if you’re responding to something negative about your company or your product. Make it clear that you’re open to helping, make your contact information available, and always be genuine.

3. Get Creative

Once you have the basics covered, you can start experimenting with outside the box customer service ideas. Since the point is to connect with customers, your social media customer service strategy should be a natural extension of your business, so feel free to get innovative but just do so in ways that make sense for your business.

To get creative, take inspiration from the best and make the ideas your own. A number of big brands like Southwest, Jet Blue, Zappos, Starbucks, and Ford have turned to Twitter for offering impressive customer service and providing Twitter-only deals. Watch what they’re doing if you need ideas, but what you’ll notice about each big business doing it right is that they aren’t afraid to take risks.

One small business trying something incredibly cool is Pelotonics. Their product is an online project management solution that competes with more well known products like Basecamp. They’re using Ustream.tv to broadcast PeloTV, accessible from the website, which is their simple way of always making themselves available to their customers. With just a web cam, a desktop sharing camera tool (like CamTwist), and Ustream, Pelotonics is giving every single customer and prospect the opportunity to engage with them live during business hours. In this particular example it’s less about views/recognition and more about value, so even though the channel only gets a few concurrent viewers at a time, Troy Malone, Pelotonics founder, is there for real-time product demos and customer support issues.

If you aren’t ready to make yourself available via live web cam, you can try less intrusive options like setting up a product support or FAQ room in FriendFeed, or use Seesmic to record and share daily product tips. Did you know that the Chargers streamed press conferences live via Mogulus this past season? You could try something similar and stream live information-rich conversations using your phone via Qik, Kyte, or Flixwagon. Plus, pretty soon 12seconds.tv will have support for real-time rooms, which means you could encourage and promote live short-form video conversations with customers, clients, and fans.

With the state of social media these days, your options for original customer service are pretty much endless.

4. Do Your Research

When your customers are your clients and you have a sales or lead driven business, stellar customer service goes hand-in-hand with how much you know about each client and their individual needs. Thankfully, you can harness the social web for timely information that can keep you educated about your clients, their companies, and all related news items.

For this purpose, take a look at Gist, a free web-based tool in private beta for power networkers. Essentially the site combines your email communications, your Outlook calendar, and your Facebook and LinkedIn connections to give you a view of your contacts like no other. Each contact and each company has its own profile-like view within Gist that includes contact info, news mentions, email exchanges, and other related data so sales and marketing types can effortlessly research leads and existing clients to better cement important relationships.

5. Share Everything

Now that you’re in the know, you’re chiming in on related conversations, you’re thinking outside the box, and doing your homework, it’s the right time to start talking about what you’re doing on your blog (try WordPress), on Twitter, at conferences and events, and anywhere else that makes sense.

The point of sharing everything is to make your customers, clients, partners, friends, and even competitors aware that you’re always accessible, that you’re learning from your mistakes, that you want to involve and encourage community participation, and that you’re doing all this with the same enthusiasm and passion that motivated you to start your business in the first place.

So what should you share? Share the big wins like new product releases, new partners, new hires, and the like. Share the bumps in the road, like why your site was down for a few hours, or why you can’t implement a commonly requested feature. Share answers to frequently asked questions. Even share the products and services that make your life easier.

While doing all of this sharing, make sure that you’re asking for a response as well. You won’t get comments or responses unless you ask for them, or you’re doing something terribly wrong. So ask for help, ask for feedback, and ask for advice on how to improve your products and your customer service efforts. And when you get answers, highlight the people and companies that are helping you. Give them credit, thank them, make them feel acknowledged, and they’re likely to share the experience with their friends both online and off.

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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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Creating a Public Facebook Page

Unlike a Facebook profile, where you establish two-way relationships with friends and typically limit access to those people, Facebook Pages are public facing and allow anyone to be a “fan” without the need to reciprocate the relationship.

Many of the features are similar to profiles – you can fill out information about your business, share photos, and update your status. However, the fact that it’s public offers a number of bonuses. For one, you can easily market your page’s URL (and vanity urls, e.g. facebook.com/yourname, are rumored to be in the works) and let people become “fans” without providing them with access to your personal Facebook profile. Moreover, Facebook is increasingly giving prominence to Pages in user’s News Feeds – what they see every time they login – meaning your updates will be visible to your Fans there.

Publishing Useful Content to Your Page

Similar to a company blog or website, your Facebook Page can be used to share useful information with your Fans. The idea here though is to not be overly self-promotional, using the “Write Something” feature to broadcast not just news and promotions for your business, but also links and information that your Fans might find useful. Remember, these updates show up on your Fans’ homepages. Like any form of marketing, if you create too much noise without providing value, they’ll opt out.

Marketing Your Profile Offline

One of the more interesting recent developments with Facebook Pages is the ability to let customers become fans of you with a text message. The way this works is that customers text message the name of your business to Facebook’s short code (FBOOK – 32665). That means you can include this prompt in all of your offline marketing, whether it’s business cards, signage, flyers, a TV commercial, or just a casual conversation with someone. It has powerful immediacy, versus simply promoting the URL of your page.

Marketing Your Profile on Facebook

There are some free options for marketing your Facebook Page, like sending an invite to friends. However, if you want to do some targeted advertising for your Page, Facebook enables this too, letting you target an ad to very specific types of users (of a certain age, in a specific town, etc.) and encouraging them to become fans. In a sense, this type of marketing could have a greater ROI than anything else you try online. For example, versus getting a one-time click-thru to your company website from Google AdWords, if you’re able to get a Facebook Fan, it’s a potential customer you can engage with indefinitely – unless of course you do something that makes them opt out!

Cross-Promoting Your Facebook Presence

Finally, once you’ve mastered Facebook itself, make sure to include promotion of your Page in your traditional marketing, like your website, email newsletter, and 800 number. Depending on the medium, adjust your message accordingly – for example, on your 800 number, it’s probably best to promote the text message opt-in method versus reading out a URL.

Final Thoughts

While you’ve probably invested lots of money in developing an online presence, Facebook could be one of the most powerful mediums yet for your business. Many of your customers are already logging in every day, versus visiting your company website only when they need to. Moreover, it creates the opportunity for continual interaction with them, giving your brand mindshare and increasing the likelihood your customers will return to you time and time again.

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While posting a job to LinkedIn is similar to any other job website – adding details about the position, skills, and requirements – where the site separates itself is with company profiles, allowing you to provide potential candidates with a lot more information about your company and the people that work there.  Here’s how they work and how to set one up:

1. To get started, go to the “Companies” menu on LinkedIn.  From there, select “Add Company”

2. Enter basic information about your company, like its description, number of employees, and industry it operates in.

3. Follow LinkedIn’s wizard for creating your company profile – you’ll be able to add a logo, locations, and a feed for your company blog.

Once you’ve completed LinkedIn’s steps for getting setup, your company profile will be available. Now is where it gets interesting though.  In addition to showing off the basic information you provided, LinkedIn will pull in data about your company from around the site.

So, for example, all of your job listings will automatically show up on your profile, along with links to the profiles of all current employees, former employees, new hires, and recent promotions.  LinkedIn also does analysis of your company and the connections that your employees have on the network.  For example, it will automatically calculate your company’s median age, top schools, and other companies that they are well-connected to.

As you can imagine, all of this aggregate data about your company gives potential candidates (as well as anyone else interested in your company) a lot of information to dive into and help determine if it might be a good fit for them.  And for you, once it’s setup, it all happens automatically as you and your employees use LinkedIn, though you can always make edits to your company’s basic profile information.

LinkedIn recently also added a premium product – Custom Company Profiles – that lets you add more features, like videos about your company and positions, interactive polls, and several customization options for recruiting.  These are worth considering for larger companies (they come at a price), but for small businesses, a basic LinkedIn company profile should be enough to add lots of efficiency to the recruiting process – both for candidates and for you.

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