How To Build A Successful Social Media Strategy

I've attended several sessions of the Social Media Success Summit 2011 and I have many take-aways, a note-book full of notes as well as lists of new tools to try out and people to contact on Twitter.

I also recently read an amazing book, The Now Revolution and one of the 2 writers, Jay Baer did a bonus session for the #SMSS2011 that was pretty much a summary of the book.
The session was called "8 steps to creating a winning social media strategy" and the points and slides are so straight on, 100% true and valuable that to literally remember every single word I need to write down my bullet points from this presentation.

First of all, it's what you do with social media that counts, not whether you have a FB page or Twitter account. Maybe in Spain this is extra interesting considering so many brands now are in panick mood "WE NEED TO BE ON FACEBOOK".
Important to remember too is that the tools ALWAYS change. We have no idea what will be the biggest social media platform in 3 years from now. Better not focus our strategy on Facebook or Twitter but instead how to create a scalable and sustainable social media plan.

Build an good team. A cross functional team from every corner of your company. Involve the most passionate people, to know and do social media well you need to genuinely love it.

Listen
Find the conversations taking place about your brand. What's being said about you AND your competitors? What's the sentiment? Do people love or hate your brand? What's the share of voice? Do we find 100 conversations about yoghurt where 43 of them are about our yoghurt company and 57 are about YoPlait, well then we have a 43% share of voice.
How? Google search or Social Mention are two ways I have personally used this.
Who is talking? Does Mr X who talk bad about us have 4 or 4 million followers? This makes a big change.
How? I use Exportly and I'm planning on trying out 1Influence soon too.
Where are people talking? Forums? Facebook? Twitter? Blogs?
How, millions of tools, everything from expensive professional tools like Radian6 and Meltwater Buzz to medium size tools like Trendrr or Exportly or many of the free tools like technorati, blogpulse, socialmention or icerocket.

What's the point?

I have written about this before but I will repeat. Are we trying to create Awarness for our company or product?
Are we trying to increase Sales?
Or, are we trying to increase the orders of our existing customers and make people come back to us? Then Loyalty is our point.

Jay tells us to pick ONE and focus on that point.

Now, who is our audience?
If we are trying to increase awareness then we should probably focus on the people who may have heard of our brand or maybe not even that. People who have yet to make a purchase. These people need to be influenced, informed and we need to wake up the curiosity within them to check us out more.
If Sales is what we are going after then we should try to find the audience who have possibly made a purchase or two and introduce more products to them.
And if Loyalty is what we are interested in here then we should find the brand advocates and contact with them.
The secret is to move the unaware people to the awareness and those to sales and then make them into loyal customers.

How do our audience use SM?
Are they creators? Bloggers, status updaters, critics, collectors, joiners and spectators (largest groups) or inactive people?
This helps us know where we should look on the web.
This tool is great to learn What's The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers?
http://forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html
Why is this important to know? Well if you live in Japan and you wanna market to 55 year old women, then this too can tell you they are probably NOT creators which means it will make ZERO sence to launch a video contest asking the customers to create a video.
We have to give our audience the appropriate social media assignment.



Next thing Jay talks about is another thing I have mentioned many times and I will be happy to repeat this.
Don't talk about your product all the time. Brands talk way too much about themselves and my newsfeed and yours is being bombarded with mk messages.
Instead find a way to communicate the soul of the company, humanity, storytelling and bring some type of extra value to your customers.
The fight for attention on SM is fierce already, imagine what it will be like in 2 years from now when every company will have a social media presence...

Select Outposts
WHERE are you going to participate. Facebook? Blog? Youtube? Twitter? Linked In?
Select a home base, usually this is the website.
The goal should be to move people from outposts to home base.

Success metrics
If Awareness is our point then total mentions, Facebook fans or search volume could be some metrics.
if Loyalty is what we're looking for then we could see how customer service service through twitter is functioning and we will be measuring how many customers return to us.
If Sales would be the objective then metrics such as redemptions from exclusive offers through Twitter could be interesting to measure.Tweet