Author: Chris Herbert, B2B Specialist & Founder of mi6
Audience: Executive Management professionals
If you’re a a member of the leadership team in your company, you’re probably looking for real world examples of how social media is being used. At this reasonably early stage in social media adoption for businesses, the more real world examples the better! Both good and bad!
You’re likely going to think about the costs associated to having a social media presence and what types of return you’ll get on your time, resources and financial investment. Wow, that’s a lot to think about!
You can start exploring this question by asking yourself: “to what extent should we participate if at all?”. Chances are pretty good that you should participate to some degree.
However, before you start tweeting, building a fan page and starting a blog, take a breath and start slow and start small. In fact, if you already are using social media, you may still want to take a breath.
Here are steps you can take as you suck on some oxygen:
- Become familiar with a social media framework. I like Forresters POST method, which they define as a “Systematic Approach to Social Strategy“. Marketing Sherpa recently introduced their ROAD Map to Social Marketing Maturity
- Go see if your customers are participating in social media now. Pick your top 20 accounts and contacts, then do a search on Google. Ask this question: is [name of company] on twitter? Do the exact same thing for your competitors. If they are, go and read about what they are tweeting. Maybe you’ll learn something about them, something that is important to you and your relationship or the competitive landscape in your industry.
- Now, go to Linkedin and search for key contacts in your industry and see if they have a Linkedin profile. If they have a profile give it a read and see if you learn something.
This may seem really simple, but if social media is new to you and your company trying this may be a good start. Even if you have been using social media, take a breath and give this a try.
- Study some social media frameworks like the POST or ROAD methods.
- Be smart and listen and watch what your customers and competitors are doing.
You’ll figure out eventually, what you should do in order to productively participate in social media land.
I recommend you read the book Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Lee. This book report on Groundswell may be useful as well.
Originally posted on The Social CMO
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree 100% We need to identify where our target “audience” is and how they are leveraging SM. If they are not on Twitter, then it should not be your focus or priority. I find that targeting LinkedIn groups that my customers/prospects are actively participating is a good way to start building a relationship and building trust. Thanks for puting SM into perspective.
I see so many professionals and small business owners get frustrated and feel overwhelmed by social media. Then they’ll do things like start blogs and Facebook pages without any idea what to do next. Strategy, strategy, strategy. Great post. I’m sure you’ve been in the same boat. Nevertheless, I’ve found that a lot of execs are afraid of this change and so they just want to pay someone to deal with it for them. The more afraid they are, the more money they throw at you to fix it but that’s not always the best solution. And, a side note to your target audience reading this, the good SMO (social media optimization) experts will never call themselves experts. If you meet a self proclaimed expert, proceed with caution. Thanks @b2bspecialist
Juliana, I think all of us can get overwhelmed by Social Media. We’re all new at this even the social media “A Listers” if there is such a thing. In fact I’m spending more time listening and learning from savvy business leaders regarding social media then the well know “gurus” out there who seem focused on getting paid to speak and start for fee discussion forums.
If the execs/business owners aren’t actively involved with their company’s social media initiative they should be. They’re oversight and involvement is necessary and paying someone to deal with it is a flag.
What I try to do with clients is show them how to use social media, do some of it for/with them and over a six month time frame (ideally less) integrate social media activities into the owners business. This may mean s/he delegates the tactical implementation of social media “stuff” into work flow/habits but s/he must look at it strategically.
Linda, thanks for the tip regarding Linkedin. I agree with you. I’ve seen some people giving really good advice in Linkedin groups. I have noticed some folks seeding groups though with “leading discussions”. They post the same question in multiple groups of which I’m a member. This feels a bit spammy and doesn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about their intentions/motivations.
Each member of a Linkedin group should think about what they can bring to the group as opposed to what they can get out of it. This is hard for many of us to do because practical thinking says “what’s in it for me”. I think over time though better, stronger and more relationships are built using this approach then the “leading discussions” approach.