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Plan to be Social in 2007:
Strategies for implementing social media for enterprises

Kimberly Kay Dillon, Channel Manager and Marketing Associate

Last year was the year of Social Media. Many of us went to "unconferences" and workshops on Google Page Rank, blogging, and the power of YouTube. Grandmothers got MySpace pages and students got jobs by posting video resumes on Facebook. While we were excited as consumers on the internet, much of the corporate world was just watching and waiting to see how it would all play out. Now in 2007, companies want skin in the game. The question today is now, how do we implement a blog, a podcast, a wiki, a social network that is viable in an enterprise setting? Social media has progressed from water cooler conversations to actual line items in marketing budgets across the country. But as we have learned from past experience, you just can’t deploy something today and wish for good results tomorrow. Instead, there needs to be a social media plan that includes business objectives, achievable goals and an understanding of key metrics in which to measure success. The rest of this article will walk through some key considerations in developing a social media strategy in 2007.

It starts with a point of view. What is your organization’s stance towards social media? Do you embrace it? Can employees have personal blogs that reference work? Is social media an internal or an external initiative? How will your organization deal with both the positive and negative reactions that will happen when you embrace the social web? Having a point of view is a critical starting point to introducing social media into your organization. Many organizations are beginning to implement policies that outline their stance on the personal use of social media and the larger corporate plan on social media. Some things to cover in a social media policy include the type of information employees can share and what should remain confidential, the stance on the personal use of social media during working hours and guidance on how certain job roles should use social media as part of their responsibility. It is important that all members of the organization are aware of the strategy because while the benefits of social media are numerous, organizations still need to be cognizant on issues such as confidential information, defamation and intellectual property. Like any other change management issue, roll out your social media initiative to key people in your organization in a soft launch, allowing you to work through issues and appoint cheerleaders to keep the ball rolling.

In order to keep that ball rolling, it is important to have clear business objectives that outline your motivations for embracing the social web. One of the beautiful things about Web 2.0 is that the tools are easy to use and are relatively inexpensive. However, that does not mean you should just post a blog or a wiki for the sake of it, and in fact this is one of the key reasons why business blogs fail. In order to launch a successful blog, wiki or podcast, there needs to be a plan that outlines your objectives and strategies. So what are some key objectives? If your objective is to improve internal communication among project teams, then your focus could be starting and nurturing the adoption of a wiki that empowers employees to collaborate and communicate. (Learn more about Cisco's Wiki) Or perhaps an objective is to provide a forum to test new product ideas amongst a loyal user group, then you could create a place for users to interact with your brand's latest launch and provide feedback and suggestions in a blog or a social network of sorts. (Check out Zdnet's product tester position) Whatever your objectives are, it’s important to be clear to understand the "why" behind your efforts.

If your objectives give you an understanding of the "why" behind your efforts, goals provide the benchmark in which you measure success. Goals should be something that you can achieve, track and then report against. By setting goals, you can determine if your campaign was successful and then make changes and adjustments as needed. Some standard social media goals include:

Develop an interactive community with an average of 5 posts, comments, or uploads per user per week

Position ourselves as thought leaders in our industry by building a collection of white papers, resources, and podcasts

Create a forum and a dialogue on the social issues that are impacting our industry

Educate our customers on our products and create brand loyalty by providing a space to network with peers

Goals should always be evaluated and monitored throughout your campaign. This allows you to reflect on successes and failures. Social media is a very fluid medium, meaning that changes are easy to implement. By constantly testing and tweaking, you can optimize your efforts in achieving your goals.

Just like with the web analytics reporting that is done for your website, analyzing key metrics is a critical component of your social media campaign. On the quantitative side, key metrics can include blog traffic, press mentions, search engine positioning and conversions. Charlene Li of Forrester Research recently published a great piece on determining the ROI of blogging, which outlines the metrics used in a variety of industries to calculate ROI. If your goal was thought leadership, tracking your TrackBacks will show you if you are a conversation starter in the blogosphere, or perhaps you measure how often your case studies are downloaded and disseminated over the web. On the qualitative side, you will want to know what people are saying about you in their comments and on their own social media platforms. Several organizations, actually have teams dedicated to monitor the web and they actually respond to both negative and positive comments in open forums. There are no hard and fast metrics for measuring comments on the web, so determining what metrics matter to you will be a part of your plan.

So here's the deal, even if you are not directly involved in social media, you are still involved. Users are still talking. . . with or without you as evidenced by this site. Even if you are not participating yet, you should begin to strategize on how your organization will respond to both positive and negative social media responses. Even better yet is to start the steps to engage your employees and your users in a more powerful collaborative experience.