Defining an enterprise social media strategy

A successful social media strategy begins with just that, a strategy. There is a non-trivial amount of technology at play here, and before wading into the deep end of social media, it is imperative that you have a clear understanding of your objectives. To begin:

1)Set a strategy. What are your long-term and short-term objectives for social media interaction? Are you looking to use a more nuanced social media capability to gain market share, expand against your current user base, or gain a stronger grasp of how to engage customers through a deeper understanding of what they are interested in based on their group dynamic? How are your customers likely to react to more focused attention from you, particularly in a public venue? Does this need socialization prior to implementation? What are your measures for success? How will you know when you’ve accomplished your goals? At what point do you begin adjusting variables, how will you adjust them, and which variables are likely to be most important?

2)Determine the stakeholders. Given the insight social media can deliver to your organization, the number of groups who are going to have an interest is likely to expand from your current operational model. This can include marketing, sales, customer support, merchandising (if applicable), operations, IT, etc. Each will have an interest in gaining a deeper perspective into how to use social media to interact meaningfully with their particular facet of customer engagement, and each is going to have a particular set of data requirements and reporting needs. Get your ducks lined up before your start moving, and once the process starts expect to adjust as you gain clarity into what works and what doesn’t.

3)Study the current level of performance of your existing social media initiatives. How much detail do you have on your existing social media initiatives? Are you able to measure beyond Likes and Retweets? What does the current data tell you? Are you finding a measureable level of success (or perceived success) with your existing initiatives? Helpful hint: before implementing an integrated social media strategy, create a starting frame of reference based on your existing social media initiatives. This will give you something to point back towards (“look how much we improved!”); a fully integrated social media strategy will always have a positive effect on your marketing performance; you want to be seen as the person responsible for making it happen.

4)Examine the current set of variables that can be used to drive segmentation. How many variables are you able to track across different social media groupings of information? The other issue to consider is that there are variables that may be in separate silos that could be incredibly useful for purposes of analysis. Questions you should be asking include:

a)What is the current marketing and/or CRM system of record, what relevant information is in there, and how easy is it to access the data?

b)Where do you track customer support requirements? Customers who are active in social media are already leaving a wealth of details in their wake which can be used to personalize customer support interactions.

c)Are you able to tie social media interaction driven by in-line posts into your customer’s profile? When they receive a communication from you and respond or engage, are you able to capture and track interaction information on the event, and can it be tracked as part of the user profile to driven content optimization?

d)What level of detail can you pick up from mobile social behavior? The beauty of mobile social is knowing when and where to reach out to people in the context of a peer group. A customized and well-timed social communication mapped to the user’s physical location can drive a serendipitous interaction. Don’t just satisfy your customers, delight them.

e)Are you able to assign attribution from social media and map that to your outbound customer engagement strategy?

f)What level of detail are you able to gain from your merchandising system? Do you know who bought what when and is there any corollary data in social media that ties to the purchase event? Look for longer term patterns that allow you to anticipate their next move with high confidence, which can subsequently be driven by social media interactions.

g)How can you integrate this initiative with existing Behavioral Targeting, or Collaborative Filtering or Predictive Modeling, etc. applications?

Social media strategy planning is not difficult, but it is complicated. While the variables that drive social media are constantly shifting, the core elements addressed here are going to be pretty constant, and should provide a consistent framework for execution.