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    Strategically Social: A Real-World Roadmap to using Social Media to Improve and Grow Your Business
    Strategically Social: A Real-World Roadmap to using Social Media to Improve and Grow Your Business
    Strategically Social: A Real-World Roadmap to using Social Media to Improve and Grow Your Business
    Ebook193 pages2 hours

    Strategically Social: A Real-World Roadmap to using Social Media to Improve and Grow Your Business

    By Jan Hyatt

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    About this ebook

    Why is your company using social media? Have you defined your objectives, designed your strategy, crafted your message and changed your organizational culture? No? Then you need this book. You need to:

    1. Embrace a new social vocabulary.
    2. Understand why your social messages are being ignored.
    3. Find out why social influencers are as important as customers.
    4. Learn why you need a social map, and how to build one.

    This book doesn’t teach you how to build a marketing strategy, a product or a sales team. It doesn’t discuss theory or the history of social media. Many other books cover marketing in-depth or delve deeply into the technologies of social media – Strategically Social combines the two into a step-by-step workbook for you to use when defining and implementing a social media presence and a new company culture.

    Strategically Social shows you:

    1. The one step your company should take to distinguish itself on Facebook.
    2. How not to get lost in the Twitter universe.
    3. What steps to take to be noticed on LinkedIn.
    4. Why you don’t need to be a programmer or web designer to give your customers a great social experience.
    5. How to be sure you are ready as the social media world changes.

    The strategies in this book will work whether you are a small local mom-and-pop retailer, a national service provider, building the latest high-tech gadget or just a regular person trying to expand the audience reading your personal blog.

    Join me in building a social media campaign for a make-believe company trying to grow and another one preparing to launch a new product. See how other companies are stretching social boundaries and defining new rules. And hear from those living the social media life every day.

    “Social media is really not about marketing. A company strategically using social media will live socially. It will involve every employee and the marketing department will be just one cog in the wheel driving the social enterprise.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJan Hyatt
    Release dateAug 11, 2011
    ISBN9781465825117
    Strategically Social: A Real-World Roadmap to using Social Media to Improve and Grow Your Business
    Author

    Jan Hyatt

    Jan Hyatt is the owner of Unmatched Productions, LLC, a technology and business consulting company. For twenty years, she has used an extensive technical background and rare understanding of business to advise and assist companies of all sizes in aligning IT and business objectives.

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      Book preview

      Strategically Social - Jan Hyatt

      Introduction

      Is your company using social media? Do you have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a LinkedIn company page? Are you considering how to add Google+ to your social media landscape? If you don’t use social media, do you want to?

      While researching how companies are using social media, I asked each company I spoke with one question – what is the objective for your social media integration effort? In response, I consistently heard the same answers - from executives, marketing directors and social media designers:

      We need to drive people to our site.

      Our competitors are on Facebook, so we need to be too.

      We'd be missing a huge potential market if we weren't.

      And my favorite, from a web programmer who was setting up a Facebook company page:

      Our CEO said to put us on Facebook.

      In defense of this CEO (who leads a very successful e-commerce company), her request was in response to a member of her Board of Directors who asked why they weren’t on Facebook. She has since directed the marketing department to define a comprehensive social media strategy.

      Now, I think companies should want to build web traffic and should take advantage of the huge potential markets found at social media sites. To do this successfully, however, companies need to drill down further. They need to determine which people, specifically, they are trying to reach. They need to define what message they want to deliver to those people. They need to determine what part of that huge market they are targeting and how they will keep those customers. And most of all, they need to define their social voice – the voice their customers, followers and fans will hear and respond to.

      This book will explore how to intelligently, strategically integrate social media into a company’s advertising, marketing and operational plan. I will discuss methods you can use to capture and keep customers, to enhance and reinforce your brand and to position your company ahead of its competition. Regardless of the size of the company or what industry and market it serves, there is a social media strategy that can help you do all of this.

      In the infancy of social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, many companies embedded Follow Us links into web pages, many hired Social Media content writers and designers. This was a great start, but now you can take the next step! You need a targeted, thought-out, cohesive social media campaign given as much importance as anything else you do.

      This book does not replace a company’s advertising or marketing plan – it doesn’t cover product pricing strategies or corporate vision. Instead, this should be seen as a supplement to those plans. Highlights from real-world examples are used to show you the importance of a targeted social media campaign and concrete steps for implementing that campaign in any organizational mode: in a company of any size; in a company with a product or service focus; in a company for profit or non-profit; and even in a small internet-based business. This is a roll-your-sleeves-up and get-dirty effort, but well worth it!

      It’s not just about making Money

      If you’re in business to make money (who isn’t?), then, sure, this information will help you. But these strategies will also be effective for those using social media to share opinions, gather supporters, distribute information or publicize special events. The principles discussed here can be applied to every social media integration effort.

      Real-world Social Media Integration Examples

      Throughout this book, I will build social media strategies for fictitious companies that you can then use as an outline for your own plan. I will analyze companies that have used social media to improve communications, to generate excitement and to enhance internal operations. And I will talk to leaders in the social media world and find out how their experiences can help your company.

      So, are you ready to dig in and figure this out? Great!

      Social Media and the Internet – Changing the Marketing Paradigm

      Traditionally, marketing strategies followed a defined methodology – Target and Deliver. Companies targeted specific segments of a market, designed an advertising strategy for that market and delivered a message. Smart companies added a third phase to their strategy – retaining customers. Building brand loyalty and communicating with existing customers were seen as critical aspects of a complete marketing strategy.

      Traditional Marketing Methodology

      Today, many companies are approaching the Internet and Social Media in the same way. They design their websites and social media pages to appeal to a specific market and use those to deliver a certain message. Their Internet presence looks much like a sales brochure. The focus is on sending information out to their customers.

      Is that strategy wrong? No, not really, but it does limit a company’s ability to take advantage of the benefits the Internet and Social Media networks offer.

      A New Vocabulary

      The social media world makes use of a different vocabulary, a vocabulary focusing on interaction.

      Engage. Conversations. Nurturing. Share.

      Now that probably sounds like relationship mumbo-jumbo more suitable to a book for teenagers than a serious business strategy, right? Maybe so, but we can learn a lot from teenagers and how they use social media. Young people stay in touch with one another, share their successes, discuss issues, talk about their likes, dislikes and moods, search for jobs – any activity they have that involves interacting with others is often carried out on a social media network.

      Social Media networks are all about, well, being social. And to strategically use social media in your marketing efforts, your company needs to make a paradigm shift. You no longer build your product, target your market and deliver your message. Your main focus is on building a relationship with your customers.

      Social Marketing Methodology

      If you’re reading this book, hoping for a way to continue marketing as you have in the past and looking for instructions to magically layer social media on top of your current strategy, this is probably not the book for you! You, and your entire organization, need to alter your approach, your marketing mindset and your marketing vocabulary for this venture to be successful.

      A company strategically using social media will live socially. It will involve every employee and the marketing department will be just one cog in the wheel driving the social enterprise.

      This is a not a new concept! Ideally, companies have always understood the importance of engaging customers, fostering conversations and sharing information with them and then nurturing those relationships. The most successful companies have known this all along. They have marketing departments that define strategies and design campaigns, but the entire company is involved in the marketing process – they recognize that every employee and every action contributes to a company’s success. The rise of social media really has just enabled companies to see marketing in a new way and explore the benefits they can find there.

      A Strategic Approach

      A strategic social media integration effort also requires a strategic approach. Successful businesses approach every project in the same way:

      1. Identify objectives

      2. Define a strategy

      3. Implement the strategy

      4. Assess, modify and improve the implementation

      I’m a big proponent of the measure twice, cut once theory of project planning – plan everything up front and you’ll be more successful. You’ll see a good example of that in the upcoming section about building a social map. But however you describe it; proper, comprehensive planning facilitates success in any endeavor.

      That’s the approach you will take to become strategically social. You will understand and define your objectives, plan an achievable strategy, implement that strategy, then assess, modify, nurture and grow your social media presence.

      Social Media – Defining your Objectives

      Your company has defined goals – to increase your market-share, to build brand awareness, to sell more products, to enhance your reputation. A successful social media integration effort will align directly with those goals and have measurable objectives that clearly outline the specific results you wish to attain.

      But what is a measurable social media objective? Many companies express their objectives with numbers – number of followers, number of fans and number of subscribers. I’ve seen objectives like increase our Facebook fan base 20% by the end of the year, which is a nice objective, but what does it mean? You may have a large Facebook following just because you display humorous videos, but do those fans buy your product? Each objective should include three components – a measurement, a result and the part social media plays in that result.

      As you consider what your social media integration objectives are, ask yourself these questions:

      1. Who are you trying to reach? Who are your customers today? Who do you want as customers in the future?

      2. What product or service are you emphasizing? Your social media objectives may differ for each different product and service you offer.

      3. What messages do you want to deliver? How do you want people to see your company? What do you want them to remember after they interact with you? What do you want them to say to others about you? The social media world is a word-of-mouth advertising network on a grand scale. Think about the implications of this.

      4. What distinguishes you from your competition? Out of tens of thousands of companies, what makes you special and will entice someone to Like you or Follow you?

      5. How can new tools and platforms introduce efficiencies into your operation? Think about ways new communication methods can help you respond to customers more quickly, identify problems earlier, better focus your advertising dollars or streamline employee recruiting.

      6. How will you know if you are successful in delivering your message? How can you link page hits, number of followers and number of likes directly back to your objectives?

      You will probably find many similarities between your social media objectives and your general marketing objectives. That said, I don’t want to draw too many parallels between marketing and social media, as I believe a social media presence needs to be planned on a much broader scale for it to be successful. Social media can help you achieve your marketing objectives but can also help you achieve much more.

      So let’s walk through the process of building a typical social media objective, based on a common goal – customer retention. The first step is to define goals. Customer retention can mean many things:

      1. A previous purchaser purchasing additional copies of your product, an upgraded version, related products, other products you offer or accessories

      2. A customer extending or expanding a

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