The post title is cheeky, yes; but this one incredibly true. The more we see members implementing a social media strategy, the wider the gap grows between success and failure – and along with that, the attendant risks of failure. For those looking simply to make the social media case, failure means another year lost while consumers and technology forge ahead. For those making social media a central part of the customer experience, failure means massive personnel costs that could have been spent on tried-and-true techniques. So without further ado, the top ten list:
1. Savvy social media-ites can cite their business objective clearly and succinctly. All members of the social media team know what their efforts are designed to achieve.
2. You’ve made principled decisions on your target audience. You know which customer segment to pursue and what social media vehicles they’ve adopted.
3. You know your customers’ outcomes and how social media facilitates the achievement of those outcomes better, faster, and cheaper than other methods.
4. You act on the intersection of customer outcomes and your organization’s broader unique strengths, creating strategic social media advantage within your competitive set.
5. Fast-cycle test-and-learn experiments comprise your tactical social media endeavors. Each experiment is hypothesis-led.
6. The team holds hands and pre-commits to next steps based on each social media experiment’s result. This facilitates buy-in upfront and limits time lost to analysis paralysis post-experiment.
7. Teams lay out required resources for each experiment to boost transparency for budget owners and pave the way for measurement clarity.
8. With ROI still a mirage for many, social media winners link transactional metrics to attitudinal and behavioral objectives that the broader organization knows have an impact on financial performance.
9. Social media teams don’t hide the ball. They are upfront with the risks each project faces, and utilize RACI methods to mitigate them.
10. Social media teams tell other marketing teams how much more fun they’re having working on this topic. What, you thought all ten were going to be serious? And I’m only somewhat kidding.
MLC Members can put these 10 habits to work in our upcoming workshop in Dallas, Texas on Thursday, March 4th. You can register here. In this workshop, you’ll actively develop your company’s social media strategy based on these proven best practices, with facilitation by MLC experts and input from your peers. If you’re responsible for social media initiatives and execution at your organization, this is an event not to be missed. We look forward to seeing you there.
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on 10 February 10
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Although a little toungue-in-cheek, point 10. is actually fairly important.
Creating a buzz about social media offline has helped me get buy-in from our department and things have suddenly got moving.
on 12 February 10
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I would also include FOCUS, important to stay on the subject you know best and not to stray as the audience may get confused or take you down a route that is different from your objectives and strategy. It could be tagged along side point 1.
on 12 February 10
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Doug, great points. One of the most important elements that I see here is the idea of experimentation and testing. When marketers venture into unknown territory it is important that they approach it as an experiment – and enroll their partners and internal customers in the journey.
on 20 April 10
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[...] a sucker for top ten lists – world’s busiest airports, tallest buildings, largest bankruptcies, habits of effective social media marketers (ok, the last was just a shameless plug). Yet there’s one list each year that always piques my [...]
on 6 April 11
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[...] Link to commercial value, but protect the golden eggs. Our advice for social media marketers applies here, too: great corporate community managers can cite their [...]