All Required Ingrediants to Set Up Your Social Media/Web 2.0 Strategy

In his few recent past blog posts, Jeremiah Owyang has started building a baseline for what an excellent organization social media strategy should look like, what it should be build and based on. In essence, how to build you perfect ‘customer strategy’ mix.

What are the elements that make up a solid social media integration across the organization and products/services?

The Customer Front is clear:  listen and collaborate with the customer. The key question and focus is to understand your customer’s online social behavior. Owyang enphasises time and time again that the organization should generate a ‘Social Media Strategy’ and not a ‘Facebook strategy’ or a ‘Twitter strategy’ – an organization must find an encompassing formula to guide the organization on all these places. Knee-jerk reactions like ‘setting up a Facebook page’ without understanding your customer, wont get you far, although you need to be present on many platforms, you need to prioritize your efforts and understand how to approach each platform to maximize its benefits – if you don’t understand the medium and your audience, you could potentially hurt your brand.

Once you understand where your customers are in the Engagement Pyramid (see in the above link), you can know where to focus your efforts.

The Organization Front: 3 activities to focus on in the organization:

1. Social Readiness and Awareness – organizations should be coordinated around customer and technology understanding. Employees should all be involved and have an understanding of not operating from a reactionary place, but from a cross-org policy and understanding (what Owyang refers to as Fondling the Hammer). “80% of a companies success is getting their organization ready through the right roles, processes, policies, measurement, only 20% should be on tools. I’ll continue to talk about organizational readiness.”

2. Social Strategy – To ensure the above happens, a unified strategy should be created and communicated, based on your organization’s Socialgraphics, as researched and discovered in the customer front analysis.

3. Ensure Technology Support -as technology complexity increases, all supporting and involved rules around the product should be synced.

OK, how do you get all this to work? The next thing Jeremiah does is to break down the different advocacy and web 2.0 elements available to a company – Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing Initiatives.

Now that you have identified your audience, what their online behavior and preferences are, you can identify which are the initiatives that would serve them best, and maximize engagement. I would also add to that that educating your audience and hand holding/supporting them to step up the pyramid is highly recommended and rewarding. Some users want to be contributors, but are feeling insecure in the unfamiliar online world. Successful Products are build for both simple and sophisticated users. Successful Social Media and Community managers know how to identify potential leaders to create a safe environment for them to become more involved.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Slideshare: Social Media Trends for 2010 (web-strategist.com)
• Social Media Trends For 2010 Jeremiah Owyang (slideshare.net)
• Understanding Social Business – Webcast (radar.oreilly.com)

Tagged as: Altimeter Group, Business, conversational web, facebook, jeremiah owyang, jeremiahowyang, Mass media, Online Communities, Social Media, social media strategy, Social network, Technology, twitter, Web 2.0, web 2.0 strategy