Executing Your Social Computing Strategy

In our previous post, Assign a Social Media Monitor, we took a look at an important keystone of your social media strategy: social media listening. If you’ve followed all the advice in our previous posts, you’re finally ready to start executing your social media strategy.

Executing Your Social Media Strategy

“You’ve heard it said again and again, but I’ll say it again.
Companies don’t fail because their strategy is flawed.
They fail because their strategy execution is flawed.”

Jennifer Johnston Canfield

“Your social media strategy execution should be in line with the company innovation, future direction, reputation management, campaigns, customer satisfaction improvements, and social CRM.”

Debajyoti Banerjee

Yes, it’s true. The best strategy in the world is only as good as its execution, and that’s where many enterprises fall down. They may spend lots of resources creating a strategy only to have it sit in a binder, gathering dust on an executive’s credenza.

If you’ve been following along with these posts, by this time you’ve created your strategy or at least sketched it out. You may have begun listening, and perhaps measuring. Now it’s time for the rubber to meet the road. You’re ready to get started. But before you do, there’s one more task you need to complete: integrating your social media strategy and tactics with your other marketing and public relations efforts.

Some organizations get the mistaken idea that using social media means they should stop doing what they’re already doing. Far from it. You need to look at how your social computing efforts support your existing efforts.

The following are some suggestions for how you can integrate your social media efforts with your existing offline marketing and promotion efforts.

• If you send out direct mail, continue, and:
  • Add social media URLs to your materials along with a call to action such as: Follow us on Facebook; Watch our videos on YouTube; Get the latest info on Twitter
  • Create events to entice recipients to join you online
  • Invite your offline followers to a Tweetup,[1] where online followers can meet one another in person
• If you send out newsletters, continue, and:
  • Add social media URLs and enticements
  • Enable immediate action by making URLs clickable
• If you do real-world events, continue, and:
  • Add a real-time social media component
  • Allow virtual attendance
  • Webcams
  • Live tweeting and blogging
  • Use TweetWally[2] to project on a wall a live Twitter feed based on a hashtag

[1] HOW TO: Organize a Successful Tweetup: bit.ly/dpWPpx

[2] TweetWally: bit.ly/cdS1oM