Establishing Corporate Social Media

A New Medium

Think for just a moment if there were no TV or radio and someone called and asked if you would like to advertise on this new medium. Conceptually it has a nice ring to it. The ability to spread your message to many people and you can target what type of people will hear your message by delivering content to shows watched by certain types of viewers. Social Media is the next TV or radio. Again and again I hear people say that they don't understand Social Media. With this post we will break it down and develop a plan for your company to move into the Social Media medium.

Social Media explained

Think of social media as the next TV or radio. The only difference is no one is going to call and sell you ad space. You and your company will need to create the ad space. The ad space and message are delivered through communities. It is a blank slate for you to develop or move a community to and then deliver the message. The community hopefully accepts your message because it provides value to them. Who doesn't need a good widget at a fair price?

Plan Summary

Social Media should be treated as a big project within a company. It requires time and money to complete properly. The message that a company wants to send is already created, the message must now be transitioned to the Social Media community. As with TV, Print, and Radio is not the great splash of a "new campaign". There is the delivering small directed messages that the community accepts and then keeps delivering for you. It is the word of mouth selling that create a long term brand loyalty. For every campaign to create brand loyalty there needs to be a plan.

Plan Organization

The first step to the plan is to organize your communities by defining them. A basic definitions of communities for a corporation is:

• Consumers/Clients - Brand awareness, Brand loyalty, May be broken down by business unit
• Stockholders - Shareholder loyalty
• Internal - Recruitment, business continuance, retention

Within each defined class a community needs to be developed and a message needs to be delivered. It is possible that a community already exists for some of the defined areas.

The plan is now taking shape. Next create the phases of the plan for each of the defined groups and begin execution. At this point it is time to begin the effort of working stakeholders of the Senior Management team. The Senior management team will have concerns that need to be addressed and suggestions on what message they want delivered. This will influence your plan creation. A well formed plan will have the following phases:

1. Discovery/Creation - Begin to discover previously created communities and form new communities
2. Acceptance - Become accepted in the community by playing and active role in supporting other community members
3. Promotion - As the community sees the active role you can now provide your product or service as a benefit to the community
4. Measurement - Measure where your message is being seen and forwarded to. Seek to grow the community by bringing the extended community into your current one or join the extended community
5. Evolution - The commercial web is 10 year old social media is 3ish years old, grow with what's next

Managing the Stakeholders

With more marketers shifting to online, some departments within a corporation will say Social Media is the best thing to ever happen and there will be several departments that will resist the Social Media concept.
The first department to voice a concern will be the IT group. They are responsible for providing bandwidth for computing resource and making sure those resources stay up and running. The second will be from managers thinking this will be a time waster for employees. The response to these and the stakeholders is the Social Media Governance plan. The Governance plan should tie to the Employee policies. Employees are expected to have certain standards of conduct and the Social Media expectations are an extension of the same conduct outlined in the the Employee policies.

Social Media Project Execution

Now that you have effectively gained acceptance from the stake holders it is time to execute on your project plan. The project plan has continuous improvement built into it so an evaluation of current state and revisions will build your brand in the new media of Social Networking. What do you think?