Increasingly, large and small organisations, are talking about using social media, typically in the context of a specific service/application they have heard of such as Facebook, Twitter etc. As with any software system or service, in order to get the most benefit from it, it is important to have a strategy in mind beforehand.

When the term ‘strategy’ is mentioned, images of volumes of work or endless meetings come to mind. However, a strategy is simply a plan of action to achieve a particular objective and in this post I would like to write about the various components of such a plan and the possible objectives to be achieved. The approach that I will use to completing such a strategy is the iterative ‘Plan – Do – Check – Act’.

What is social media?

Social media is generally regarded as content that is created and read online using accessible technologies such as Twitter or RSS readers and publishing channels such as blogs, websites etc. With the increasing range of online publishing technologies, People can now not only read, but also comment and publish information relatively easily, thus increasing the access to information on an increasing range of topics.

With the appropriate focus and co-ordination, this ease of circulating and sharing information can bring practical business benefits. The first step in the co-ordination is agreeing the right objectives.

And the objective is….

In undertaking to use any technology or methodology, an organisation should have an objective(s) in mind to help provide a focus and to be able measure progress and ultimate success.
Reading the above definition of social media, there are numerous potential objectives that could be chosen where the use of social media could be very useful in achieving success. I would like to focus on two potential examples that demonstrate internal and external benefits for an organisation;

• Group collaboration


Group collaboration

The use of social media to ensure sharing of information within an organisation on key products or services so that less experienced staff can have queries answered by experienced staff. Metrics such as customer satisfaction, staff performance and the turnaround of customer queries could be used to measure this type of objective.

• Influence and increase awareness

The use of social media to advertise key products/services and to influence customer’s perception. Organisations can use social media proactively to respond to customers’ needs and/or comments. With such an objective, success could be measured by increase in sales, market awareness or customer satisfaction.

The setting of objectives and metrics completes part of the ‘Plan’ step in our iterative process.

And the strategy is…..

In this section I would like to discuss key steps that should be included in the roll out of a social media strategy, to form the reminder of the ‘Plan – Do – Check – Act’ of our iterative cycle.

The remainder of the ‘Plan’ step is focused on how these objectives will be achieved with the identification of the appropriate workflows and technology. Taking our two objectives above as an example;

• If you wish to improve group collaboration, one of the processes/workflows could be around the raising of queries by staff to nominated experienced staff and access to all queries that have been already answered. The use of appropriate technology could include the use of blogging or wiki software with defined access and administration levels.
• If you wish to influence customers, you may want to be aware of any aspects of your products/services that are being discussed by customers or potential customers in online sites and have an agreed process to respond to any queries. In deciding on the response, it is important that the staff who will be responding are trained and experienced in dealing with customers, so that their response is professional and informative.
  With the influence objective, it is important to identify the online sites that you may wish to monitor as this will have a bearing on the appropriate technology to use. For example, there are search facilities in a number of Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, Spaz or Hootsuite that enables you to see if particular phrases are being mentioned in tweets. Another option could be the use of an RSS reader such as Google reader or SharpReader to aggregate information feeds from commentary websites that you wish to track for comments on your products/services.

The Do step then involves the rollout of the necessary workflows and technology with appropriate training for all the relevant staff. The rollout can start on a pilot basis with a limited range of products/services and then be increased as staff get familiar with the new workflows and technology.

Checking how our strategy is working

The Check step of your strategy involves a monitoring function, whereby you are observing the ‘traffic’ that is being generated by your strategy. With reference to our objective on improving collaboration, it is possible to measure what products or services are generating the most queries or searches of the knowledge base or which staff is asking the most or least questions using a combination of search queries and results reporting. This can be incorporated with staff feedback on how beneficial or otherwise they are founding the collaboration exercise and the technology that is being used.

Looking at the objective to influence customers, the monitor component will be important in tracking the further responses from customers to your initial response to any comments on your products/services as well as tracking what products or services are attracting the most or least commentary. This monitoring can be extended to look at the amount of commentary on competitor’s offerings or general requests from people unaware of your products/services that are looking for assistance.

Acting on the feedback

Finally, in spirit of ‘Plan – Do – Check – Act’, the Act step involves reviewing and analysing the metrics and feedback from your new workflows to assess what further changes are required.

For example, with the collaboration objective, you may find that some of the staff who were new to your product/service range are now quite experienced and can assume responsibility to respond to queries of less experienced staff. Similarly due to the volume of queries of particular product/services, you may wish to update the staff training to concentrate more on those products/services that are causing the most queries.

With reference to the objective to influence customers, one obvious follow-up action would be change aspects of the product/service range that are attracting the most negative comment and to demonstrate that the changes are as a result of customer comments.

As I said at the start of the post, the Plan – Do – Check – Act is an iterative cycle and that means ongoing improvements to how social media are being used by your organisation and possibly extending the scope in which it is being used (once you’ve set your objectives and metrics).

In a future post, I plan to write about some case studies which show the practical benefits of social media for businesses. In the meantime, here is an interesting post on preventing social media flops by creating a sound strategy.