5 Steps For Steering Rolling Boulders (and your Social Media activities)

So how do you guide the Rolling Boulder of social media? In my last post I covered why marketers have lost control of their brands. Now what? First, lets take the "glass is half-full" approach. As a marketer, you may have lost some control, but you now have significantly more tools to get your message out than ever before. If you are a corporate exec, you are closer to your customers and you can get much more info from them real-time. Great - now let's talk about how you can implement a social media program and steer the online conversation.

As a framework for your social media program, I suggest using the 4 steps of "OMMI" + 1 bonus rule. OMMI stands for "Objectives - Measures - Methods - Initiatives".  Let's see how OMMI translates into practise:

1. Set Your Social Media Objectives

Unless you know what you want to achieve, you social media initiatives will drift. So, determine your Objectives first. Naturally the objectives or a well established consumer brand will be quite different from those of a marketing agency or "brick and mortar" business.

Here's are some examples: I am working with two very different companies on their social media programs; a growing industrial equipment company and an international child safety products company. The industrial equipment manufacturer has the following two social media Objectives: (1) establish themselves as "the most innovative company in their segment", and (2) build their online brand presence for their target demographics. In contrast, the child safety products company's objectives are: (1) any time somebody researches "car seats", they want feedback on their products from across the web to show prominently in the search results, (2) any valid, negative online feedback of their products need to be addressed with a company comment, and (3) they want their brand to be associated with being the safest seats out there.

2. Identify how you will Measure success.

Tracking your efforts using KPIs to quantitatively measure your progress is critical. The effectiveness of different Social Media mediums need to be evaluated using different metrics. If you aren't sure which KPIs to use or don't have the resources, consider a specialty analytics agency like Maass Media.

As you experiment and iterate, you will generate quantitative data and be able to refine your campaigns to increase demand, increase satisfaction, reduce costs, etc. It is quite likely that your KPIs will evolve over time as well.

3. Implement the Methods (People, Process and Technology) to achieve the Objectives.

Identifying all the possible Methods for managing your social media activities is beyond the scope of this post, but here are a handful of conversation starters:

Technology
There are a variety of different technologies that can be deployed to enable and monitor your social media initiatives. In fact, some of the technologies will be part of your social media campaign. This posting can't cover all the different technology components, but there are a few "minimum requirements":

To track your metrics you need tools for Monitoring and Measuring

• Omniture or Google Analytics for your website visits, blogs and microsites. They also can be used to track which social media outlets are driving the most site visitors
• Twitter Search allows you to search for keywords or phrases. You can also setup realtime alerts using tweetbeep when someone mentions your particular keyword/phrase/product/etc
• Google Alerts allow you to setup your Dashboard widgets and emails to track your particular keyword/phrase/product/etc
• Track everything in one place with Squidoo's - Brands In Public tool
• Monitor with services like Nielsen's Blog Pulse

To drive the conversation you need tools for Community Engagement (beyond the social media sites themselves)

• Get creative and co-opt the conversation - build plug-ins and widgets that your customers can embed in their blogs. For example, Huggies released a “Baby Countdown” widget for customers to add to their desktops. Guess what brand of diapers they will be thinking about when they go to make a purchase.
• Timberland built an iPhone app that has a compass, click to talk, provides trail maps and other cool stuff that reinforces their brand using social media. 
• The American Cancer Society has a Facebook page with over 1 million fans that participate in their promotions. Don't want to build the promotions yourself? Use Wildfire to do the heavy lifting for you.

To make it easier to contribute to the conversation you can use Social Media Enablement tools like:

• TweetDeck
• Hootsuite
• BigTweet

Process
Your Social Media activities cannot be addressed ad-hoc. There has to be a structured, process-centric approach. From a process standpoint, there are proactive and reactive components that need to be addressed:

• Proactive Actions - establish the tasks that need to be performed on a consistent, scheduled basis. For example, weekly blog posts, daily comments on industry articles, hourly Tweets and periodic LinkedIn answers to industry relevant questions.
• Reactive Actions - establish how negative issues will be addressed and then implement a process to make sure that plan is followed. For example, if there are customer complaints, what's the decision tree cycle on when to respond and how to respond to the complaints. You might not want to respond to all online complaints individually (that would circumvent your customer support processes), but if there are a lot of similar issues, use a template response to ensure consistent communication. You could even host a community forum with a recorded video (on YouTube of course) to discuss how the issue is being addressed. 

People
Social media (guiding the boulder) is NOT just a marketing and PR function. Let me repeat.....social media is NOT just a marketing and PR function. It is a corporate function. Product Management must take customers feedback and incorporate it into the product, Support must know about issues and work to proactively resolve the issues, Finance (if publicly traded) should know about the online buzz as well. Marketing must be the leader however.

So, to be successful, you need to build an organization that can manage your social media processes and respond to changing dynamics. Each company will need to figure out which structure meets their own needs best - whether its a Chief Community Officer and a team of Social Media Ambassadors, whether it is 100% outsourced (which I don't recommend), or some other structure, there needs to be an organizational mindset that goes beyond just marketing and PR.

4. Initiatives
We are so early in the Social Media cycle that there are no right or wrong approaches. However, if you don't get started, execute on a few initiatives and learn from your own results (?mistakes?) your learning curve will just get steeper and steeper.  Like any initiative, track success against your metrics and aim to get 360 degree feedback from customers, employees, partners and pundits. Then evolve your campaigns and processes based on the results, experimenting and testing is a lot cheaper online than offline - do it.

And finally, Rule #5 for guiding your Social Media initiatives: Be Excellent

Lastly, but probably most importantly, BE EXCELLENT. As with all great brands and reputations, excellence is critical. It doesn't matter how much you invest in guiding the online conversation, if your product or service in not excellent, you will not be able to succeed. With social media your strengths are magnified, but so are your weaknesses.

Reinforcing this idea of Excellence as the foundation of social media comes from online guru Dave Evans: "... Marketing sets the expectation, marketing creates demand, marketing helps a consumer differentiate why one choice is better than another choice. Operations delivers. Any gap between the two drives a conversation on the social Web."

If your product or service is not excellent, the conversation can quickly turn into an incident.

The Bottom Line: We are very early in the social media lifecycle and there are no industry wide best practises. So, experiment, iterate and chart your own course.