Social Media Strategy Fundamentals, Social Business and the Digital Agency Client Relationship

The Transformation to Social Business
Social media has become an integral component of the modern marketing mix. And social as a channel for communication, innovation and customer service has the opportunity to transform how brands conduct business.

However, the concept of “social” and what it offers for business growth, innovation and customer relationships is far bigger than simply “social media”. Social media is simply part of a larger transformation happening in business today. When building the right social strategy for your brand, consider what social business might enable for your organization.

To leverage the opportunities afforded by social business transformation, brands need to recognize that: 

• Social properties are part of a connected digital eco-system and cannot be treated as isolated islands; customers expect an integrated experience. 
• Customers are more than ever in discovery mode and content distributed through social channels empowers the customer discovery journey. 
• Social technologies enable brands to uncover powerful customer insights not available through other research methods. 
• Social media will only amplify the truth about a bad product or service. Make sure you build great products and services first, then amplify them through social. 
• Innovation around products and services can come from anywhere. Employees, customers, partners AND those responsible for product development. Social technologies often enable innovation at greater speed. 
• To realize the most value from social engagement, brands must be present in and listen to online dialogue on a consistent basis. 

In order to build momentum and acceptance with your social business agenda, it’s best to take a pragmatic approach to social media. With respect to managing ongoing programs, evaluate your needs based on the stage of sophistication of your social initiatives.

For example, listening on a consistent basis for conversation around your brand and products is a fundamental building block. Beyond this, evaluate your programs based on your social mix. 

• Are you managing a presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube?
• Maintaining a corporate blog?
• Running a brand-sponsored community?
• Have you created relationships with bloggers or other online influencers?
• Do you have an internal social community to connect employees and drive business innovation?
• What else is part of your social mix?

From an agency perspective I’ve supported clients in many ways, including being the voice of the brand on external social properties, acting as the eyes and ears to regularly listen for opportunities and threats. At a certain point of program growth though it makes sense for brands to have a dedicated employee or more to support the continued nurturing and growth of social programs, along with your agency partner.

On a very practical level, when an agency is engaged in supporting a client with social programs, regular and frequent communication between agency and client-side teams is important to being as proactive and responsive as possible.


Social Media Plans and Deliverables

Let’s start by acknowledging that there are different levels of plan depending on your situation and business needs. For example, a holistic social media plan would encompass a wide range of properties, tactics, campaigns, programs, integration points, measurement criteria and so forth. An outline for a holistic social media plan might look like this: 

1. Objectives 
2. Social Channel Mix 
3. Foundational Programs 
4. Measurement Approach 
5. Immediate Action Plan 
6. Short-Term Action Plan (next 3-6 months) 
7. Longer-Term Action Plan (Next 6-12+ months) 
8. Appendix 

Whereas a social media plan for a specific advertising campaign or even for a presence on a specific property such as Facebook or Twitter would be more focused in its substance. That said, broadly speaking there are 12 important questions to consider when developing a social media plan, the answers to which will provide the inputs for the substance or your plan, they are: 

1. What’s our strategic vision and business goals for social? 
2. What does integrating social mean for our organization? 
3. From a marketing and operations perspective where does social fit? 
4. What are realistic objectives to pursue? 
5. What's our social channel mix? 
6. What role does each social channel serve and what's our approach to each? 
7. How will we measure success? 
8. What content should we invest in? 
9. What else should we invest in? 
10. How do we get people to share? 
11. What's the 90-day plan? 
12. What's next on the 12-month horizon? 

Example Social Media Strategy Approach
As a caveat, any recommended strategy should be based on research-driven customer insights, the outcome of collaboration between agency and client teams and competitive analysis, but sometimes you’re missing that, so here’s a straw man you can use as a start.

Let’s use the following criteria to think through developing a social media plan:

Objectives
“Sales growth through transactions at retail locations, both corporate and franchise stores, as the primary objectives, followed by brand awareness and affinity as secondary.”

Program Approach
One might consider the following elements as foundational building blocks for a social media strategy and set of initial tactics:

1. Shared vision amongst the executive team regarding the role of social for the brand and realistic understanding of the timeframes required to achieve results. 
2. Online community manager regularly monitoring brand properties and online conversation, multiple times per week. 
3. Using a professional grade listen tool to monitor conversation across blogs, forums, Twitter, online communities, Facebook, YouTube, etc. 
4. Signage at retail locations promoting the value and benefits of participation with the brand’s social properties. 
5. A presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 
6. A corporate blog. 

Beyond these foundational elements, as a first pass at relevant programs to pursue, you could consider the following tactical program elements: 

1. Seasonal campaigns and contests. 
2. Real-world events that are amplified through social broadcasting. 
3. Social advertising leveraging interest graph targeting. 
4. Invite-only customer product innovation community. 
5. Mobile check-in rewards program. 

With respect to evaluation criteria, for any program there will be both marketing metrics and business performance metrics. For example:

Marketing Metrics may include:

• Participation rate 
• Social reach 
• Amplification rate 
• Total program participants 
• Fan growth rate during and after program compared to baseline 
• New versus existing customers 

Business Metrics may include:

• Net new customers 
• Total sales 
• Incremental sales 
• Incremental profit 
• ROI 

How to approach integration across consumer marketing, customer service and corporate communications departments

It all starts with open communication and a culture of collaboration. If your organization is highly siloed and departments are used to protecting their turf, and therefore not sharing, these behaviors need to be addressed before you can effectively integrate departments for the purpose of a coordinated social strategy.

Assuming you have established a culture of collaboration and there is support from the executive level for pursuing a social business agenda, it often comes down to clearly establishing roles and responsibilities, appending those to existing job functions, providing incentive to share and collaborate rather than rewarding the hoarding of knowledge and information.

In addition to behaviors and acknowledged job responsibilities, there are tools that can help to coordinate participation by the right people in the right conversations. Many listening tools on the market today offer a social CRM and/ or engagement management set of features for routing, responding and tracking brand engagements with customers. It’s still important to remember though that the technology will not solve behavior problems. The right behaviors must be established, acknowledged and rewarded before you can benefit from process automation tools.


Content, Community and Influencer Outreach (Social PR)

Content and social media
Content is the lifeblood of social media and inbound marketing. If you are not willing to invest in the creation of original content, the repurposing of existing content, the curation of quality content and the intelligent distribution and publishing of content, then you’re missing a fundamental part of the equation for social media success. Content - quality, contextually relevant, timely content – is critical to the success of your social media programs. Plan for it.


FTC guidelines and how they impact influencer outreach programs
The FTC guidelines are common sense. They are not new rather they have simply been updated to incorporate guidance for social media since it did not exist when the guidelines were originally developed. So if you’re an honest, responsible marketer and advertiser who sells good products and services then the FTC guidelines should be nothing new or scary to you. On the other hand, if you’re a marketer and advertiser that has trouble with transparency, is trying to hide defects in your products and overall OK with being in the gray zone with communication, then you might have problems with the FTC guidelines.

With respect to influencer outreach programs, you as the brand are ultimately responsible for the legality of claims that your brand-supported influencers make on their blogs, in their tweets, on your Facebook page or anywhere else online. As such, the simple truth is that if you are planning to leverage and benefit from the voices of influencers that you have some known relationship with, you need to have clear policies that they agree to AND you as the brand must dedicate resources to tracking and managing what your influencers publish.

So in terms of the impact of the FTC guidelines on influencer outreach programs, the impact is that you as the brand need clear policies and you must dedicate resources to tracking and managing the programs. You simply cannot put an influencer outreach program on autopilot, you must remain involved to oversee and manage it.


Defining and determining “influence”
First off let’s start with the understanding that influence is a relative measurement. You must always ask yourself, influence relative to what?

Online influence and the ability to identify relevant online influencers for a brand, product or service is not only a hot topic in marketing today but also a field of measurement that is rapidly evolving as we continue to learn more. With the ability to observe connections between people and uncover individuals whose opinion matters within different spheres of conversation, services like Klout and Kred are giving marketers more sophisticated tools for analysis and interpretation of the ever-evolving social media landscape.

With this perspective, here’s a framework to evaluate and measure influence by three criteria: 

1. Topical: where someone has influence in a topic of content or expertise 
2. Temporal: where someone has influence within a defined span of time 
3. Identity-based: where there is life-style association and affinity amongst the audience and influencer 

As influence measurement tools become more sophisticated and accurate there will undoubtedly be new ways we’ll seek to quantify and quality influence that matters to a given brand.


Identifying influencers within various social media channels
Identifying influencers within social channels begins with defining a clear vision for the attributes of the people a brand is seeking as well as the actions the brand desires for the influencers to take on behalf of the brand.

With this, working with influencers is not simply a function of mathematical calculation, looking at whose numbers are best. Rather it’s a process of relationship building. And relationship building starts with getting to know people. If it’s Twitter then you may look at the subject matter a person is tweeting about, their follower to following ratio, the frequency of their publishing and also look at tools like Klout and Kred to get a directional sense for social reach and such.

In all cases look for people who have a contextually relevant audience of audiences that are associated with them through their social graph.

With respect to other social channels such as Facebook, YouTube, blogs, online communities and such, each channels has its nuances with respect to the granular data points that are evaluated, but the common thread is that you’re looking for people with an audience engaged with an influencer around topics relevant to the brand.


Outreach process for communicating with identified online influencers
Outreach begins with getting to know potential influencers through familiarity with their content. This means reading blog posts, Facebook updates, Tweets, forum entries, watching YouTube videos and so forth. Before approaching an influencer, you need to understand their perspective and be familiar with their content. This way you can be as relevant to them as possible. It’s important to keep in mind that there’s a value exchange that needs to take place when a person, identified as an influencer, agrees to act on behalf of a brand.

Once you have context and an angle to reach out, use channels such as email and phone as a primary means of contact but also use Twitter, blog comments and even a hand written note to make initial contact with people. Tailor ongoing communication with influencers by the level of participation in the influencer program.


Integrating influencer outreach with traditional communications and/or marketing campaigns
From a strategy perspective integrate influencer outreach with traditional communications and/ or marketing campaigns by using influencer content to engage people at points of interaction such as on landing pages, emails, integrated within online ad units and print communications.

Fundamentally it’s about finding ways to elevate the voice of real people to connect with others around the brand, it’s products and values. In addition coordinating real world events with online influencers can often be a great way to generate more online content and buzz. This includes contests with rewards for social sharing activity connected to your various key influencers.


Nurturing your relationships with influencers once an initiative is completed
Depending on the expectations you’ve established and what brand value exists for continuing to be involved with a given influencer, how you continue to invest in a program or individual will vary. Different influencers will impact your results but only once your program is underway can you see what’s really happening. Given this your initial plan may need to be fluid and change relative to different influencers. This will dictate whether you wind down or crank up a given influencer relationship per your original plan.


Content versus context
Great content, provided out of context will never be as successful as great content provided in context. It’s simply not one or the other; they are both extremely important in today’s world where there is often a high level of noise to filter out before we get to what we are seeking.

The key for brands is to figure out how to be contextually relevant and match the right content to the opportunity for interaction with the brand.

Given that as consumers and business people we are often online in a discovery mode, and it is content that we are ultimately seeking, the right context often leads us to the right content.

So in brief summary, make sure you’re building great content, that’s your entry ticket to the game. Work diligently to identify points of interaction where your content will be contextually relevant to a person. Continue to test and refine your contextual placements and content over time. And assume that continuous optimization is the new norm.