Your 2010 Social Media Plan, The First 30 Days

Before you read this post I would encourage reviewing the starting point of this series.  If you have already read it you still may want to review again as I added a little more background and the comments for the first post are great.

Hey, you’re back already…. Good, you’re fast.  The last person took a lot longer.  Since you are fast, though, take a moment and make sure you’ve read the last post too as it focused on hiring your first social media employee.

Now, you have your new employee in place, you’ve read all the articles, what do their first thirty days look like?

How do they start out?

• To be honest with you, I went back and forth on this answer a dozen times, there are great arguments for either function to own it.
• Regardless of the team that this person reports into it, ensure that the person also reports in a dotted-line fashion to the other team.
• In the end I chose marketing because it is important that the person understands how to define and articulate a corporate voice, a corporate identify.
• At the same time this person must avoid the urge to generate leads, they must focus on helping existing customers, and potential new customers, in finding solutions.
• They are a corporate good citizen with a primary purpose of just helping.  Remember that I told you not to focus on ROI in year one?  You will see it but do not focus on it, not now.

Where do they start?

Repeat after me, this is not a sales role.  Repeat after me, this is a sales role.  While this person is not looking to sell externally they had better be good at selling internally.  In three months the CFO is going to be asking for results, the CIO will be trying to make the role more efficient, and the CMO will wonder why they haven’t had one good press release come out of this damn experiment.

Sit down with all teams and understand their needs and concerns.  Nothing in life is black and white, but, as a starting point, understand:

• Your CIO is concerned that you’re going to open up holes, leading to viruses, worms, and other assorted threats.
• Your CFO is onboard with the experiment but it had better not cost much as you are not promising any ROI.
• Your CMO is excited about exploring these new channels and is wondering how long it will take for qualified leads to flow in.
• Your VP of Services and Support is excited but skeptical.  They have heard that this might reduce the team’s workload and make them more responsive to their customers, which is great, but they’re worried it might just be hype.
• Your VP of Sales is trying to determine if they can add some numbers to the forecast.
• …..

Your CIO

The CIO is worried about corporate security and they should be.  Okay, sit down with your CIO or IT team and discuss:

• How does Social fit into the Accepted Use Guidelines?
  • Ultimately you may want every employee on social networks.  However, especially in the beginning, focus on getting your key message carriers on board.  Work with the CIO to get every executive team member, key members of your support and marketing team, and yourself, permission to use corporate computers for “approved” social networking activities.
  • For some companies this is a non-issue, for others it is a major issue. However, even if your company is “wide-open” bring in the CIO and get them on-board with this effort.  You need their support.
• What Corporate Governance and Compliance Guidelines do you need to be aware of?
  • This will vary by industry but you must seek to understand the issues at play.  This is beyond the immediate scope of this post but I’ll come back to it in a later post.
• What are the guidelines around installing software on corporate machines?  You are going to start off with some solid web applications and you are not looking to house sensitive data outside of the corporate walls (in year one).  However, discuss the applications you will be looking to work with initially in your passive listening phase, applications like Google Reader, Gist, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace (?), and others depending on industry.
• Are there bandwidth limitations you should be sensitive too?  Do you want to avoid posting that YouTube video?

Your CFO, Your CMO, and Your VP of Services and Support

Work closely with the CFO to define the metrics you are working with in year one and understand the metrics they want you to track as they look at ROI going into year two.  In year one the size of your twitter community matters…. However, it’s also critical to be able to track things like:

• How many leads were generated from each channel vs. the time spent working in that channel?
• How many calls were deflected by knowledge base articles, community tweets?
• and much more… 

Start to listen, passively at first

After getting buy-in from the CIO, branding input from your CMO, get your accounts setup on the following networks:

• Facebook.  Setup a Fan site.
  • Ask every employee in the company to become a fan of the company.
• Twitter.  Setup a corporate site, and one for each of the people identified above.
  • Use sites like Tweepml and Tweepsearch to identify key journalist, analyst, and other decision makers.  Follow them all.  As a result of this simple action some percentage of them will begin to follow you back.
  • Do not follow back people to game the system and gain followers.  Focus on the quality of the people you follow first.
• Setup a YouTube Account.
• Make sure the Company’s LinkedIn Profile is Right.
• Setup an account on Gist.
• Setup a Google Reader Account.
  • As with Twitter identify the key players in your market including competitors, partners, vendors, customers, thought leaders, etc..  Setup RSS feeds for all of them.
  • Setup RSS feeds for key magazines and blogs.
  • Setup and RSS feed for my blog. 
  • Perform google blog searches, by date, for key words and phrases and copy/paste that URL into your Google reader.  You’ll get updates as new data is added, very powerful.
• Setup an account on SlideShare.
• Setup an account on myBrainshark.

Listen

Alright, sit back, listen to the social chatter that is underway.  While there are great tools that will do the following for you, at a price, I don’t want you to start with the complex tools as I want you to be very hands on early on.  Construct a simple spreadsheet that tracks, on a weekly basis:

• Number of mentions your company receives per week.
• Number of mentions key corporate team members (like your CMO, CEO) receive each week.
• Number of mentions your competition receives per week.
• Number of positive, neutral, and negative stories you find each week.

Engagement

Using a combination of your personal and corporate Twitter account feel free to engage but do not “sell”, just add value.  If someone is looking for statistics related to your market, point them out.  Someone looking for conferences that might be useful?  Point them out.

I could keep writing but, if I do, I’ll never hit that publish button looking at me off to the right side of my screen.  I’ll continue with the rest of the first quarter soon.  Stay tuned, let me know if this was helpful.

John