Almost everyone I meet feels unsatisfied with their social media strategy, but they aren’t sure how to make it better. So I wrote this paper to provide six steps to develop a true social media strategy.

As I discuss social media strategy with leaders around the world, almost everyone feels that their social media strategy is either (a) inadequate or (b) does not exist. In addition, most of the folks I meet aren’t really sure how to determine a social media strategy that has broad consensus and engagement across teams including Marketing, Communications, PR, Customer Service, Product Development, HR, etc.

Further, many of the folks who feel they have a social media strategy actually don’t. They have a few superficial goals about increasing Facebook Fans or Twitter Followers, but they don’t have a clear strategy for increasing the value of the business through social media.

This paper outlines the following six tests that any social media strategy must pass. In order to be called a social media strategy, your plan must:

1. Achieve measurable business outcomes
2. Rest upon unique insights
3. Specify where to engage (and where to not engage)
4. Use your organization’s unique strengths
5. Define internal changes required to achieve the strategy
6. Belong to a team with the conviction to act on the strategy

Get the free paper entitled When Can You Say, “We Have a Social Media Strategy!”

If you’d like information examples of where my team has helped clients define compelling social media strategies, contact me any time.

---

Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

If you are publishing a social media policy, and you want your employees to really get the message, consider following the example of this video from the Australian Department of Justice. It’s a high-quality, very effective message in a much more engaging medium than your run-of-the-mill corporate mass-emailer.

Yes, it would be easier to slap together a page-long email and run it through your corporate emailer, but employees — just like customers — are constantly bombarded by messages from your brand. If you want them to get the message, you need to put in the effort.

---

Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

56% of Inc 500 companies say that social media will be very important to their marketing or business strategy, and 30% say that social media will be somewhat important to their marketing or business strategy, according to a (link updated) report from Norah Barnes, Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research.

The study by Dr. Barnes says that it, “revisits the Center’s study of Inc. 500 social media usage for the fourth consecutive year, making it a valuable and rare longitudinal study of corporate use of these new technologies.”

In addition, PwC reports a survey of CEOs, wherein they found that 43% of CEOs say they will “significantly change” their strategies in the next three years to respond to customers’ increased use of social media and mobile devices to voice their needs and preferences to companies.

From multiple angles, we are seeing large organizations mobilize significant resources into social media for business purposes.

More and more executives are being held accountable for business outcomes through social media, and that is great to see.

---

Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

When I help clients mobilize internal experts in social media, there is always a need to share lessons learned. In those programs, the best way to motivate employees to share knowledge is to simply make it a part of the job. Actually, make it part of doing a good job, then motivate people to do a good job.

Don’t create new incentives for knowledge sharing. Don’t try to pay people or reward them, or give an award to the person who shares the most knowledge.

Two reasons:

1. Such incentive systems can be gamed.
2. Second, when you provide incentives which are separate from the incentives of the job, you send the message that knowledge sharing is not part of the job. Finally, these systems just add more bureaucracy, rules and process, without adding much value to the organization. It just makes work more difficult by giving employees more rules to follow, or guidelines to interpret.

Here is what consistently works for my clients:

1. Establish knowledge sharing as part of the job. Write it into job descriptions, and include it in annual reviews. If you need your internal experts to enter lessons into a lessons system – make it part of their expectations, and only grant final project QA approval when the lessons are documented. Or, if you require internal experts to own or edit part of a wiki, write it into their job descriptions.
2. Reward people for performing above expectations, just like you would in any part of their job, and include knowledge sharing when you discuss overall job performance.
3. Publicly thank the best contributors. Depending on your corporate culture, you might want this recognition to come from peers, or the person responsible for curating internal knowledge. In any case, such recognition can be included in job appraisals, just like any other type of feedback.
4. Create a little peer pressure within the management team. For example, you can regularly give the management team a ranked listing of knowledge contribution activity. Highlight the teams that share freely, and the team that do not share. Managers will not want their teams to appear at the bottom of any lists, and they will improve the performance of their teams. This is not the same as setting targets and quotas, this is making people aware of activity, so they can take action.
5. Recognize that knowledge management is content management, and both require continual, proactive curation. Assign someone to own curation of knowledge content. Ensure that they regularly gather and act upon feedback from the people who need to use the knowledge management tools. In essence, the curator should think of themselves as a product manager, continually improving the tools and the organization of the content to help people get the information they need, when they need it, in the formats that they need.

Of course, if you are mobilizing a large number of internal experts into social media on behalf of your company, you might choose to implement these tactics slowly, over time, depending on how much change they require. Change Management planning is a whole other conversation.

---

Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

My team at Converseon just published this white paper to explain how the limitations of existing social listening tools make it difficult for enterprises to pursue business objectives in social media, and then we explain how new solutions are emerging to help large organizations overcome those challenges. Read the full description and download the white paper on the Converseon web site.

---

Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.