How to develop a social media strategy for your organisation

Start with a strong purpose

1.1. Know your purpose

Like any good strategy, a strong purpose and a good set of objectives is important. This set of purpose and objectives has to be relevant and aligned to your overall aims and objectives.

1.2. Know your limitations

It is important to know that not all objectives or purpose can be served by social media and it would be foolish to assume so, just because everybody is in social media. Social media is effective not only in PR, marketing and brand building but it is also effective when used for innovation, crowd-sourcing, building organisational culture and engagement.

Know your social media landscape

2.1. Look around you

Know the landscape before you start constructing. The social media landscape generally consists of the following attributes that should always be in the mind of the social media strategist or the planning team:

• Community-driven where people not only read, watch or listen but they also participate.
• Conversation is the new content king aside from videos and images. As David Armano said "It's the conversation economy".
• It's viral where people spread, share and transmit content readily. That's what makes social media contagious.
• Personal spaces are even more pronounced, if you haven’t got permission don't enter. Nobody wants to be spammed or get bombed with donation requests. 
• Authenticity is what makes social media real and human. Don't bother with high cost production houses; real is soul here.

2.2. Build relationships

At the end of the day, these attributes are what builds relationships among friends. Get acquainted with people who were previously a stranger to you. These attributes build a strong fan base for your brand and organisation. Small organisations can become famous overnight because of them too.

Create your path - the four Es of social media

3.1. Build your road

After you have understood what social media landscape attributes are, you will need to build a road before you can travel to your destination. The road here is acquainted to the 4 primary social media strategies that your organisation can deploy in your social media initiatives. These are the 4Es of social media:

• Education - enriching your target community's knowledge with information and resources for them to better understand you.
• Entertainment - creating fun, sticky and memorable content that allows them to associate the image or message to your brand or organisation.
• Engagement - engaging the community by recognizing their presence, contributions and inputs.
• Empowerment - give your target community the power to play an active role in what you are doing.

3.2. Tailor to your size

If your organisation is large enough, you can opt to deploy all four Es at the same time but if you are a small non profit choosing the most relevant and effective route will be your best investment and will keep your resources focused.

Build, hire but don't steal a vehicle

4.1. Build slowly

You need a set of wheels to move forward. Once the road is ready, in order for you to move forward you will need a set of wheels. Depending on the size of your organisation, it would mean a bicycle, tricycle, motorcycle, car, F1 sports car etc. The set of wheels we refer to are the social media tools and widgets that you will need to choose from and to decide how they can work together and when to use them. In general, social media tools can be divided into 4 major categories:

• Networking tools - blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, etc.
• Collaboration tools - wikis, social news, social bookmarking, etc.
• Multimedia tools - videos, images, interactive contents, etc.

4.2. Select according to need

Selecting the right combination of tools is important and helps you build expertise over time, because frankly you don’t want to be managing 20 social networking sites at one go.

Guide your journey

5.1. Set up road signs

Whenever anyone goes on a long journey or to unfamiliar places, one of the most important things to be able to do is to refer to the road signs on the side of the road. They tell you your destination, the dangers, and other necessary information to make sure you don't get lost or end up in a road that has no petrol station. The same logic applies to social media. It is important that your social media initiative has a good set of metric or measurements that will tell how you are doing at any one time. Nathan Gilliatt of Social Target LLC categorizes measurements into 4 distinct types:

• PR/media measurement - viewing social media as media for their ability to reach an audience.
• Word of mouth measurement - viewing social media as online interactions among people.
• Web analytics - interested in people's usage patterns, as both audience and customers.
• Opinion research - mining online opinions as the world's largest focus group

5.2. Translate into equity

All of the above is important to consider but even more important to actually measure is to be able to translate the measurement information above into what we called the "Social Media Equity", a set of fundamentals that are important for organisations to make decisions about their social media investments.

• Strength of relationship (size, quality, relevance of type of activities etc)
• Degree of familiarity (with your organisation, brand etc, not just awareness)
• Degree of efficiency (where and how efficient is your viral logistics)
• Value creation (is there any?)

5.3. Be aware that measurement via loyalty is only one aspect

Loyalty without social media equity nailed down? It is hard to say whether your investment in social media has actually worked or not. This is because having 100,000 readers in your blog only says so much as 100,000 eyeballs of awareness but is this sufficient as a measure for performance?

Don't forget the fuel

6.1. Get going

So you understood the terrain, you got yourself a road, bought your wheels, set up the road signs, so let's move it. Hold on! Have you fuelled? Fuelling your social media initiative is no small task because when your organisation wants to take social media seriously, you've got to really invest in:

• Time - to learn how to use the widgets, set up your blog, create and filter content, participate in conversations, spread your message.
• Fresh content - needs to be cooked up periodically whether it is from your organisation or from other sources. Social media is not a website where you can stick up one article and let it stay there for time immemorial.
• Dedicated team - social media is no part time job for your comms or PR or marketing team. If the social media person’s business card reads “Communications, Marketing and Social Media Manager” your fuel is going to run low really soon.
• Creative Juices - to create value relevant content and conversations. Creative here does not necessary equate to fantastic designs but to content and conversations delivered in relevant ways. If you can put aesthetic make-up to that, this is even better.
• Good design - because nobody wants to stick around a 1.0 design site and initiative.
• Widget familiar - this is a given. Anybody that wants to be in social media has to get themselves familiar with at least 10 to 30 different widgets and how they work and inter-work with each other.

6.2. Get involved, be active in getting it moving

If your plan is to ask your IT department to hook it up for you via a memo or official request and then put that task to a queue of other stuff that the IT department has to attend to, that is really not going to work.