Lisa mentioned that one of her competitors launched a “community” but she wasn’t terribly impressed.  In her view the community lacked innovation and leadership and failed to drive concrete business objectives.  Having a look at the competitor I found that while there were a lot of features, an active community with interesting content it seemed disjointed with more monologues then dialogue.  There didn’t seem to be that much direct interaction between the host and it’s visitors and while there were plenty of text links and banners leading to the corresponding e-commerce site none of the links were tagged for analytics reporting.  It’s little wonder Lisa was not impressed.

Lisa was also anonymously participating in industry related blogs and engaging in some other Twitter activities with industry leaders.  In spite of the unofficial nature of Lisa’s strategy, her organization seems to be benefiting, if only modestly from her social media activities.  What’s more Lisa doesn’t have to jump into the responsibility of managing a community or hire more staff to continue to make important and beneficial strides in her social media activity.  As Lisa  engages cautiously she just needs to continue to avoid three common mistakes…

1. Narrowly Defining Social Media. Don’t imagine for a second that the only way to leverage social networking is to put up a community.  Intuitively Lisa realizes this or she wouldn’t have come as far as she has, but she needs to identify those gateway opportunities that will strengthen her confidence to expand her social media activity!
2. Ignoring Social Media Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Some seem to think SEO and Social Media are UNRELATED!  There are two key sources of SEO benefit, you can build a community and grow content that generates traffic, get’s crawled and ranked, spawning more traffic; or encourage your fans to make their voices know in other social media communities kicking off the same virtuous-cycle via inbound links.  Of course doing both will ultimately maximize your benefit but motivating your current fan base is a fine place to start.  When consumers use social media sites to identify their interests, affiliation or appreciation for your web site, your credibility grows, increasing the likelihood that your natural search rank will improve and you will attract new prospects.
3. Without Measurement Your Driving Blindfolded. A failure to create strong measurable and contextually relevant connection between all social media content and commerce is like driving blindfolded.  Having text links and banner ads is great but if you don’t measure it you’re blind or worse yet you’re probably attributing sales to the wrong event or content and skewing ALL your reported results and their interpretation.  Measure accurately or perish!

I strongly believe that organizations should have a comprehensive social media strategy with clear measurable goals engaging the full spectrum of social media tactics.  But use the same approach you’d use grasping a rose, proceed with caution.  You can outline a long term strategy that looking forward a couple of years and flesh out the first year with goals and measurable objectives.  Be flexibility enough to benefit from the learning of a phased deployment and deepening customer insight.  Doing so, organizations can be action oriented while using key learning to refine and optimize strategy.  Ultimately the phased deployment of campaign and tactical layers fill out the full blown strategy.

As a part of that strategy it’s important to establishing some fundamental business rules and training to guide employees in their strategic participation in social media.  This will insure that everyone is in sync as they represent the organization. These rules don’t have to be complex day-one nor does the training need to be a week-long seminar.  The effort should set clear standards of conduct and unify the participants around the strategic thinking behind the planned social media tactics.

Six Shoestring Social Media Salvos

1. Invite or use incentives to get your fellow employees to setup a Linkedin account and link back to your e-commerce site (Benefit: improved natural search ranking)
2. Invite your customer and employees to setup a Delicious account and bookmark several of their favorite pages or products (Benefit: improved natural search ranking), do it in conjunction with a sweepstakes drawing to get people engaged.
3. Launch a single blog that provides your customer base with further insight into your business and provides thought-leadership among your customers (Benefit: improved natural search ranking, contextual advertising via text or banner; foundation for relationship and customer engagement)
4. Identify 5 employees to actively participate in external industry related blogs offering comment and gathering insights on topics and trends that might be relevant to your business.  Include folks from senior management, marketing and customer service. (Benefit: Increased visibility in the community and intelligence gathering)
5. Launch a Social Media Newsroom or convert your existing PR into Social Media PR with the addition of relevant media assets (Benefit: expanded visibility of new product or service offerings, to a wider media audience generating link benefits and ultimately strengthened SEO).
6. Identify employees who are currently maintaining a blog or active on Twitter provide them incentives to do posts with links back to your site about current promotions, new products or services(Benefit: the exponential exposure of existing social networks to your products and services).

Small steps, YES, but remember this is just phase one.  These social tactics will aid core SEO strategies and ultimately create more exposure including consumer feedback and criticism.  Nevertheless by creating a blog you can openly acknowledge your organizational weaknesses and keep your customer base updated on the actions you’re taking to improve their customer experience.  Leading marketing experts argue that consumers actually embrace those who acknowledge their shortcomings, attributing greater overall credibility to the merchant as well as exhibiting greater customer loyalty.