Posts Tagged Best practice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins

This post began as a list of the seven deadly SINS of social media, but as I scanned my TweetDeck, various sites, and the general chatter that I monitor about and in social media sites, I decided that our role as consultants should be as focused on the positive and results-oriented possibilities of our internetworking more than critique.   We have discussed and helped clients implement tactics oriented around our key success factors, and I hope this informs and enlightens that approach as much as it highlights techniques for compelling and sustainable social media and network interactions.   With no further ado and much literary license re Pope Gregory’s original virtues as alternatives to the vices:

Chastity: Recruit followers and Fans and invite membership to communities you establish with  the objective of creating a meaningful and valuable dialogue between you and your constituencies.   The quality of the engagement is far more important than the quantity of members and followers.

Temperance: Maintain a regular schedule of blog posts, status updates, and Tweets, and avoid posting just for the sake of posting.   Key messages on a consistent basis become expected and are less likely to be overlooked.

Charity: Concern and active help offered to others.   Provide valuable insight to problems, offer customers communities where they can exchange best practices, ask questions and be open to constructive input.

Diligence: Develop infrastructure and guidelines around your social media strategy so that it maps to your marketing, sales and company guidelines.   Make your social media effort a formal activity rather than an item on the “get-to” list.

Patience: We share with our clients many ways that you can attract and retain followers and Fans, but we also advise avoiding most automated tools that guarantee X number of followers overnight.   If you do the footwork of identifying the audience you want to attract and the communities to which they belong and tag words that you include in your posts that will trigger alerts for them, you will begin to build a following.

Kindness: Stress the positive aspects of your solutions and offerings rather than delineating the failings of your competitors.   The opportunity to share where you are differentiated will come in different format than 140 characters.

Humility: A strange virtue for marketing consultants to advocate, perhaps, but the social media world is very self-regulating and expects honest and real information.   We earn our followers and fans, and to earn them we must offer to engage in networking dialogue rather than demand it.  As you develop networks of satisfied customers, weaving their Tweets and comments into your own posts become a very effective means for getting objective testimonials about your solutions.

The most effective social media strategies are those that are clearly mindful and planned to acheive the overall goals of an organization by using new and different channels.   If the strategy is clearly laid out, and these virtues are top of mind, there is no reason why the execution cannot happen at various and compelling levels of the organizaiton that may not be traditionally externally facing.

Best regards until next time, Lisa.

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