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BUILDING BLOCKS FOR A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY DEFINITION
Marketers reading this are probably already two steps ahead thinking about social media marketing plans, tactics and tools. But let’s just put the brakes on that train of thought and go back a few steps to what every business starts the business strategy.
A target audience is another way of describing the desire for a business to build relationships. It is relationships that brands desire not just transactions. Relationships create a sustainable business model and offer businesses lifetime value from customers.
It is useful to understand what makes up a business strategy (broad terms) so we can understand how a social media strategy then needs to work alongside this to achieve business goals.
If we dismantle a business strategy we can use it to piece together a social media strategy and look at the links between the two.
Whilst these are common elements in the definition of a business strategy how they come together and their meaning vary enormously. You can simply get into a game of semantics.
In business basics, the strategy defines the what, who, how, and why you use resources to win the hearts, minds and business of customers.
Strategy and plannings are not purely mechanical. Both employees and customers react and vote with their feet, not just on price or wages.
For employees, the culture of a business and how it is perceived in social media can play a huge part on talent acquisition (it’s not just about the money).
Resources sound a cold term and employees doesn’t always do justice to how critical the people within a business plays in its success. The culture of a business can make a break a business and has a massive impact on customer service.
The key in terms of strategy is that both employees and customers are not fixed inanimate objects. They are humans that are part of bigger social settings (offline and online) that influence their behaviour, their decisions and their perceptions of your business. They and the ways they communicate and behave changes constantly due to technology e.g. mobile, social networks but also the many other factors that then form part of a strategic plan e.g. political, legal, economic and environmental.
Internally relationships determine company culture which if done well can create a formidable competitive advantage as has been demonstrated by Tony Hsieh with Zappos – see this Stanford Business School presentation on YouTube.
Now, this may seem like common sense but many businesses focus on marketing without listening to their customers or brand name on social media. Many likewise do not consider their social media silence or corporate social media face as destructive. Yet from the outside in stale, bland and pushed business communications that purely aim to improve SEO or generate potential leads shows a gap in how social media is being used.
There is often a disconnect between sales and marketing use of social media and the consequences to the broader business.
A social media strategy then must consider how social media can be used and if it is needed:
Earlier I mentioned the fact that businesses need to build relationships and this is perhaps the defining point about social media is that it offers tools and methods to not only facilitate conversations, sharing of information and collaboration BUT it also forges relationships.
So the main difference is in how you develop relationships, what value they offer as a potential for your business and what resources you then need to use (including technology/tools). Relationships vary in value. If you, for instance, are looking to promote a new organic face cream as a product, you might target high profile women bloggers who have a large social following. If a blogger endorsed your product and was willing to promote it to their audience the value of this relationship would be significant.
A social media strategy defines the why do we want to do this?
Social media needs to consider the relationships the business needs to develop, the types of relationships (number of people, type, who, context, relevance…) and the communications processes. Because of the dispersed nature of these relationships, the brand becomes part of the way of doing business. The standards, routines, culture and leadership cascade across real world communications by water coolers and equally across social networks. Governance then determines policies, guidelines, processes, and educational resources to guide your relationships and provide consistency for your brand.
A social media strategy defines the relationships, their value and sets out a plan to harness them to achieve a particular goal or set of goals.
This view of strategy sees a business as part of a wider set of networks that involve social interactions and levels of influence that then determine a businesses capabilities to access resources (e.g. talent, funding…) and organise these to achieve its goals.
Businesses can align a social media strategy to many different goals:
Social media has to be tied to solid business goals that deliver a clear and tangible benefit to the business.
Depending on what goals are used a social media programme developed linking business objectives to measurable KPI’s.
So this all may seem as though it is purely focused on those businesses that can afford the time for big strategic plans, that have lots of resources and people to play with.
Well, small businesses have a lot to gain from using a well thought through social media strategy. Forming alliances and collaborative spaces that are local can result in new revenue streams that allow small business to compete with much larger organisations. Social networks offer some of these benefits, but they are dispersed and informal.
Formal collaborations ARE NOT networking spaces or simple networking groups – they are formal places that companies can submit tenders, see examples of collaborative projects and have visibility of capabilities.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
