Burning the midnight oil
Just a few years ago, if your company was dabbling in social media, you had only a handful of things to worry about. Blogging was a big deal. So were community sites like message boards. In just a short time, though, social media blew up.
Don't get me wrong. The internet has always been social, even in pre-web days. But the social media discipline has seen some of the greatest innovation in the digital sector fall squarely into its lap over the past few years. Video content creation and sharing, social networking, virtual worlds, the real-time web, social aggregation -- most of these things have made a big impact with Joe Consumer and how he spends his time, and they all fall under the umbrella of social media.
It is both a blessing and a curse that people or groups that demonstrate the skill sets necessary to handle emerging media are usually given responsibility for emerging media. Just as digital media planners at agencies awoke one day to find themselves responsible for things like mobile advertising and pre-roll video, people on the client side who considered blogs and message boards their domain suddenly found themselves confronted with handling strategy for things like Facebook and Twitter.
These same people find themselves scrambling to avoid social media burnout -- the condition that results from having to constantly evaluate and assess the potential of an insane number of new social media vehicles. And this evaluation has to take place while simultaneously trying to shepherd and accelerate a number of tests and programs designed to prove the value of social media vehicles that arrived on the scene earlier.
So, with all the new sites, utilities, apps, and other platforms vying to become the social tool people can't live without, how do we avoid social media burnout?
Have a social strategy
This is the most important tip I can give you to help you keep from getting caught up in a tsunami of new social media platforms. And that's just an ancillary benefit -- your social strategy is what keeps social media on track to build your business.
You know the drill. No sooner did you believe you had the company blog figured out than some senior VP asked why the company wasn't on Facebook. Once you were live on Facebook, someone else asked what the company should be doing on Twitter. And so on and so forth for every new social media vehicle that gets a mention in The Wall Street Journal.
Unless you want to forge a path to nowhere and leave heaps of failed programs in your wake, you need a filter. That filter is your social strategy, and there are a number of vehicles you can filter out right off the bat because they won't be easily adaptable to the path you've mapped out toward building revenue.
The strategy must explain the following in very clear and concise terms:
- What role social media will play in building the business
- Clear business objectives, given the resources you're able to put toward social media
- How you're going to measure the results, with as direct a tie to revenue as possible
- Rules for evaluating new vehicles, based on their ability to address the three points above
Without this strategy, you can't evaluate what's important to your business and what's not. That will leave you with a poor idea about where it's best to execute. So be sure to formulate a strategy and sell it in to upper-level management before you start executing.
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