Sherpa’s “To Do” List for Social Media Success

Marketing Sherpa has put out a book on “Social Media Marketing and PR” which includes an “to do” type article on the Nine Steps to Social Marketing Success.  It’s a useful, but somewhat lengthy, guide so I’m paraphrasing the main points of the piece for you here:

Step One: 

Get the lay of the land.  Identify the discussions of interest to you – this includes social sites, groups and blogs.  Check to see if there’s an overload of blogs.  Consider what you can bring to the table that’s new.  Determine who the top 25 people are in your realm and interact with them.  Set up a regular monitoring plan

Step Two: 

Establish your goals.  It could be that you want to establish a new grand identity.  Target a new market segment.  Build traffic to your main site.  Grow your executives’ personal/corporate brands.  

Step Three: 

Match your goals with measures.  Social media measurement is an emerging art, or science, depending on who you ask.  In general, however, there are the categories of goal and each one has different measurement challenges and metrics:  Buzz, Influence, Traffic/audience.

Step Four: 

Inventory your in-house resources.  Who can contribute?  Who can manage your activities?  What technologies are needed (in-house or outside services?)

Step Five: 

Identify missing pieces.  What are the areas of concern: do you have enough people involved in content development?  Do you have a tool to easily publish the content?  Can you collect and analyze the data?  

Step Six: 

Build a program timeline.  Like any project, your social marketing program will benefit by having goals built into a timeline.  The key, however, is striking a balance between creating a robust program and not getting overwhelmed by the possibilities.

Step Seven: 

Start talking/blogging.  Create some kind of schedule for adding content.  More importantly, make sure that the first round of blog posts have strong content.  Decide on your internal monitoring mechanism.  

Step Eight: 

Keep talking.  Micro-blogging (Twittering), social network pages, group discussions, photo/video sharing, etc.

Step Nine: 

Six months out: Evaluate, Add, Subtract and Test.

And I’ll add a Step Ten:

Let us know if you want to talk about this further or need some help getting started.  We’d love to hear from you.