By Heather Lutze, CEO
Findability Consulting & Speaking
Would you like to Google the name of your organization, and see nothing but your business show up on the entire results page—no competition in sight? In today’s Panda and Penguin environment, your best bet for taking over an entire page of Google search results lies with social media engagement.
If you want to take your organization into social media marketing, but don’t quite know how to begin, let me lay it out for you with a six simple steps.
Step One: The Leadership Team Meeting
Bring all your executives and brand managers on board. Discuss the objectives of your social media program and address the fear around social media as well. Get all your key leadership people in the room and really talk…
- OK, if we’re going to do this, what return on investment do we need to get from it?
- What measurements can we apply to track that return?
- What is our goal or purpose?
Did you know that social media marketing has finite, measurable results? Being clear about what you want from the very beginning is essential to its success.
Step Two: Define Your Objectives
Each department in your organization will have different goals they would like to realize from a successful social media endeavor. HR, sales, IT, marketing, PR, and strategic leadership teams are all focused in different arenas. Make sure key department heads in each group are represented in this initial meeting.
The questions to be addressed …
- How can each department use social media to be more successful?
- What do they each need?
- For targeted sales goals, should we use promo codes? What about contests?
- Will videos get the results we’re looking for?
- Do we create internal assets like white papers, videos, or case studies to use in our social media efforts?
What about the Big Picture?
Along with department-specific, finite number goals, you also need to talk about big picture goals for the entire organization. What might be some of your overall objectives?
- Branding: You want to brand the company as a whole, particularly if you are new or not widely known.
- Reputation management: You must be monitoring what others are saying about your company on social media. Make sure you’re the first to know, not the last!
- Thought leadership: You want to be seen as a leader, an innovator, and a major player in your particular industry; putting out papers, information, videos and quotes.
- Building customer relationships and retention: This is one of social media’s strong points.
Step Three: The Start-Up Committee
I suggest you create a small, start-up committee in your phase-one approach to social media. This group would consist of a few excited and savvy social media advocates within each department. Someone from HR, sales, IT, marketing, PR, e-commerce.
Excited and Savvy are the key criteria here … bet you’ve already got staff who fit this criteria.
Stay tuned for the second half of this post, with the next three steps you need to make sure your organization’s entry into social media is efficient and effective.
Warm Regards,
Heather Lutze
Author, Internet Marketing Speaker, Trainer and Consultant