Image via WikipediaSocial networking has to be part of your business strategy for 2009, as more companies get into social networking what I am seeing in my consulting gigs is that many of them just jump in without a plan, or an idea of the expected benefits that they want to see. Rather what I am seeing is that there is one person who is very well informed when it comes to blogging who thinks that they are a social media manager, but does not participate at the level that a corporation needs to participate at within the process of social media. Some of the more interesting people I have talked to see this as a way to ensure job survival by getting a position that no one else can take, but is important to the company. Often this is done without goals, without a plan, and without marketing or PR’s knowledge, rather it is going to be someone in the Business department who is busy doing things, that might be contradictory to what the marketing and PR goals are.

If you are planning on jumping into social media in 2009, by all means do it, but have a plan, know what you want out of it, and understand the limits of social networking.

Earlier I wrote about how people can get into social media management, what the person should expect from it, but from the corporate site, there is going to be an investment of resources, and you have to know what you want to get out of it before you get too involved.

Have a plan, good social media management and engagement has a simple plan to begin with, that covers much of the expectations that the company should have about their goals. Why is the company doing this, what do they hope to gain, how does it tie into the marketing and public relations plan? Is there going to be a budget involved, how many people, what freedom and latitude will they have, when should they escalate to management, how much can they talk about, when can they talk about it? What do you want your folks to talk about, what about blogging outside the company? The plan needs to cover in enough generalized detail the who, what, when, where, why and how to be meaningful to the people who will be doing this.

What is the political plan internal to the company, people who do this if they have budget, management, and support services will fall somewhere in the hierarchy of the company. Should they be under marketing, public relations, should they be on their own, who is going to control the process, who will control the budget. The internal landscape of the social networking plan has to take into account the internal politics of the company. If it is new and shiny, people will want it, not just because of the budget, head count, but they may also want it because they want to survive and if they are offering a positive experience for customers, it is one way of showing worth to the company.

What is the technology plan, who will host it, how will it be protected from hackers and spammers, where will the technology physically reside, backups, updates, upgrades for all the internal systems. If you are running your own blogging platform, who gets to babysit it and keep it running, including what does the SLA (Service Level Agreement) look like. There is nothing worse than launching a social marketing or media campaign on poor servers with lousy service.

What is the engagement plan, who do you engage with, when do you engage with them. What is the policies, support plans, and business plans that go along with this. Having documents, policies, and plans for the social media campaign or marketing is also very important. This includes a communications plan, a Return on Investment document, as well as authority and control plans for the entire system. You also want to indentify your corporate sponsor, how the social media campaign works in with the overall corporate marketing and PR plans by documenting it with clear delineations of control over what aspect of the communications will be run by whom. You also want to know under what circumstances you take down your own blog or notification information, and what plan you have when everything goes wrong.

What other social media systems are you going to tie into, and how are you going to tie into them. If you use company named accounts, then you will want to make sure you have the passwords stored off somewhere so that anyone can get to them. You want to make sure your blogs, tweets, and other systems all tie into them nicely. You need to decide what will be your root collection system, with many people using friend feed to be the main landing page, with all your blogs, tweets, and other systems pointing to your friend feed page. Having this root system can really help people find out information about the company in one easy to find location. Tie all your systems into one system, and then plug that main page or main landing page. If you need to get metrics, you can also see if there is a way to get metrics off your landing page, or just not sweat it.

Things to remember, that social networking is a bottom up process rather than a top down process. When bottom up processes happen, the average folks are talking about your product. That includes bad spelling and grammar. Word of mouth is what will work here, and how people experience your product, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You cannot hope to control this interaction, at best, you will be able to engage, but then not all comments will be worth engaging with on line. Pick and choose your battles, make sure they are the right ones, and be willing to walk away from some of them because that is the smarter choice. Always admit when you are wrong, or let people know how they are influencing the product because of their input. Validate the experience, address it, and show that you are listening to what they are saying to you. This is the most important part, unlike most corporations, there is no top down hierarchy here, and rather the social networking scheme is bottom up with a large amount of randomization to go along with it. Understanding that will help you work out how to engage and what to do, say, when everyone starts picking on your company because the company did something that someone will not like.

If you see anything else I missed here, let me know. The important part is sharing the information about developing a coherent social media plan for a company. There are a lot of little steps, but these general broad categories can be addressed by a company seeking to do this process.

Tags: social media, plan, business, corporate communications, marketing, pr, money, budget, people, battle, comments