Creating A Coherent Social Media Strategy

Where do you start with such a big area? "It's about relationships", says Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group. There are some great slides in her presentation and the overall message I hear is: are you, your business or your organisation ready for the necessary change required in a truly 'open' social media strategy? A strategy that goes beyond marketing. Our summary of the slides are below - the full presentation is inserted right at the end. There are some big themes to take on here - what's your take? Let us know.

Strategy

• Learn: Invest in analytics to learn from your customers once you understand their socialgraphics. This process requires listening, having the right software in place and using metrics that are relevant to your business.
• Dialogue: Have the conversation with customers that they want to have, think specifically off-site and in sites and communities where they already are. Be responsive to customers and build an army of customer advocates that are naturally authentic.
• Support: Real-time is not enough, 'social' requires integration across your business, you create the groundswell and then scale the support to meet the demand in all areas of the business.
• Innovate: Given that innovation can come from anywhere internally or externally it requires new ways to make it happen. Innovation communities are a new way to do this but require commitment to build and nurture, and of course extending your firewall to bring customers in to your organisation.

Lead

• Disruptions are the 'next big thing', according to Charlene Li, these are graded in their ability to improve the end user or consumer experience, improve the business model of the organisation and create ecosystem or market value. Disruption examples include Rohit Bhargava's Likenomics, Social Search, Leveraging Big Data, Enterprise Social Networks, Gamification and Curation.
• Open leadership: Having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to achieve your goals and yet still being in command. The examples the Charlene cites include explaining the organisations vision, conversing, crowd-sourcing, using open platforms and employing new ways to make decisions. Open leaders and authentic and transparent. The point is how new tools with new thinking can improve efficiency, communications, decision-making and profit.

Prepare

• Are you strategically prepared as an organisation? Charlene suggests starting with a culture of sharing first, and then having a process and a discipline to manage interactions (good and bad!) from that sharing.
• How do you perceive and measure 'customer lifetime value'? Recognising that customers carry measurable influence, provide support and also have valuable ideas to share back is key. To this end value is not only tied to purchase and repeat purchase.
• Plan for failure - "fail fast, fail smart" as Google say. Plan for things going wrong, how will you manage it and be sure to learn from it, build failing into your processes.