Saturday, August 29, 2009

Four Steps to Social Media Plan

I just finished reading Courtney Spencer's "Implement a Social Media Marketing Plan with These 4 Easy Steps."

Courtney minimizes the process to four basic steps:

  1. Decide Where Exactly You Want to Be Online
  2. Come Up With Multiple Options
  3. Implementation
  4. Search the Web

All in, I think Courtney did a good job of summarizing the basics. I would have liked to see a little more meat, particularly on the Implementation stage. But all in, not a bad summary.

If I had to focus in on one area, it would be the sections that speak to the resources needed to "maintain" the effort. Unlike other marketing channels that may be somewhat forgiving, social media is one that can truly require anywhere from weekly to daily to hourly effort once the campaign is launched. The media is so fluid and interactive that ignoring it could result in lost opportunities or reputation risk. Think Community Manager when you roll out an effort to ensure you give the appropriate attention to the plan.

Give it a look and provide Courtney your two cents.

2 comments:

  1. I'm sorry, but Courtney's article/advice was crap.

    The first step in any plan is to define your objective(s).

    Courtney's advice is directed at those who want to do some cool Web 2.0 thingy before knowing why they even want to do it. And her advice to "study the competition" only leads to me-too solutions.

    If Courtney really wanted to help her readers, she'd have paused on the first item in her list. How does one determine "where they want to be online?"

    About the only thing she said that hit the mark was to "hire somebody" to run your social media campaigns.

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  2. Jeffry, hiring someone to run the campaigns is definitely the right step. Since most people are able to set up their own Ning, Facebook, Twitter, et al, accounts, the thought is that it doesn't take much to create and launch a plan. But as you suggest above, incorporating social media into the overall marketing plan takes some real thought and effort...at least if you are being serious about the effort.

    As I noted, her piece lacked some depth. But any piece that minimizes a plan to four easy steps is going to leave something to be desired.

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