5 Steps to Social Media Planning

5 Steps to Social Media Planning © June 2009 Denner Group International, a partner of Haines Centre for Strategic Management Page 1 of 6

Step 1 Start with a plan of action. Don’t just launch into social networking without first knowing why you’re doing it and how to make the best use of

the tools for your business. Create a Social Networking Strategic Action Plan that details your desired outcomes – what you want to achieve – your measures of success, your current level of knowledge about the industry and the tools, and the steps you need to take to achieve your goals. You’ll need to do some research, too, which may include talking to industry pros like Denner Group and Social Networking San Diego, and others.

Follow the journalist’s mantra of answering the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of your social networking

plan and you’ll ensure a thoughtful, strategic approach to using social networking to your best advantage. Once you’ve created your plan, you can begin to put it into action. The next four tips lay out the framework for

creating your strategic action plan for social networking and provide some resources for gathering the information you’ll need to help you make the key decisions about which tools to use to target which audiences.

Step 2 Do some research. Research will get you started answering the Five W’s and H mentioned above. This is a critical component to creating

your strategic action plan and executing successfully.

Who: Who is / are your target audience or audiences? Start there. The tools they use and how they interact with online websites and social media differ by age, gender and ethnicity. So you first need to know who your customers or clients are and then find out what they’re doing online.

A good resource for research data is Mashable – The Social Media Guide. Aaron Uhrmacher’s August 28, 2008 blog

provides relevant information and resources for understanding this exploding industry. In it he cites several resources for information about who uses which social media sites.

One resource he cites is a study conducted by Rapleaf in July 2008. In their study of 49.3 million people, they

identify each of the social media tools most used by men and women in several age categories. An interesting statistic is that between the ages of 14 and 34, women tend to be the heavier users of social media sites. From ages 35 to 65+, the shift is to men as the heavier users of social media.

Another interesting tool to help you identify the social media sites your customers are using is the Social

Technographics profile tool created by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff of Forrester Research Technographics, as part of a promotion for their book, Groundswell. The tool lets users enter some basic information and see how participation varies among demographics worldwide. The results give you a picture of whether your target audience is comprised mostly of Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators or Inactives when it comes to using social media. Visit the Forrester website for a short slide presentation that defines these types. Following are a few slides from Forrester Research Technographics, showing how each demographic type participates in using social media, as well as B2B decision makers’ use of social media tools. Good stuff!

STEPS TO SOCIAL MEDIA

PLANNING


Source: Data from Forrester Research Technographics® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile, see groundswell.forrester.com.


What: Know what your customers and clients are doing when they go online, not just which tools they’re using.

Are they blogging, searching for product and services, sharing photos and comments on Facebook, looking for jobs on LinkedIn? You need to understand what they’re doing so you can meet them online in the same space, providing coupons, special promotional offers, and information they’re seeking.


There are many websites that provide information about the myriad social networking sites out there. Comscore did a study in early August 2008 citing statistics about the growth of social networking worldwide. This is a great resource for statistics about the most popular tools and what age groups are using them. Another resource for statistics about some of the more popular tools is The Future Buzz. This information was posted by Adam Singer in Popular, The Social Web, Web Trends and News, and provides 49useful statistics on some of the most popular social media sites.

Here’s a collection of resources you can review for relevant statistics about social media networking from Jeremiah

Owyang, Web Strategy: Techcrunch has listed out Comscore’s numbers across multiple social networks, Sources: Techcrunch via

Comscore, Jan 1, 2009 Compete has released stats in Feb, comments by Cnet. Unique Visitors, Total Visitors and rank information. Cnet,

Feb 10, 2009 Nielsen Online shows that: Social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular online activity ahead of

personal email, Member communities are visited by 67% of the global online population, time spent is growing at 3 times the overall internet rate, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, PDF, Nielsen Online, March, 2009

Nielsen reports that Social Networks are 68% more popular than email 65% (but not by much), Nielsen, Cnet, March 2009

Here is some interesting information about Facebook usage, for example, from Nielsen’s March 2009 report, Global

Faces and Networked Places: Facebook started out as a service for university students but now almost one third of its global audience is aged 35-49 years of age and almost one quarter is over 50 years old. In the UK, for example, if the average month-on-month audience changes over the last six months were to continue; by mid-June 2009 there would be as many 35-49 year olds on Facebook as 18-34 year olds. The changing audience offers advertisers the opportunity to use social networks as a vehicle for targeting all demographic groups. In Italy, brands such as Maserati – traditionally marketed to an older audience – now have fan pages on Facebook.

When: Know when your customers and clients are going online to interact with social media, so you’ll be online at the same time. This is a critical component of your social media strategy. Some of the research resources listed above may provide insight about when your customers are online. Gary McCaffrey, for example, has tracked the best times for sending Tweets on Twitter to gain the maximum traffic and attention, based on the traffic he’s seen to his websites. Early in the morning (5-6 am) and middy (noon – 2 pm) seem to be the highest traffic times. You may want to look at similar stats for traffic to your blogs and websites, too.

Where: A critical aspect of your social media strategy is to understand where your customers and clients are coming from. Are they being referred by other customers? Are they finding you through Google searches? Are they coming to your sites because of your online presence, your blogs, your links to other key sites? What other sites are they visiting and where are they buying? You’ll want to find ways to link to those and/or advertise on those sites to entice them over to yours.

Why: Get an understanding as to why companies, clients and customers are turning to social media. A scan of the environment around you will provide some clues. Examine key areas such as those on the following pages.

Sociodemographics: how society is changing and will change in the next 3-to-5 years, the exit of boomers from the workforce, the talent gap that will exist between the 30-somethings in power and the knowledge and experience void the boomers leave behind. Look at ethnicity too to see if it has an impact on your products and services, and your changing customer base. Competition: have a thorough understanding of who you’re competing against today as well as who the new entrants might be into your particular industry or market. When I was in banking in the early and mid-80’s the mentality was “build it and they will come.” Who would have thought that retail stores like Sears and Wal-Mart would enter the field? Now we find bank branches in grocery outlets. Clearly, the banks had to change to meet their customers where they shop. Who might be your next competitor? Economy and Environment: Yes, the economy is having a dramatic impact on how people work, shop, live, and it’s affecting how companies market to them. More and more dollars are shifting to online social media sites in order to establish relationships with their customers. This next slide shows how today’s economy has dramatically affected organization’s marketing strategies.



What about the Environment? Are your customers and clients concerned about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, buying only products and services that are environmentally friendly, etc? What are you doing or can you do to ensure your company is “environmentally friendly”? If it applies, be sure to include this in your plan. Political and Regulatory Issues: Do you operate in a regulated industry like energy, health care or the financial industry? How are the changing political and regulatory issues affecting the way you do business and how you serve your customers? What additional changes might take effect in the next 3-to-5 years for which you need to prepare today, and how do they affect your social media and online marketing strategies and tactics? Technology: The world is changing so fast. If you haven’t seen the video, Did You Know? Watch it now. It’s mind-boggling how fast things change. What do you need to do today to ensure your staff has the latest technological tools they need in order to do the work necessary to achieve your social media goals? Industry: How will your industry change in the next 3-to-5 years? Who will be the new entrants to the market? Who will be gone? What do you need to do today to be ready for the changes and what impact will these implications have on your social media strategies? Customer/Clients: Today’s customers may not be your customers tomorrow. The newspaper industry is a good example of an industry that didn’t pay significant attention to the changing environment. They continued to write for an increasingly diminishing market: the baby boomers and older. While many have also gone online to reach the younger audiences, they focused their major attention on the print side rather than online. And we see what’s happening today to that business. What about yours? Are your customers of tomorrow increasingly researching and shopping online? Do they get their information from sites like WebMD or from trusted friends? How can your website(s), blog(s) become “trusted” sites your customers refer to for valuable information?


Step 3 Identify your measures of success. Once you’ve done your research, identified your target audience, the social media sites they use most frequently,

and how actively engaged they are in creating and using the tools, you need to determine your own measures of success for each audience.

What will determine that your strategies are working? Customer comments? The number of people that link to your

information, websites, blogs? A percentage increase in sales or customer satisfaction? Only you can determine what these measures are, and they are critical to helping you gauge how successful your social media strategies are.

Step 4 Understand your current situation. How knowledgeable are you and your staff about the social media tools? Who will be using these tools and to what

purpose? Will you rely on one person or department to handle all the social media marketing? Will you outsource the process? Will you do it yourself?

Do an evaluation of your staff’s current strengths and weaknesses relative to social media use, as well as your

competition. Know which of your competitors might be ahead of you in the social media networking arena and which are still sitting on the sidelines. You also need to look at where your new competitors might be springing from two-three years down the road. The world is changing so fast and new opportunities are being created daily that didn’t exist a year or so ago. You need to be reviewing these trends on a quarterly basis to stay ahead of the game and be ready to act when the opportunities present themselves.

Step 5 Close the gap with key strategies and actions. How: This is where you start creating the strategies and tactics you’ll implement to reach your desired outcomes.

The research you do beforehand answering the Five W’s and the steps you take beforehand to create success metrics and understand your current situation, will provide fodder for the strategies and tactics you need to implement. It begins to fall into place once you’ve answered the Five W’s and completed Tips 3 and 4.

For each target audience, identify the social media tools they use: blogs, RSS Feeds, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,

MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, etc. Are they creating content, uploading videos, reviewing and linking to other people’s content, or reading and commenting on content? This will determine how you and your staff participate and communicate with the specific target audience. You may want to assign different people to focus their efforts on different target audiences. You may want to match your staff with the appropriate age groups so the language they use is the language the target audience uses. These are some of the key decisions you need to make as you develop your strategies and actions.

Chris Brogan, one of the gurus of social media, offers an interesting resource: The 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using

Social Media. It’s useful information for helping you formulate the tactics your need to execute as part of your social media strategy.

Another guru is Bill Crosby, author of Twitter Traffic Machine. If you’re new to using Twitter, he’s a great resource

providing step-by-step instructions on how to set up your Twitter account and automate it to generate followers quickly.

If you choose to outsource the social media networking process, these are some of the key strategies we would

develop with you to ensure we have the right team of people communicating on your behalf to with your specific target audiences. We recommend you create no more than five to seven core strategies with a maximum of 10 key actions supporting each strategy. It’s difficult to execute more than that.

Set a calendar of key dates to track your progress and your staff’s progress in executing the strategies and actions. If you don’t do this, other work will get in the way, and you’ll find this plan falling by the wayside. This is one of the most critical aspects of putting your plan into action. People do what you Inspect, not what you Expect. So setting a calendar for progress reports and holding everyone accountable who will be involved in executing your organization’s social media strategies is critical.


Research the Environment

Identify Key Success Measures

Analyze Current Situation

Strategic Social Media

Planning

Identify Core Strategies and Top Priority Actions

Set Desired Outcomes

The Strategic Social Media Planning process is based on the Haines Centre’s Systems Thinking Approach® to strategic management and planning.

For Books, models, and articles on strategic planning and management, click here to visit Systems Thinking Press.

For more Information, or help with your plan, call

JER I DENNISTON (858) 357-9600 x5

Email: [email protected] www.hainescentre-sandiego.com

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5 Steps to Social Media Planning