You need a plan.
You want to know why Social. How Social. And ultimately you want a plan to get you where you need to go. Easy. We tap into the conversations, perceptions and sentiment about your brand, product, service. Then we go to work on profiling your target audience… who are they in the real world and where they live in the virtual world. Great. Still easy. Now we take your 17 random objectives and we make one or perhaps three concise, measurable objectives. Still easy. Now we put your strategy together. We identify the traditional marketing required, then figure out whether you should build and let them come or if you should go to them. We then rope in all the sticky social tools needed. And voila. We have a plan. But…3 months is all I got.

Here’s why:

You roll out your acquisition plan.
You watch what happens. You monitor. You listen. You observe.
We course correct according to the insights gathered.

What happens after that?
You go back to your plan and assess how to evolve your plan for the next three months. If your success in social is directly proportional to your audience… then listening and understanding your audience is key to your plan.

That’s what my gramma has told me for donkey’s! I was reminded of this while reading Marketing Mag’s  Controversy Cubed.

The story in a nutshell? Cap C ran a SM contest for Nissan’s Cube. All looked great until the winners were awarded by 6 judges. Appears the judges had a history with the winner(s) and they were unfairly awarded. Cap C followed the competition rules to the letter… but that wasn’t enough.

Participating in this Social Media space means you must be prepared to be transparent, candid and fair in your approach. Period.  Fudging something, or discreetly throwing your Social Media broccolli under the table for Fido to wolf down while nobody is looking will not fly.

I’m not here to debate whether the judge favored one or more winners because they were friends, former business associates or whatever. I am interested in the part of this story that says:

… someone cried bull shit and posted their concerns online… but these haters were ignored for way too long.

…Tony Chapman told the FP that the Cube’s demographic were models, arty farty types and people with corn rolls only to completely unsettle all of the active participants in the contest who were dads from suburban Markham and Moms from the Hammer.

I totally get that it is far easier to edit than create. I also know that Social Media is very much in its infancy and therefore goofs are bound to happen. I know but there are some key learnings in all of this for the rest of us to take away.

And  I keep coming back to the same one liner…

People need a ‘Come To Jesus’ kind of a social media 101 before they start dabbling in this, and for God sakes, don’t let the sales or marketing types lead these campaigns.

This is not marketing the way we did it even a years ago. This is not about marketing. This is about engaging people in real life. That means genuine intentions followed up with real value. Scott Stratten sums it up beautifully with his UnMarketing! I blogged recently about loving your haters. This is what Social Media was meant for… giving you the opportunity to find your haters, find out what their pissed off about and giving you the choice to remedy it and move you that much closer to turning your hater into a neutral… or if you’re good enough… a fan? Or you could just roll your eyes and move on leaving them to blog on and on and on and on about why you are a chump. Finding your haters and addressing the cries has to be part of your Social Media plan. Do I really need to give you an analogy to drive this part home? how bout the One bad apple story?

I’m also notorious for beaking off about stalking emerging media, market trends and analyzing the evolution of consumer behavior!

Why?

So people don’t hang me from the nearest stop sign <I’m short so wouldn’t need a lamp post> for delivering a SM campaign that doesn’t absolutely understand, know and consider the audience. Geeezus people! It has to be about the audience.

If you are trying to fudge this part… the foundation… everything else you build on top of this is chumpness! Duct tape it if ya like… but it won’t hold. Doing it right the first time isn’t nearly as difficult as you think! Really. If you think it’s just not worth the extra few dollars or effort… consider how well you would sleep knowing this was circulating about you, your client, your brand, your <whatever you like>!

So you are no longer on the fence – you are on the other side and ready to go full speed with Social Media to enable your product/service and support existing initiatives – glad to hear it.

Where do you start? Glad you asked.

PEOPLE WATCHING!

It starts with knowing your people. Who are you interested in? How old are they? What do they do online today? What do they need? What do they want? How much of that can you provide them? What do they use today or where do they go today to obtain what you offer? Why will they perceive yours to be better?

Forrester offers a cool tool that allows you to profile the social technographics of your audience based on some basic data input.

If your audience are more spectator than creator, perhaps you don’t want to ask them to upload content or create vlogs.

If your audience are creators – your static 1.0 site will probably not have them returning to your site any time soon.

What else can you do? Well… start playing with and testing stuff!

Monitor what is being said about you/your brand/your product/competition. Try these … Free Social Media Monitoring Tools.

Start your blog! I like wordpress – I also like Mr. www.stevesaylor.net who can work magic with your wordpress blog to make it a kick ass site. Blog regularly. At least every second day if not daily.

Create profiles on communities. Loads of ‘em. I was going to suggest you check out Atomkeep to manage multiple social profiles with one click but I think Ben Parr’s blog on HOW TO manage multiple profiles is a far more robust and helpful post than just directing you to AtomKeep. So take the time to read it.

Get mucked in to the convo. Now! Comment on people’s blog posts. respond to questions on linkedin/twitter. ask questions. Have a bloody opinion… even if it’s not the opinion of the majority. It’s ok.

Find the brilliant minds in this space today. Observe them. Read their articles. Read their case studies. Ask them questions. Learn from them.  How do you find those brilliant minds? Start here. www.Mashable.com

Gather insights, data, learning from your online activity. Monitor who is coming to your site(s) and what they’re doing on them. This analysis will be a really good indicator as to what your next steps should be.