While there are countless ways to Plan, Design, Implement, and Sustain a social media marketing program, the key is to actively address all of these steps because they are critical in developing a successful campaign. Each step in the process supports the other and all of them together create a foundation for connecting with your community. As I explained in this post, creating a campaign consists of two parts: 1. Plan, Design, Implement and 2. Sustain.

Plan: Without a plan that is based on the long term goals of the organization, your social media marketing efforts will flounder aimlessly with no clear path for direction. A campaign based on a set plan will ensure the activities and resources allocated to the social media effort are spent in a way that benefits the organization and works toward achieving its goals. Metrics are established in the planning process as well to measure progress from the beginning of the campaign.

Design: Your community consists of two parts: your organization, and your community. Designing a program that meets the needs of both your organization and your community will help guarantee the long term success of your campaign. This is done by identifying tools and areas online that will best reach your community and provide for the highest degree of engagement. Online research and surveying your current and potential customers will ensure your campaign actively targets your community and provides the resources that they are looking for. If you don’t know where your customers are online, and what they are looking for in a community, you can’t effectively connect with them.

Implement: The planning and design stage will give a clear direction for implementation. This is where a company will actually set up the different applications and integrate them to create a desired experience for their customers. They will also apply any analytics or tracking software that will assist with metrics measurement. All of the applications should be appropriately branded and linked in a fashion that directs the customer down the established channels. Once the applications are integrated, the campaign is ready to go online.

Sustain: The sustaining portion is where all of the action takes place. This is where content is created and shared with the community. It is also where interaction and engagement takes place. There are many different ways to carry out this portion in terms of the frequency and mix of communications; that is why all companies need to have guidelines and policies in place to protect their brand and their organization. Schedules need to be created for updating the different social media sites as well as communications channels for elevating and dealing with issues. Without them, there is substantial risk not only to your brand’s image, but legal ramifications as well.

As you can see, each part of a properly administered social media campaign relies on the other. If you take out any part of the system, it will significantly hinder your ability to effectively connect with your online community. On the other hand, properly working thru the process will create a solid foundation for your company to connect with its community. Once your company has connected, you can join the metrics conversation in 2010 as you measure your progress toward your social media marketing goals.

Most of the job descriptions are similar in that they are looking for someone who knows everything about social media marketing and has the experience to design and implement a full-fledged social media marketing campaign. In addition, this person will then need to manage and maintain all of the content on their different social media sites. While this seems like a pretty straight-forward and simple job description, there is one major problem: This person doesn’t exist; and if they did, you wouldn’t want to hire them.

The reason has to do with skill-sets. There is a completely different skill-set involved in designing and building an effective online community, than the skill set involved in maintaining your community. Building an effective social media marketing campaign is similar to building an office building in the sense that it starts with goals, planning, strategies, and timelines. It has to be built on a solid foundation and designed in such a way that it meets the goals of everyone who uses it. Your social media marketing and online community strategy is no different. Much like you don’t hire the construction company after the building is completed to sell the units and do the grounds keeping, you wouldn’t want to hire an expensive community strategy consultant to maintain your communities after they have designed and implemented your campaign. When you flip the equation around, it sounds even worse. You wouldn’t want to hire the sales-guys and groundskeepers to build your office building and have the construction company maintain it; just like you wouldn’t want to have an unqualified employee design your entire social media marketing campaign, and then have a high-priced consultant maintain it. Unfortunately, that is what these job descriptions are asking for. The candidate will either be under-qualified on the front-end in goalsetting, design, and implementation, or overqualified on the back-end in maintaining. Either way, with this approach, your company loses. It either has a poorly planned and executed campaign because the new employee didn’t have the proper skill-set, or you are going to pay way too much on the maintenance side compensating an overqualified employee. When you break down those job descriptions, that is exactly what you are going to get.

Once you can grasp the problem that I have just explained. The solution is simple and will actually save your company money in the long run. But it involves looking at your campaign in two parts: 1. Planning, designing and implementing and 2. Sustaining. For planning, designing, and implementing, the smartest companies are going to partner with experts who are already ahead of the curve and have the experience to get them up to speed in the shortest amount of time. Once the proper infrastructure in place, you can decide if you want to handle the sustaining side internally or outsource it to save resources. This approach will not only save you money on the sustaining side, it will ensure a strong foundation for your community that simultaneously meets the goals of your organization.

For the programs success, the community manager and social media marketer needs to be aware of the business goals. Why is your company investing in these programs?  What are the goals (make sure they are measurable and not “feel good” metrics)? If the person or people in charge of the programs are unclear or unaware of the purpose and goals, then the program is at risk.

On another note, if you have internal staff handling a few tweets, Facebook page updates, etc., make sure the manager adds the responsibility to their job description and it clearly outlines expectations. Many companies ask employees to do these things “when they have time” and that sends the wrong message. It is unfair to the employee and it will backfire on the program when it is not taken seriously. Remember that social media marketer is a new position and requires specific instructions that ties into the business goals, then also trickling down to the metrics.

Whether you like it or not, a new race has begun between you and your competition. It is a race to see who will be the first to connect with their online community in the most effective way. The one who does the best job of connecting will get the most from their community. There are many benefits to connecting with your online community as I spelled out in my last post, but the macro benefits come in the form of customer-based innovation, reduced service support and marketing costs, and increased sales and profitability. If you aren’t actively pursuing social media marketing, your opportunity cost is the opposite of all of these benefits.

An easy way to understand just how big social media is today is to look at search engine statistics for three of the largest social media platforms from 2007 thru the end of 2009.  As you can see in the graphs below from Google Insights, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have not only exploded in popularity, but it all happened in 2009.

Facebook:

Twitter:

YouTube:

Given these statistics, it is not surprising that Facebook just received a peer nominated Crunchie for the Best Overall Start-Up Website in 2009. Facebook won this award for the 3^rd time in a row – it already has 350 million users and is growing.  Twitter came in 2^nd. Sorry YouTube – you get a mention in our blog, but no Crunchie this year.

The writing is on the wall. Social Media Marketing is bigger than ever and it began last year. The smartest organizations have already realized the opportunity costs involved. They are actively planning and budgeting to connect with their communities and meet their Social Media Marketing goals for 2010. The race to connect with your community is on between you and your competition.  While it would be nice to “ease” into the race, with the opportunity costs involved for losing, you can’t afford not to win.

With the rise of mobile technologies and their interfacing with social media, it won’t be long before the US is almost 100% online with a major portion of that time spent on social media activities. Every day, the people in your community are talking about everything in the world including your brand. But they aren’t just talking about your brand, they are talking about your competitor’s brand too. And you are not the only one who can talk with them, it is possible for your competitors to talk with them too. Some of these conversations are happening on open platforms such as Twitter, while other conversations are partially hidden on Facebook and other private online communities.  The challenge for every company from here on out will be to connect with their online communities.

There are many steps involved in connecting with your online community, but the basic ideas are outlined in the book Groundswell. Listen, Talk, Energize, Help, and Embrace. A strategy built around these principles will help you connect with your community and create a resource like your company has never seen before.

Effectively connecting with your community will:

Increase Brand Awareness

Open Relationships with Customers

Educate Customers

Increase Web Traffic

Reduce Marketing and Advertising Costs

Allow for Marketing Research

Create Online Archive of Documented Knowledge

Reduce Customer Service Support Costs

Provide Competitive Research

Encourage Customer Innovation

Reduce R&D Costs

Improve Product Development

Create Two-Way Conversation

 Allow Exchange of Information and Ideas

Promote Blog

Build Trust

Increase Leads

Increase Sales

Increase Profitability

Seem too good to be true? If there weren’t companies already taking advantage of these benefits, I would agree. No other form of advertising or marketing can compare. This list is neither exhaustive nor guaranteed, but the opportunity is real and it is happening right now. The companies that do the best job of connecting will get the most in return from their community.

Is your company connected with its’ community?

Given this fact of life and business, I am amazed at how I still find companies who aren’t participating in social media marketing. I have blogged about it in past posts and see it daily while making calls. I mostly call on marketing departments in large companies and I get all kinds of responses to our attempts to help; “I have tried blogging, but no one came, so I quit” or “We have other capital projects we are working on, and we are intentionally taking it slow” or “I think we have a Facebook or a Twitter account but we are pleased with where we are.” Since I didn’t make up any of these comments, I have left out the companies’ names because two of them are well known. Mind blowing.

Why wouldn’t you want to connect with your online community (customers) in the most cost efficient manner possible? There are so many benefits to using social media that I am going to dedicate an entire blog to just that topic, but the obvious benefit is being able to connect with your customers. No other form of marketing allows for the open two-way flow of information between you and your customers. Instead of barking at them like traditional media has done for too long, why not engage them in conversation about your brand?

 But you have to do it properly. Failure to do so can impact your brand negatively, discourage the natural progression of your community, and leave your image worse off than when you began. All companies should establish best practices and corporate guidelines for everyone in their organization to follow. To justify the expense involved, goals need to be created that can be measured along with metrics to track your progress. Your overall strategy should be consistent with not only your marketing, but your corporate goals as well.

The reward for doing everything properly is a thriving community that will benefit your organization in every way. Many companies have already figured this out and are enjoying a significant advantage over their competition.  Social media is happening as we speak. The sooner your company gets up to speed, the better off it will be.

This era of social media ignorance reminds of the time before companies promoted their websites. People were already out using the web in abundance long before companies started putting their URLs on their TV commercials. I remember the first super bowl where every commercial finally included their web address and I was like, “Eureka”!

That day is going to come again, only this time companies will be advertising their social media marketing applications. Instead of companies posting their website, they will be posting their Twitter address like mine: twitter.com/ridleymsc on every marketing contact. Don’t get me wrong, you should still include your website http://marketsquarecommunications.com in all of your marketing, but you should also include whatever other social media tools you are using. It blows me away when I see companies send out emails without links to their social media applications – what a missed opportunity!

The future, and what all companies should be doing now, is directing as many people as possible to their most effective, engaging, and least costly form of marketing – social media. Not only is it where all of your customers are, it is where they expect you to be. Much like the growth of the internet, social media is growing exponentially, the sooner your company figures this out, the better off you will be. From my travels, it’s clear to me that these airport advertisers are behind the times, hopefully your company isn’t missing the boat too.

What an ideal industry for social media marketing and online community. It revolves around a highly regarded, constantly changing product that creates connoisseurs the world over. These connoisseurs are connecting with each other online daily to stay informed on their favorite wines. This creates an ideal situation where smart companies can engage and embrace these online conversations. The companies that do this successfully will enjoy a range of benefits. Most importantly, they will create a two-way conversation with their customers. This will allow them to see what they are doing well and what their competition is doing well. They will also get new ideas for current and future products, and decrease marketing expenses. If they are listening, engaging, and connecting with their customers as they should, it won’t take long before they are producing exactly what their customer wants. The end result will be a happy customer and they’ll probably buy more wine too.

Now that I have identified a problem in wine country, somebody has got to go back and help those wineries. It’s a tough job, but I think I am just the one to do it. Anyone want to come?

What matters is the engagement of the members.  Are they posting, commenting, downloading, viewing videos, listening to podcasts, do they return regularly, etc.?  Or you could have specific activities based solely on your community’s members and how they prefer to interact or collaborate.  You could have a small community in regards to numbers, but the quality of interaction and information in the knowledge based is in high demand.

All this said, you do want to continue to drive people to your community site.  You do want to encourage people to join and this is ongoing, month after month.  Evangelizing the community externally and internally as well. Educate your colleagues, that the success of the community does not solely hinge on the number of members.

Make sure your online community goals and strategy include member interaction as well as a continuous and steady growth of registered members.

If your company is large and has an established brand in the marketplace, then you should definitely take a long hard look at online community, which is a full-flown website with discussion forums, blogs, content, member interaction places and more.  This will require substantial budget and head count to support the community, but brand is important here.  So is control of and access to the knowledge base that is created at the online community.  If people are sharing and contributing, then you own the knowledge and resources shared there.  If this community was created on Facebook or a similar social media, then you have little or no control of the knowledge base at the present and most importantly in the future.  When creating your own online community, which usually is linked to the corporate website, you own the information and the member database.  If you create a full-blown online community, then use social media as the marketing tool to send people to your online community website.

Smaller companies or companies who don’t have a well-known brand or a lot of budget, then you should look at social media.  Social media is free, and even though you do not own the knowledge base, you still want the access to existing and new customers.   Use social media as an extension of your marketing arm. No time like the present to start and get the word out about your product or services and in the process build community around these.

Most importantly, large or small company, big or little budget, make sure online community and/or social media makes sense for your business goals and strategy.