STRATEGY MANAGEMENT
Social media as a whole is a shiny new object to many companies and is often characterized as something that “Gen Y does” or is subordinated as a collection of small tasks, such that it is relegated to entry level staff or interns.
Corporate social participation can be a lot of work depending on the size of the company, it’s goals and more importantly, the level of social activity of its customers. Some of that work is indeed appropriate for interns and if there is deep user experience with specific services, there is insight to be gained that can be immensley valuable. Segmenting social tasks and forecasting hours should enable most companies to determine how many entry level staff or interns are needed.
However, the question about interns in a discussion about a company’s decision to engage social media needs some consideration. Social media has strategic and tactical roles and public facing activities need to be guided by individuals with deep experience and knowledge regarding Customer Service, Marketing, PR, Sales, Talent Acquisition and even Legal.
“Lack of an effective social marketing strategy” is one of the most significant challenges facing businesses.
Without a strategy, organizations typically approach social media by putting the cart before the horse – starting a blog, a Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube account, or other social platform – rather than first mapping a course to achievable objectives.
The Online Circle Interactive will begin by discussing your business and marketing objectives with you.
After clearly establishing your business objectives (whether they be customer acquisition/retention, increasing brand awareness/market share etc.), we will devise the best social media strategy, structure and execution to meet these objectives.
We believe it is vital to fully understand your business objectives first in order to customise a strategy plan for you.
The use of channels and tools like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube will come AFTER we understand your needs and limitations like budget, head-counts, legal and others.
Once we have created the perfect social media strategy, customised specifically for your business; we will discuss managing each of your social media entities. To guide marketers through overcoming this challenge, we use a practical method for mapping an effective social marketing strategy.
Research – monitoring target audience dialogue about brands and competition.
Objectives – defining objectives aligned with target audiences and social metrics.
Actions – creating a social marketing strategy with a definitive plan of action.
Devices – deploying social platforms based on audience, objectives and strategy.
SAMPLE REPORT
Page coming soon.
CALENDAR
When using Social Media in business there is much uncertainty around what content to use, resources to alocate, confidentiality about your information and productivity of your staff.
Our experience has showed that senior executives and business owners share the same questions:
” I don’t have anything to say” , “I don’t have time for it”, “If we open up to comments, won’t people criticize us?” and more.
Such concerns are not new.
A February 2009 worldwide survey by security software company Sophos found that 50% to 60% of companies studied blocked access to social networking sites from the workplace. “Productivity” was the most-cited reason, followed by threats from malicious software (known as malware) and data leakage (the possibility that employees might share proprietary information on these sites). In fact, 62.8% of the managers polled felt employees shared too much information via social networks. Still Social Media helps. Companies using the power of it have come to value social media very highly to:
- enhance relationships with customers
- build their company’s brand
- marketing research
- direct communication to your final stakeholders or influencers
- competitive analysis
- build througth leadership
- direct sales and more,
At The Online Circle we believe in the power of spontaneous communications on social media however we also believe that social media tactical implementation should not happen in a vacuum.
Before we start to execute our Social Media plan for clients we suggest a social media calendar with specific topics and themes that meet your business objectives, sales and/or communication/marketing calendar.
Why a Social Media Calendar?
One of our primary goals with this system is to minimise the amount of time that senior management allocates to social media activities, and give them more focus on strategy. In the long-run, the calendar will support and leverage Social Media Promotion Campaigns into assets, for you and your company.
The system fulfils the need of getting in control of the outcome message. It allows a senior leader to understand and liaise with the flow of updates, of messages and migration of information from an internal to an external environment.
Using a Social Media Calendar can help ensure you keep hitting your core messages, and helps you coordinate your efforts across a range of social-media platforms.
Give too much information and you will be seen as spam. Give too little information and you will be seen as a non-engaging brand.
In order to adequately structure an update system, we help you to to define what each update is designed to do and what purpose it will serve.
From these specific topics and post references, we then branch out, looking for other mentions, communities and communications that we can reference that are relevant to our plan focus, objectives, and brand.
Therefore engagement will be natural. Meet your objectives and still follow a coordinated and planned pre-approved calendar.
At regular times we review our objectives and actions to make sure of the audience you want to attract and connect with; and the actions you’d like to drive through your outreach.
Are you on track?
If you are using social media to encourage others to give you feedback: to take a poll, to refer a friend to your site, to hire you, to purchase a product, whatever your goal or goals may be — is it working? If not, what are you doing wrong?
Below are 2 samples of graphics and models you will work with you:
INTERNAL POLICY SETTING
The Online Circle can work with the different departments in your business to create a social media internal policy that meets the demands of your PR department, marketing department, legal department and your staff spectations.
Social Media can be very powerful for your brand or can be very damaging if used inappropriately.
Your staff and collaborators use online channels to express themselves and to share their view of the world.
You can help them to understand boundaries and transform their position of ‘threat’, into online ‘allies’ and advocates.
Giving them clear direction about things they can and can’t do around your brand, products and services will not just settle controversies but also shows your confidence in them.
Talk to us, we have supported companies (Medium to Large) to implement their Social Media Policies.
Our approach is to answer mainly:
“What is the behavior that your company expects from its employees regarding the use of social media?
Our previous work has showed the best approach is to understand your company and then work the balance between requirements for different departments. Respect the employees’ right of expression. Balance between what the company wants and the employees’ rights.
How does your company position itself in this matter?
INSIGHTS
Page coming soon.
ROI
Each of the social media strategies developed by The Online Circle are measurable to ensure you are able to clearly see your ROI. There is a vast array of different metrics used to measure your ROI.
