This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the second pillar, Strategy.

Marketing in Social Media is fast becoming an important piece in most companies’ marketing plans for this year and moving forward.  More companies are adding Social Media Marketing as a line item in their budgets this year.  They are either maintaining what they invested in it last year or adding more money to it, which is pretty impressive seeing the state the economy is in and how budgets are being slashed left an right.

What Are Your Company’s Goals for Social Media?

With that increase in money towards Social Media Marketing though must come accountability.  At the end of the day, how what is your Return on Conversation or Investment for entering into the Social Media space?  Do you have goals set in place to help understand whether or not the marketing tactics you’ve researched and laid out very carefully in your strategy are really helping or harming your company?  Without a clear set of goals, how do you know what to even measure and what do the success metrics look like?

A study from Business.com surveyed its audience about their plans for 2010.  In it one of the figures showed that over 25% of the companies who were intended to participate in Social Media Marketing were planning to implement 10 or more marketing tactics in social media.  Wow!  10 or more!  How does any marketing team keep track of all of that, and whether each tactic its successful or not?  It’s a tall order.  Even taller is how do they know how each of these tactics help reach the goal set in place – if there are any?

Goals are Different than Metrics

Measuring, counting, accumulating anything is looking at metrics for a particular tactic you are implementing.   Measuring tactics alone doesn’t really mean you are hitting your goals.  Goals are more encompassing of the bigger picture of where a company wants to be.  It isn’t to gain 100 more fans on a Facebook page – that’s measuring a tactic.  A goal is something like “Increase Customer Retention by 10%” and figuring out what metrics you measure in your social media tactics that can help prove social media helped to meet or contribute to meeting that.

Counting tweets, retweets, fans, friends, website traffic, referrals, and everything else is all about the metrics.  Individually they can mean absolutely nothing.  For your goals to be successful you need to look as how all of these metrics work together.  Which are the strong pieces and which are the weak.  You do need to measure, and look at these individually  – how else will you know if the particular tactic is helping you?  But when you look at your goals, it has to be from a higher view, and remember that’s what the C-Suite and Senior level management is looking at too.

When you are putting together your strategy, make sure you lay out your goals first – then figure out what metrics help you understand how what marketing tactics you are implementing are helping you reach those goals.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the second pillar, Strategy.

If there is one thing that is certain in this every changing world, it’s just that – change is certain.  As the tides of the internet and the whims of social media community members ebb and flow, so does the popularity, web site traffic, interest and buzz around tools, applications and sites in social media.  Even with all your research, six months down the line, the social media marketing tactic that you identified as part of your strategy could be in serious decline and not performing.  On the other hand, the marketing tactic could be even more of a success than you imagined.  The question then comes to any company – “Are You Flexible Enough in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy to Change & Adapt to Those Conditions?”

Can You Plan to Be Nimble?

Some companies have internal politics that make it nearly impossible to be nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changes that happen in social media.  There are budget constraints, signatures that need to be obtained or a bunch of other hoops that a social media marketing team must go through in order to change parts of their strategies on the fly.  This is where mid-sized to small-sized businesses have an advantage to super big corporations, a lot of times it’s a quick phone call or email to get that change done, not a check list of permissions that need to be obtained.

The key for these bigger corporations to be able to be flexible is to plan in flexibility if they can and to also educate senior management about the entire social media environment.  If they understand that you are monitoring and measuring closely and need to be able to stop or invest more into something within a short time frame and have the data to back that up, they may be more willing to allow for more flexibility and less rigid processes for your strategy.

Don’t Be Afraid to Stop

When something isn’t working, why would you want to keep doing it?  It’s a lot like beating your head against a brick wall, you’re not going to move the wall, you’re only going to get a bruised forehead & a headache.  If you have the data to tell you that the tactic you are implementing isn’t meeting the success measurements or helping you to attain the goals you set in place, you need to be nimble enough to either change the approach slightly or stop it all together and even replace it with putting more investments and resources into other tactics that are hitting their success metrics.

Continuing to deploy and invest in social media marketing tactics that aren’t working just because they are cool or you like them a lot and feel comfortable in that community, is likely only prolonging the failure and wasting your valuable resources.  You’ll get more out of being nimble and flexible enough to adapt and invest in places that are garnering your more engagement and success than in places that you merely feel comfortable with but aren’t producing for you.  This is why its important to diversify your strategy with a few marketing tactics and not to fall in love with one or two particular sites, tools or tactics.

Be Ready to Invest in What’s Working

Sometimes a particular marketing tactic can work a lot better than what you had even expected.  Those are the nice kind of surprises that marketers like to experience.  If something does take off and works like gangbusters in your strategy are you prepared to invest more time, resources and money to further enhance the success of what’s working so well?  Do you also readjust your goals, the amounts invested and time you are allowing the program to run?

Being able to plan into your strategy the ability to change rather quickly is important for the success of your plan.  It’s especially important to be able to take advantage of things that are working better than expected, or if there’s a new opportunity with a feature or a tool.  Sometimes implementing new tools can make your team even more efficient and free up some time and resources, so can you then dedicate that newly freed up time and resources into current tactics or implement new ones?  These are things that your team should be looking at when you are first planning your strategy.

At the end of the day if you can plan in some “padding” into your strategy that will allow you to be flexible you’ll be better able to adapt to the every changing social media marketing world.  If you educate your C-Suite about the way social media can change but show them you have the data to back up the reason for changes, you’ll end up being more nimble and better able to adapt and find a lot more success in your future.

I get a lot of questions about how I approach Social Media Marketing. The team here at Serengeti Communications has a very methodical approach, we like to ensure a solid foundation for every strategy that we put in place for our clients. In doing that there’s four fundamental ideas, or as I call them “Pillars” that help stabilize any efforts taken into social media marketing. As a team here, we decided that we’d like to share some of our experience and knowledge with the 4 Pillars of Social Media in a series throughout the month of June. Each week, we’re going to have 2 to 3 posts on both Social Conversations and on Endless Plain about each week’s Pillar.

• The first week we’ll be discussing the first pillar of social media marketing: Research. Those posts will be published between June 1 and June 4th, 2010
• The second week we’ll be discussing the second pillar of social media marketing: Strategy.  Those posts will be published between June 7th and June 11th, 2010
• The third week we’ll be discussing the third pillar of social media marketing: Engagement. Those posts will be published between June 14th and June 18th, 2010
• The fourth week we’ll be discussing the fourth pillar of social media marketing: Measurement. Those posts will be published between June 21st and June 25th, 2010

We’ve also designed specific training around the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, with two areas of specification:  B2B and B2C.   These two types of businesses take rather different views when it comes to each one of these pillars, that’s why the training we provide to our clients addresses the specific needs of these two very distinctly different types of business.

So stop by next week when you’ll get the first edition of our Four Pillars of Social Media based around Research.