Questions to ask before implementing your social media plan

There are a couple of other things I always need to cover in customer conversations that customers that have already implemented social media in their organisation often forget.

(thanks to Alchemy for the image)

• How to measure the impact of employee blogging.  It’s not the numbers of people who read your blog, it’s the quality of the readers of your blog and the quality of the interaction.  Trackbacks, pingbacks and comments aren’t the whole measure.  If you’ve syndicated your blog through Twitter, you also need to record the comments and retweets in your measurements
• How to check that your social media guidelines and policies are actually being adhered to.  Do you read every single blog post, Tweet and Facebook status update or do you wait for the press to let you know that there’s been a leak
• How to get everyone talking about the new product release or corporate initiative.  Do you hold a meeting, or send an email before the official PR release goes out?  Do you give the bloggers extra talking points around the press release? or do you let them interpret the PR release in their own way?
• How much time will you allocate to your staff to do social media outreach activities.  A good social media plan takes a significant investment in time with several companies spending 11 hours per week or more on their strategy execution.  Do you hire someone to deliver your social media strategy or do you adjust the workloads of the staff to allow for the new communication
• How to measure a baseline to workout your ROI. Establishing a baseline is crucial as you need to use an effective baseline for your metrics measurement and your ROI figures. Finding out how your customers use social media to impact their purchasing decisions is also key to finding out how their sales purchases work.
• How to change employee behaviour to embrace the new way of communicating  across the company.  How do you implement this effectively.  Kira has a couple of good tips on the AntsEyeview blog about changing your behaviour after learning something new in social media.

It’s not to late to add these considerations into your existing plan.  Fortunately social media projects are flexible enough to merge things in at a later stage so it’s not the end of the world if a couple of these points have been missed in your organisation.

Something to think about anyway…

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