An Executive Introduction to Social Media

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A group of 'C' level executives recently met to speak about how they can leverage social media into their marketing mix. We started by asking people what they knew. It was interesting to note that they knew all the buzzwords, that they were aware of key trends, & were in touch with what their competition was doing on social media.

However, here were some key issues -

1. The 'execs' didn't truly understand all that was available. Besides the buzzwords and some social media channels - they didn't really know what could be done.

2. They were doing things because others were doing the same exact thing.

3. They all meant well - their primary interest was to build a sustainable ROI business with each social media channel.

We spent a very productive half day where we looked at all the options - here is a quick summary:

Start by picking all the channels where your recipients hang out. List all of these channels, and understand how each channel works.

Next engage your recipients to see where they would best like to interact with you. One suggestion is to pick three social media channels to start things off.

Develop key strategies to lure recipients, engage recipients, & keep them coming back for more.

Plan your interactions through a series of step by step use cases.

Be sincere. Dedicate resources and work with your team to make sure that things happen. Set small goals, measure your performance, & evaluate your goals.

We had a very simple assignment where we tried to develop a strategy to get people to come to a workshop. We went down three paths - the traditional path, the social media path, and a hybrid path. The hybrid path included a little traditional and some social media. We tracked the responses with goals of time, the ability to measure responses, and cost. Of course there are a number of other metrics - but simple exercises like this helped us decide what path was ideal and how best to assign ROI.

Social media is an absolute and is best utilized if integrated into your marketing mix.