Mike Rynchek
Spyder Trap Online Marketing

With Facebook recently achieving 225 million active users, and Twitter – well, who really knows how big Twitter really is – firms are desperately trying to understand how to make social media work for them. Not only is the volume of users massive, so is the challenge of making sure you have a social media strategy in place. As Spyder Trap continues working with larger and larger organizations we are becoming very accustomed to taking a firm who has a fragmented approach to social media and creating an integrated social media strategy. Our task is to consider all stakeholders, business objectives, hearing all voices/pieces of information and molding a model that will accomplish those goals. As fellow Twitter friend Adam Kmiec of http://www.thekmiecs.com/ stated this morning… “You can’t pulse social media. It doesn’t turn on and them off.” In other words, any social media campaign needs a starting point and that starting point should be accompanied with a well thought out integrated strategy.

Below is a strategy and process I devised for a particular American clothing manufacturer with a similar issue to what I described above. After further thought and discussion, I began to think that both large and small firms could benefit from this guidance. I hope it helps.

Social Media Strategy Definition Process:

1. Discovery Meeting/Roundtable – Each department has a stake in the successful development and implementation of a social media campaign. Our goal is to fully understand and address each core-marketing objective of each department. Common questions to discuss during a discovery session are as follows:

1. What are your overall business objectives? What role does your online marketing play in your marketing mix, and what are you looking to achieve via an online marketing program?
2. With regards to your online marketing efforts, where are your biggest “pain points” and/or areas of greatest opportunity? How would you prioritize them? For example:
   • Reach – Are you attracting enough traffic via your paid/organic efforts? If not, what are your goals? What are the biggest barriers to success?
   • Engagement – Are visitors finding your online presence relevant and engaging? Are they coming back?
   • Conversion – Are you getting enough sales? Are the leads converting to sale?

3. Who are your key competitors? Brick and mortar institutions, click and mortar institutions, etc.?
4. What is your key competitive advantage / what “niche” do you serve?
5. What KPI’s (key performance indicators) do you use to measure your online performance? How are you tracking them?

2. Trend Identification – Upon completion of the discovery process, the next step is to complete an analysis of the data/comments/thoughts received and formulate it into and actionable social media strategy. Considerations during this phase of the process are as follows:

1. Matching the goals of the individual department with the overall business goals.
2. Understanding how the unique business units work together.
3. Understanding of how the different marketing channels work together to build the brand and ultimately drive sales.

3. Strategy Development – This is the culmination of the time spent identifying goals/objectives, the core business needs and the current brand presence in the social media universe. The output of this phase is an on-brand integrated social media strategy that meets the goals and objectives defined by the different business departments in the discovery phase. Considerations during this phase of the process are as follows:

1. Developing a strategy that is a progression into a full-blown social media campaign. Ex. Start with brand monitoring to make sure we have the consumer approach, language and messaging determined. Slowly work into more consumer engaging activities and promotions.
2. Developing a strategy that is both timely and cost effective as defined in the discovery phase.
3. This strategy must be trackable to the extent that the services and tactics will allow. Goal is to closely monitor key performance indicators (KPI’s) such as:
   • Impressions
   • Visits (landing page, microsite, website)
   • Conversions/Sales

4. Integrated Social Media Strategy – As illustrated below, through this process we began with a fragmented strategy and approach and concluded with an integrated social media campaign. Again, this campaign is designed to support and accomplish the goals and objectives of the business departments and the client’s overall brand.

What do you think? Was this helpful? Any thoughts or feedback to the process would be greatly appreciated.