Back to Basics: Revisiting the Groundswell

If you work as a communicator or you’ve been identified as the “young” one at your organization with social media savvy, you may heard the following from colleagues, supervisors, or clients.

We want to start a Facebook page. Can you help us develop a Facebook strategy? Or, we just started a Twitter feed: can you help us get more followers?

I’m sure I’m not alone in hearing requests like this with increasing frequency. Social media, is, after all, becoming mainstream, its use exploding across almost every online audience.

Developing a social media strategy

However, just because Facebook pages, YouTube videos, and Twitter feeds are the current tactics du jour doesn’t mean it’s ok to forget everything we know about communications and start putting tools before the basics. We still need to start by asking the right questions, knowing our audiences, setting measurable goals, and evaluating our success.

So in response to your client or boss’ demand to set up social media tools, where do you start? I just finished reading Groundswell by Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, which offers an excellent four-step planning process for building a social media strategy.

It’s called POST (people, objectives, strategy, technology) and it may have been developed in 2007 but it is as applicable as ever for social media planning in the current media environment.

Know your audience

When you start with people, what you are doing is going back to Communications 101 and taking the initial steps to find and learn about your audience. Before launching any kind of social media initiative, you have to know what types of online activities your target audience participates in. With Groundswell, Forrester popularized the Social Technographics Profile, which offers a tool to profile any type of audience in social media.

The most recent version of the profile was released earlier this month and you can test it out right here (thanks Forrester!).

So, while you have to pay A LOT of money to Forrester to get all the gory details, you can still learn for free that women over 55 are most likely to participate in social media as spectators, rather than creators, critics, joiners, or collectors, and incorporate that knowledge into your strategy if that’s who you are trying to reach. And there are many other sources of online audience trends out there such as eMarketer and MarketingCharts.

Objectives

Yes, when it comes to social media, we still need to build measurable goals into a strategy just as you would in any other communication planning process. To revisit the client request for a Facebook page, for example, you’d first need to ask several questions about what you and your client are trying to accomplish. Are you interested in improving internal communications, marketing a product, conducting audience research, setting up a support system? All of these are valid potential uses for social media, and may or may not be accomplished by the use of a Facebook page, depending on what you already know about where your audience is online.

There’s a chance you may be suggesting to that client to think beyond Facebook to reach their goals. But it’s only after you’ve researched your audience’s online behaviors and set objectives, that you can really start thinking strategy and technology tools to get you where you want to be?

I hadn’t heard of Forrester’s POST method before reading Groundswell, and I think it’s really an excellent synthesis of what I’ve been trying to explain less eloquently to clients. While it’s not entirely comprehensive, failing to directly address issues of culture change and capacity to implement, it’s the best social media strategy planning tool I’ve seen.

So, what do you think? Do you prefer any other methods, published or self-created, for creating a social media strategy?

Tagged as: forrester, groundswell, objectives, research, socialmedia, socialpulpit, strategy