By adaptive - July 23rd, 2013

A new eBook from Altimeter Research offers clearly defined social media strategies that all corporations can learn from.

Earlier this year Altimeter Research released their latest piece of research that looked at the evolution of social business. Altimeter concluded: “Social media strategists have long championed the adoption of social technologies for business purposes. Despite that, social media is still largely operating in a vacuum, focused on bottom-up functional roles rather than guided by a top-down business vision. The crux of the problem is that many so-called social strategies are not innately linked to business goals. They are instead often guided by a peer or competitive-driven “social for social’s sake” philosophy. And even where clear goals do exist, social initiatives face challenges in the form of a lack of defined strategy, governance, and funding.”

 

The issues that the company identified will be familiar to many corporations that are continuing to wrestle with their social media strategy. Often this will mean a miss-match between executives and those actually at the social media coalface. The social media messages that are generated are uncoordinated, and a lack of funding is holding back the development of a coherent brand voice.

In their new eBook Altimeter now offer a number of clearly defined steps that corporations can take to develop a holistic social media strategy. The seven steps include:

  1. Define the overall business goals
    This is a fundamental component of any successful social media strategy, as business goals must align with social media activity.
  2. Establish a long-term vision
    Social media isn’t a short-term proposition. The messages that are generated could mean several years of refinement before they show good ROI.
  3. Ensure executive support
    For a social media message to be truly successful it must have buy in from the very top of a corporation.
  4. Define a strategy roadmap
    All too often corporations will jump into social media marketing with no defined plan of action.
  5. Establish governance and guidance
    Who is responsible for social media across your corporation? Guidelines and accountability should be clearly defined.
  6. Secure staff, resources and funding
    All successful social media strategies are well funded and have the appropriate resources allocated to them.
  7. Invest in technology platforms that evolve
    What is certain is that social media is rapidly evolving. Care must be taken to not commit to any technologies that can evolve, as these networks will over the next few years.

Success Factors of a Social Business Strategy

The new eBook takes each one of these steps and expertly expands on them to deliver to the reader a deeper understanding of what social media strategy is in today’s business environment. Moving away from what Altimeter call ‘vanity metrics’ of likes and retweets, this eBook is a mature overview of what a corporate social media strategy should look like to, and is essential reading by all corporations that want to gain a deeper understanding of not only how social media has evolved, but how they can practically exploit its massive potential.

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