The success of any social media program is irrevocably tied to the initial expectations of the program. What did you think was going to happen?
“We’ve integrated the Social channels & Social personality into our everyday business and we’re now seeing unprecedented positive service sentiment and we’re very happy with the steady (organic) growth of loyal and engaged followers over time.” – said no client EVER.
Having a clear formula for success up-front is crucial to your expectations. And having clear expectations up-front is crucial to your success. But this is not the chicken or the egg. Expectations can come in many shapes and sizes. They are very complex and multi-faceted. Here is my top 10 list of expectations that MUST be internalized or the overall perceived success of your program will be decreased significantly.
Expectation #1: Your entire decision-making team must ALL have the same expectations and the “buy-in” needs to be top-down.
Expectation #2: You need to work hard to be relevant. This is not the Field of Dreams—you must do more than build it.
Expectation #3: Be more concerned with measurable engagement than the number of followers. Vanity metrics is good for your ego, but is not sustainable and can be manipulated in the bottom line. Seek to win consumer trust and brand advocacy instead.
Expectation #4: You must provide customer service in social channels with a purpose and commitment that may leave you vulnerable and transparent. Be accountable, timely and consistent with your community.
Expectation #5: Keep evolving. This space is dynamic—changing constantly. Take risks in new channels and with new creative brand storytelling angles. Stretch outside your comfort zone, there are no hard and fast rules. The worst that can happen is nobody joins you. Go ahead and blaze some trails.
Expectation #6: The size (number of followers) of your current social communities is NOT the size of your engaged audience at all times. If you have 10,000 followers on Facebook, I assure you that they are not all collectively holding their breath until you release your amazing $10 off coupon. Refer to expectation #2.
Expectation #7: You MUST advertise your Social presences (online and off) if you want to jumpstart your community numbers. It doesn’t matter what you have to say or offer if nobody is there to hear you. On-going advertising is worthwhile to COMPLEMENT organic growth and raise awareness outside your established communities.
Expectation #8: Social Media is not an overnight success. Be patient. Your success will be determined by your audience sentiment (they will tell you if you have a successful Social program) and not your internal measurement. Traditionally, majority customer sentiment determines a brand’s service quality—and this tradition has not changed.
Expectation #9: Establish trusted brand partnerships that will keep you connected to Social/Digital trends and strategies in order to keep you evolving. Adopt Social policies internally and train team members in best practices and engagement philosophies. People say and do stupid things online, and your employees are people.
Expectation #10: As communities grow, so will the number of hours you need to commit to maintaining them. This is where things really start to get interesting—and consequently where most brands abandon their social ship citing budget restrictions. Momentum is key. Don’t let your mouth write a cheque that your actions can’t cash. (Yeah, actions isn’t what I was thinking either.)
With a base understanding of realistic expectations, you can start to formulate what success will look like to you. Set goals, use benchmarks, and try and have a little fun.
Magazines were the original social networks. They filled a void for otherwise isolated individuals and the content transported them outside their community. Brands promoted their products through this early network with static advertising placement that shouted “LOOK AT ME. BUY ME. LOVE ME.”
With that in mind, let’s use Coca-Cola’s 70/20/10 content rule. 70% of your stories should be the low-risk, solid useful content your audience expects—appealing to all audiences. 20% of your stories should be higher-risk, solid useful content that is directed to specific segments of your audience—your loyal consumers. The last 10% of your stories are where you can set your hair on fire. It’s the content that reaches out to the edges, or comes at your idea in an entirely new way. Your audience might not be there yet or they might be right there with you. It’s the crazy, never-been-done-before-and-might-fail ideas. This is high-risk, but it has the potential to achieve the highest share rate and is also where your future 70-20% will come from.
A good example of a Brand leading their story through innovation is the grocery retail chain, Longo’s. They are telling you their brand story—quite literally. They are exercising their 10% and pioneering into new content configuration frontiers. They are bringing journalistic blogging together with traditional publishing techniques for a compelling story that is fun, engaging, and worth the attention of their audience.
Net policy or social media policy? I hear both of these terms being thrown about as if they were interchangeable. There is a difference. There should be a difference. The main distinction is the focus on what employees can do in the web world, rather than what they can’t. An internet policy typically outlines employee internet use during work hours—and consequently the monitoring of that use. A social media policy governs the individual interactions of your employees in the social sphere—as it relates to your brand—and can be much harder to monitor once an employee has clocked out and is operating in their own time.
their systems and processes and find something that might work for them. My instinctual response is to lie—and lie big. However, the short answer is that you have to figure it out for yourself. The long answer illustrates a chaos that is not for the faint of heart. I may be a bit old-school in my setup, but there is a generous helping of new-school. 
I defied nothing at all.
In this business, we writers watch each other very carefully. We keep an especially twitchy eye trained on those corporate staff writers with their pages of accolades. It’s not their fault. The collective ego of society convinces us that there is value in those accolades. They need it to have value. But the new generation is on to them. They’re bored with them. The slow-acceptance of these primitive thinking newspaper executives allows them to keep ramming their ‘glory days’ references up our wazoos. They tote by-lines noting decades of combined newspaper writing experience—like that means something now. It doesn’t. There is no edge there. It’s just old news.
Documentaries are gaining immense notoriety these days. Even my local video store has taken the time to negotiate documentary titles out of the genre muck and onto their own special rack. 
