The Wordswell Social Media Process

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There are a lot of people jumping on the “social media” train right now. Many know what works and what doesn’t. Many do not. Our most recent story is of a friend of ours who is selling social media consulting who had not gotten beyond a few facebook friends in their own life.

In any event, at Wordswell we believe social media is really just a cocktail party where engaging and building relationships with people may bring about good things. However, you go because you want to engage the relationship NOT because you want to “get business”.

As a result we work through a 10 step process on understanding, implementing and effectively building your social media presence in the conversations going on out there.

1. Understand your business. Our first goal is to understand our clients businesses and begin to gain a clear understanding of the organizations overall mission, vision, values, and goals so that we can become partners in helping them succeed.
2. Choose your audience. One of the advantages of social media is that you get to pick and choose your audience. In traditional marketing many channels were shotguns: hit lots of people with a message and some of the people may come do business with you. In social media you can narrow the focus.
3. Identify your goals. What exactly do you want to have happen. “Grow my business” is not a valid answer (though it may very well be the outcome). We want to help you identify what you want people to do with the conversations that we will be engaging online.
4. Create a clear strategy. Everyone agrees with this idea but very few take it to heart. The web is full of blogs that have been posted to 2-3 times and then sit dormant for months. This is a lack of clear, consistent and well implemented strategy.
5. Pick the right channels. Not all online opportunities are created equal and many are narrow in terms of audience and reach of impact. The right channels, on the other hand, will reach who you need, when you need them.
6. Listen. This is possibly the most misunderstood part of social media. Francis Schaefer used to say “I spend 50 minutes of every hour listening so that in the last 10 minutes I have something to say”. Social media is about engagement and to engage you have to be a good listener.
7. Utilize existing content. You may already have great content developed to share with the world. If so we want to find it and make sure that people see it. In addition, if there is already PR out there that needs to be “exposed” we want to find it and get it out there.
8. Create great new content. For most clients we go through the process of creating new content that helps tell your story to the world. This involved coming up with your company story, your service offererings, and your core message.
9. Engage the conversations. Everything we have talked about until now is still creating groundwork for the real work of relating online to people. After we have all the ingredients above in place it’s time to start engaging. Engaging is partaking in real conversations with real people about real issues – or in some cases just sharing about you and listening about others. For companies this is a crucial step in reaching out to the world. It says that you care and that you have a voice. This may seem like a strange way to talk about an organization…just trust us…you can create a powerful voice.
10. Track results and innovate along the way. Social media is not an end in and of itself except in the case of folks who use it only for entertainment. For the vast majority of people it is about connecting with real people about issues they (and you) care about. We’ll evaluate your strategy, quantify the activity and results and adjust course along the way to help you get into the conversations and relationships that you want to be involved in.

Here’s a great example of what we are talking about using twitter as an example: