Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Social Media. Getting Results!

Patrick Mason, TechMarkets

Social media tools such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter have been in the press a lot for their ability to deliver business results faster than ever before.  We have all heard the story about something going “viral” and becoming a sensation overnight.

Unfortunately, results like this cannot be guaranteed. To get the most out of these new tools, it is important to understand why, how and where you will use them, and to make sure that you are not just jumping on the bandwagon in the hopes of instant success. While you may achieve it, it is far more likely that you will not without a little planning up front.

If you are thinking about using social media for you business, OASIS is a simple five-step process that will help you get started.

Below is a brief overview of the five key steps in OASIS.

1) Objectives: Start planning for your project by picking a clear objective. Perhaps it is to increase sales or maybe it is to reduce customer support costs.  Whatever your goal, make sure it is clear before you start.

2) Audience: Next, define the audiences that need to be involved to make it happen and list their on-line habits. Are they mostly into e-mail, do they read Blogs, participate in any forums? If you don’t know, ask them. If you are still not sure, there are plenty of free tools around that will give you some basic information about who is on-line and where. If in doubt, here is a basic primer on social media research as well as some other resources to get you started.

3) Strategy: The next step is to figure out who you want to connect and why. For each group, determine how can you best reach them, and also think about how they can best reach each other. For example to increase sales your strategy might be; “We would like existing customers to tell new customers how they can implement/configure/ use our products” or if you are trying to reduce service costs you might say “We would like to capture the knowledge our customers have in troubleshooting our product so other customers can start solving their own problems.”

4) Implementation: Once you have a good sense of how you and your audiences will interact, the next step is implementation. This is where you determine how everyone will connect to achieve your objective.  Given the huge range of possibilities, you would be best to do a little homework to see how others have accomplished similar goals in the past. For example, blogs have been used very successfully to both increase sales, and reduce customer service costs. Blogs are able to disseminate information to many people at once.  What’s more, recipients can comment on articles, creating  more content for others to read. This can be ideal for both sales and service objectives. Here is a great list of examples of how others have used these techniques in their business.

5) Sustainment.  If you have successfully implemented steps #1-#4 above, chances are you have started some new conversations with your customers and other stakeholders. As such, it is important to define how you will end (or not) your social media project. Some projects like building a house have a natural end. Others like publishing a newspaper do not. What will be important for you is to decide how you want to manage yours. If it has a natural end date let people know, if not, prepare to manage it for the long haul. Good luck!

For more information, advice and free social media tools, feel free to visit our blog, or drop us a line.

Posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under Internet, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.