I spend time looking at the questions posed by many on Linkedin and find a lot of them answered in the way that I would also answer them. I found this one from Robert Pease Vice President of Marketing at Gist, and this was my response...
Q. Looking for ideas and approaches to take our social media marketing to the next level. What does a world class program look like?
My response...
It depends entirely on the current level of social media marketing ...and any programme running should be world class you have a the world at your beckon call from just one Tweet if you want!
Essentially things are not rocket science... and there are no guru's out there that know it all - it is impossible with the daily changing face of social media (pinched from something that @grahamjones said this week). No one has the one answer to your total success in social media and no one really has any secret to tell you about it all that isn't there for the reading if you want to.
As people have said here strategy is key for social media output and building relationships. Many do this instead of other marketing efforts and have shifted massive budgets from one extreme to the other.
My fear for many in business is that the same will happen when we saw the dot com boom. A massive shift from offline to online, then the crash came when people realised they needed an offline budget too.
Social media is the same... it is just ONE tool in a box of hundreds that businesses and organisations need to use a mix of, not just major in one area.
My two pennies worth on how businesses should be addressing social media... take the whole marketing, customer service, account management and internal comms processes from a business and ensure that social media touches all four. That is the next level for social media.
World class programmes will include all these four areas, they wont just focus on selling or chatting or pushing articles out on people. Complete holistic engagement inside and outside of the organisation it where it's at to made social media really 'work' for a business.
And as some have muted about this... numbers. It's about the listeners you have not the followers.
