A starting strategy for Social Media

     Using the six approaches above, here’s a quick rundown of your potential starting points to building out a social media project for your organization.

• Find the Customer - Assign two people in the organization to build listening queries, populate an RSS reader as a command center, and conduct regular reporting cycles on the fruits of listening.
• Be There Before the Sale - Create a quick, one page document to outline company guidelines for building employee profiles on social platforms like Facebook. Work with IT on firewall concerns. Work with management to lay out fair use policies during work hours (again, no more than a page). Work with sales/marketing/engineering on ideas for using the platforms.
• Be (or Empower) the Influencer - Have a one page blogging policy in place (usually no more strict than the email policy). Have policies on comments (including how to handle negative comments). Build strategy on types of posts, ideas for outreach, promotion, and finding similar blogs and people in the space.
• Shift Behavior - Demonstrate through case studies and pilot efforts how to empower employees to be helpful. Share examples and ideas on how these efforts can positively impact marketing/sales efforts.
• Warm Up the Funnel - Determine a method for internally annotating the social aspects of CRM, or build a way to report the multi-touch approach of using social tools to reach out and maintain relationships with prospects and customers.
• Measurement - Improve current reporting to include the social elements such as comments, inbound links, search term value, etc.

     Source: Fishing where the fish are: Mapping Social Media to the buying cycle (Chris Brogan) e-book