I love these kind of titles, they sound so powerful, so enticing.

Designing a strategy of social engagement isn’t hard. As my old brand manager used to drum into us, “Strategy is simple, everything you do has to relate back to and support the integrity of the brand. If it doesn’t, you’ll damage it.”

You have to be very clear on two things when you’re considering your strategy. (1) What do you want to talk to your audience about and (2) what you want to achieve for your brand. The balance between commercial and community is a delicate one but entirely achievable; Dell, Jet Blue, Tourism New Zealand and Age Concern have all built trust and grown awareness of their brands on the back of community engagement. The key is that engagement has to come first.

Jet Blue (the US airline) has a very simple strategy.( i) Monitor, (ii) engage with individuals, (iii) inform customers and (iv) humanise the brand.

It uses Twitter effectively as part of a vibrant social media mix, a by-product of this being a Twitter account on which they post late flight deals to an eager audience of 30,000 followers.

At Dell, social media isn’t a budget or revenue question, it’s a listening question. Dell says that their foremost objective is to listen and make it easy for the customer to engage them. Dell’s is the archetypal tale of getting social media right. In the face of poor customer satisfaction and losing ground in the market to HP, they engaged their customers and took a battering. They never hid from complaints and over time, earned back their trust.

Now as market leader they leverage their social capital and work with their customer directly on NPD across a number of channels and currently have one of the most valuable social media retail spaces in the world (Dell attributes it with $1.5m in sales), through which they sell stock.

So to the strategy.

Step 1

Answer this question. (Truthfully, or there’s no point). Why do you want to get involved with your community?

When being social is at the heart of your strategy, revenue (actual or personal social capital) doesn’t have to be a dirty word, it’s a by-product of other actions that are intrinsically social.

A mix of the altruistic, a desire to give something to your community will lead to new levels of understanding that feeds directly into your brand / product design. And let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to move your brand deeper into the mind of your audience.

Consider their world. What do they need? What are they looking for? How can you add greater value to their life beyond that of the product or service you provide? Can you be the catalyst for bringing your audience together?

Think about how your audience uses social media. A great starting point is something like Groundswell’s consumer profile tool. A fantastic tool that will help you understand social media usage by country, age and sex. I find this incredibly useful alongside other market research to build a picture of how a brand’s audience is interacting or not, across different types of social media platforms.

This is essential if you’re considering designing a strategy and making channel choices. Nothing says more about you than building a channel (a ‘forum’ for instance) that your audience inclined to use.

Step 2

Listen for a while, take time to ease your way into social media.

There are millions of convergent conversations happening across the social media space, too many for a single person or a small team to map efficiently. Using tools like Twitter Search and Blog Search will help you dial into conversations that are more pertinent to your brand, industry or service. Search for specific conversations (brand related if your brand is big enough, or service related otherwise) such as ‘buying flat pack furniture’, ‘car hire’ and ‘recommendations for builders’.

Don’t focus solely on looking for conversations amongst your audience relating to the product / service you provide. Learn more about their lives. For instance, what do they do for fun? What do they search for online? Where do they holiday? What entertainment do they prefer? This is useful knowledge that can feed product development, future competitions and promotions. It can also help you identify potential product or service partners i.e. party caterers and taxi firms. If everyone is having a good time and drinking, offering a cut price deal with a local taxi firm adds value to your service and your customers’ enjoyment.

Take time to understand what your competitors are doing, if anything. And bare in mind an absence of any competitors isn’t a sure fire indication that you don’t need to be there. Regardless of your audience’s age, if you intend your brand to be around in 10 years’ time you need to consider them now. Your audience is increasingly going to be online. Young people, consumers of tomorrow, live their lives online now. That is not going to change as they join the workforce and become consumers of your products or services.

When you feel you understand where you audience is, what they like to do and more importantly what you can do for them, think about how much time you can commit to maintain the conversation.

Step 3

Organise yourself

Pretty much everyone I speak to says time is their biggest barrier to putting in place a social media strategy. To be honest that’s the ultimate self fulfilling prophesy; they see barriers before they’ve even begun and if they jump into social media feet first and eyes shut, failure is sure to follow with potentially damaging results for their brand.

The truth is that many, many people manage it by being structured and prepared to engage with their audience, from individuals running their own businesses to teams in large organisations.

Three things need to be planned for effectively. (1) How often you intend to write / produce content for your social media channels, (2) how will you answer your audience’s questions and (3) how will you deal with positive and negative feedback.

It really isn’t hard. Don’t over stretch yourself. Tell your audience at the outset what you intend to provide and stick to it. Your audience understands that you have a business to run and a life to live.

Consider all your channels separately. Website, Blog, Facebook, Linkedin Group, Flickr, YouTube and not forgetting Twitter. Some channels can update others automatically, saving you time i.e. Twitter can update Linkedin and Facebook profiles, Flickr and YouTube can be used to add content to your website and blog. Think about how much time each will need to be kept up-to-date.

You may write one blog post per week and only upload images to Flickr and add news to your website monthly. You may update you Twitter profile once day, or have it turned on all the time. Whatever you chose to do, kept it up and be consistent.

You want people to communicate with you, so be timely with your responses. If lots of people ask the same question answer it once and address your reply to everyone. If someone does something for you eg forwarding a link or guiding someone to you, thank them for it. People won’t be upset if you can’t answer them immediately, but don’t leave a question unanswered, as it suggests you’re more interested in broadcasting your message than engagement.

All feedback is good feedback. And if you deal with it effectively as Dell and Comcast have, it can provide huge benefits for your brand. Think about it. A problem dealt with within a call centre has little chance to influence or help others. If you create a platform for your audience to feedback directly to you and are seen to own your customers problems and fix them effectively as Comcast do, the benefits are more than a single problem fixed.

Comcast’s Frank Eliason, or “ComcastCares,” as you’ll find him on Twitter, started searching for people talking about Comcast. He quickly found what he was looking for and set about engaging customers and solving their service issues. He now has 36,000 followers who benefit from his advice. More importantly, 36,000 people get to see a customer’s problem owned and fixed creating spectator advocates for Comcast.

This isn’t a replacement for customer service, it’s another channel which is more personal and two way.

Importantly, customers are fast becoming aware that Twitter is a way to air grievances and have them listened to because they are aware that brands are listening and engaging with people as soon as someone complains.

How you resource your social media strategy can be an incredibly positive undertaking. Your business may have teams to deliver your strategy or you could be on your own as a business owner with a small team that is busy doing other tasks. If you can’t manage it or don’t feel confident using social media, ask your team. You could be surprised that someone is a committed user and only too willing to manage your social media strategy on your company’s behalf. Empower them and let them talk to your customers, and give them clear guidelines as to what the task is and where the boundaries are. Creating rules makes you feel more comfortable and your team will be happier knowing what is and isn’t expected of them.

Step 4

Engage

How you deliver your brand across social media is up to you. Learn from others, see what is out there and transferable to your strategy. If you’re following someone else’s lead, attribute them. Don’t feel you always have to be original, as that can take time and resource you may not have. Be opinionated, contribute to the conversation and where your expertise is valuable, share your knowledge. What you give away will surely come back to you in other ways. And finally, enjoy it. It shouldn’t be a burden, it should be life affirming. You’ll feel part of something bigger than just your business and will have made contacts both professional and personal that will enhance you as a human being.

The opening paragraph from Cluetrain (Which for some reason, because it’s been universally spoken about has lost it’s cool, which is utter rubbish. Good words live forever in the mind) “Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”

Please stop using high scoring words in scrabble to make presentations on social media / business design language nonsense

A recent post by Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd in Harvard Business discussed how few socially connected organisations there are, indicating this will need to be redressed if companies are to be attractive to a future workforce that judges a potential employer by the social media freedom they allow their employees.

The social networking juice that powers a generation across sprawling vibrant communities has its feed forcibly cut off when the majority of company staff walk into work. All the potential of networked company communities, the opportunity for people to collaborate and and share knowledge is left at home and lost to the company.

Is it fear of lost productivity to idle chatter, tighter budgets and a weakening of central control that drives businesses to produce restrictive policies on social media use at work? These are long held arguments against developing a social media strategy, and simply don’t hold water. Devolving central control works. Flat organisational structures dissolves barriers between teams, ideas are generated with the customer and new products and services can be brought online quicker than through the traditional gate process. Vibrant social communities support this open structure and in todays rapidly changing economy, knowledge and innovation that drives the market can be at the heart of a company’s social community. Businesses have to let go of centralised control.

People who keep close to their customers by empowering their staff to engage directly with them across their internal and external comms channels, to solve problems and find solutions know what the market’s needs are and can respond faster to changes. In flat organisations, decisions are pushed through faster because the ideas are fed directly into decision makers without having to go through limiting chains of command. It also means the creativity of staff is released, and ideas and innovation blossoms.

Companies who are slow to release the energy of their own staff could have serious repercussions for them when the next generation of employees, the tuned in Millennials, who increasingly spend more of their time online being entertained, learning, researching, listening and talking to friends enter the workplace.

Think of the posibilities of a socially networked business. The ability to nurture new ways of thinking and innovating together is already proving sustainable (Look at the human genome project) and businesses who are tuning onto the opportunity are setting the standard for a new social business model that puts customers inside their products / service development process. These businesses tap into the human processor at the core of it’s workforce and free peoples minds to dream and create better products and services.

The winners and losers in business is borne out by Don tapscott and Anthony D. Williams who suggest in their seminal book ‘Wikinomics’, when web properties are compared, the difference is the losers build websites, and the winners build vibrant communities. I.e wiki beat britannica, blogger beat CNN, craigslist beat monster and googlemaps beat MapQuest. The losers build walled gardens the winners public squares.

Millennials will form over half the available workforce by 2014, and it is they who will set the bar for their employers.

Held at The Great North Museum, and the room in question was without doubt the coldest room I’d sat in for a long time. 30f is pretty cold and we were wondering why so? Half way through the event we were informed we were sharing a room with Lindow Man, a 2000 year old guy found preserved in a peat bog in 1984. He had to be kept at a constant temperature to stop him from melting! Well any feelings of upset quickly disappeared as you’d imagine. If a guys been around that long he’s got the call on how he wants to be kept.

Anyway here’s the presentation. I make no apology for the title, I like quirky nonsense!