Blu Morpho Marketing

Recently, I attended this fabulous workshop presented by Lipscomb’s Career Development Office all about social media implementation and measurement.  As promised, I’d like to share what I took away from the second presenter, Rob Robinson, Director of Social Media, at McNeely, Pigott & Fox.  Rob talked about the 4 P’s of implementing a social media strategy. 

The 4 P’s are simple.  First, know your purpose.  Why do you or your organization believe that using social media tools and tactics would be beneficial.  What do you want to accomplish?  Perhaps it is to find out what others are saying about you or maybe you want to do more to allow your audience to get to understand what you do better.  The point is to just start with a goal in mind rather than to just jump in and drown or not go in the water deep enough to swim easily.

However, and here’s where social media gets tricky, it is ok to play first.  So go ahead and subscribe to a few blogs that you find interesting.  Make comments when you want to add something to the conversation.  Are you on FaceBook?  Great!   Just watch the status of your friends and become a fan of a page you find interesting.  Comment when you have something to say.  I think the key for me here is to remember to follow what or who you find interesting or you won’t have enough drive to log on and participate.

Now once you have been playing with others on their sites, you should be more than ready to start your own.  That’s where the 3rd P, planning, becomes important.  Where do you want to start?  Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, a blog.  It’s up to you to determine where you want to start conversing with people.  How will you organize yourself.?  Who else will be involved?  What will your company or personal brand identity be?

Finally, preparation is the 4th P.  Secure your URLs and email addresses that you will use for your social media profiles.  Perhaps you will want to develop a social media marketing plan and select the tools you will use to organize the conversations.  Also, if you are a company, will you want to assign social media as a task for someone already on your staff or will you want to hire new for this one. 

Denise Shiffman has a great checklist for companies who are in the planning stages of implementing a social media strategy.  You can download it from her Engage Daily blog.

Thanks Rob for giving us so many great ideas to ponder and use.  Here’s a link to see the slides from Rob’s presentation, Implementing Social Media.

Here’s the discussion question:  What would you do differently today if you had the opportunity to re-implement your social media strategy?  Would you have taken more time to find your purpose, play around, plan your entry, and prepare?