1.  Make sure your message is authentic.

Authenticity is key when developing a social media strategy.  Customers have the innate ability to spot a fake from a mile away, and it may only take one dishonest act to forever ruin your company’s social media reputation.  Take, for instance, the now infamous Walmarting Across America blog.  This is a textbook (literally, it is now featured in media relations textbooks) example of how NOT to be authentic.  When the fake blog was outed, Walmart had to own up to their mistake and reevaluate the way they used social media for advertising.  WebAdvantage makes a great point:  the bigger the brand, the bigger the target if they are outed for being inauthentic.  Big brands fall the hardest.  Also, if social media marketing is being outsourced, make sure that expectations are laid out up front.  By covering your behind you can ensure that inauthenticity will not be a problem for your company.

2.  Know your intended focus.

This tip is incredibly central to your company’s social media efforts, and it involves knowing several different things.  First, what is your company’s focus?  The focus of your company itself is what is going to determine its effective social media endeavors.  Paul Worthington of Mashable gives great advice on determining your company’s focus.  He suggests that a company should really sit down and get a better understanding of who they are, what they believe in, and what they feel they can offer their customers.  It is only then that a company can determine  how social media is going to fit into their business plan.  Second, who is your audience?  Knowing who to focus your company’s social media on will help you to determine placement and content.  Doing the research on your publics will be what determines whether or not your social media utilization will work.  Knowing both your internal and external focuses will allow your company to see the bigger picture of how social media will help them build relationships with their stakeholders.

3.  Listen first, advertise later (or not at all).

Listening has always been the key to relationship building, whether it be in person or online.  Social media is an ideal tool for facilitating conversation, and it especially makes listening to your stakeholders easier than ever.  Liana Evans of SearchEngineWatch.com points out that there is a difference between just hearing and actually listening.  Listening allows your company to really get beyond the surface, to empathize with your customers and find out what is truly important to them.  Your company would not fair very well without customers, so why not spend that extra time getting to know them and their needs?  The feedback that can be collected from listening to your stakeholders using social media sites will be invaluable to your company’s advertising efforts, product development, customer service, and many other aspects of your business.

Now there are plenty of other tips on how to use social media to your company’s advantage, I just chose some points that I felt were especially salient.  Be sure to at the very least include the above points when developing a social media strategy, along with doing your own research on what is going to work for your specific business.  Social media is incredibly beneficial to companies hoping to establish a relationship with their stakeholders, but it is up to the company to use the tools available to maximize the usefulness of the medium.

Amy Mengel at Social Media Today posted some great reasoning for why corporations are failing at social media.  These reasons point directly back to the information I have previously posted about the who, what, when, where and why of companies using social media to develop relationships with their stakeholders.  Companies will fail with their social media usage when they can’t talk about anything broader than their products.  This goes back to that relationship building.  Customers do not want to be bombarded by one message that may or may not have anything to do with them.  Also, listening but not taking any action is a guaranteed way to misuse social media.  The interactivity of social media is made for both listening and responding to consumer comments.  Not taking advantage of that interactivity is detrimental to your company’s social media utilization.  Lastly, just placing your company on every social media outlet available without any justification or strategy is never going to work.  Your company must be aware of both the risks and benefits of each individual social media platform, and it must base a social media strategy on the analysis of these factors.

Zia Yusef, executive vice president for SAP’s global ecosystem and partner group was recently interviewed by Forbes magazine about his views on the dos and don’ts of social media.  One of the most salient points of Yusef’s interview is when he says that it is not necessary or effective for a company to try to control a social media community once they start it.  Even if the community grows to enormous numbers, try to manage and control content on it to protect your company is not going to work.  It will just make your company appear overbearing and it may even turn customers and users off.  Customer’s needs should be at the center of any social media endeavor.  Instead, Yusef suggests that while communities cannot be managed, they can be influenced.  Leadership will eventually emerge, and when that happens it is beneficial to support the most active and followed people.  This will allow your company to indirectly influence the community.

I’ll leave you with a funny (albeit poorly filmed) video that illustrating some major DON’Ts of social media relationship building.

Mashable recently posted a great article that points out ways in which social media is changing business.  In that article, they talk about how social media has helped businesses and corporations go from simply  trying to sell products to making connections with customers.  This idea of “making connections” with customers is one of the most important reasons your company should be using social media.  If you build a relationship with a customer, they are more than likely going to come back to your company in the future for products and services.  The Mashable article also discusses how Social media helps to humanize companies and allow them to be themselves.  The highly customizable features of most social media platforms really allow companies to give themselves and their brand human characteristics, which in turn endears customers to them.

Chris Muccio of CFO Strategist really helps to explain why social media is helpful by explaining the core purpose of social media.  According to Mr. Muccio, the core of social media is simple– “social” plus “media”.  Almost seems too easy, doesn’t it?  Social media is a media that is there to help businesses socialize (there is that “making conversation” idea again) with their customers.  Businesses have always had conversations with customers, and social media has ended up being a natural evolution to facilitate and make these conversations easier and more beneficial to the company’s bottom line.

So to answer the question in the title of this post is simple- why use social media?  Social media facilitates conversation.  It gives your company a human personae.  It allows you to reach your customers where they are located instead of them having to come seek you out.  Ultimately, social media will help you build better and stronger relationships with your stakeholders.

So your company has decided to utilize social media to build relationships with its stakeholders, that’s great!  But, do you know where it’s social media presence is going to be?  It is important to determine where your company’s social media endeavors will be placed.  Just because someone in the company read somewhere that Facebook is a popular tool for building relationships does not necessarily mean that it will be the most efficient location for your brand.

Mary Ellen Slater has some great tips in how your company can integrate its social media presence.   She recommends first and foremost, doing the research on where your audience is, and establishing a presence there too.  The medium must fit the message though, so perhaps using Twitter’s measly 140 characters to post a complicated news story may not be your best bet.  Also, know the rules of each community before you participate.  This rule is vital, because your company may not be taken seriously if they ignore the unwritten codes of a social networking site.  Integration of your company’s different social media usages is also important.  Putting links to all your company’s social media presences on your main web page will make things much easier for your customers.  Lastly, cross promotion is ok (sometimes).  Occasionally tweeting that your company can also be located on Facebook is fine, but remember that posting the same information of a multitude of mediums may eventually draw away from your company’s ultimate message.

As I said before, knowing who your audience is will be your most important strategy when deciding where your company’s social media presence will be.  For instance, it may not be pertinent for a company that caters exclusively to the elderly to have a presence on Twitter.  One Degree makes an excellent point in saying that your company’s customers should be perceived as a community, and therefore any social media you implement should treat them as such.  Remember, communities are about interaction, and where your company’s social media is placed will either help or hinder that interaction.  Your social media presence is also going to build trust with your customers, and that in turn will benefit your company’s bottom line.

In sum, location matters!  Your company should not be placing its social media efforts in places where they will not be seen or utilized by your consumers.  Doing the research to determine where you should be and then developing a social media strategy from there will be what helps you build a relationship with your stakeholders.

1. Monitor social media channels.  Keeping tabs on different social media channels will allow your company to be in the know when and if a crisis situation occurs.
2. Use social media to respond.  Responding quickly when there is a crisis in your company will help your company maintain credibility.  As I stated before, making sure that the information about your company is accurate and up to date will endear customers to you.
3. Admit it when you’re in the wrong.  Admitting your mistakes is another credibility booster.  If your company is at fault in a crisis situation, it should be owned up to.
4. Use social media to fix the problem.  Post on your company’s blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc. about the problem and how you plan to fix it.  Keep your stakeholders in the loop of what your company is doing to overcome the crisis.
5. Make sure you have backup before a crisis even occurs.  Your company’s loyal fans and followers on social networks are there to back you up.  If you have properly utilized social media to do the above steps and made sure to establish strong contacts, you should have no problems finding people to support your company during their time of need.

Here’s an (albeit not so great) example of a company using social media for crisis communication.  I’m sure everyone remembers the automaker’s private jet fiasco, wherein the CEOs of the big three automakers flew to Washington DC in private jets to ask for taxpayer’s money in order to bail out their companies.  This event was a public relations nightmare for the auto companies, and in the video below Chris Barger, director of social media over at General Motors outlines his social media strategy for dealing with the crisis:

Using social media for crisis public relations can be effective or ineffective, depending on the strategy implemented.  Ultimately, the choices that your company makes when using social media to communicate about a crisis is going to have a lasting effect on your stakeholders no matter what the outcome is.

Using social media as your focus group.

So your company has just created a cutting edge new product and is just about ready to release it to the public.  Before you do though, maybe it would be a good idea to use your established social media to see what your loyal customers and fans think about the product.  Here is a very interesting article in AdvertisingAge that talks about a company using Twitter as their focus group for a new product.  The company developed a new campaign for a client, and after releasing it they monitored Twitter to see which elements of the campaign created a buzz on the site.  Surprisingly, they found that one of the products they didn’t promote was receiving a lot of praise.  They discovered an asset they didn’t even know they had, just by monitoring Twitter.  Companies have traditionally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on focus group testing, but now with social media they can do a lot of that research for little to no cost!

Developing a new advertising campaign.

Starbucks is a company that knows the value of social media.  Recently, the company became the most popular brand on Facebook with over 3.6 million fans.  That’s a whole lot of support!  Starbucks actively incorporates social media like Facebook and Twitter into its brand marketing plans, and it utilizes the media to promote and receive feedback on its new advertising campaigns.  Recently, Starbucks created an instant coffee mix called Via, and the company used social media to promote and advertise for the new brand.  Starbucks used social media channels to facilitate discussion about Via, and to try and convince customers of the potential of the new product.  Apparently their efforts worked, because Via was just recently released and accompanied by an advertising campaign offering a free coffee to anyone who wanted to try it.

Using social media when developing, marketing and advertising for a new product is a great strategy.  The dialogue that social media facilitates between your company and it’s consumers are invaluable when determining all aspects of a product’s development process, from pre-production all the way to an advertising campaign.  Don’t let the opportunities that social media presents for customer feedback pass your company by!

Dairy Queen is a particularly good example of a company that uses several different social media platforms to engage and build relationships with their customers.  The company has a blog entitled “Creating Smiles and Stories” that was launched in February 2009.  Several employees at the company contribute to the blog, including Dairy Queen’s Chief Branding Officer.  The blog is an easy to navigate outlet for the contributors to upload videos and podcasts, and to post personal stories, all while subtly advertising their product. 

In addition to the blog, Dairy Queen also created and maintains a Facebook fan page (created in May 2008) and Twitter account (created February 2009), which has 730,000 fans and 4,040 followers respectively.  Dairy Queen uses these accounts to promote new products, to give away coupons, and just to engage with its customers.  Although all of Dairy Queen’s social media strategies have been launched fairly recently, look for yourself and you can see that they are working.  Dairy Queen has done it’s research, and the company is successfully utilizing many different platforms to develop relationships with their customers.

Although specific types of social media can often work to you company’s advantage, customers often take social media into their own hands which can cause issues for your organization.  How your company responds to those customer concerns can greatly affect future relationship building endeavors you undertake.  Take for instance the United Breaks Guitars phenomena.  Dave Carroll, a musician from Canada, flew United Airlines and experienced some terrible customer service during his journey.  He witnessed United Airlines baggage handlers throwing around his Taylor guitar on the runway, and later discovered that they had caused $3,500 dollars worth of damage to it.  In response to United’s lack of caring and response to his issue, he decided to write a series of three songs about his saga that highlighted the poor customer service he received and posted the videos on YouTube.

While United did eventually apologize for what happened to Dave, the damage was already done.  This is a perfect example of a customer using a specific type of social media to affect a company for the worst.  Viewers of Dave’s video sympathized with his plight and also offered up their own tales of United’s poor customer service.  Ultimately, the video proved detrimental to United’s customer relationship building.  Just something to keep in mind when evaluating the power of user generated content and it’s ability to affect your organization’s customer relationship building capabilities!

Here are some enticing statistics courtesy of USA Today that might get you thinking about the benefits of using online media:

Facebook is up to 250 million members, 50 million of whom joined in just the past three months.  Also, more than 300,000 businesses (one-third of which are small businesses) have a presence on Facebook.  Lastly, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is people over the age of 35.  This demographic has enormous purchasing power, something to keep in mind when considering using Facebook as your business’ social media platform.

Twitter is up to about 40 million members, and each day those members produce a staggering amount of tweets.  Using Twitter as your social media platform could be successful of unsuccessful depending on what  kind of audience you want to reach.  If your business involves a lot of customer service, using Twitter like Comcast (who has over 30,000 followers and uses the account specifically to receive customer feedback and provide assistance with problems) may be a great idea.

Linkedin has more than 365,000 company profiles, and more than 12 million professionals are members of the site.  If your company is involved in business to business marketing perhaps this site would be a great way to get more connected.

Although the above social media platforms I have described could work for you and your company, none of them will have much of an effect on a targeted public without a good strategy to back them up.  For instance, when researching different social media tools a company could use I decided to type some of my favorite companies into a Twitter search to see what kind of presence they had there.  I use Amazon often to shop online, and while their customer reviews function has been a pioneering feature that many other e-commerce websites have begun to use, their Twitter page leaves something to be desired.  @amazon is nothing more than a glorified RSS feed that tells me nothing that the actual website couldn’t tell me quicker and more efficiently.

So the moral of the story is, when choosing a social media platform (or two, or three) for your business to use, strategize.  Choose who you want to reach and do your research on how best to reach them to establish a relationship.  Not every type of social media may be for you.

There are several options:

The CEO

Your company’s CEO seems like the logical choice to be the face of your company’s social media usage, right?  Well, not really.  The CEO is most likely going to have quite a few things on his or her plate, and for all you know social media is their plate equivalent to that unappetizing piece of parsley that just gets pushed off to the side.  UberCEO recently published a piece titled “It’s Official: Fortune 100 CEOs are Social Media Slackers” wherein they evaluated the social media usage of Fortune’s 2009 to CEOs, and the results were quite interesting.  Only 2 of the 100 CEOs had twitter, 13 had a LinkedIn profile, and not a single one of them had a blog!  There’s many reasons why CEOs may not want to undertake your company’s social media, but it probably just comes down to a lack of time and a lack of knowledge about the medium.  Social media is so new and different, it’s not surprising that maybe your CEO isn’t quite ready to make that leap and tweet.

Empowered Employees

So, now that your CEO has decided that blogging just isn’t going to fit into their schedule, who should be your person in charge of social media?  Sometimes it’s just easier to keep things in house.  It is pretty likely that there is someone in your company who has both the time and the know-how to be able to manage your social media.  In fact, there’s probably several people right down the hall who would jump at the chance to write a blog.  It is important to keep in mind though that a protocol should be established with the social media using employees, just to make absolutely clear what is allowed and not allowed to be said.

But perhaps you don’t have a social media savvy CEO or employee to blog on your company’s behalf.  What then?  That might be the time to look to outside agencies.

Outside Agencies

B.L. Ochman posted a great blog about what company’s should look for when choosing their social media “guru”.  He suggests that there are several important things to consider when looking into a social media firm, including: looking at the firm’s track record and seeing what other campaigns they have done, do they have any followers and engage in social media within their own company, and importantly, do they have the ability to produce original content, or are they just providing the same old boring information?  These questions are good to keep in mind when evaluating outside agencies who could have power over your company’s social media.

Of course, these options I’ve just described aren’t the only way to go when it comes to who in (or outside of) your company is going to be in charge of social media.  Just find what works best for you.