Social Media Strategy

In a social media world where every blog has posts on 10 ways to XYZ it’s easy to see why many can get drawn into the doing before doing too much of the thinking.

All to often social media campaigns fall down because they start downstream, they are focussed around platforms or content or interactions. Twitter is the hot new kid on the block so let’s have some, rather than creating a well rounded social media strategy that’s aligned with business objectives.

If you start upstream it will be easy to see where everything fits in, creativity may be needed, in some cases just downright hard work, but you can’t prescribe the approach until you know where it’s going and how it fits in with everything else.

Upstream is where the thinking takes place, downstream is where the thinking is implemented and tasks are carried out.

Do you hire an agency? That’s decided upstream, formulating strategy is all about opportunity and capability, is there an opportunity that suits our goals and if so do we have the capability to take advantage of it?

Once you have a strategy you can start to formulate a plan, select platforms, decide on content and how to interact.

Whatever you do, don’t be task driven or creative driven, neither will work if you don’t have a social media strategy.

I’m going to put together a little toolkit that will hopefully help people easily put together a social media strategy and sell it to their boss, I will update this post when it’s online.

Ashton Kutcher

In this episode of the iGary TV podcast I take a look at what’s happened on Twitter this week. A few weeks ago the words ‘a plus k’ wouldn’t have meant much, but since Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), of 70’s Show and Dude Where’s my Car fame decided to race CNN (@cnnbrk) to be the first on Twitter with 1 million followers everyone is aware of it.

So, the story so far, Ashton decided he wanted to beat CNN to 1 million followers on Twitter and pledged $100,000 to a charity if he did. Low and behold he did win the race.

Ashton Kutcher hits 1 Million Followers on Twitter

But, there’s been a backlash, or should I say #backlashton which is the search tag being used by people upset by the whole thing on Twitter.

#backlashton

Some have accused Ashton and CNN of gaming the system as Ashton had over 1,000 billboards given free to help him.

Ashton Kutcher @aplusk Billboard

Using mass media to collect followers on Twitter isn’t what social media is about, it’s all a bit retro, social media is about building an audience, engaging them, building trust and joining the conversation. Personally I don’t see too much wrong with what they did, but I don’t think it’s best practice, I wouldn’t like to see big brands following this example and Twitter could have acted better by allowing people to unfollow Ashton and CNN, instead there was a mysterious error.

How to Unfollow Ashton Kutcher

The great thing to come out of this is that Oprah (@oprah) is now on Twitter.

Oprah on Twitter

Oprah has made 10 Tweets and has over 300,000 followers, not bad for the first day!

With Oprah now using Twitter it could change the demographic profile of Twitter, which currently stands like this.

Quantcast Audience Profile Twitter

It could swing the age/gender profile more towards certain brands.

More importantly it could influence the Technographic profile of users, especially in the USA and UK, creating critics and creators out of spectators and inactives.

Technographics

By getting people involved as critics and creators means they are more likely to do the same elsewhere and as evangelists come from these groups this can help your brand.

Data from Forrester Research Technographics^® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile, see groundswell.forrester.com