We have created the following flow to help clients understand the ongoing commitment to their newly established social presence and those that are participating in their efforts.

Monitor: Start by actively listening before jumping into social media

• Read blogs in your industry and comments from the readers.
• Monitor your brand’s keywords and products on twitter to gain insight into the collective conscience about your existing reputation.
• Read reviews and forums on your company or brand and understand what the audience is hoping to get from you and what an open dialogue might make possible.

Manage: Mediate conflict and strategize your responses.

• Communicate comments and issues from the online world to your internal team. Executives to customer service professionals should know what others are saying about the brand and understand what is necessary to improve.
• Follow up with your audience with resolutions to their concerns. Let them know that your internal team is working hard to make improvements and you can impact their sentiments towards your brand before changes are even made.
• Maintain an ongoing list of customer concerns and recommendations and use this as content for blog posts, announcements, and new company initiatives. Your audience will find value in learning about how you are listening to them and what creative solutions you’ve found to make their experience better.
• Create an editorial calendar and stick to it. Use this content bank to ensure that you always have valuable content in your back pocket in order to always have updates in social media and to stay top-of-mind for your audience.

Mentor: Teach your company the value in social engagement.

• Establish a company voice and culture that employees can use to project a cohesive message in their own way and through their own positions and online profiles. This is the 2010 equivalent to getting employees to stand behind a mission statement. Make them proud to represent your brand online and help them understand what the overall message should be.
• Demonstrate the importance of social community by sharing with them how these social strategies are improving public perception of your company and how it impacts the bottom line, and eventually, their paychecks.

Message: Don’t shout, but share…AFTER you’ve listened.

• Promote your brand. Use events to encourage actual physical engagement, contests to create enthusiasm around an offer, employee profiles to show the humanity behind the brand, and product information to give valuable information to your audience.
• Share media. Links, videos, photos, articles, and white papers can all be quickly uploaded and shared with your audience across multiple platforms and for the purpose of education, value added service, and helpful insight.
• Be helpful. Share to solve a problem, answer a question, or bring delight to your audience. They will appreciate the value shared with them in the social realm instead of an intense marketing message that they have learned to filter out anyways.
• Be authentic. Always state your identity and role within the company when sharing and don’t spin your message like it’s a press release. Everyone sees through it, so just don’t do it.

All of these steps should not be done in a vacuum and not only once. It’s an ongoing process that will help to refine your digital marketing strategies and change (and GROW) with your company and customer base.  In the next post, we’ll look at how to begin to measure these efforts in order to determine their success.