The Practicals: Planning a Complete Social Media Strategy

(cross posted from 360 Digital Influence)

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start with social media. Giving birth to a digital engagement strategy that’s aligned to an overall communications goal while employing the right digital tactics can be, well, tricky. What if internal decision makers are reluctant to incorporate social media into the equation? How do you know which tools are appropriate? How in the world are we going to measure all of this?

If you’ve tried clearing these hurdles before then you’re not alone; we had over 500 participants join us last week for a live social media presentation – a great sign that public relations professionals are reacting to the changing landscape and eager for ways to incorporate social media into existing communications programs.

In an effort to answer some of these common questions, 360° Digital Influence, in partnership with BurrellesLuce, recently hosted a free webinar titled The Practicals: Planning a Complete Social Media Strategy. My colleague, Brian Giesen, and I covered how organizations can create strategies that go beyond just the tactics. We walked through the process we undertake as we build a digital engagement strategy to accomplish a variety of communications objectives, from building brand ambassadors to selling products. If you missed out on the live show, head over to BurrellesLuce for a full replay.

In addition to strategy, we also offered up a few of the tools we use everyday in 360 Digital Influence to monitor conversations online. If you’re new to social media and are looking for ways to jump in, be sure to check out the last section where we go through the steps you can take to get started today.

I caught up with Gail Nelson, Senior Vice President at Burrelles for her thoughts on the presentation “For PR professionals operating in today’s changing communication environment, knowledge truly is power. The webinar conducted by Brian and John on social media planning attracted the largest attendance of any of our webinars to date.”

The Practicals: Planning a Complete Social Media Strategy was the first in a two part series that Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence will be presenting. The next presentation, The Practicals, Executing and Measuring a Social Media Program, will be air live on July 23. Visit BurrellesLuce to register and reserve a spot. Until then, head over to our feeds section for the Essential 15 Pack – a collection of our 15 must-have feeds for anyone in marketing or communications.

Presidential Profiles

[cross posted from Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence]

Imagine waking up one day in the future, firing up your Facebook account and learning that one of your friends has decided to run for President. Not a joke announcement like so many faux relationship statuses or parodies like Stephen Colbert’s presidential run, but a legitimate presidential campaign in its infancy. Maybe the candidate was an old friend from college, an overachieving history major who headed to law school and then fell out of touch. And now, in between your tagged photos and status updates is an invitation to join your friend’s group: March to the White House in 2020.

During a Q&A session at the recent Converging Campaigns event (covered in a previous post), a panelist wondered when America would see its first candidate with an actual Facebook profile. Not a profile manufactured for the purposes of a campaign tool but someone who built and maintained a Facebook profile and then subsequently decided to make a run for the White House.

Certainly none of the candidates in the 2008 election spent their college days tagging friends and updating the ‘where I’ve been’ application. However, at some point in the next few years or decades, there will be a candidate who had a presence on Facebook long before he or she ever considered running for office.

I’m not as myopic as to assume that years down the road there won’t be an application several derivatives away from our present-day Facebook, but no matter the tool, the personal narratives we create for ourselves via social media today will stretch long into the future.

No longer will a candidate have the luxury of misremembering a dangerous helicopter landing under sniper fire or lay awake at night praying those incriminating photos don’t surface. That content will live online — tagged, posted, and ready to be shared.

Regardless of what may live in the dusty archives of news footage or what an old professor remembers, social networking sites will not allow future political candidates to stroll far from the reality; the uber-social Facebook-like applications acting as the biggest sticklers for truth.

I wonder who is currently Facebook friends with a future US president? Looking at my newsfeed from over the weekend, I’m not holding out much hope for my network…