A few books occupy space on my desk at any one time. Each has its own angle, and I reference them all consistently for insights, intel, and facts.
One in particular, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, is one that received a lot of repeat visits over the past year. This book isn’t much of a secret – it resides on Amazon’s Best Business and Investing Books of 2008 [http://bit.ly/AWgzS]. I like it because it lays out a smart, systematic framework for putting together a Social Media plan. It outlines the four key components of a social media plan; they are People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology; or, the acronym POST. While extremely popular, I’m starting to wonder if business people actually read the book, for real.
Excerpt from page 68: “After having decided on the people, objectives and strategy, you can move on to pick the technologies…” For the record, Bernoff and Li already italicized the word ‘after.’ I think you know where I’m going with this. In case you don’t, allow me to make a statement based on my observations: too many companies are joining social media tools as another broadcasting medium with no real strategy in tow.
Here is what we are seeing now all to often… brand X has a nice website and the CEO of Brand X wants the VP of Marketing of Brand X to “harness social media” — whatever that means. So, VP of Marketing of Brand X tells the Marketing Manager of Brand X to set-up a Twitter profile and Facebook fan page. Brand X adds a section to their homepage called ‘Join the Conversation’ and links folks to their respective social media profiles. The Marketing Manager logs into the accounts daily and tells everyone what he or she thinks we want to hear about Brand X.
Mark Stevens had a book published in 2003 called Your Marketing Sucks. I think Brand X is what he had in mind.
OK, since I beat that horse to death, twice. Let me leave you with a positive example of how it’s done. Sony is about to launch a social media campaign called DigiDads. It’s a very cool way to get influential, dad bloggers to interact with Sony’s products on a human level. Smart. Check out a video teaser to the campaign below and here’s a link to The DigiDads Project on Sony’s site [http://bit.ly/OGK4N]:
Jeffrey Sass and Chris Brogan, among others, are leading this highly interactive, fun campaign (Incidentally, Chris Brogans book, Trust Agents, will be added to the desktop arsenal upon completion this week). Whether they knew it or not, it looks like someone spent some time thinking about the first three elements in POST. Nicely done.
