Simple Template for Social Media Strategy

"The plumber's house always leaks." "The cobbler's children go barefoot."

For me, it's strategy.

I love thinking strategically. Working through the SWOT analysis, envisaging worst case scenarios, developing training systems to meet needs identified in a skills gap analysis, identifying the resources needs and the priorities and the sequencing. Love it.

And I love helping others to think strategically.

I've done a lot of it, both the strategy development and the coaching of others to think strategically. It has advanced my career and earned me a not insignificant amount of money over the years.

Except when it comes to my own business. Then it's a challenge.

Because I'm also an enthusiast. And when I think I have a great idea or a great opportunity, I feel I want to dive in and do whatever seems like a good thing to do right now, rather than to stand back and do the strategic analysis and planning I recommend to and do for others.

To be a bit more precise, it's not that I don't think at all strategically about my own business. More that I don't always do the systematic thinking through and documenting that I do when being paid by others to do that for their businesses.

Case in point. Right now I'm working on setting up a new podcast show to focus on social media in the enterprise. I have plenty of material, a lot of good people I'm hoping will accept an invitation to be interviewed, a name, a registered domain, and enough knowledge, technology and skills to get started.

So I've actually done a lot of the thinking. What I don't have is a written strategy. A half-done mind map doesn't count.

So it was very timely this morning that I glanced at my Twitbin and saw that Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at Forrester, had provided there a link to a blog post by his colleague Josh Bernoff. The POST Method: a systematic approach to social strategy provides a neat framework for developing a strategy for any social media initiative.

As indicated by the blog post title, the strategy has an acronym, POST, standing for People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology.

People: assess your customer’s social activities

Objectives: decide what you want to accomplish

Strategy: plan for how relationships with customers will change

Technology: decide what social technologies to use

The approach looks simple, but reading through the explanation and thinking about my own experience in developing articulated strategies, I can see it’s roll-up-the-sleeves stuff. Some non-trivial thinking about to be activated.

The POST system, it is explained, is at the heart of the forthcoming book by Josh Bernoff and his colleague Charlene Li, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

I guess I won’t now be launching the new podcast site today. But when it is launched there will be a strategy in place. Which should in turn help with measurement.

Of course, if I’m to be rigorous in my strategizing, I have to be open to the possibility that a podcast show might not be what I want or need right now. Possible, but I do believe I’ve thought that through enough to press ahead on setting it up. It’s really a backtracking, checking and documenting process I have in mind, rather than re-thinking completely or starting from scratch.

What I’m confident I’ll get greater clarity on, through this process, is how what I’m about to do can be tweaked to meet my objectives better, faster, more economically.

I’m open to suggestions about what I might be missing here.