What Business Problem Are You Trying to Solve?
Clarity around objectives can make your “social” time much more palatable. Seriously: if the boss knows why you need to do this – or if YOU are the boss and you know why you need to do this – you can better justify the hours spent blogging, tweeting or updating the world on Facebook.
So how DO you set objectives? And can those objectives be purely social?
Some thoughts from here…
1. Awareness – good place to start. But knowing where you want to increase awareness is an even better place to start. Local? Hyper-local? Industry-focused?
We’ve met folks who said, simply, where they are right now is “eyeball acquisition.” Some tweets on a regular schedule, a hundred Facebook “likes” so they have an audience to speak to. Actually, not a bad objective.
2. Measuring can be a soft science. The obsession to measure everything – the obsession with the word “metrics” – has taken a lot of the “social” out of social media.
We made a concerted effort beginning October 1 at Area 224 HQ to blog regularly. By regularly, we said “once a day during the week, give or take.” We missed a few days, we double-posted a couple other days. But the result was a traffic spike – but also an awareness spike. In that we got calls, we got emails, and the inbound marketing machine was, well, working.
3. You work for the boss. If you’re inside Corporate America somewhere, you need to find out who that boss is. You might be in corporate communications, but if it’s the CEO who gets to be the social face of the enterprise, then your objectives are gonna be different.
And you may have to have a heart-to-heart talk with your actual boss: executive positioning and industry thought leadership have just become your objectives as a team.
4. Being social can be an objective. Reconnecting with friends, old classmates, old colleagues – strengthening your actual social network – this is a great use of time. And you can be up front about it to the boss: “having a better LinkedIn network helps us showcase our organization’s expertise, and opens us all up to more business opportunities.”
Setting social objectives need not be totally stressful. Start small and ask the right questions.
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