It sounds obvious.
But is the tail wagging the dog?
Most firms will have a surfeit of business plans. Some will guide and inform, others will find a place of obscurity.
If you are about to embrace social media as part of your business development process, then it is important that you align your efforts with your business planning.
Social media has the power to change opinion, increase awareness of the firm and develop new strands of work. If you need evidence of this ask to see the results of Google analytics prior to and subsequent to social media integration. Without too much effort, you will begin to see more traffic coming to you via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Assuming that you have a data capture process for new client instructions, then it will be straightforward enough, without paying for any analytics service, to measure the ROI of your Tweeting etc.
Too many firms decide with irresponsible abandon to open one account after another, and it is clear that they haven’t thought through the raison detre. It is is a case of being seen without seeing the bigger picture.
Most business plans will be replete with broad statements like “we want to be the premier firm for private client work”. But how does that translate to the work on the ground? Less still how on earth do you map out a process on Twitter and LinkedIn?
Make sure you pursue a course of action that dovetails with your purpose, mission and goals for the firm.
Summary
Make sure that every meeting agenda includes a line or two devoted to social media.
Embrace the idea of the honeycomb model espoused by Zappos amongst others. You may be in the command and control stage but that doesn’t scale.
If you must have a policy to facilitate engagement then so be it but engagement is key. If people are disinterested then having a policy will make no difference.
Be specific with what you are trying to measure. Does your follower number translate to ROI?
If you have a budget for marketing, how much of that will be transferred to social media? If the answer is a big fat zero, then it doesn’t deserve to succeed. You are fooling yourself.
~ Julian Summerhayes ~