By M. Isi Eromosele

The spirit of being a successful company has been about communication, sharing ideas and connecting. These core values are still the heart of social media today.

Exchanging knowledge, swapping stories and bonding is something that both companies and their customers will always cherish. What’s exciting is the new and evolving ways they can now communicate with each other.

Social Media is all about communication on a whole new, quick and effective level that is all in real-time… The possibilities are truly endless!

It is imperative that every company develop its own House Guidelines to educate all their employees about the importance of using Social Media correctly. While there are hundreds of Social Media websites, you may want to start with just three.

These would be Facebook for social networking, Twitter for content sharing and business updates and finally YouTube for videos and product demonstrations. Each of these platforms has a specific function, so choose what is right for you and your business.

Creating a Successful Social Media Presence

Find your digital audience

Find the right audience. Begin by surveying your audience to determine their interest in using social media and what platforms they may already be using. You want to go where your audiences already are rather than asking them to come to you.

Once you have determined several sites that they actively use, determine whether these sites also meet your needs of communication, fair access for everyone and online safety.

Create a strategy

Connect programs to business goals. Consider how you can use social media to interact in ways that meet your business goals. Each of your social media updates, posts and campaigns must work towards one or more of these strategic goals.

Define clear measures for success and track them. Set goals. What do you want from this effort?  New Visitors? Increased Brand Awareness? Define clear goals and measurable means to meet them; choose one or two online platforms that help you meet these goals.

Develop community guidelines

Set the rules. Community guidelines should provide a strong foundation for what your audience can expect when they visit your online spaces. It also provides a clear explanation for why you would potentially remove any content from your pages.

These boundaries ensure that the space is safe for all to use. Be transparent. Users in the social space know when an organization is being inauthentic. Post your guidelines publicly. Be open and honest in all communication.

Build an editorial calendar and team

Protect your brand

Make sure to protect your brand by creating a general account for your network, versus attaching it to one person’s email information.

Protect your privacy and organization

Make sure that any employee blogging or posting comments online is aware that disclosing financial, operational, legal or personal information is prohibited. Publicly articulate that comments posted in your space are not necessarily the opinion of the organization.

Plan a publication schedule

Determine how often content will be refreshed, new posts will be posted or comments will be made. Set up an editorial calendar for postings and plan ahead around holidays, special events, etc.

Work to formulate who internally is responsible for updating and maintaining content. With programs like Hootsuite, you can schedule a whole month of posts and updates ahead of time.

Connect, Listen, Monitor, Measure

Understand user wants and needs

Before engaging in the social space, do some research around what your audience likes, what they want to know more about and what they can use in their communities. Be prepared to have conversations with them and answer questions. Understand that some of your employees’ roles will be as customer service representatives for your organization.

Accept, and prepare for negativity

There is a fine line in social media regarding negativity. Some organizations are stricter than others when it comes to allowing negative dialogue to occur in their space. Always try to engage the conversation publicly by being responsive, offer help to ease the situation. Trying to control the dialogue through aggressive screening and selective posts is generally not effective or recommended.

Get permission

If you plan on using any content from other sources; site them, link to the article or reference the contact. You are not only protecting yourself from plagiarism and other legal charges, you are encouraging users to click back and forth from various websites at their leisure, the true essence of social media.

Prepare, prepare, prepare

Ensure that you also have an escalation plan in place should information or conversation on your page illicit an unexpected response. Determine who will have the final say in responding to a crisis on your page.

Responsible Engagement In Innovation And Dialogue

Explore how online discourse through social computing can empower your employees as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model: not mass communications but masses of communicators.

Through these interactions, your company’s greatest asset, the expertise of its employees can be shared with clients, shareholders and the communities in which the company operates.

Believe in the importance of open exchange between your company, its clients and customers and among the many constituents of the emerging business and societal ecosystem for learning. Social computing is an important arena for organizational and individual development.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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