By M. Isi Eromosele

With regard to social media, your message is an invited guest from the get-go. This is both an opportunity, your audience is picking up your message on its own and a challenge as you have to have that invitation to get in.

The use of social media is intended to complement and extend your current marketing efforts, not replace them. Offensive practices such as spam and pop-ups, attempted instead with social media are unlikely to win friends in precisely the forum where you really want to win them: the Social Web.

On the Social Web, you have to take a different approach when creating your social media marketing plan. When you first establish a presence on the Social Web, you’re like any other new-comer.

The fact that you’ve been marketing for 10 or 20 years doesn’t mean nearly as much as your online social reputation. If you’re new to social media, then by definition you don’t have a social reputation beyond the carry-over from whatever you have built outside the Social Web.

Building a solid online reputation is essential: ultimately, it is your online, not offline reputation that drives your results on the Social Web.

Your online social reputation is something that you build as you go. Metrics like the ratio of blog comments to your blog posts: unique visitors, dwell times and quantitative assessments of social commentary about the content you create or the conversations that reference your brand, product or service can provide an indication of your online reputation from a social viewpoint.

Based on those measures, you can get an idea of what needs to be done to strengthen or improve your reputation, regardless of your starting point.

Social Media Channels

To make sense of the Social Web, it is highly useful to split social media channels into functional groups: platforms, content and interactions. It makes it much easier to plan a social media merketing program.

Social Platforms

Social platforms, the first of the big groupings within social media, include social Networks - Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo and more as well as white-label platforms that can be used to provide community and support services.

Also included in this group are wikis (collaborative platforms that drive consensus around ideas, externally with customers or internally with employees and partners). Through participation, you’ll learn more about social media than by sitting on the sidelines. Social media is not a spectator sport.

Social Content

The next big group is social content, the things that people make and share: content, photos, videos, comments, blog posts that then circulate on the Social Web. This content is often consumer generated but just as easily can be marketer generated.

Social content is an area where you can play in several ways. You can use existing social content to gauge your reception and reputation as it currently stands. What are others saying about your company and what you offer? You can look for new ways to extend your products that tap the ideas and the applications being advanced through social content.

Social Interactions

If social platforms are the containers for social content - the photos, posts, videos, and other content that people share, then how do Social Web participants keep track of what’s going on?

That’s where the final group of channels, social interactions fit. Think of these as the little pieces of content that fly around based on something that you or someone else just did, messages that notify you of what just happened or what is just now available to you.

These include “Follow” notices on Twitter, Share updates on Facebook and Google alerts are all examples of these links.

Think about social platforms, social content and social interactions: Which is most likely to provide the support you need and fits into the marketing program you already have in place?

With your objectives identified, you can think about the kinds of applications that may be useful. Perhaps you’re thinking about setting up a blog or launching a podcasting effort. If so, tentatively place these on your social feedback cycle and touch point map. Think through how these new marketing efforts will complement what you are doing now.

As such, you have identified the core social media channels that you’ll be considering for complimenting your existing marketing program, based on the dynamics of your current customers and their interaction with potential customers at the point of consideration in the purchase funnel.

You should now have a social feedback cycle that includes active listening or participative components. In addition to the awareness and purchase activities you are already engaged in, you should now have social elements that connect and amplify your messages if you are planning an outreach effort.

If you are starting with a listening/learning effort, you should have a solid set of metrics identified that support tracking what you will learn over time so that you can use it to drive change within your organization, setting yourself up for success when you choose to add socially based outreach efforts to your marketing program.

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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