By M. Isi Eromosele

Two essential marketing elements play key roles in an effective social media concept:

First, social media involves a diverse set of activities – social networking, blogging, and so on.

Second, the effective use of social media depends in part on the activities selected and the mix of the social and traditional channels that your audience is interested in or to which it is receptive. In other words, the effective use of social media, involving technology, control and other components is essentially an integration paradigm.

Social media, while certainly different in terms of how you approach it, is no different than anything else in your marketing toolbox: the channels may be different, but you still plan for it within the context of your business and campaign objectives and audience and channel mix.

Building Your Social Media Strategy

In developing your Social Media Strategy, the challenges you will face will be along the lines of one or more of the following:

Relate these challenges to your business and involve your coworkers. Build consensus. Above all, look at what you are selling or promoting. If it needs fixing, then right now would be an excellent time to take care of that.

If things are as they should be, you’re going to find smooth sailing. Implemented correctly, social media will help set significant differentiation between you and your competition.

If your product or service isn’t all it should be; if there is a notable gap between marketing expectation and operational performance and you don’t take the time now to address that, you will find it difficult to implement your social media strategy.

The Main Points Of A Social Media Strategy

Building Your Social Media Strategy

You’ll begin building for your social media campaign by first establishing a solid base and working knowledge of the tools that are available to you as a marketer and only then add social media marketing elements to your plan.

Importantly, you’ll also learn the etiquette and rules of social engagement. In social media-based marketing, perhaps more than any other single factor, the understanding and adherence to etiquette (along with emerging best practices) will make or break the

effectiveness of the campaigns you create.

Social Networks: The Power of the Collective

The power of the collective is all about the power that arises directly from the ways in which the Social Web is organized and what it conveys to its participants as a result. Understanding how network organization affects the flow of information is central to your successfully implementing your social media strategy.

There are three network-value-governance laws as related to social media. They speak to the fundamental value of a network from the perspective of those connected to it.

These laws ascribe a potential value to any given network on the basis of how participants are connected to a central source, to each other and so on. The laws that govern the value of social networks and the Social Web itself are presented in order of increasing importance with regard to the use of social media.

The first law underlies the reach component of most media pricing models. In the typical broadcast application, a single voice is sent to millions of listeners. A net-work with 100 people is therefore 10 times as valuable in terms of reach as a network with only 10.

The second law states that for networks that support communication between members, rather than only from a single source, the network value grows as the square of the number of users. Think of this as arising out of the fact that people can talk in both directions and with more than one conversation occurring simultaneously.

The third law holds that the value of the network grows more powerfully with the formation of groups (which in turn give rise to communities) and the interconnections between them. Compared with a network of 10 people, a network of 100 people that can talk not only with each other but with outlying communities will carry the information farther and faster.

The Customer - Centerpiece Of Social Media

The notion that the customer is at the center of all potential brand-related experiences is based on the Social Web reality that all of the communications that a particular individual is exposed to shape his/her ultimate perception of your brand, product or service.

Note that all communication, everything you say, along with everything that your customers say plays a role. This includes your advertising and the actual product experience as well as the conversations occurring on the Social Web.

Specific to marketing and its core objectives, customer perceptions generally (and certainly hopefully) contribute to a conversion. It is in this way that social media ties directly into your marketing toolbox.

Social components such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and more surround the conversion process and are central to the usefulness of social

media in marketing.

Social media contributes to informed choices by aggregating and making available to an interested individual the collective experience and resultant conversation.

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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