1. Demystifying Social Media 2011
Marc Strohlein
Principal
Agile Business Logic

2. Get Started with Social Media ............................................................................................................ 3
What is Social Media? ............................................................................................................................ 4
Why Should You Work with Social Media? ................................................................................... 4
Social Media Tools .................................................................................................................................. 4
Some Organizational Considerations .............................................................................................. 6
Approach, Timeline, and Resources ................................................................................................ 7
Step 1: Establish Goals ..................................................................................................................... 7
Step 2: Listen and Learn, Identify the Target Audience ...................................................... 8
Step 3: Define Roles, Method of Engagement, and Content ............................................... 9
Step 4: Engage .................................................................................................................................. 10
Step 5: Measure Success and Fine Tune ................................................................................. 10
Your Next Step ...................................................................................................................................... 11
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 2

3. Get Started with Social Media
At first blush, the world of social media may seem foreign and complex—filled with
tweets, wikis, microblogs, and other terminology. Your first impulse may be to
ignore or dismiss it.
The reality is inescapable for most businesses—going forward, the effectiveness of
“push” marketing and media is going to continue to decline, and social media will
become a more and more important component in the way that companies interact
with customers and prospects. In fact, eMarketer Digital IntelligenceTM predicts that
88 percent of businesses with 100 or more employees will use social media for
marketing.
Witness how companies such as British Petroleum, Toyota and Sony have been
savaged on the web while companies such as Starbucks, Dell, and Ford have had
great success in building and leveraging communities.
This paper is a primer on social media, aimed at those that want to explore the use
of social media, but need to understand how to go about doing that. Social media is
interesting in that, in theory, it looks simple; it is essentially just a new marketing
channel. But it is complex because it is interactive and you can’t set all the rules of
engagement. It is also fast—information travels at near real-time on the Internet.
Agile Business Logic provides services to help businesses scope, plan, and
implement social media programs.
We can help tailor the size and scope of a program to meet your business needs,
help implement tools, and provide guidance on or direct authoring of content.
We can also help avoid embarrassing missteps.
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 3

4. What is Social Media?
Social media is a relatively new channel for engaging and conversing with customers
and prospects in an open, transparent environment. It incorporates the basic
components of a social interaction—listening, talking, and asking questions, but
using a variety of social media platforms and tools such as Twitter, Facebook, or
Linked In, in lieu of, or in addition to face-to-face interaction.
One way to think of social media is to picture the last party you went to. When you
arrived, the party was in progress and you didn’t know many of the people there,
but wanted to add to your network of potential friends and associates. You started
by circulating and listening in on conversations until you found one that sounded
interesting. After listening to get the context of the conversation, you asked some
questions, and finally volunteered some of your knowledge about the topic of
conversation.
That is the essence of social media—listen, ask questions, talk, and engage with
customers and prospects.
Why Should You Work with Social Media?
It is no secret that the relationship between businesses and their customers has
changed in dramatic ways, and the Web, specifically Web 2.0, has added powerful
new channels that need to be part of any marketing, sales, and customer service
planning.
Social media leverages the power of the Web to find, engage, and build relationships
with prospects and customers. In fact, not using social media may shut you off from
your customer and prospect base for marketing, brand management, service and
support, and education.
Social Media Tools
Before diving into the creation of a social media strategy and program, it is useful to
understand the various channels and tools one can deploy, as they each have
nuances and attributes that make them uniquely suited for different types of
communication and collaboration.
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 4

5. Table 1 contains a list of key tools, some examples, and the types of application each
platform is suited for.
Table 1: Social Media Tools and Applications
Platform Description Examples Application
Blogs Diary-like platform for creating WordPress, • Education about
Examples
reverse-chronologically ordered Moveable Type, products and services
posts that can be commented on Blogger • Convey company culture
by readers. • Gather feedback about
products and services
Wikis Tool that allows the creation and Wikipedia, • Education about
editing of interlinked web pages Wikinews products and services
• Customer service
information
Microblogs Microblogs allow users to Twitter, Yammer Press Releases
exchange small elements of text, Announcements
•
individual images, or links Hiring Notices
•
Links to new
•
information
•
• Promote events
Social Networks Social structure made up of LinkedIn, Facebook • Community-building
individuals (or organizations) • Promotions
called "nodes", which are tied • Reputation management
(connected) by one or more
specific types of interdependency
Forums and Online discussion site where Google Groups, • Community
Discussion people can hold conversations in BigTent • Promotions
Groups the form of posted messages • Customer service
Media Sharing Sites that enable users to post and You Tube, Flickr • Product demos
share documents, presentations, • Marketing presentations
podcasts, videos, etc. • How-to information
Social Review Tools and sites that allow users to Yelp, insiderpages • Brand and sentiment
and Rating write reviews and rate products, monitoring
services, companies, etc. • Customer service quality
monitoring
• Product quality
monitoring
Listening and Tools and platforms for Jive, Radian6 • Brand and sentiment
Monitoring monitoring blogs, microblogs, monitoring
• Campaign tracking
• Customer service quality
monitoring
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 5

6. Note: some applications and functions can be performed on more than one platform
or tool. If you choose to spread functions across multiple venues, be sure to keep
messaging and approach synchronized so as not to confuse your audience.
Some Organizational Considerations
While the tools are important, it is also necessary to look at how and where social
media fits in an organization. The figure below illustrates the organizations that
typically participate in social media programs, and where it fits among existing
channels of interaction with customers.
Figure 1: Social Media Context
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 6

7. Approach, Timeline, and Resources
There are a number of ways that businesses implement social media—some create
cross-functional teams comprised of marketing, sales, customer service, and
product development.
In other companies, social media takes root in customer service and/or marketing.
In still others, social media takes place across the entire company. The latter is an
ambitious undertaking and not recommended as a first step except, perhaps, for
small companies and startups.
Time required to implement social media can range from a few hours to, for
example, start using Twitter, to months for a more comprehensive, cross-
departmental approach. In the latter case, once the broad strategy is defined, the
effort can and should be broken into smaller chunks to manage complexity and
speed time to results.
Resources can similarly vary—a baseline investment might be two staff, either full-
or part-time, one for listening and synthesizing web-based conversations, the other
creating and publishing content, or gathering content from other providers and
publishing it.
Step 1: Establish Goals
Step 1 in building a social media program is to understand and clearly identify why
you are doing it. Goal setting is best done with a cross-functional team of
stakeholders from marketing, sales, customer service, and product development
organizations, and should include one or more executive sponsors.
One means of establishing goals is via a facilitated discovery session, ideally
conducted by someone that understands social media and the characteristics of
your business, customers, and markets served. Some possible goals include:
Monitor, protect, and enhance your brand
Increase awareness, identify new prospects
•
Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
•
Educate the market
•
Communicate with, and educate employees
•
Learn from customers, solicit feedback on existing products and services
•
•
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 7

8. Get ideas for new products and services
Co-innovate products and services
•
Enable customers to provide customer service to other customers (cost
•
reduction)
•
Identify and promote influencers and evangelists
Promote events, products, services
•
Everyone’s doing it—be seen as “in touch”
•
•
Note: if the last item is your one and only reason for doing social media you
probably should refrain. Insincerity is highly visible in the realm of social media.
While the range of goals noted here is impressive and illustrates the power of social
media, it also should serve as a warning not to be overly ambitious—it would be
both costly and risky to undertake more than a subset of these goals. Pick the ones
that matter and have potentially significant business impact.
Step 2: Listen and Learn, Identify the Target Audience
Step 2 in creating a social media program—finding and listening to your customers
and prospects in their “native” online environments. The goal is to find out who
they are, where they “hang out,” and what they are interested in. That forms the
basis for a content and engagement strategy.
While there are powerful tools from companies such as Lithium and Radian6 that
enable monitoring of social media sites, there are also a number of cheap, even free
ways to get started including setting up searches on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn,
or by using free tools such as Social Media Firehose Google Alerts.
One great example of how listening can help comes from a stay at a Boston hotel
where I was attending a conference. The Internet service was slow and I tweeted a
note to that effect. Within 10 minutes, I received a reply explaining that they were
doing an upgrade and having some problems and they ended up offering
compensation for the inconvenience—for me, problem solved, for the hotel, good PR
as I tweeted my thanks for how they handled the situation.
With listening in place, the information gleaned, combined with organizational
knowledge of customers can be used to segment the target audience and produce
personas—a set of fictional people who represent the characteristics of your
customer and prospect base. A key part of each persona’s attributes is the type of
information they desire and how they plan to use it.
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 8

9. Step 3: Define Roles, Method of Engagement, and Content
Step 3 involves identifying which organizations and people will actually create
content, monitor conversations, and generally run the social media program. The
personas developed in step 2 can be used to identify who in the organization is best
equipped to fill listening and publishing roles.
In example, listeners might be in the customer service organization monitoring
service or product issues, and/or in the marketing department, monitoring brand
image. Bloggers could be in product R&D writing about and soliciting feedback on
product designs.
Table 2 is a simple outline of typical functions performed by participating
organizations.
Table 2: Social Media Functions by Organization
Marketing • Brand monitoring and protection
Organization Function
• Promotions
• Market education
• Market and competitive intelligence
• Campaign measurement
• Market and customer segmentation
Sales • Prospecting and lead generation
• Finding and leveraging advocates and influencers
• Networking with prospects and customers
• Researching potential prospects
Customer Service • Monitoring for product/service quality issues
• Providing support information
• Creating communities of support
Product Development • Soliciting product ideas and feedback
• Co-innovation of products
• Testing product ideas
• Market research
Also important in this step is the establishment for rules of engagement that govern
both listening and publishing, including the specific individuals, roles, and
responsibilities, policies for content authoring and review, and policies for handling
various situations such as product or service criticism, viral public attacks on
brands, etc. All participants should be trained on those policies.
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 9

10. There is no need to create a social media policy from scratch as many good ones
already exist and can be found at: http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php.
Step 4: Engage
Now comes the fun part—you have been listening long enough to know who is
talking about you, what they are saying, and what they would like to know. You have
also identified who is listening, who is publishing, and what the rules and policies
governing their behaviors are. Now it is time to “join the party.”
Just as they would join a live party, the social media staff should listen, ask question,
and then publish. Carrying on our party analogy, nobody likes the guy that drones
on and on about himself—his job, his kids, his vacations, with no interest or
consideration for his listeners. Your goal is to not be the digital equivalent of that
guy. Instead, engage listeners by showing genuine interest in their wants, needs, and
especially any issues they have with your company, products, or services.
One personal example—after a recent visit to the San Francisco Zoo, I tweeted that I
had seen an actual black swan. Within minutes, I received a tweet back thanking me
for visiting. Minutes later, a second tweet asking me what zoo exhibits I liked best.
With a few minutes effort, the zoo social media staff provided customer care and
appreciation and also did a bit of market research, and left me feeling positive about
the zoo.
Create an editorial calendar that identifies who is publishing what for each social
media venue and stick to the calendar as much as possible. Success at social media
requires persistence, consistency and time—sporadic, stop/start participation will
not build an audience.
Step 5: Measure Success and Fine Tune
Now that your social media program is in full swing, it is time to step back and
measure to what you extent you are achieving the goals established in Step 1. While
there are a host of metrics that one can measure, in the end, you are seeking to
ascertain whether or not your social media program is helping to meet the goals you
established. If your goal is to gather new product ideas, getting lots of attention to
your blog, re-tweets and mentions, or follows is nice, but the hard metric is how
many truly useful ideas you were able to glean. That said, some common metrics
used to measure social media include:
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 10

11. Number of views
Number of followers
•
Number of comments
•
Return traffic
•
Conversions
•
Number of positive mentions, retweets
•
Number of reviews posted
•
Number of active users
•
Amount of user generated content.
•
•
These and other metrics serve as the pulse that helps measure the effectiveness of
your program.
Social media can serve a lot of purposes—it truly is powerful and flexible. But
Your Next Step
harnessing that power requires a laser focus on what you are trying to accomplish.
If you keep putting off starting a social media program because you don’t have the
time or resources to develop that focus, Agile Business Logic can help.
What I bring to the table is my background and expertise as both a business
executive and as a technologist. I have been using social media for years, have
implemented it in my organizations, and can provide soup to nuts guidance and
support in implementing a social media program. Contact me to discuss how I can
help you get started with your social media program.
©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 11

12. Marc Strohlein
Principal Consultant
Agile Business Logic
mstrohlein@agilebusinesslogic.com
Twitter ID: @mstrohlein
Agile Business Logic
PO Box 935
El Granada, CA 94018
650-766-1067
www.agilebusinesslogic.com
Agile Business Logic is dedicated to helping small and medium
businesses exploit technology for competitive advantage, growth,
and agility. We believe that technology exploitation that is tightly
integrated with, and synergistic to, business strategy is critical to
business success.
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©2011 Agile Business Logic. All Rights Reserved 12