KD Paine:
The 7 steps to social media
- Define the R — define the expected results
- Define the I — What’s the investment?
- Understand your audiences and what motivates them
- Define the metrics — what you want to become
- Determine what you are benchmarking against
- Pick a tool and undertake research
- Analyze results and glean insight, take action and measure again.
Classical strategy, leavened with several critical items — we know benchmarking is essential, but Paine asks, determine what you’re benchmarking against…
Paine also offers:
- Research without insight is just trivia:
- Look for failures first
- Check to see what the competition is doing
- Then look for exceptional success
- Compare to last month, last quarter, 13 month average
- Figure out what worked and what didn’t work
- Move resources from what isn’t working to what is
Paula Berg now has seven people working with her at Southwest Airlines on the social media beat. What’s that tell you about the future of measurement in the social media space?
Brad McCormick focused mostly on search engine optimization — which is outside my expertise. But, certainly, even as a consumer, I thought it really interesting stuff.
Finally — We’re running out of excuses — social media is here to stay, and it may replace some forms of mainstream media. We’d all better figure out how to measure it effectively.
And right soon.
P.s. Blogger Marcie Casas waxes rhapsodic about Twitter; as I’m recently on it, I’ll reserve judgment.
