Small business
by PatrickMason
I write a monthly article for HP’s small business blog. The following was my most recent contribution.
Social media has been in the press a lot lately for its ability to accomplish certain tasks more quickly and easily than ever before. We have all heard about the woman on Facebook making money selling jeans, or the many photographers using Flickr as their on-line store.
Given the overworked and under resourced life most small businesses lead, therefore, one would have thought that all of them (us) would have jumped on board. Ironically, Forrester released some stats that would suggest that it is larger organizations, not small business who are jumping on the bandwagon first.
It’s a given that small businesses are looking to do less with more, so this is somewhat counterintuitive. Without doing a lot of research, my guess is that they are too busy to take the time to “figure it all out”. With that theory in mind, I offer the following simple advice to any small business wondering about social media.
1)The first step to any social media project is to define a goal. Define your top 3-5 business goals and write the steps you plan to use to accomplish each one. Social media projects work best if they have a specific goal. As such, you will probably find your goal somewhere in and around the tactics/plan level.
Tip: Do not worry about what technology can or cannot do at this phase or you will hamstring the possibilities.
2)For each goal, define the stakeholders involved and make sure to include everyone. Next, determine the on-line habits of each major group. If you don’t know, you can make some working assumptions using free on-line tools, and then refine your knowledge with actual experience.
Tip: If you are confused about whom your stakeholders are, think about it from the perspective of a value chain and define who is involved from start to finish.
3)Next is strategy. Given your goal and audience, whom should you try and connect with whom (that’s the social part) and what should they say to each other and how to help accomplish your goal (that’s the media part)? If you are trying to keep customers from switching to the competition your strategy might be; “We would like existing customers to tell new customers how they can implement/configure/use our products so that we become more entrenched in their business”, or if you are trying to reduce service costs you might say “We would like to capture the knowledge our customers have in troubleshooting our product so other customers can start solving their own problems.” Statements like these will allow you to then draw some conclusions about who you want to connect and why.
Tip: Try to avoid technical considerations here, that comes next.
4)The next step is implementation. If you are not familiar with the tools, you can get a great education at Wikipedia. Generally speaking, there are a lot of choices so take some time to look at the options.
Tip: A lot of tools are free, so don’t assume you need to build anything yourself, just use what’s out there already.
5) Finally comes the issue of sustainment. Successful conversations do not necessarily end. Part of the planning process will be to look at how you will manage for the long term. If you are successful, this may be one of the most valuable assets you have, so think about how you will stay engage with your stakeholders for the long haul.
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