Just like any good conversationalist would tell you, when socializing, listening is much more important than talking.
And when you are talking, it’s much more important to ask people about themselves than to drone on and on about yourself.
The same logic applies to your organization when you’re dealing with audiences online in any capacity, and the “listening > talking” mindset can give clarity to the foggy concept of socializing online.
The basic first steps:
Listen before you speak Don’t just dive in, identify voices in the discussion and observe how they interact. Every industry has a specific lingo and certain style of interacting. Learn it before you jump in and look immediately out of place.
Listening to what reporters, industry experts, competitors, and influential bloggers are saying is a good start, but don’t ignore “regular people” because the world is made up of us.
And you never know when someone you know becomes someone famous that remembers you being there before their fame ever was.
Besides, understanding the flow of the conversation already taking place will help to inform your strategy for participation. Learn what types of content are popular among the audience. Establish baselines in terms of industry engagement.
Ask, how active is your industry, what are the norms? Stay informed as conversations relevant to your niche occur by setting up RSS feeds, Google Alerts and other notification mechanisms.
Identify key personas internally and formalize approach. Determine what “voices” from within your company will champion your brand in the social sphere. Establish feasible schedules for how frequently people will interact online. Select tools for account management, such as HootSuite and Google Reader to help minimize the amount of time spent on a daily basis.
You’ll also want to set some general guidelines for social media interaction that employees at your organization can follow. Consider them your brand rules of engagement. This empowers your employees (who may or may not be part of the formal strategy) to interact in a proactive and positive way for your organization. It can also help alleviate the suffocating by process (for example, having 6 people sign off on one Tweet).
Participate in a proactive, non-commercial way. After identifying relevant social media sites, create profiles and work to establish your brand’s voice as a positive, contributing member of social society. Remember the 80/20 rule of conversation: limit self-promotional content to one out of every five interactions—think “cocktail party” instead of “convention.”
Also, this is your chance to just be yourself (provided you are quasi-socially acceptable). Think of social media less as a marketing channel and more as an editorial channel, where you can collaborate with people, share ideas, and truly connect with them. People will be honest with you if you are honest and transparent with them. And nobody likes to be sold to all the time (except for the informercial-watching portion of the population).
Measure and repeat. What gets done gets measured and may cycle back into your budget, so measuring ROI in social media is not only an effective way to demonstrate impact, but can also justify devoting additional resources to social media efforts.
Twitter: Provide monthly reports on number of followers, site referrals, growth/success of account over time, and brand reputation, which you can monitor by tracking mentions of your organization’s brand names, important terms, key executives and personas.
Facebook: Provide monthly reports on growth of fan base, site referrals, demographics of fan base and page interactions. Facebook Insights continue to evolve and can be a great source for garnering insight into who has connected with you on Facebook.
LinkedIn:Report monthly on growth of group, discussion topics and themes, and group interactions.
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