Laying Out A Framework for Social Media Strategy

In my Social Media 101 presentation to a group of marketers from E&Y last week, I included the beginnings of a social media framework that has been on my mind recently.  This post explains how I will be using the framework to address social media strategy needs for my clients.

One more thing – the tables below are slanted toward a B2B social media strategy, but could easily be modified for a B2C or hybrid strategy.

The first table looks at the six primary social media functions.  I first saw this list of functions in a presentation by Marta Kagan and have been using  them to explain the different areas that social media can address.  Against the six social media functions, I mapped the key social media tools that can be used to address these functions.  I could have used generic categories such as blog, video, social networking and bookmarking and I omitted some categories for my audience such as wikis, user review sites and forums.

Once I plotted the intersections, it is interesting to see that not every tool addresses each function.  Some people may argue that if you make the bus big enough, you could probably justify any of the tools for any of the functions – but I have limited the intersections to their most typical usage.

Mapping Social Media Functions to Tools

After mapping the social media functions to tools, the next important step was to assign priority to each tool.  Along with the priority, it is also key to understand both the upfront effort and the ongoing effort for each tool.  For example, creating and maximizing your LinkedIn profile is a high priority that has moderate upfront effort and a low ongoing effort score.

There are better ways to to quantify effort, but they are difficult to document without further knowledge of the situation.  After spending some time doing discovery with a specific client, I would most likely assign hours or days of effort.  For now, the table below just identifies relative effort levels.

Social Media Tools - Priority and Effort

As you can see above, I would rank LinkedIn Profiles and Groups,  a blog and Slideshare as high priority implementations.  But each one comes with different levels of both upfront and ongoing effort.  And I would put blogging and managing a community in the high category for ongoing effort which explains why many companies choose not to implement these tools despite their relative priority.

The framework is also a work in progress so any comments are welcome.

Using Slideshare to Promote Your Business

Another great and easy way for small-to-medium businesses to leverage the social media channel is set up a company account on Slideshare.

Slideshare claims to be the largest community for sharing presentations and other documents with over 23 million visitors  who view more than 60 million pages per month.  It’s free to use and it is a great place to store company presentations, whitepapers and other marketing collateral.  Presentations and documents can either be totally open to the public or you can set the privacy to only you or to people with whom you share the secret URL .  Slideshare is a great way to promote and broaden your company’s exposure with a fairly low level of involvement on your part.

I also find many great presentations and documents on Slideshare, so it is worth your time to explore some of the great content.  You can easily embed a presentation in a blog or share it on other social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Delicious.  Slideshare  has many other features like events, slidecasts, groups, a community and widgets that are worth checking out too.

After completing your profile page, uploading content to Slideshare is very easy.  Simply click on the Upload button, locate the file or files you want to upload from your computer, then add a title, description and tags.  Within a couple of minutes, your files will be ready to be viewed on the Slideshare site.  It is really important to include a complete description and as many relevant tags for each file as this will make it easier for others to find it and to get picked up by search engines.

Some quick tips for using Slideshare for your business include:

1. Create an account with your company name in it
2. Make your profile as complete as possible and include a logo, picture, address and URL
3. Upload great content and make sure that the title, description and tags are complete
4. Tell people your content is on Slideshare by sharing with prospects, customers and others,  and by sharing on other social media sites

As you can see from the example company profile below, you can include a fairly detailed profile including address, phone number and website.  All presentations or documents that you upload are also displayed on your “My Slidespace” page along with the number of times each document has been viewed.

Example Company Profile from One of My Clients on Slideshare

For businesses that want to use Slideshare as a lead generation channel, there are now two options called Adshare and LeadShare that were launched in October.  I have not had an occasion to try either service, but I did explore the website to see how they work.

AdShare is a way to get targeted visitors to view your content.  When you sign up you get to pick which documents you want to share and the type of content or category that you want to sponsor.  You only pay when someone clicks on one of your documents.  The current rate is $.25 if you don’t select a geography and $.35 per click if you select a geography.  AdShare works a bit like Google Adwords but your message can be longer than 50 words and documents on Slideshare are viewed as ‘content’ and not ‘advertising’.

LeadShare allows you to leverage your content by capturing the viewer’s contact information.   Pricing starts at $1 for a call to action and moves to $3 per lead if you want to capture contact information.  As you add additional information you want to capture, the price per lead increases.  For example, it costs an extra $2 to get a phone number and $2 per qualifying question.

I am sure I will experiment with one or both services before the end of the year.  For more on these services, I have embedded Slideshare’s presentation that explains the programs.

While there are other file sharing solutions on the market today including Scribd, DocStoc and Yudo, I think that Slideshare is the current gold standard and definitely worth using to promote your business.

_________________________

November 21 Update

I wrote a follow-on blog post about using Slideshare to promote your “best of” blog posts. This is another business use for Slideshare.