Building a Holistic approach that delivers results can only be done when you have a core focus and strategy. Strategy deals with having a clear idea about who you are and what you want to achieve. So to create a holistic strategy for your web and social media machine fundamentally means to rethink what closely held stakeholders close to the critical business strategy. Also any strategy means that you have always first to start any change or definition of action within yourself and yours: internally!
Holism from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total
Thus to build a holistic web social media strategy approach you have to define the way to go. A given organisation or company needs to emphasizing the organic or functional relation between the parts and the whole of its interest. This path needs to go side by side within the direction of the technology trends and developments, the worldwide economic flows and cicles with its geopolitical innuendos and the environmental situation. In sum all the challenges that businesses, companies and users face.
Companies and organizations being it large and small have to adopt a holistic business strategy that empowers transparency, trust and engagement. In order to do that their internal teams of management and employees have to rethink and continously optimise the whole of the business processes and operations and adpat it towards the new driving factors. Web and Social Media are without any doubt partly the driving factors of business and society so the efforts and shifts have to go in that direction. This goes hand by hand with the concept that any organisation of business has to cope with a Corporate Social Responsability CSR. Any busines, company has to manage their work towards a way that fully understands the engagement of their strategies in relation with the ins and outs of the product/service offerings towards their audience and customers. Ultimately that needs to be an evolution of focus towards serving that audience, customers, instead of serving the politics, executive management or stock market egos. This is the critical subject for the future of any organisation a balance between different subjects and areas of expertise and interest towards an effective responsible handling of strategies to a specific audience that in some way it is its community, social target.
In this fashion planning and executing an effective and systematic plan of action for a web and social marketing strategy & campaigns needs a total related approach that agregates all the resources and his people wealth. Some of the tactics, ideas to adopt and focus:
- Private business: social media marketing and branding strategy focus on customers and its total engagement
B2B social media strategy, focus in creating strong links between partners and related businesses, example IBM
Putting social media methodology in place deals with a clear message and assumption of the importance of branding
Continuous optimisation: SEO (Search engine Optimisation) and Social Media Optimisation – Total Web Optimisation. In general a continuos optimsation of business and processes
Communications, branding, PR and Marketing + customer service – Holistic approach
Any business is a media business, it has to have a clear voice, spokespersons, message and channels to distribute it.
It is core mapping a company audience, engage with it &… influencing it!
It is necessary a digital and Social Media competitor landscape (research ongoing in main channels: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…)
Creating, Curating and distributing content is key to be visible.
Strategies, platforms, have to walk side by side with brand storytelling & needs for business
Focus in managing internal and third party message and creating a relation with key influencers and bloggers
Customising branding and buzz monitoring engines needs to be done on a regular basis
Planning and executing an effective plan needs preparation. Bellow a graphic I did thinking precisely about a strategy and implementation plan for a web and social media strategy based in the article Process: A Pragmatic Approach to Social Business by Jeremiah Owyang
| Set Up, Preparation |
Task Description |
Questions for the organization to Answer | Homework / Resources |
| Education / Management & Employees / policies / legal issues / compliance / Security | Be informed on the impacts of web development, social technology to business, customers, employees, and compan, market and amrketing intelligence | What audience we are targeting?How have customers changed their behaviors? How has business changed due to this power shift? How to engage in the best way? | Conferences, Books, Analyst Firms, Thought Leaders, Webinars, training, training! |
| Homework / Research / proper Brand strategy and protection / back up | To document the changes in the business given specific market, its processes and tools | How do my customers and employees use social technology? How will they do that in the future? What tools are most used? What are my competitors doing? | Mapping business, organisation, Social graphics studies, Research firms, Marketing Research departments / SWOT analysis / |
| Communication, PR & Business Strategy | Define specific goals of what is to be accomplished | What are the business goals? How will we measure success? How does this support the company and customers mission? | A combination of aligning to executive leadership, teams, agency partners, and manage a proper customised corporate social strategy |
| Planning, Planning & planning | Defines specific resources /teams needed in what timeline | How much budget is necessary? What skills are needed? How much time is needed? Deadlines? IT, tech, internal vs external. Which vendors? Tools, Platforms. | Agency partners, project managers, community managers |
| Implementation and make sure there is execution, and test, test | Initiating the plan and making sure the organisations is ready by steps and processes | Coordination between traditional existing processes and new ones. How will the new strategy be integrated into existing efforts? Balance old and new. | Marketeers, PR, Communications, Community managers, developers, agency partners, technology vendors. |
| Management/campaigns / lead generation / engagement | Ongoing support of efforts, checking and learning continously | How will the business keep this long term effort going forward? What resources and staff are needed for continual program growth? Continue with the traditional tasks don’t kill all existence good practices. | Marketing and commercial teams, Community manager, customer service, agency partners, IT departments, technology vendors |
| Measurement / analytics: ROI versus ROA | How effective was our effort? Return on Investment and Return on Attention | Trends. Competitor landscape. Best practices, policies. Performance. SWOT analysis | Analytics and measurement groups, brand monitoring vendors, agency partners, and business intelligence providers |
| Short, Medium, long term strategy | Improving the effort after understanding how it has been deployed. Measure set goals & go step by step. Try always new things and mantain a list of the effective area sthat work. Never forget the traditional mediums such as email marketin and integrate it as much as possible | Set up a concious think tank. Ask questions and answer. How can the company improve this effort going forward? How can it be integrated, mixed, optimised within the other existing processes, tools? | All teams have to work in a holitsic way expanding the strategy with the web social team and the rest of the organisation and its activities: digital marketing, events, and real world experiences. |
- Image by MyThoughtsMindMaps via Flickr
Related articles
- Building a Social Media Machine and Strategy (dinisguarda.com)
- Setting Your Social Media Strategy – Part 2 (futurelab.net)
- 7 insights for a strong 2011 Social Media, SEO and PPC strategy (dinisguarda.com)
- Your Social Media Followers Are Your Best Customers (darmano.typepad.com)
Whats up very cool web site!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing ..
I’ll bookmark your web site and take the feeds also? I’m satisfied to search out
so many useful info here within the post, we want develop more techniques in this regard, thank you for sharing.
. . . . .
When some one searches for his essential thing, thus he/she desires to be available that in detail, therefore that
thing is maintained over here.
This text is worth everyone’s attention. How can I find out more?