What's the Plan, Stan?

If you're the owner or marketer of a small business and are trying to make sense of wikis, WOM, blogs and buzz, you know the challenges of creating a social-media strategy from scratch. After all, it's an emerging channel with emerging rules—and everyone worries about missing something or heading in the wrong direction.

To help you stay on the right track, Christina Kerley, aka CK, has outlined a 10-point road map. She starts her new-media primer with an old-school recommendation that applies to any marketing effort:

• Build your program on a foundation of fine-tuned goals. "Will you be working to generate new leads and sales," she asks in a Pro article at MarketingProfs, "increase awareness of your offerings, decrease marketing spend as compared to traditional media, ensure the relevance of your company, decrease purchasing cycles, extend the reach of your market footprint ... or achieve other goals?"

Then, after walking readers through the process of creating and managing a top-flight social-media program, CK suggests an oft-neglected—but critically important—final step:

• Share your insights with other teams in your company. "You might distribute monthly reports," she says, "or make a quarterly event of holding brown-bag lunch briefings where you invite representatives from relevant departments to discuss findings and next steps—and let social media be a way to open up conversations within your own company, too."

The Po!nt: A successful social-media program begins and ends with a comprehensive plan, so be sure you have one.

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