Know-How Exchange : Strategy

For starters, you probably want to initiate some relatively small tests ... one or two countries/regions, a handful of active participants. Their challenge would be to create an initial foray into social media for the company. In some countries/businesses it might take one form; in others another form.

Begin to collect some basic data ... number of contacts, amount of time spent, new business contacts, conversions, etc. It won't be totally clean, because social media don't stand alone; they are part of a larger marketing effort. But you start collecting whatever you can.

At some point your test team (and you) will need to look at what you invested (mostly in people time) and what you got for it. If you've kept good records it may not be that difficult. Just give it enough time; it would be a shame to abort the test the month before it was about to payoff for you.

Hope this helps. It would probably be worthwhile to get some outside consulting help with experience in integrating social media into a marketing plan. No sense reinventing the entire wheel on your own. There are some things that will be unique to your company and your industry, but there are others that will apply across companies and categories.

In any event, this is a better approach than letting every operating unit stumble into this new space on its own ... making decisions based on imperfect information, preconceived ideas and haphazard implementation.

Avinash Kaushik (the Google Analytics guru and Occam's Razor blogger) recommends a 10/90 rule for social media: 10% of your investment should be in technology, 90% in people.

I'd have to agree it's somewhere close to, but maybe not as high as that, depending upon your situation, objectives and needs: Yes, technology is of little use if you're not determining how to leverage and exploit the learnings, develop insights and take action. However, especially in social media - to a large extent, you get what you pay for and the better the technology, the less personnel time is needed to make the data useful (a potentially useful analogy would be manual manufacturing versus high-tech robotic manufacturing).

I've been reviewing many social media monitoring and measurement suppliers: There are a plethora of free tools and a wide range of paid options -- with a commensurately large range of scope of information, accuracy in data/sentiment analysis, ability to drill-down/filter/customize and report results and in the technology to transform information into insights (workflow management, etc.)

Net - It depends upon your company/brands, how much you want to monitor and manage, and whether you have to ability to make it all worthwhile from a resources and follow-up perspective.

Also consider the holistic organizational impact (in personnel and resources) of social media monitoring/CRM: One example - Will you be able to save on, or reallocate, phone center, customer service or sales staff if you start addressing questions and issues online? Another - What are the cost savings of addressing bad PR in its infancy and satisfying a customer griping in the social media space (who has the potential to impact many others)?

It will be an evolutionary journey, but one well worth taking!
-Steve Udell