1) Go to Twitter, Facebook and Linked In and set up profiles for yourself. Become friend or follow few people to see how it works. Try following editor ‘Brendaward’ to see how to use Twitter, look at ‘thedailylark.com’ for excellent blogs, search Facebook for the award-winning ‘Your Future at Deloitte’ site. Search for famous people, communicators you admire, and experts in your field.
2) Find few people who use social media prolifically to have conversation with. Any ad agency will have someone who understands social media. Have coffee and talk about it.
3) Decide who in your organisation should be in charge of and involved in social media. The IT department will have the know-how, but those in customer management, marketing and call centres will find it most useful. Reputation management is an important part of social media and is an area where your public relations team should be involved.
4) Get group together as working party. Start in small way, with just one person (and backup) updating the sites. You’ll find customers will get familiar with one personality and get to know their ‘voice’.
5) Invest. Where role updating blogs is simply added into person’s role without any remuneration, it’s unlikely to be successful, the experts say. Everyone’s busy and blogs and tweets are unlikely to be updated often enough. Think about employing social media marketer to take charge of campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. If you’re looking for ideas, again ad agencies are good at thinking up ways of using sites for engagement.
• For NZ Management magazine’s full article on Harnessing the Power of Social Media visit: www.archivesearch.co.nz
