It's not unusual for business owners or company boards of Directors to ask themselves the question:
'What is this new marketing media all about? Does it really impact our business and should we be spending any time or energy worrying about it?"
And the answer is, it depends! The truth is, that for some businesses it's had a big impact, with online credibility and brand reputational issues or new smaller players grabbing market share from nowhere. Whilst for others it hasn't yet had a big impact, but might offer opportunities to help protect or sustain market position in the future.
The other truth is, that for many (to paraphrase a certain US politician) you don't know, what you don't know. So coming to a decision as to whether there would be any 'return on investment' from spending time and money on these things is very difficult to make.
That is why often, the place that new or existing clients start, when considering this difficult dilemma, is a Social Media Strategy Workshop.
Depending on the number of staff and/or decision makers that need to be involved, these are tailored to your needs, but typically are from between a 1/2 day to 2 days in duration.
(If you'd rather just send yourself along to one of our 4 hour "
open Social Media Strategy Workshops" then
click here to find out if there are any places available on the next one...)
And a typical agenda looks something like:
- Identifying the clear business objectives
(e.g. reputation management, new markets, sales growth)
- Based on those goals, matching the top 3-6 Social Media to look at in depth
- An educational session on each of the chosen media
(e.g. best practice, case studies, how, when, where etc)
- A facilitated prioritisation process
(to match these to the identified business priorities and goals)
- Identifying the resultant workshop outputs
(e.g. SM Policy, strategy and implementation plan)
Through this process senior management or business owners can be confident that they are making decisions based on 'knowns', rather than hearsay or fear of the unknown.
If you decide to implement some of all of the plan, those decisions can be made in the same way as other strategic or tactical decisions, based on fact and understanding, as we all know,
'failing to plan is planning to fail'.
Whether you implement the plan internally, or have external help from WSI or another consultancy, whenever we facilitate a Social Media Strategy Workshop, you will also receive a full copy of our
Social Media Strategy Kit, which has been developed to specifically support organisations such as yours navigate what some might perceive as the minefield of incorporating Social Media into their full Marcomms Plan.