This is a common question among many organizations and associations.  Should you become involved in Social Media as a company or not? The biggest challenge faced by associations is time and staff.  Everyone has had to cut staff and/or take on multiple responsibilities over the past year or so and no one  has the time to add another responsibility.  Social Media involvement does take a commitment whether from one or multiple staff members.

There are a few ways that involvement can be addressed that may fit into your company strategy and profile.

Should you become involved in Social Media – YES.  According to the Nielsen 2010 Media Fact Sheet, Time spent on social networking sites in the U.S. increased 277%; The average U.S. worker spends 5 hrs a month visiting social networks at the office; Facebook reaches 56% of the active U.S. Internet universe with an average usage of 6 hrs a month per user; Twitter grew 500% over a year; and 32% of all mobile web users visit social network sites.

Due to these statistics, it would definitely be in your best interest to become involved in social meeting as a company and marketing strategy.  Now, to what extent do you become involved?

This will really depend on your staff and time allotment.  Adding a blog to your site and providing content and resources to your viewing audience and member is a huge commitment but one that will pay off in the long one as establishing yourself as a knowledge leader in your field.  Blogs do take time and commitment to write, but is it possible to spend about 1 hour a week on your blog work?  Consider video blogging vs. writing a blog.  Make it a point throughout the day jotting/writing down blog topics and key points (approximately 5-10). Schedule an hour to sit in front of a video (does not have to be a professional production) and tape a 5 minute blog session on each topic that you’ve recorded. The video blogs can then be posted weekly to your site and based upon the number of video blogs that you recorded, you could have about a  months or a little more of video blogs to post that took you a few hours to complete.

Assign social media sites to various people in your organization. Arrange for these people to be in charge of each site and check/perform searches on the selected keywords for your organization, and interact with others. A schedule can be arranged where this occurs at least 3 times a day for approximately 1/2 hour each time. This provides some type of interaction with the social media main stream and enables your organizations name and content to be seen and discussed.

Becoming involved in Social Media does involve a commitment of time and resources. But if this is planned according to your companies goals and staffs schedule and abilities, can become a positive tasks to any ones day while increasing company awareness, site visitors and potential members.

Last month I decided to begin a Social Media Adventure by starting with a new company that did not have a web presence.  Well, the one company has turned into several and everything has become so very exciting.

The tools and tips in the first two posts were definitely the starting points.  The referenced sites and materials which are included in the first two posts are definitely worth a visit and read.  Click here to return to the first post and here to return to the second post.

One very important key factor is STRATEGY.  To be successful and to learn/know your target audience and peers, you need to be aware of their needs and their interests.  By devising a strategy, you can determine these needs and target your goals more effectively.

Your strategy should include:

1. Social Media Presence – create your Social Media Presence by creating Profiles in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, etc.  There are numerous social media sites where profiles can be created, select the ones that best fits your needs. Search/see where your target audience has a presence.
2. Look, Watch & Listen – search the social media sites where you have profiles for keywords relating to your industy, your company name, competitor company name and groups that fit your profile.
3. Join the groups where applicable and watch the interaction. See what people are saying and asking – find out their needs and how you can help.  Begin to log this information for further research.
4. Search – search for blogs that are similar to your service or product.
5. Contribute – Contribute when you have something to offer that provides information or helps with a post or comment.

This strategy will help as you begin to explore social media and all that this encompasses.  So, now that you have a few strategy items, it’s time for action.  Below are a few tools that will help with the items listed above:

• Setting up your profile in Twitter – I recommend you visit http://www.twitip.com.  Read the information and sign up to receive the posts.  This is a great site that has a wealth of information that you won’t want to miss.
• http://search.twitter.com.  Enter keywords for your industry to see who is tweeting and what they are saying.
• Use a twitter tool – There are quite a few to select – TweetDeck (my personal favorite), Twitteriffic, Twhirl, Spaz, etc. Check out all of the available apps at http://twitter.com/downloads.
• Don’t forget to click on the link at the bottom of the page for the Twitter fan wiki.  Amazing applications listed here that will make your head spin with all that is available. So very cool.
• Facebook – you can search for a specific term in Facebook and select to narrow the results down by Group, Events, Applications, Web, etc.
• LinkedIn -   you can search for People, Answers, Jobs, or Groups.
• Alltop – an “online magazine rack” which is better than a magazine.  It is updated each hour with the hottest stories on any topic, category, name, etc.
• Google Blog Search – searching for blogs can be done by entering “blog” behind the search term in Google. As an example, if you want to search for blogs on WordPress – enter “WordPress Blog” and hit search.
• Technorati – good site that provides the ability to search blogs by various categories, words and view the top 100 blogs, most popular, etc.

These are a few strategy items and tools to get you started.  If  you have questions or feedback, please feel free to post comments or contact me.

The beginning of my social media adventure includes working with my client on their website and marketing goals.  Outlining the goals are an important step in this process and helps define the strategy going forward.  Goals should include:

• Overall goal of the website – is the site to increase membership, increase product sales, increase attendance at meetings/classes, provide information to users (members and non-members), establish client as a source of knowledge in their vertical market, etc.

• Based upon the goals above, how will the information be shared to the users?  As an example, if the client wants to establish them as a source of knowledge, do they currently have a blog, rss, newsletter, etc.? If not, then this would be a goal to establish for the new site.

• Content - what type of content/navigational options will be available on the site? This will help determine the site structure and if forums, blogs, wiki’s, etc. should be options for the new site. 

• User Interaction – how much interaction with the content would the client want the users to have? 

After the goals were identified, my next step was to review their current site and make recommendations on changes/alterations. In my review of the site, I found the site slow, content and direction needing help, and SEO (search engine optimization) issues.

Since the goal of this client is to increase web awareness, traffic and sales, we decided to change the site and go with Web 2.0 strategies.  Over the past few days I’ve been working on setting the site up using WordPress, transferring domains, organizing content, etc.   As a side note, I am really loving WordPress – so easy to set up sites to include content pages, forms, etc.  The widgets are awesome.

Once the new site structure is set up, we will continue with the adventure to include building the social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.