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.