Your Social Networking Strategy Doesn’t Have to Include the Kitchen Sink

by Joanna Pineda Posted on February 12, 2009

Social Networks By popular demand and client request, I conducted a webinar on Tuesday with esteemed Project Manager Cat Lee from Matrix Group on “Creating a Social Networking Strategy (SN) for Your Organization.” Why do a webinar on a topic that is already getting a lot of coverage?  Our reasons:  Clients are looking for help, they want to know why and how to set up their social networking toolbox, and they’re looking for best practices on ways to use SN to help them achieve their overall goals.

The key take aways from the webinar were the following:

A point we tried to emphasize is this:  your SN strategy does not need to have everything but the kitchen sink. Every organization needs to craft an SN strategy that takes into account its organization type, size, goals, and internal resources.  For example, a research organization client of Matrix Group uses its Web site to disseminate its research, Twitter to announce new research, and a Facebook page to make consumers aware of their consumer-oriented research.  This organization decided against a blog because it is a neutral organization; as such, they don’t provide a whole lot of commentary on their researh.

Another client is using a CEO blog to provide thought leadership and have a dialogue with members, a Facebook page to reach younger members, and YouTube to gain a wider audience for their research and events.  Yet another client uses Twitter and RSS to engage the media, Flickr to share photos from their fabulous events, and Facebook as a way to generate leads and promote their events.

So which SN activity takes the most time?  Blogging, because it involves generating original content that provides a perspective on a topic, issue, profession or industry.  And yet, keep in mind that for every SN page that you create, you will need to cultivate readers, fans, group members, or subscribers, and that customer cultivation is ultimately where the greatest staff time will be needed.

3 replies on “Your Social Networking Strategy Doesn’t Have to Include the Kitchen Sink”

I really like how you use examples of how different companies are using different SN platforms to reach different audiences (ie, Facebook to reach younger members, Flickr to promote photos from events, etc.etc.etc.). That’s a point missed by a great number of companies determined to use social media to reach their audience…they don’t realize that most of their audience might be at one platform compared to another.

Great post! Stumbled and tweeted.

Barbara

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