Social Netorking Strategy
IN THE NEW AND EVOLVING ONLINE WORLD, THE GREATEST MOMENTUM GOES NOT TO THE CANDIDATE WITH THE MOST DETAILED PLAN FOR CONQUERING THE WEB BUT TO THE CANDIDATE WHO SURRENDERS HIS (HER) IMAGE TO THE CLICKING MASSES, THE SAME WAY A ROCK GUITARIST MIGHT FALL BACKWARD OFF THE STAGE INTO THE HANDS OF AN ADORING CROWD.
—MATT BAI, (NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 9, 2007, "THE WEB USERS CAMPAIGN.")
Whether you personally implement a social networking strategy or hire someone to empower your community through social networking initiatives, you'll increase your company's internal and external ROI and get the jump on your competition. Social tools extend basic social skills and enable proactive businesspeople to build communities that better connect employees and customers among themselves and with one other. By putting yourself and your company at the center of your immediate universe, you give yourself access to newer and better information and facilitate better and more effective communication between you and everybody around you. In so doing, the legacy thinking taught in business schools is squared with new ideas and new measures of success. By building social, cultural, and financial capital through the amplification of your microcelebrity brand and through successful use of feedback loops, you might even be able to take it one step further. Consider the ultimate opportunity made possible through social networking for business: Take the lead, set the corporate standard for success, and reinvent legacy thinking for your industry.
Social networking offers you the opportunity to become an expert in your field and lets people near and far know about you and what you do. It makes your connections more visible and more readily available, and can increase your reach and create brand awareness. Does that mean that the more you affect culture, the more you attract financial capital? The answer is yes... to a certain extent. However, just as you can't directly correlate the number of people who will buy your product to the amount of money you spend on marketing and branding it offline, you can't directly correlate sales to your online presence. Whatever your strategy, always keep one rule in mind: Success begins with adding value to your community.
With social networking strategies, just as with general Internet and online strategies before them, it's not as much a slot machine as it is a game of chess. Making a single move probably won't make a fortune pour right into your lap. Ultimately though, planning your moves carefully and being able to think a few moves ahead will pay off in a way that is far greater, far more meaningful, and most importantly, far more lasting than any one-time fluke could ever be. A slot machine is all about luck; a chess game is all about making the best use of strategy given the available possibilities and opportunities. Now it's up to you to get out there and make your first move.
...May the best players win.
Excerpt from: Juliette Powell
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