Making the Most of the Social Media Boom in 2010

2010 is going to be the year of social media and those who know how to use it will really start to see it becoming a central part of their strategy to reach out to customers online. Those who don't will start regretting it.

Here are my top 10 tips for you to prepare for the Social Media tsunami to come this year:

1. Hold on to your code of conduct: As social media moves into the mainstream, there is going to be a temptation for traditional marketing managers to try to recycle old recipes which already stopped working a long time ago. At best, these traditional methods will be seen as failures to adapt to social media; at worst, there will be seen as attempts at infiltrating social media. More than ever, it is time to remind people of the fundamental rules of disclosure, of which Andy Sernovitz and SMBC are so fond.
2. Structure your teams: Social media initiatives have most of the time been started as grassroots projects. I think they are now endorsed much more broadly and officially by Management. This is the time to change some of your teams' job descriptions subtly, in order to industrialise what you have just started.
3. Do away with renegade initiatives: If your brand is popular, you will get fanboys wanting to create your twitter account. But how many twitter account does a company need? More than once, I have seen such efforts fail anyway, because communities aren't created without effort. You have to -- as Tara Hunt put it -- work out your Whuffy Factor first.
4. From presence to engagement: Quite a few enterprises have experimented with social media, if only dip a toe in the water and to say they have a presence online. Social media users demand engagement and not old-style marketing, as online crisis managament efforts of Eurostar, following the pre-Chrismas breakdown, has shown. Once again, this is an area in which well-meaning Social Marketing initiatives could suffer from traditional approaches.
5. Industrialise video and embrace UGC: Many enterprises have experimented with video in the last two years. 2010 will see them moving into a more mature way of producing videos. Making the most of high quality User Generated Content (UGC) videos will soon become easier, due to the introduction of new generation HD hand-held cameras such as the Flip or the Kodak Zi8. As long as sound capture is improved dramatically though.
6. From video to radio: As pointed out by Cisco's John Earnhardt in late 2008 at a blogwell conference, vlogging (video blogging) introduced a new and easier way of delivering original content at a very reasonable cost. Yet, if videos were easier to produce than blog posts, certainly radio content is even simpler, using tools like Blogtalkradio or Saooti.
7. Get ready for the rise of Facebook in the enterprise: Usage of Facebook has soared, and its business model is being fixed. The fact that Facebook can not be seen behind many corporate firewalls is frustrating for B2B and B2C players alike because they cannot reach potential customers through the site. Gradually, US companies are opening up the use of social media in the workplace. I expect it to happen in Europe as well. It's important to hone your social media marketing skills on Facebook so that you are ready for when this change comes. Facebook marketing for dummies by Paul Dunay is a good place to start.
8. Time to get back to the ROI/ROE question: This is a subject we have already touched on quite a few times. social media ROI forecasts will need to be created to demonstrate a proven benefit. Apart from the traditional which let you measure visits and popularity, I also suggest social media managers emphasise the amounts of money that they have been able to save by using UGC.
9. Community management has to be improved and industrialised: I believe that most agencies and clients have the wrong ideas about community management which I think means more than hiring armies of staff in offshore companies to send more or less standardised responses to comments. Tara Hunt is even more radical as she declares that she is torn on the question of whether enterprises require community managers at all. Much of community management has to be in-sourced I believe, in order to make it real because customers are fed up talking to helpdesk robots.
10. Beware of the next big thing: New social media innovations appear almost on a daily basis, if not more. Yet, shrewd marketers have a sixth sense for knowing when and when not to jump on a bandwagon. New social media tools are being created every day, but it doesn't mean that all social networks would be should be tried. Be selective, and yet open-minded.