A new social media planning tool
I recently spoke at an event for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. The event, called Social Media for Nonprofits, featured Wayne Breitbarth, LinkedIn expert, and me; and although it was targeted at the nonprofit community in Milwaukee, much of what we spoke about can be useful to for-profit businesses.
My presentation focused on the results of our recent Social Media Survey of Nonprofits ( get the results here) , specifically what nonprofits value about social media, and the challenges nonprofits face in implementing social media tools for their organizations. Because the Business Journal was kind enough to ask me to speak at this event, I wanted to be sure to deliver some high quality content for them. The result of my prep for this event is a new tool we hope you’ll find useful in planning your social media strategy. We call it the Ongoing Social Media Strategy Wheel.
One of the biggest challenges faced by nonprofit is getting others involved in the effort, either from a participation standpoint or from an implementation standpoint. This is partially because most nonprofits (64%) do not have a social media policy guiding the people charged with implementing social media. If your organization doesn’t have a social media policy, be sure to download our template so you can fix this! A social media policy can help make it “safe” to build a team of people to get the work done, rather than relying on a single person (who often has other work to do).
The other challenge is finding time to plan a strategy. Although most of us would never think of spending advertising dollars without a plan or hiring a receptionist and not training that person on how to answer the phone, many people don’t think anything of just jumping into social media without a plan of action. We hope our new document, the Ongoing Social Media Strategy Wheel, helps address the planning issue. When we created it, we wanted to be sure we recognized the following things:
- Most organizations are already using social media in some way. It would be stupid for me to lead you through the perfect planning process for people that are not yet involved in social media. That process won’t work if you’re already participating because you can’t stop and undo what you’ve already done just to make a plan.
- Planning is not a one time activity. You have to constantly reassess where you are at, look for new ideas, and pay attention to what is going on in the world.
- The world doesn’t stop while you plan. You can’t take a vacation from interacting with your social media contacts while you think. You have to think and act at the same time.
The ongoing social media strategy wheel attempts to show this by using continuous circles. The inner circle illustrates the planning and reflection activities that most people forget. These activities are conducted internally and aren’t seen by the public, but they are very important because performing these activities will increase the effectiveness of the woare the public sees. The outer circle illustrates the activities that most people see. Both wheels are rotating constantly and at the same time.
We hope that this new document will help you continuously refine your communications on social media.
If you want to see the rest of the presentation from the Social Media for Nonprofits event (the ideas work for for-profits too), you can view it here:
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