As I’ve said a couple of times before, my mission for now and ever is to pull back the cover on the social media engine and get greasy. I want to tinker with the moving parts and figure out how they work, and map all that out for businesses that are really trying to understand how to apply all this STUFF we keep talking about. No preaching. Real work.

Here’s some of the stuff I’ll be thinking about. Will you add yours?

Bridging Online and Off

The online world is teeming with life, but there’s still a big analog world out there. 2.0 brands are going to have to learn how to keep a foot in both universes. Up for consideration will be how offline communication in person and print can perpetuate cycles of communication, instead of being stopping points.

Can we effectively use concrete brand experiences – like tangible products, collateral, and in-person events – and bridge them back and forth to digital? How?

Building Without Walls

Flexibility is going to be key in a nimble digital world. Plans are going to be made, reworked, and all out broken. The days of the tabular marketing and communications plan are long gone. What’s next will be frameworks, scaffolding. Structure without permanence so that communicators like me (and you) can adapt and mold to the shapes that the conversations are taking online.

So what, exactly, does that plan look like? What factors need to drive our goals and objectives? That’s a big thing for us to chew on this year. I’m already doodling…

Inside Baseball

The foundation of external social media success is internal. It’s having the right mindset, the right team in place, the right resources allocated (and waiting in the wings) so that social media becomes part of the culture and operation of a business from the inside out. It just doesn’t work otherwise.

As more team members are using social networks in their personal lives, we’re going to see a gradual but distinctive bleed into business. Employees are going to expect that they can work with these tools to do their jobs better.  So how do we structure the flow of information, empower and educate employees, engender trust between believers and skeptics? Are we meeting the needs of our internal clients – our bosses, our colleagues, our teams – and putting our own social media money where our mouth is? What does this mean for roles and responsibilities in tomorrow’s companies?

Information Workflow

Listening, learning, participating. All of our favorite buzzwords for social media. But from an operational business standpoint, just what are we doing with this new found wisdom? How are we adapting and evolving our operations and communications based on what we learn? Are we creating best practices and making our companies leaner and better at serving our customers, or are we preening?

The only way social media will be sustainable is to integrate the effective parts into the way we build businesses, and jettison the crap that weighs us down. Critical issues to think on will be how information flows through the business and exactly how those touchpoints affect day to day work.

You’ll note that there’s not a thing above that’s specific to using blogs or Twitter or Facebook advertising or RSS or anything else. The reason is simple: the tools come last (or close to last),  only after figuring out what, exactly, we’re trying to accomplish. I’m going to keep thinking about the tools themselves, but from the angles of how they plug into the pieces above. Not for their own sake.

The questions above may be masquerading a bit as theory, but there will be no answers without practical application. And the answers are going to be different for each and every company. So I’m sketching blueprints right now. You’ll see them this year, because together, we’re going to figure out what works.

So you’re going to work every day, trying to assimilate this stuff. What should people like me be keeping in mind for people like you? What do *you* need on these blueprints so that you can take them to work with you and start building?

Photo credit: Ralph Bijker

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