I’ve been working away behind the scenes on an initiative that I’m hoping is going to be helpful to you, and is going to put my money where my mouth is for all the times I talk about doing and building rather than just talking.

I’m building the framework for a social media blueprint, and I want to share it with you. I’m going to do that in a couple of different ways.

Right Here: The Blog

The blog is home base for me, so over the course of the next few months, I’m going to be building and riffing on the social media blueprint. I’m sure I’ll end up on tangents once in a while (after all, sometimes post inspiration strikes in strange places). But by and large, I’m going to keep taking about different concepts and practices dedicated to these areas:

Research, Listening and Observation: Best practices, case studies, and resources to learn all you can about the social media space before building a plan of your own.

Auditing and Readiness Assessment: Asking the practical (and sometimes tough) questions about the current state of your business and what challenges and opportunities you’re likely to face when starting out in social media.

Goal Setting: We’ll talk about how to define your measures of success, determine what your customers really want from you, and what the internal expectations of your colleagues and management are for your social media endeavors.

Resource Planning: Practical explorations of the human and monetary capital that social media requires, as well as determining the roles, responsibilities, and time commitments appropriate for your company.

Internal Education & Training: Initiating discussions about fears and hesitations about social media across the business, establishing communication policies, and empowering both employees and management to reap the benefits of social media.

Immersion and Participation: The “just do it” part of the process, where we’ll talk about specific tools and sites, strategies for corporate blogging, responding to detractors, and staying focused on building customer relationships.

Integration: It’s important to address the notion of building on and adapting what you’re already doing, and integrating social media into your existing business landscape (versus constantly reinventing the wheel).

Measurement and Learning: All of your social media endeavors are for naught if you aren’t going to assess how well you’ve done against your goals, learn something about your business and your customers, and then do something with that information.

We’ll be talking in and out of these themes probably throughout the year, but I want to hear from you about the real world challenges and questions you’re facing. There’s no issue too basic or complex: let’s try and deconstruct it together. I’m even going to recruit some guest experts to post on relevant topics. Leave a comment here or send me an email about what you’d like us to address.

The E-Book

It’s under construction right now, but it’s going to be an overview of all of the above topics in a light framework format that you can take back to your office and start digging into right away. It’ll have questions for discussion and examples of relevant tools and resources. And it’s going to be free.

Why? Because I believe my value to you as a blogger is to provide as much information and best practices as I can. And I think my value to you then as a consultant is to help you take the general framework and  do the heavy lifting to customize it and apply this to your business.

So it’ll be available in a week or so. Watch here for details. In the meantime, if you’re just getting started, check out my previous e-book on Getting A Foothold in Social Media. The guide is aimed at small business, but the basics apply regardless. It should give you a good start.

Your Turn.

This blog is here to help you. It’s a great place for me to develop ideas, but ideas don’t sell stuff. So I spent a lot of time contemplating my aims for this year, so this is how I intend to deliver. But you’re the ones who have to sell this stuff to your boss or to your clients. You’re the ones doing the work in the trenches.

So please keep the feedback coming. Tell me what topics you need me to weigh in on, because I’m typically going to shy away from the topics you can probably find better elsewhere. (You’ll rarely find a list post from me, because Mssr. Brogan does them so much better than I do, anyway).

I want to help be your architect *and* your builder. We’ve still a lot to learn together, and I for one am ready to roll up my sleeves and start digging into the hard stuff. How about you? Will you tell me what you need?

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