Strategic Planning for Social Media

As referred in our previous feed approximately 40% of organizations are moving to the strategic approach what it comes to their presence in Social Media. Approximately 23% of the companies have already reached the strategic stage.

Fine so since proper planning is fundamental to any successful activity. “If you fail to plan you plan to fail”, as we know. In Social Media this involves structured, disciplined, and aligned preparations in order to increase web traffic, generate leads, and grow sales among other goals.

Obviously all the large, globally active enterprises are among the most advanced ones what it comes to strategic planning in Social Media whether it is done in-house or outsourced. Nevertheless, we have recently seen serious failures reflecting incomplete or lacking planning.  Apparently, the former one lead to the most famous failure ever in social media: the Nestle Greenpeace confrontation.

We are not going to re-write all what happened but just to state the known facts: The conflict began in March 19^th in YouTube and resulted in overload of negative discussion in both Nestle’s company and KitKat’s facebook pages. Nestle prompted Youtube to shut the propaganda video down and tried to control the fan behavior in Facebook. Being not succesful it then decided to shut down the Kitkat page which lead to a „loss“ of nearly 800.000 fans. Finally in April 13^th the Nestle CEO launched in Facebook an open letter on what Nestle has done or will do in order to solve the respective environmental issues and to achieve a consensus with Greenpeace.

Is Social Media different?

Social Media as a promotion channel is new, very economic, and it evolves in light speed. The opportunity to reach, engage, and to activate with a targeted audience with size of millions and to share information with them in real time is very attractive for most marketers. Indeed it is the dream to come true for the brands owners. This makes Social Media more powerful than any other marketing method before. Much more powerful!

Social Media Power

For brand owners Social Media offers 3 superior characteristics:

1.The brand supporters (and non-supporters) tell what the brand is.
2.The brand supporters share the information with the brand owners and other prospects.
3. The supporters can engage with their ideal brands thus they rather purchase the brand than search for other alternatives.

This all means that in Social Media the community has the ownership of the power. In generally this can be regarded as strength but it also makes the brands more vulnerable. The result can be a misinterpreted communication or in worst case scenario, a community attack as in the Nestle case.

Social Media Crisis

Recently, political criticisms lead to a shutdown of the US Marine Facebook page, Kentucky Fried Chicken got some negative publicity in YouTube not long time ago, and several other cases with negative brand impact have exposed the risks in Social Media. The Nestle case is most likely not yet finished, and there are many Social Media failures still to come. Obviously this negative publicity keeps some enterprises from entering into Social Media thus meaning that Social Media is going through its first crisis. While it is growing in very rapidly, it faces a number of challenges such as policies, guidelines, ethical rules, metrics,standards, and many more.

It is not recommendable to create a Social Media presence without taking all these points into consideration. However, Social Media can also benefit from these issues and mature.  At some point there will be more advanced strategic planning including disaster planning. Finally, we need to bear in mind that the fanpage shutdown is not a solution.

Social Media Disaster Planning

What to do when things go wrong?

1. Prepare upfront a disaster plan as a part of your Social Media strategy!

• Identify the most critical areas related to your brand.

2. Identify the key influencers and get them to defend the brand if needed

• Listen and monitor permanently the web 2.0.
• Understand the trends.
• Investigate the CRM database.
• Increase loyalty and brand advocacy among your clients.

3. Be prepared to show something positive

• Address the critical areas, prepare videos, statements, press releases to communicate brand perspectives.
• Turn the negative publicity into your brand VICTORY.

4. Keep in mind that Social Media is transparent so also you must be transparent

• Tell the truth and nothing but the TRUTH!

5. Do apologize if you make mistakes

• Mistakes happen, so be prepared to “OUR APOLOGIZIES” if you have not done things well.

6. Think before you act

• NO primary reactions!
• Know who and where your target audience is and act there.
• Assure that the message you want to communicate is aligned with the strategic planning.
• Assess the crisis situation with your team, prepare an action plan to rescue the brand, and then apply the disaster plan.

7. Consult Experts

• Social Media is new. It is hard and expensive to get on top of the learning curve
• Consider outsourcing whole Social Media to specialists.
• Outsource crisis planning to remain un-biased.
• Do not stretch out internal resources, it is not the same: Turn threats into OPPORTUNITIES.

Read here B.L. Ochman’s what’snext blog with his lessons learned in the Nestle case.

Finally, we want to modify the former aphorism to following: “if you fail to plan your failure plan, you’ve already planned your failure”.