How strong is your social harness?

Being an Innovation and Social Media evangelist at Wipro, there are a few questions which come back frequently to me while interacting with Brand & PR managers – Am I doing enough on Social Media? Can I bank upon it as a channel of marketing/sales? How do I know if I am being effective?

Following is an approach to ascertain whether your organization/brand is following a good Social Media strategy and test how strong your Social Media harness really is.

1. Defined roles

a. Do you have a Social Media leader in your organization? 4 points
b. Is there a defined role and KRA for that leader? 2 points
c. A social media execution team to go with it? 3 points

2. Ubiquitous presence - Presence on Social Media channels is a relative thing. A niche brand might do well by not only creating its own community but also connecting to customers on other popular social networks. Below are some broad classifications of Social Media channels that exist today.

a. Popular channels – Channels where your customers go frequently.

Do you have presence on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Myspace? 2 points for each

b. Targeted channels – Focused content targeted towards women, men, teenagers etc.

Do you have presence on targeted channels such as Gather for Family, Piczo for teens, Kirtsy for women etc.? 1 point for each channel

c. Concept channels – Channels heavily into content for gaming, music, cooking etc.

Do you have presence on concept channels? 2 points
Built community on the channel and actively monitoring it? 3 points

d. Professional networking channels – Opportunity zones for businesses to connect to prospects, leads and business community

Do you have presence on professional channels like Linked In, Company loop etc.? 3 points
Do you participate in discussions, forums, Q&A? 3 points
Do you monitor and channel it back to CRM, sales funnel, lead generation etc.? 4 points

e. Bookmark channels – Users share, organize and manage interesting links from the web

Do you share content with customers on bookmark sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit? 1 point for each channel

3. Tenets of the new media

a. Content – Do you create content for your customers on products, services or in general about your brand? 3 points
b. Creative – Do you strive to make the content creative, interesting and insightful? 3 points
c. Collaboration – Do you allow/encourage your customers to give feedback, collaborate, and crowdsource ideas? 4 points
d. Reach – Does your website link back to your social media initiatives? 3 points

4. Monitor A successful social media strategy entails implementing a listening platform that lets you view relevant conversations happening around your brand and products in real time and analyze them to make it meaningful and actionable.

a. Have you implemented a Social Media listening platform for your brand? 4 points
b. Do you analyze the reports and bring upon changes in your Social Media strategy? 5 points

5. Crisis communication

a. Does your Social Media team know how to handle a crisis and communicate it internally or externally? 3 points

b. Is there a defined crisis communication approach in the organization? 4 points

So what was your score?

Strong Harness: 55 – 70 points – You are most likely to succeed in your social media initiatives and will strongly influence the trends in the future. You can bank upon your social media strategy as a reliable source of marketing/sales.
Medium Harness: 30-54 points – Likely to succeed but there are loose ends which must be managed. Often it is the focused and strategized effort in Social Media channels which will do the trick.
Weak Harness: 10-29 points – You may not be effectively leveraging Social Media to its fullest potential. There are also potential risks to your brand’s reputation due to stronger competitive presence and non-control mechanisms in place.

The above points are indicative of a broad based Social Media approach. Inviting a Social Media consultant for assessment and analysis would work well for organizations.

It would be interesting to know your comments on this.

About the Author

Ramanujam Srinivasan is a Enterprise Innovation Evangelist/Lead Technology Architect in Retail, Consumer Goods, Transportation and Government vertical of Wipro Limited. He is an Innovation and Social Media evangelist responsible for the online and social media initiatives. He has conceived and built Wipro's Social Media offering known as 'Digital Marketing Cockpit' which includes online brand monitoring, search rank analysis, community building and real time price monitoring. He is also the creator of TINA - 'The Intelligent Next Gen Associate' - an automated robot and platform, and works actively to develop unique solutions on user experience devices/concepts such as Android, Microsoft Surface, Augmented reality etc.

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