Over the past few weeks, we have had a myriad of conversations at work about social media. There is so much buzz out there, sometimes it's easy to get lost amongst all the different tools and tactics. Plus, if you don't have an overlying strategy - your social media initiative is doomed to fail anyways. But regardless of all that, I wanted to take a minute to explain the three (very basic) elements of social media. It's a framework that should help in organizing and prioritizing your social media plans.
Listen
Listening is the simple practice of observing the different conversations that people are having about your products and services. You can listen to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums and really any type of online content. Try to make sense of those conversations, analyze trends and then see how you can improve your marketing and product strategies based on what you learned. If people are asking you questions, try to answer them. If there is a social media emergency (hello Dell Hell,) quickly figure out a strategy to respond.
Participate
You should always listen before you start participating. But once you've learned a bit about your part of the social world, you can begin participating in conversations. You could start a Facebook group, launch a Twitter stream, be active in forums, pitch key influencers or write guest blog entries. There is no shortage of opportunities to participate.
Create
Now that you've listened and participated, it might be time to create something yourself. There really is only one rule. It should deliver value to your audience. To me delivering value means that you're either informing or entertaining. You could start a blog, record a weekly video series, you could write a write a whitepaper or maybe come up with an entertaining viral site such as toogoodforthisshit.com.
If you think about social media marketing in the framework of these three elements, it really makes it pretty simple.