Marketing strategies and campaigns have substantially grown in complexity. Maintaining current content while cultivating branding and engaging audiences is not for the faint of heart. So how do businesses maximize brand loyalty while elevating comprehensive campaigns through the use of social media visibility without compromising control?
- First and foremost, develop a social media policy. When you don’t know where to start, look to those who have established policies and start your outline from there. Check out these policy examples: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, American Red Cross & Starbucks. Prior to moving forward, let your corporate legal counsel review and edit if necessary.
- Through your internal means of employee communication (Newsletter, Intranet, Digital Social Board, etc.…) ask each employee two simple questions. First, ask each to provide a brief description of what they value most about the organization they chose to serve. And secondly, ask each to provide their level of comfort with social media on a scale of 1 to 10. Ten illustrates exceptional ability.
- Identify a social media team that includes a rep from each department. These are internal marketing links to the marketing department giving the organization a holistic voice. (Employee buy-in is paramount to campaign success.)
- Utilizing internal feedback, task the marketing team to formulate a comprehensive integrated marketing campaign employing a combination of: PR-Blog(s), video, customer/client/patient testimonies – content, geo initiatives, discount partners like Groupon, social media and gamification. Remember, each medium needs to be customized based on intended audience and approach and some platforms may not be a good fit.
- Minimally, test pilot campaign initiatives with your own team prior to launching them live. Ideally, launch the campaign using a controlled test segment and employ random sampling to measure penetration and impact.
- Fine-tune if necessary prior to campaign launch based on reactive feedback.
- Task your whole organization with monitoring campaign initiatives. Strong public relations and exceptional customer service is everyone’s responsibility from the janitor to the CEO.
- Base measurement on a campaign-by-campaign basis deriving from initial strategy and desired outcome.
RedKite 
These are great steps in developing Social Media Marketing, I took a look at Coca-Cola’s company commitments and I think there philosophy is great.
be transparent
protect our consumers’ privacy
respect copyrights
be responsible in our use of technology
monitor our behavior
Kat,
I have to say that I nearly cheered and applauded your post when I came to numbers 2 and 3. These insights could not be truer, and I believe are VITAL in any sort of SM campaign success. Getting your brand behind your social media strategies and tactics is the first way to ensure authentic content posting. Authenticity is the topic of my soap-box speeches in my IMC courses, so I thoroughly believe that following even these two rules will help marketers and brands develop a stronger, more substantial and real presence on social channels.
Social media marketing gives high impact to a company. Currently, social networking is the new place getting any information, even in the future social networking will change newspaper and becoming e-magazines.