How to make your organization Social media Ready ?

Like it or not ? You have to start working on a Social Media Strategy for your business or organization, if not done so yet ! There are several parts to make this a successful effort and gain optimum results.

The benefits of participating your business in Social Media are plenty !

• It Helps to manage your company’s or brand’s reputation.
• Builds brand awareness and helps improve how people view your brand.
• Gets you closer to your customers.
• Helps you Learn more about their needs.
• Features new and inexpensive ways to support your clients.
• It is typically less expensive than traditional advertising.

There are several people talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online about your business. Unless you listen and engage in those ’social conversations’ effectively, your business will soon lose the ‘edge’ to your competition. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

What are the Social Media Platforms available ?

Social news sites: Sites like Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, Yahoo! Buzz and BallHype let you read about news topics and then vote and/or comment on the articles. Articles with more votes get promoted to a more prominent position.

Social sharing Sites like Flickr, Snapfish, YouTube, and Jumpcut let you create, upload, and share media/videos or photos with others.

youtube.com
vimeo.com
last.fm
myspace.com

Social networking Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter allow you to find and link to other people. Once linked or connected, you can keep up to date with that person’s contact info, interests, posts, etc.

facebook.com
linkedin.com
twitter.com
pownce.com
bebo.com
secondlife.com

Social bookmarking: Sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, BlogMarks and Diigo allow you to find and bookmark sites and information of interest. You can save your bookmarks online and access them from anywhere or share them with others.

digg.com
stumbleupon.com
del.icio.us
reddit.com
google.com/reader

This is just a sampling of social media sites. More are added every day.

With the help of above mentioned Social Media sites, you can engage your business with people on one or more of the following.

discussion (forum)
microblogging (tumblr)
Participate in Virtualworld (SecondLife)
blogging (wordpress, blogger)
wiki
media library (Youtube, Flickr)
suggestion box/recommendation tools

All of your Social Media efforts should be interpreted/linked to business objectives and make sure you follow these simple four steps to maximize your ROI on your Social Media investements.

• Benchmarking (What You want to Achieve ? Your Goals )
• engagement strategy ( How you want to Achieve ? )
• engagement (Actually executing your strategy )
• analysis (Measuring your success or your return)

Recently,  KMP , an interactive marketing and technology firm from UK, hosted their second social media workshop at the MDDA in Manchester. This was hosted by KMP’s MD – Jon Keefe, alongside one of our Client Service Managers, Gerry Daring.

The workshop was a great success, and had attendees from a wide range of companies including Johnsons Cleaners, Business Link NorthWest, The Beatles Story and Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce.

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