In this series, we will cover some of the first 60 days of integrating social media into your overall business strategy.
Day One – Finding Your "Who Dat" and "So What"
Objective: Discover the reasons, the desired outcomes, and the level of dedication you have in integrating social media into your business model or strategy. Discuss potential content production and conversation habits. Determine how we will measure successes.
Tools: Post-it notes; Whiteboard or Sketch Pad; Coffee (lots of it)
Our first day together is possibly the most important day. It's during this discovery conversation we start determining strategies, tactics, time lines, audiences, collaborators, fringe fields and success measurements.
This day is mostly Pens, Post-its, and Sketch Pad (and pizza?). Some tough questions. And of course fun.
We talk about:
- Who is your customer? I've learned a lot from my friends Mike Wagner and Drew McLellan on this question. Both are strong in helping folks discover exactly (specifically) who their customer types are and what their pain points are. The book, Business Model Generation has also shed some light on this topic (see page 130).
- What is your customer's pain? What will you do to assist them? This is where we begin talking about your content creating (writing) and content curating (sharing resources). I know there's a big push for "Brand You" right now (and a lot of great stuff it is), but I believe even more importantly is the theory of "Brand Them." How does your work create value in their lives?
- Where are they? I believe and preach speaking to the back of the church, and we will develop ways to have a global reach so to build up your core (however local or regional that may be). We also discuss fringe fields and competitive collaboration and some great conversational possibilities with those areas.
- Why are you doing this? You fill in the blank _______ and I say "So What?" A lot. "Because everyone else is doing it" is not acceptable. We dive deep into the why you will engage and why your "audience" should engage in return.
- How will we measure success? While comments and retweets are great, and yes, incoming and outbound links are still important, we want to count and improve on some thing towards a bottom line. After all, we are in business.
- When do we engage? How much time can I devote to social media? We must figure out a time frame for engagement (day parts or at least how many minutes per day). Without a commitment, this won't work.
All this, and we didn't even turn on the computer yet. Maybe tomorrow.
The Series:
This is an outline of Day One of the first 60 days of my coaching. You can get the full 60 days via email or we can set up individual coaching sessions for you (email me about your interest and we'll have an initial call to find out how it might work for each of us).
Note that during these 60 days, I would have about 20 face-to-face or live conversations (Skype or other form of video/screen sharing). The other days are self-paced — though plenty of homework.
Follow Mike Sansone on Twitter or Facebook or on Google+
Find Your Social Media ROI
I hear it from a lot of business owners: “Where is the ROI with all this Social Media?“ If this is a question you ask yourself, maybe we should work together a bit more. We can work together solo, or via a professional learning community. Find and increase your ROI. There is a “there” there.
