a thousand cuts :: adam cohen's blog

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This was an informative article. Thank you. Many people want to “ride the wave” of SM but as PR professionals we have to complete analysis such as this to help assess practicality. In my company a major stakeholder is our investor relations department. Everything comes back to the bottom line.

Good stuff.

“Rinse and Repeat” would be my #8

These are all smart moves, but they have to be part of a committed, long term process. There is no “end” to a listening program, Corp Objectives need to be reevaluated against the principles you are putting into the program, doing serious outreach inside the company (#7 Culture) isn't a one-time thing.

I love the fact that #1 is Listening. Even if 2-7 take a year to implement the listening will only improve the work of the rest.

Adam,
Great post. I agree completely. You need clear goals. A clearly identified audience with a focus on understanding their digital universe and you need a content strategy that will actually engage them.
Of course, you have to listen and monitor what they're doing on the platforms your participating in but you must add value to their community – otherwise your hijacking their conversation instead of enhancing it.
Thanks for the great stuff!
- Drew

I share these sentiments completely. I preach Four P's and ABC's …they help reach into these areas. The biggest hurdle I find is that most business people haven't understood how we evolved to demand these new communication platforms, and without that understanding it's very difficult to appreciate their impact or predict where we'll go from here. Your #6 is almost always my #1 but not just in the marketing stove pipe. Social Media is a way to accomplish some business goals, from reducing cost to increasing sales or building client retention, the goal has to start with the business and social media considered as a means to achieve the goal. It's not (in my experience) been as worth while or reached its full potential when businesses decide to use social media and develop goals around it (unless social media is the business). Great stuff thanks for keeping the beat.

Thanks Drew – I agree, an engaging content strategy is going to be the central pillar across tactics, and it needs to be based on thoroughly understanding the needs and wants of customers' “digital universe” – great way to articulate it.

I'd say these aren't in order and depending on the brand, some will outweigh others as contributors to the strategy. I agree completely about jumping into tactics and then building goals around it. Thanks for the feedback.

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I agree with your approach, assuming we're talking about a large corporate effort. We work with smaller companies, though, and POST can be a more digestible set of concepts to this audience and still add plenty of value.

Thanks – Yes, this was for a larger corporate effort, but some of this still helps define smaller company efforts for the “P” in POST. Company culture, marketing objectives/research, and listening to customers still apply.

Agreed! These inputs definitely establish a road map for a social media strategy that will successfully integrate and align with overall business goals. Also, thank you for the shout out.

Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL

I believe #2 (market research) and #5 (stakeholder interviews) are two critical components in particular. In advertising and in new product development situations, I've witnessed respected brands gloss over – or at best take a shallow dive – into these areas before moving on, relying more on collaborative best guess (Suzy's worked there forever, you know) or letting a panic-stricken competitive response drive them.

I'd also suggest potentially another area involving reflection or history analysis of some sort. Before moving forward, I think brands really have to come to terms with their failures and near-misses, understanding the characteristics of those scenarios and root cause.

Great post!

Adam – This is one of your best posts IMO. I've referred this to many others and keep coming back to it as a reference. The practical application of what you recommend is what makes it such an effective method for informing strategy. Bravo buddy!

Heather – I love the “collaborative best guess” analogy. So often it's easy to default to individual perceptions and opinions rather than factual or more broadly researched input. I like your suggestion of learning from past failures and near-misses (or near-hits!) as well. Thanks!

Thanks so much for that feedback Ken, that means a lot coming from your background and experience. I really appreciate it and glad to hear it's been helpful!

Adam – This is one of your best posts IMO. I've referred this to many others and keep coming back to it as a reference. The practical application of what you recommend is what makes it such an effective method for informing strategy. Bravo buddy!

Heather – I love the “collaborative best guess” analogy. So often it's easy to default to individual perceptions and opinions rather than factual or more broadly researched input. I like your suggestion of learning from past failures and near-misses (or near-hits!) as well. Thanks!

Thanks so much for that feedback Ken, that means a lot coming from your background and experience. I really appreciate it and glad to hear it's been helpful!

[...] that has traditionally been through listening. However, there are those of us, including my friend Adam Cohen, who are talking about many other kinds of research that we can conduct before creating our social [...]

[...] 7 Inputs to a Social Media Strategy [...]

[...] business intelligence, case studies, conventional statistics and studies…There are many inputs that companies can use to determine what makes sense to fuel social strategies that will resonate [...]