Where Social Media Fits In
Here's an architecture and plan for integrating social media into a communications strategy. One of the virtues of thinking about an integrated communications strategy that includes social media is that you start to think about social media and how you use it. Reports from people adopting this architecture suggest that a byproduct is a greater understanding of exactly what the social media tools are and how they work.
The first point to notice about the architectural diagram is that it's a circle: there's no beginning and no end. People may enter it at any point and move on to any other point in a variety of ways. Describing it, however, is easiest if we start with the website and move clockwise toe blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Remember that that's just the simplest way to describe it: it's not a required sequence for users. And, as you'll see in one of the other articles in this series, the central point for your work as a communicator may be the blog which then drives the other components.
Don't worry about the connections among the components. Remember that in the world of social media, we relay on technology for the glue that keeps things together. The integrated social media architecture uses that glue so that, for example, your automatically appear on your Facebook Page and your latest tweets can show up on your website. Likewise, your blog postings can flow to your website and Facebook Page. And, of course, links to all the components belong in all of your other components along with the sign-up for your email list that should appear everywhere. Make it clear whether the email list and RSS feeds are general to the entire architecture or specific to one component. You want to make it easy on yourself and on your visitors.
Here's what each of the four components is and how they differ from one another. The goal of this architecture is to come up with a coherent strategy that minimizes duplication and maximizes communication. Towards that end, you'll see that some of the components are described slightly differently than you may have thought of them or used them. And, of course, there are always exceptions. Herewith the generalized overview of what goes where in an integrated social media plan. It's quite a challenge because many of your visitors will click once or twice and not get the full glory of your website, tweets, Facebook Page, and blog. The challenge is to balance the desire that all of the information be presented everywhere and the desire to present information in a single place. In one case, you accommodate the casual visitors, and in the other you can annoy them when they can't find the magic spot where the information is located.
Remember that people are remarkably good at finding patterns. Even without being able to verbalize it, they may catch on very quickly to the logic of what goes where. (And test-test-test because this pattern-finding behavior can lead people to discover patterns that you never intended.)
Website: What
This is where you present your case, defining or identifying your cause or product: what it is you're talking about. As you start to put the pieces together, you'll see that you can structure your website and its content specifically for this architecture. Here are some key components that matter when you're putting the social media pieces together.
- Final The website is always final. It may have minutes of nonprofits meetings for the last ten years or it may have a gallery of ads and press releases from the last twenty years, but in each case, the information is the final version as of its time. Because a website has almost unlimited storage capacity, this can be the complete repository of your information.
- Public. Sections can be walled off, but by and large the website is public. And, in fact, with our efforts at search engine optimization (SEO), we now spend a lot of time and information making this information accessible and promoting the site itself.
- Official This is the voice of the organization. As we're more sensitive to social media, we're starting to think carefully about how we integrate public comments. For many organizations, some time spent identifying the areas that welcome public input are clearly identified so that there is as little confusion as possible between the official statements and the uncontrolled comments from the public.
- Complete Most organizations already use their websites as their main repository of information and research. For media and savvy users, it's often the first or second stop in finding out about the organization.
- How People Join You site has your email list signup (and your email list policy) as a primary tool for recruiting newcomers. Following along with the notion that the website is complete, email list signups from the website should provide a complete picture (NOT every single posting and article) of what's going on. And, of course, there are icons and links to the Facebook page, the Twitter feed, and the blog.
Blog: Strategy
Your blog is your evolving strategy to address the issue defined on your website. It definitely has a time dimension, and often it's open to comments. Letting the public participate in your strategy planning process is a difficult move to make for many organizations, and there are obviously many strategic decisions that cannot be done in public. But it's remarkable the extent to which you can offer people involvement. If there's one thing we've learned from social media, it's that people like to be asked to participate -- even if they don't actually jump in. In many cases, it's not so much a matter of letting the public into everything or nothing but a matter of deciding where the boundaries will be.
Just as with websites, thinking about the characteristics of your blog help you decide what goes where in your communications strategy. Here are some characteristics of your blog:
- Work-in-progress The website is the final and last word on the subject (or, in the case of incomplete issues, the current word on the subject). Blog lend themselves beautifully to discussions, revisions, and comments. You can circle around and come back or circle around and move in a different direction. The input from outside can help the process enormously. And in dealing with your audience (users, clients, or whoever), the invitation to participate can be just as valuable as the participation.
- Public Don't try to fake it. It's really hard to fake social media. If you're asking for suggestions, you don't have to implement them all, but don't try to stack the deck, and make it clear under what circumstances you will remove or modify suggestions. If it's all revealed as a man behind the curtain a la the Wizard of Oz, you'll have a lot of repair work to do. Make sure the rules are clear, and then stand back. (This is often the most difficult part of the process.)
- How People Join With blogs, you don't have to do anything special beyond making it clear where comments and participation are welcome. Make certain you've turned on the option for an RSS feed so that people can subscribe either to individual postings or the blog in general. Remember that RSS feeds are a pull technology: the user's browser or email client retrieves blog postings on a time schedule set up by the user. The user doesn't have to provide any identification or an email address although sometimes that's required to prove age eligibility. Somewhere on each blog page you want links or icons to the website, Twitter, and the Facebook Page.
Twitter: How
The easiest way to integrate Twitter into your comprehensive strategy is to recognize its strength: 140 characters a tweet. Those tweets show how you are implementing the strategy you have developed to address the issue described on your website.They may be tweets about reviews and articles or about sales figures; they may be about events; and they may be about anything at all that is relevant to your strategy. And that brings up a key issue for managing your tweets.
If your tweets describe how you are implementing the strategy to accomplish your goal, make certain that they do just that. Once again, thinking of the integrated social media architecture helps you decide what content goes where. Periodically, do a reality check to confirm that your actions are implementing your goals in the ways in which your strategy suggests. Printing out a the most recent tweets can help you stay on track. If you're veering off, maybe it's time to reopen the blog for discussion about a new strategy, or maybe it's time to modify the website's description of the goal.
Facebook: Join
Your Facebook Page is where people can join in to your community. Add links to the website, Twitter feed, and blog, and use the Facebook Page editing tools to pick up the most recent blog postings and tweets as well as the latest news from the website.
- Now Your Facebook Page can be a major portal to your integrated communication strategy. If you use the automated tools, you'll have the latest from all of the other components.
- Public Your Facebook Page is more public than you may think. Edit the page and check out the settings to make certain that you've allowed it to be indexed for search engines so that people who are not even logged into Facebook can find it.
- How People Join Because your Facebook Page is at the heart of the social graph of Facebook, it can be a prime portal for attracting new people. Make sure you become familiar with the marketing tools that Facebook offers. The goal is to draw people to Like your Facebook Page. This often will show up in the stream (news feed) of their friends, and the friends may check it out and Like it in turn. This isn't magic, and it's not automatic until your numbers reach a critical mass (and that's different for every organization). Until you reach that point, you have to work-work-work at getting people to Like your page.
What does it mean when people click Like? You have to spend a little time with one of Jesse's books or the Facebook site to understand the process. If you have 200 people who Like your Page what does that mean? Is 200 out of half a billion Facebook users good or bad? (It sure doesn't sound good.) What it means is nothing more or less than that 200 people have clicked Like. From the user's point of view, it can reinforce the message in the same way that underlining a sentence in an article can reinforce it even if you never look at the underlined page again. The fact that the Like click may show up in friends' streams starts to circulate your Page's location to friends. Facebook attempts to aggregate the stream, so if your friends A and B both click Like, the news story might be "A and B Like XYZ page." (And an aggregated story is more likely to appear in streams.) As to whether 200 -- or 20 or 2,000,000 is good depends on the context. The basic cost of getting to the 200, 2, or 2,000,000 is the same (very little and that is mostly imagination and energy, so Facebook can be a very efficient way to reach a very small group of people who are self-selected through their friends' networks. The same is true of Twitter and blogs. That's what social media is all about.
Jesse Feiler