In my last post, I covered two of the very first steps you should consider when planning your [Social] engagement. This post assumes you’re up on the concepts of having a strong foundation to spring from and that your organization has committed to taking time to LISTEN before jumping into social conversations. If you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend taking a peek.
In this post, we’ll keep on moving down the path to Social Engagement. I’ll share some thoughts on planning your Engagement Strategy, and how the 5 C’s of social can act as a sanity check for that plan.
Step 3: What’s the Plan?
Welcome to the most important piece of the puzzle! This is where you take your strong foundation and build on it. I can’t stress how exciting I find this step. I also can’t tell you how surprised I am to learn that some (okay, many) folks find this step tedious. My tip: find the people in your organization who are fascinated by this stuff and charge them with creating your framework. This is where the rubber meets the road, so the better your plan is, the better your ability to achieve (and measure and refine) your goals.
So, now that your organization has defined the WHY to engage, it’s time to define the HOW!
Source: Radian6
When working with clients to support their ‘WHY’, we create an engagement playbook. This is a ‘living’ document used to clearly convey high level goals, technical details on how listening will be set up, give clarity on who, how and when to respond, and define success metrics for reporting. For a step-by-step sample, the Radian6 team has shared an Engagement Playbook HERE.
Another terrific benefit of creating the playbook is the ability to use the engagement summary to get sign off from program sponsors. These are the leadership folks who may not be keen on getting into the nitty gritty, but will appreciate being able to have clarity on the program at a high level prior to giving their go ahead.
To do it right, this step of the Engagement path takes time, creativity, and effort. The power of a fully formed playbook is the ability to leverage results and lessons learned for continually improved results. What I’m trying to convey here is this: don’t be afraid to defend the need for ample set up time! In a future post, I’ll cover the anatomy of an Engagement playbook in detail. I recommend yours including at least: engagement summary, goals, success measures, topic details, workflow and automation definitions, and engagement rules of the road.
So, where do the 5 C’s of social come in (you might be asking)? EVERYWHERE. Use the 5 C’s of Social as a quality litmus test. They’re a sanity check to make sure you’re aligning your intent to your results! As you’re planning, before you roll out, and when you’re measuring the success of your initiatives, check in with the 5 C’s to be sure you’re keeping on the right side of Social.
- Community: Who are the people that make up the community? Where can they be found? Why would your [brand] presence there be valued?
- Content: What’s compelling based on your listening (trends, memes, topics, etc.)? Is there a way you can bring a fresh perspective?
- Collaboration: Does your strategy employ a valuable point of view – how do you help? Add value?
- Connections: To build connections, your brand must be accepted as genuine. Gaining loyalty takes more than just showing up. You’ve got to give to get.
- Conversation: You’re not [just] engaging to get leads, to sell better, or to save costs in the contact center. You’re engaging – no matter what – to take part in the social conversation. Keeping this ‘C’ in mind throughout your planning and execution is vital to your continued success.
It’s very likely that your company will create and maintain multiple playbooks supporting different initiatives. That’s terrific! Keep in mind that your goal is to be able to connect, measure your impact of that connection, and to continually mature / improve your results. By taking the time to plan the strategy and tactics you’ll use, and using the 5 C’s to ensure you’re adding value, you’ll be engaging well from day one!
Jennfer Phillips (@CRMjen) is a Salesforce.com Certified Administrator, Service and Sales Cloud Consultant. She’s also a repeat Dreamforce speaker, a Salesforce.com MVP, the Orlando Salesforce.com User Group leader and an SCRM Certified Professional. In her spare time, she’s an avid cupcake enthusiast.
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