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I recently had a chance to speak about social media to a group of women at the East Boston Chamber of Commerce. My topic was “The Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media for your Business.”   So, here’s my personal spin on best social media practices for your business. Go ahead, take, steal and apply some of these principals to your own company’s social media strategy.

Q. What’s your Individual Spin on Social Media?

A. Social media should be based on business strategy to be effective. Think of social media as a part of your entire communications plan. You wouldn’t develop a direct mail campaign and then decide not to send it. You wouldn’t write a press release and decide not to post it to the wire. So why would you create a LinkedIn Profile or Facebook Page without driving your clients and customers back and consistently engaging them?

Q. What Social Media Strategy has worked well for Spotlight and what has not?

A. Our team is really adept at “seeing the forest through the trees.”  We take an integrated approach, so we value a larger overall impact across all applications, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and our email marketing campaigns.  While the individual audiences may be smaller, we have a larger audience as a whole, which we know we can engage by providing useful, relevant and valuable content.

Q. What are Some Great Examples of Spotlight’s use of Social Media?

A. We did a project for Commodore Builders with the objective of using social media to monitor whether Commodore would be able to complete a full green build in 15 days. This is rare in the construction industry, as cost overruns and missed deadlines have become the norm, so we dubbed the campaign “15 Days” and incorporated a microsite, where the team setup a blog, vlog, real time footage, and photography.  This was really a breakthrough for the construction industry. Essentially, we leveraged social media so that everyone could tune in, 24-7, and hold the builders accountable to the deadline, which created lots of national and local PR attention.

Internally, we started our online newsletter, SPARK, five years ago, with the goal of being “the hottest monthly newsletter for the inner publicist in all of us.”  The format was PR-based, with a heavy emphasis on content, company news and clients.  Last year we developed SPARK PLUG as a more blog-based model for people to engage, share and comment on short snippets of relevant social media news.  Now in the Twitter era, in the world of 140 characters, we are working on an even shortened and more hard-hitting version with just the facts, and no fluff. The reality is, people want content and they don’t want to have to go searching for it. This way, they can’t miss it.

Q. What are your Top Tips on How Best to use Social Media?

A. Choose the best social media marketing options: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, etc, and start small.

A. Understand the pros and cons of social media. It may not be a fit for your particular business.

A. Don’t do social media for the sake of doing it, because you can lose credibility if you don’t continually update it.

A. Always make sure that your social media is based on a strategic goal.

Click here to see my event photos: http://www.spotlightcommunications.net/media-center/photo-gallery/album-3/73/

Tags: Business strategy, Do's and Don'ts, Social media, SPARK Plug

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.