Extracted from John Golden’s book Social Upheaval: How to Win @ Social Selling
J.R.R. Tolkien, in his children’s fantasy The Hobbit makes this excellent point:
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
In other words, it is important to know the lay of the land when planning an excursion—of any sort.
The second definition of discipline is a “regime that develops or improves a skill” and regimes are often associated with a plan or system for restoring or maintaining health. You can see where I am going with this: You need a regime that will increase the health of selling activities just as you need to avoid anything that is detrimental to it. In life, spontaneity can be fun, energizing and generally make you feel alive. In social media not so much—you can’t unpost a rash, stupid, crass (I could go on…) comment. As the Violent Femmes sang, “this will go down on your permanent record.” You can try apologizing if it was offensive in some way. You can hope no one noticed if it was just silly or ill advised. But you cannot un-say it. It is almost as if it was written in stone, because it is almost certain that it was forwarded, pinned, re-tweeted or posted on a blog somewhere before you attempted the retraction. It is now out there in cyberspace forever. If you take nothing else from this article, please do heed this warning and be circumspect, thoughtful and sensible in what you post. Always consider the consequences and look at what you are about to post from the viewpoint of those reading it. Look for how it could be misinterpreted even if such misinterpretation seems farfetched. Murphy’s Law dictates that someone will misinterpret it that way….
My mother constantly told me while growing up that if I had nothing say, then don’t say it. It is sage advice that I ignored all too often but now use as a guiding principle when it comes to social media. If you have nothing worthwhile to contribute to the conversation then don’t post something just for the sake of it. There is enough digital pollution out there and it is growing exponentially with each unnecessary and vacuous “Happy Friday” tweet.
Social media campaign planning needs to be done with the same strategic rigor as planning any other sort of marketing campaign. The generally agreed upon basic steps to planning a successful marketing campaign are as follows:
- Be very clear on your objective and define what a successful outcome will look like
- Figure out who you want to reach
- Work out the appropriate, impactful message
- Choose a call to action
- Determine how you will measure and analyze results
- Launch and adapt to the response
If you follow these steps you will be well on your way to an effective social selling strategy.
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