There are a couple of things that most marketers ignore, while initiating a social media srategy:

1. It’s not a 1 month activity- Social media cannot be switched on and off. It has to be perpetual. The brand cannot just stop engaging in off-season and then start engaging in peak season of sales.

The idea behind creating and nurturing communities is to stay connected and engaged for a long time. Once the brands establish trust- then one can think about other metrics.

2. Many brands start a community- but only respond to members who are in a buying mode. That’s a wrong metric and objective to start off with.

I have heard a top education brand say that they ignore people who just come and say ‘hi’. I think that’s precarious and going absolutely wrong on social media strategy

The brands need to remember that their interaction with one member can help them reach 10 others (friends of friends), as also that one needs to ‘nurture’ relationships. Someone who says ‘hi’ has great potential in future, or can be an influencer or an ambassador for the brand.

I have written extensively on social media marketing, startegy and RoI/Metrics on http://www.atomthought.com , as also create and deploy social media and performance solutions (especially for education sector). Hope you and your readers find the read useful

thanks

Please also be aware that from http://www.telesperience.com you can get the following resources for free:
1. a directory of telecoms-specific hash tags. These are keywords you can use to help other telecoms folk find your twitters
2. a directory of telecoms firms/people using twitter. A new revision is due out this week. To get in the directory simply follow telcodirectory on twitter. We aim to add a big tranche of new telecoms twitterers every month.

We’ve developed expertise in using social media as a company since it enables us to reach out further into the telco community at low cost. I would strongly recommend ‘linked in’ as it’s a great way to get started and begin to interact. Blogging is also a great thing to do and has been very successful for us in terms of marketing. However, I would caution that blogging takes a lot of effort and that is something to think about before jumping in. You need to be posting at least one piece a week and it needs to be informative and well written. A lot of folk start blogging and then gradually the blog withers and dies due to lack of commitment and/or things to say. Frankly you’d be better off not starting than having a “blog corpse” on your website.
Hope this helps and very best wishes
Teresa

Teresa Cottam
Research and Publications Director
Telesperience