POST: People Objectives Strategy Technology

So … Nick and I have to make a POST media plan for our SocialMedia class, and the teach said we could use America as our client. Like all acronyms, it’s really just a grouping of “things to remember.” And I think it might actually help us maintain some sense of organization and purpose as we tackle this beast of a project. I tagged each of the explanation paragraphs with its heading, so that if we tag stuff in these areas as we collect and develop ideas, we’ll be able to search the tag and the definition will be right there … pretty clever, eh?

People (step 1)

What are your customers ready for? The Social Technographics Profile we described in the last chapter is designed to answer this question (remember, you can also generate your own customer profiles with tools at groundswell.forrester.com). What’s important is to assess how your customers will engage, based on what they’re already doing. Skipping this step and making guesses about your customers might work, but you might also build a whole social networking strategy only to find that your customers are more likely to write review that join social networks.

Objectives (step 2)

What are your goals? Are you more interested in talking with the groundswell for marketing, for example, or in generating sales by energizing your best customers? Or are you interested in tapping the groundswell internally to help your employees work together more efficiently? We lay out five of the most powerful objectives in the next section.

Strategy (step 3)

How do you want relationships with your customers to change? Do you want customers to help carry messages to others in your market? Do you want them to become more engaged with your company? By answering this question, not only can you plan for the desired changes up front, but you can also figure out how to measure them once the strategy is under way. You’ll also need to prepare and get buy-in from people within your company who may be threatened by changes in these customer relationships.

Technology (step 4)

What applications would you build? After having decided on the people, objectives, and strategy, you can move on to pick appropriate technologies, including the ones we described in … chapter 2 – blogs, wikis, social networks, and so forth.