Planning a Website or Blog for Your Business
The Social Media Contract: Turn the Market into a Network
Before we begin to build or even plan a website or blog for our business, we need to consider the importance of the Social Media Contract and its relationship to our market. My friend Jon has an e-book about this concept (read about it here [link]) and the exciting possibilities of the newly emerging realities. The basics of the Social Media Contract are as follows:
- Give the market the opportunity to understand you and your products when and where they want to
- Provide access to your people, your product, your competitors and your customers
- Discuss openly your products and brand successes and failures
- Trust the market and your customers to differentiate your product
- Deliver a quality product based on the peoples’ needs, not the perceived uses
- Listen to understand your product’s place in the market
- Move your message to be relevant to the conversation
What does the Social Media Contract Mean?
As Steve Johnson says, “It’s easier to find products for people you know than it is to find people for products you know.” How does this work in terms of our business?
We must build a site that makes it possible for our market to talk, to hold a conversation about our business. We have a product or service, our market has people. Our goal is to turn our Market into our Network. Let these people find and talk about our business, and tell the people that they know (the “find products for people that you know” from the above quote), rather than trying to find people for our product.
To this end, number 6 in the list above is one of the most important steps:
Listen to understand your product’s place in the market - Go to the places where people talk about products like ours. Forums, blogs, and groups where people discuss these products and services are fairly easily search-able and a good place to get involved in the discussion. Rule number one for getting involved: Listen more than you talk, at first, and when you do talk make it highly relevant to the conversation. Whatever we do, we must avoid looking “spammy” or “ad-like” in our posts.
Learning what our market is talking about will drive the design and features of our own site, in order to create a welcoming environment for our market (the people that use and talk about our business) and invite them to become part of our network.
The Social Media Contract is about Access
The first three points of the Contract are all about access. Access to our business, access to our employees, and above all - access to our market and network.
- Give the market the opportunity to understand you and your products when and where they want to - Our customer service department may not be open 24 hours a day, but our blog and forum, and many times our network, are.
- Provide access to your people, your product, your competitors and your customers - This kind of access builds trust, credibility, and brand-recognition. Keep in mind that we do not own our brand anymore, the market/network does.
- Discuss openly your products and brand successes and failures - Once again this goes to credibility and trust. This type of open discussion can often lead to collaboration and innovation. See this article at Insight magazine [link - Co-creation Theory]
The Social Media Contract is our starting point for building our website. Once we have determined how we will address these issues - specifically for our business - we can begin to work on the technical/operational aspects (which we may find to be much easier!).
The Social Media Engine for Business
After the strategic plans for the website and its community-centered goals have been determined, the rest of the development plan for our business website or blog can be described in a few basic steps:
- Planning - Create the content plan. For example: will the site contain a blog and forum? How will the Market/Network talk to each other? Next, we create an implementation plan (if we are building the site internally) or write a Request for Proposal (RFP) if we decide to outsource the project.
- Design - Determine design features, content considerations and technology to be implemented on the website. Features generated in this step include design concepts and a site map. Include a summary of any budget or timeline issues.
- Implementation - Create the website, on time and on budget. We need to keep a watchful eye on the scope of the project and proactively manage the time-line and budget, as well as any changes to the plan suggested or requested by others. Be sure to review all site content at least twice during implementation, ideally, partner with some customers to look at the nascent site and solicit their feedback.
- Testing - Check all of the links and connections within the site.
- Promotion - Publish the new site and register it with search engines, as appropriate. Talk about it on Twitter, and get involved in those forums!
Once the process is complete, we need to monitor, update and evaluate the site on an ongoing basis. A steady addition of new content will keep things fresh for the search engines. (We will be discussing analytics and traffic in later posts.)
Your Social Media Strategy
Let’s have a discussion about how you and I can implement the Social Media Contract, leave a Comment!
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Great post, thanks for sharing!
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