However, I started thinking about developing one after after reading “What’s Your Personal Social Media Strategy” from November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

I also don’t have a emailing, texting, instant messaging, phone calling, or socializing strategy either. And maybe that’s OK.  Social Media is not as “plannable” or “strategizable” as an online ad buy, product placement or a Super Bowl commercial. Social Media is about staying in touch, with friends, family, consumers, peers, and other brands.

We stay in touch with those constituencies in ways that are comfortable, both for us and for our constituents. When was the last time you wrote a letter and sent it snail mail to a friend. When was the last time you executed a direct mail campaign to introduce your service to a previously un-targeted community?

It’s incumbent on us to stay in touch “the right way.” And “the right way” evolves. If you’re new to Social Media, (if you’re playing catch-up) then here are a few tips:

1. Be authentic: Don’t be someone/something you’re not.
2. Speak in YOUR voice: Don’t hire a ghost writer, Don’t recruit your 19 year old niece to maintain your social media profiles.
3. Listen: (or read) Don’t just push content that is self-promotional.
4. Share: Post content that is interesting to your audience (and to you, content helps define your online personality.)

As far as your brand, or company is concerned, they should have a profile too…maybe. I highly recommend that executives, business owners, entrepreneurs participate in social media before forcing their company to participate. There are many reasons for this:

1. You (and your team) will appreciate the “Rules of the Road” and will be less tempted to be deceptive.
2. You will get a first hand understanding of how other brands play in the social media space which will allow you to shape your social media strategy.
3. You will be able to launch your company’s social media presence from within the space through online Word of Mouth marketing.

BTW, Regardless of whether you are going to be active in social media, I highly recommend you capture, lay claim to the relevant profiles for both YOU and your company…before someone else does!

This is an unusual experience for me, many of my clients have had an aversion to blogging. They consider it a chore, another annoying responsibility on top of payroll, taxes, and expenses. They’d rather delegate it, and many do. The posts inevitably lack sincerity, insight. The client starts to resent the costs of these ghostwritten posts, and the client fails to see the benefit…only the cost. The blog stops getting contributed to, with the exception of the quarterly press release. HOW BORING (and nonstrategic)!

I’m working with Chris on doing LESS not more.  He’s been writing since August 2010 and has more than 250 tags for 104 blog posts.  This ratio suggest that we need to do some clean-up, and perhaps put some rules in place so that this doesn’t get much more unwieldy. Chris is addicted to tagging, he’s a tagging junkie and it’s time for blogging rehab!

Rules to Tag By:

1. Use a previously created tag FIRST before creating new ones. (Some blogging platforms list preexisting tags, and allow you to select them as tags for the post being written.
2. Stay consistent with capitalization. For example, there is no need to use “franchise marketing,” “Franchise marketing,” and “Franchise Marketing.” (I’d lean towards starting each word in a tag with a capital letter.)
3. Stay consistent with plurals. For example, there is little need to use “Restaurant Franchise” and “Restaurant Franchises.” (I’d lean towards the plural.)
4. Stay generic-ish. Tags are meant to be a navigation tool to link related content. Creating a tag that is too specific, won’t have any relevancy to other posts you’ll write, so why be so specific in your post? Your blog search tool will find the article if someone can’t easily browse to it.

If you weren’t following these tagging rules, you can go back through your posts and revise the tags. It’s a bit painful, but will be worth it in the long run. Why? well, it could improve your search engine ranking, and certainly benefit your visitor’s navigation and exploration of content.

Someone passed on this article, and it annoyed me a bit: TV Execs: Social Media Influence Still Anecdotal.  I appreciate doubt surrounding new technology. But Social Media is not new any longer. Social Media is practically as “old” as the internet. Social Media needs to be evaluated, sure. But why does Social Media need to be held to a significantly higher standard than PR, or an ad buy in newspapers? It doesn’t.

Social Media is a communication channel. If your company communicates with customers, prospects, influencers, then they need to leverage Social Media. If your company doesn’t communicate with customers, prospects and influencers, then….well, your company may not be around much longer, so you can pretty much ignore this post.

The important part of Social Media engagement and monitoring is to understand where your community lives. If you’re a BtoC then look to Facebook, if you’re a BtoB then you should target Linkedin. Similar to an conservative domain name strategy, it doesn’t hurt to develop profiles in places you won’t necessarily be active. Develop profiles/pages, monitor and that focus on the platforms that seem to resonate. Although social media isn’t old, it is the wild, wild west. There a land grab going on, stake your claim now. How you use the “land” can evolve over time. For some of you some of your claim will stay dormant, like pasture, for others you’ll plow fields, and still other will develop lead generation factories.

Ring…Ring…your customers are calling, are you ready to listen?