Social media this, social media that. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, today’s marketer can’t help but feel the pressure of leveraging social media with your marketing efforts. Everyone has an opinion of where to start, what to use, why some channels are better than others and what is working or not working for them. Often, different markets will enjoy success from different social avenues, but there are a few solid choices that should be implemented as part of your initial SMM strategy that apply to most, if not all, organizations. I came across an excellent case study on BreakingPoint out of Autin, TX, provided by Marketing Sherpa that outlined 6 steps for leveraging social media that is generic enough that most companies can replicate the processes.

To provide a high-level overview of how BreakingPoint got their SMM efforts going, we will briefly review the 6 steps while adding our professional two cents as we go:

1. Create a blog and start online conversations – this is often a fairly tough one to start, as you need content and content providers, but we have found internally that one or two people will tend to take the lead on this, and then as the adoption of blog-mentality will take effect and you’ll begin to hear things like “…and that would make a great article.” Encourage others to share their wisdom, especially if they have a particular area of expertise or regarded knowledge on specific products or services.
Recommendations – Again, the task of getting going here can be daunting, especially if you aren’t a daily follower or reader of existing blogs. Most modern marketers enjoy this type of read, so getting started should be as easy as visiting wordpress.com or blogger.com and go from there. Leveraging your internal IT team with the template, look and feel can also separate you from the generic appearance of most blogs. If you are using marketing automation software, such as Eloqua, you can easily integrate your Eloqua tracking scripts with your blog right away, and begin to leverage reporting on page views, and whether particular contacts/leads/accounts are visiting your blog, and which topics seem to be of interest, and much, much more.

2. Establish a Twitter account – 24 million tweets a day, and growing. You can’t take too many steps in any direction before you’ll hear someone promoting their ‘discovery’ of Twitter, and chances are, the person standing next to them ‘doesn’t get it.’ This will be a common theme, but hopefully one that will start to move in a positive direction. If you have already completed step 1 above, this is a no brainer when you post new articles on your blog. Tease your audience with the title and brief snippet on why your article is a must read and link back to the article – easy stuff.  BreakingPoint used ‘scanning’ tools to put a little more gas on the fire and pull out the information from Twitter that was most relevant to them. They used TweetScan to achieve this, and this is really side B of Twitter-based marketing; side A being your outbound communications. The ability to create alerts and custom search results based on what others are saying about you, your brand, partners and competitors is really valuable stuff. Some of the examples that BP mentioned were: industry-specific catch phrases, their brand name and negative word associations such as ‘sucks’, as well as negative verbiage surrounding their competitors.
Recommendations – BP has done a good job of leveraging the Twitter space in general, but also added some firepower by using third-party add-ons to help sift through the swamp of random posts. We have implemented a very similar solution here at C&A; we leverage CoTweet to help us identify our customer’s Twitter communications using Twitter’s List functionality, saved searches (such as Eloqua, Marketing Automation, Marketo, etc), integrated Twitter handles/username’s into our SFDC and Eloqua install, utilized query string values on our re-direct URLs that are posted in a given tweet so we can use Eloqua to track our lead sources by tweet, and obviously to keep an eye out on our competition.

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