Over the past couple of years, I have talked with lots of companies excited about the potential of social media. Fuelled by this enthusiasm, they put together detailed strategic plans and set themselves up on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al.
Then they run into a serious hurdle: who’s actually going to make social media happen tactically on a day-to-day basis. It is one thing to have a master plan but if no one is going to execute on it, the plan is pretty much useless.
As I have mentioned before, tactics is the part of social media that is crucial but doesn’t get as much attention as it should be it’s not as sexy as strategy or the cool services. Tactics is grunt work, it’s blocking and tackling, and it’s a game in which victories are measured in inches rather than miles.
It is always strange, therefore, to see a growing number of people set themselves up as “social media strategist”, while few people call themselves “social media tacticians”. Being a strategist is fine but you’re only doing half the job if you are not also engaged in helping your employee or client execute tactically.
This means not just setting up and launching social media services but creating a plan of attack, hiring the right people to make social media happens on a regular basis, and giving them the education, training and tools so they can be as successful as possible. It might even mean hold someone’s hands tactically under they can run on their own.
At the end of the day, social media strategy has a relatively short shelf life before tactics starts to impact everything you do. Sure, strategy can be tweaked and re-calibrated but once social media has been launched, the execution of tactics will determine whether what a company does is successful or not.
Too many companies consider tactics to the less glamorous cousin of strategy when, in fact, tactics is as, if not more, important.
Tags: Social Media, strategy, tactics
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Right on! Its easy to check on FB- all the businesses have a fan page to have their so-called social media strategy in place but very few companies seem to be focused on really using the power of the FB social network in expanding the ‘fan’ base or daily or even weekly updates. And a large part of it that even for bigger companies that have hundreds of employees, there is full or even a partial headcount yet thats budgeted to keep-up with the mandate of the daily social grind. Most often than not, the traditional Product or Corporate Marketing contacts inherit this as a part of their other 101 responsibilities and rarely have the bandwidth to do justice in maximizing the social media presence. I heard Computer Associates recently created a job role for 3-4 bloggers to maintain their social networking presence but I guess it al boils down to the resources and the awareness that their is better ROI in focusing on the social media vis a vis traditional channels.
I couldn’t agree more with you. I often wonder how many of the so called social media “gurus” could even manage a Facebook Page or Twitter profile day-to-day. For example, I often see high profile bloggers cite case studies of contests and sweepstakes on Facebook that are clearly in violation of the Facebook promotional guidelines. Anyone can talk about high level strategy but the people that make the ideas happen are the key. So many people want to discuss the long term goals and overall strategy but fail to realize that engaging with people on Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis is a skill itself. Thank you for calling this out.
[...] This post originally appeared on the Sysomos blog) This entry was posted in Social Media and tagged execution, Social Media, strategy, tactics. [...]