The Bigger Picture for a Business Blogging Strategy
In my endeavours to communicate to business owners and executives the potential benefits of blogging, one of the challenges I’ve been facing is how to explain satisfactorily the broader context of social media and social networking.
And when I can hold their attention long enough to communicate something about the social media/social networking revolution, my next challenge is to help them understand how all of this can fit with their strategic goals and how it can be woven into their operational plans.
So I was delighted to read, back at the end of March, my colleague Dennis McDonald’s post How to Develop a Business-aligned Social Media & Social Networking Strategy. I’d intended to post here about it at the time, but felt I should give it a closer read first. The perhaps inevitable happened and I’ve only now done that closer read.
I’m even more impressed than I was the first time.
The document’s value comes not just from its elegant internal logic, but from the fact that Dennis walks the talk. He is a keen and prolific blogger and deeply engaged in exploring social media “in the wild”. And although he knows all the buzzwords, he is able to explain things technical to the rest of us without resorting to jargon.
Like the systems thinker he is, Dennis first defines the scope of the document:
This document describes a process for helping organizations define and prioritize the steps involved in applying social media and social networking to their operations.
And as one of the very valuable aspects of the document from a corporate perspective, he proposes a general structure and flow of work, with the end goal being
“support for an organization-wide plan for employing social media and social networking in support of defined corporate goals”.
A three step approach is provided and clearly explained:
Step 1: Describe Organizational Goals
Step 2: Describe Organizational Functions
Step 3: Describe Social Media Functions
There is also a very thought-provoking discussion of practical issues about the development of strategy in organizations and he touches on how to handle some crucial issues, such as internal politics and organizational complexity (which I call the “who’s really running this show and who is the real client?” factor). Issues which all of us who are or have been consultants have had to grapple with but are often discouraged from incorporating in the brief.
The strategic approach Dennis provides would make sense in the smallest of companies as in the largest.
A pdf file version of the post is available for download.
Tags: Blogging, blogging-strategy, corporate-blogging, Dennis-McDonald, Social Media, Social Networking, social-media-strategyRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Corporate, General, Small Business, Social Media, Social Networking
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