As many of us know, or have heard, Jeremiah Owyang brought down the house with his keynote presentation at the Seattle! Yep Web Community Forum on December 5th. Special thanks go to Beth Kanter for casting a spotlight on Jeremiah’s contributions toward our better understanding & appreciation of social media.

The key is to create a strategy based upon the objectives that your organization seeks to accomplish. Doing so must precede your decision/commitment to which types of presence, activities, events, applications and services to create/operate in social media. Don’t just race out to hire developers without the big picture and the other key resources needed by your team, because nobody can expect to know precisely which resources those might be (at this stage-of-process). Hopefully, we’ll get into useful depth on this subject at a none-too-distant date.

An NPO-oriented restatement of Jeremiah’s five goals (which might be thought of as principles, MOs, or philosophical commitments):

1. Listening to gain insights, new ideas, or hypotheses worthy of testing.
2. Speaking to create emotional attachment.
3. Energizing your fans, visitors, members, and participants to create “word of mouth” (e.g. through applications).
4. Supporting relationships between fans, peers, members, and participants through SIGs, discussion threads, and other forms of interaction.
5. Embracing visitors, members, fans, and contributors to bring them closer, understand them better, and gain support for your organization’s projects.  

With these goals in mind, a strategy should be easier to formalize. Jeremiah prescribed a roadmap (to follow after the strategy is finalized):

1. Analysis: Build or Join (platform or network? Existing membership/Profile mining/analytics? I’ll have to ask Jeremiah.)
2. Experimentation leads to Understanding (multivariate cases: A vs. B vs. C. I can’t stress this enough!)
3. Gain Market Intelligence (acquire/create the right data, using the appropriate analytical methods)
4. “Advertise” Efficiently (develop traffic, engagement, interaction)
5. Embrace and Lead Communities (yours and others, work on peer properties)
6. Deploy Campaign (widget, group, page, & applications)

Best Practices

1. Listen before Speaking
2. Members are in control
3. Allow for discussions (allocate time and patience)
4. Segment – for content and programs addressing the relevant interests, needs, and pre-dispositions of each major target cluster (if you don’t have clusters, then return to “square one”.)
5. Media as a “lead in” – be present, active, and effective across platforms, sites, groups, and other orgs
6. Trouble Kick starting? Be a resource, and reward
7. Integrate with Marketing Initiatives

(ed. Note: the italics are my interpretations – rr)