A while ago I read a blog post from a marketing executive who wrote that he had prohibited the use of certain words in his strategy and planning meetings. Among those words there where many popular social networking and media words such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Though that might seem odd at first, it makes a lot of sense. The point is that while social media may serve as an effective method of promoting your business, it is only a set of tools and channels that you may use to execute against your business plan and strategy. It is part of the tactical stuff that you do after you have figured out your strategy.

This may seem in contrast to all the talk on “social media strategies”. Well, one can certainly strategize on how to use social media for a business. But it remains a fact that social media is a vehicle to carry out business or marketing strategies. Here are a few relevant articles and blog posts on this topic.

In “The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration” Brian Solis refers to social media as “transformative”. That certainly is true. He outlines insightful stages of adoption and guidelines for social media in business. Some are strategic such as “finding a voice and a sense of purpose” where he highlights the importance of “strategic communication and engagement” as opposed to “chatter” or “aimless broadcast”. He also points out under “social Darwinism” that social media is only one part of an “overall integrated strategy”.

Sharlyn Lauby in “HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy” discusses some strategic work that must be done before implementing specific social media methods. She outlines five steps (such as “determine your objective” and “find an internal evangelist”) that are in fact general and equally apply to any large project across a sizable organization. For example implementing a business application or some infrastructure software such as BPM or SOA in an enterprise also requires the same disciplined rigor.

In “5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses” Samir Balwani discusses several social media based marketing strategies. These are essentially techniques and approaches on how to use social media to execute against the marketing strategies.

Edward Boches in “10 Ways a Start-Up Can Use Social Media to Market Itself” outlines useful advice for small and start-up businesses (who may have limited resources) on using social media. They range from fundamental and general marketing advice such as “craft a brand position rooted in a customer benefits” (which is independent of social media) to basic tactical stuff such as “get on Twitter and use it actively” to an interesting concept that he calls ”crowdsourcing”.

And in “13 Tactics to Make Social Media Work Harder” Heidi Cohen provides sound advice on using social media, such as providing content that meets your customers’ needs and allowing them and your employees to share content and take part in social media. I like her explicit use of the word “tactics” as opposed to strategies, even though her advice is mostly general and not specific to any particular social media channel.

So before you start tweeting away on your business, loading up videos to Youtube, creating groups on LinkedIn and fan pages on Facebook, etc. it is advisable that you do some strategic thinking and come up with an overall plan that may (and should) include social media as channels but it does not (and should not) include specific mentions of any of the above.

In a follow-up article, I will discuss how you can leverage various social media channels in an integrated and orchestrated fashion (in terms of specific tactics) to market a business (or a cause), a brand, or products and services.

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