This post is the first in a multi-part series on Social Media Time Management, intended to supplement the content of the presentation I gave at BlogWorld Expo 2009. Click here to see the collection of posts in the series.

Information overload is real, but it’s something that’s in your control. Managing your time in social media is first and foremost about deciding where to spend your time and why, and that requires a little bit of organization to start with.

What Are You In This For?

If your goal is to be engaged in social media for pleasure or just for personal connections, your approach is rather simple. You’ll choose the tools and sites where you find folks with common interests, and you’ll tuck the time in outside your other responsibilities.

But if you’re in this for business, at least in part, you’re going to need to think through some clearer goals than that.

Here are five sets of questions to ask yourself:

1) Realistically, how many hours do I have to spend in social media each day? Do I have resources/people other than me? What can I expect of them? (Note: if you’re serious about doing social, you need to find an hour a day to start with, at least.)

2) Which 2 or 3 tools and social networks make sense based on my listening efforts? What is my goal for participation on those sites? What is the culture of those communities and how will my participation line up with that?

3) Have we evaluated our current online and offline communication efforts to determine what’s working and what we might supplement or replace with social media? Am I going to need to add this on to my existing responsibilities in order to prove its value before making tradeoffs?

4) Has our leadership bought into this idea already, or am I establishing a presence so I can build a stronger case? Is time I spend on social media going to be viewed as an investment or a time sink? How do I make the case for the former?

5) What does success look like? How about failure? How can I measure both, even simplistically? (Hint: Objectives you can’t measure against are going to be really hard to celebrate or adjust, since you won’t know how you did either way).

These are just a start, and you’ll think of more. But managing your social media presence and time means having a crystal clear idea of what you want out of it. The goals and objectives will help dictate the path and resources you need.

Personal Vs. Professional

You’ll hear lots of takes on this one, but here’s my short answer about whether you should be participating as yourself or as your brand:

The web is a vast, intertwined thing. If you’re participating in social media, you cannot keep your personal stuff from touching your professional stuff, even if you think you’re separating them by imaginary lines. The dots can always be connected, and you’ll do well to keep that in mind for the long term.

For the most part, as connections and colleagues, we don’t draw distinctions between you, the “personal” account and you, the “professional” one. You are you, with many facets. We think of you as a whole person, with many parts.

That said, you *can* create a separate blog, Twitter account, and Facebook page to foster conversation with a business purpose. I’d advise against participating solely as a logo; if you have a central corporate page/account, please let the voices and participants be intensely human and contribute as such. Whenever possible, provide names and faces to go along with the people on your team. Give your community people to associate with your company, and a sense of who they are. Allow them to converse outside rigid messages and corporate topics and be personable and approachable. That is, after all, the point of all of this.

And remember. If you’re using your personal account in hybrid (like I do, and the approach I prefer), whatever you post has a long shelf life. If you don’t want internet content about you personally to reflect on you professionally, keep it off the internet. There are no shortcuts to personal accountability. And good judgment doesn’t come with an owner’s manual.

Next….

We’ll cover time allocation for varying social media tasks like listening, responding, content creation, and measurement. Stay tuned tomorrow.

Other questions you’d like to cover about social media time management? Let me know in the comments.

image by allyaubry

Many of us understand the idea that in order to have a successful social media or community program, you need some executive- or senior-level buy in for the long term. You’ve got to make a case to the executive team as to why this is important to your business and your customers.

(I’m a big believer that renegade ideas from grassroots places can win, but we’ll save that for another day).

But getting that buy-in demands that you present your ideas and plans from the perspective of a business leader.  To do that, avoid the seven mistakes that are sure to kill your plan before you get started:

1. Thinking Departmentally

You have a job description, and you’re likely part of a vertical area or department of your business. But presenting a social media plan from the insulated perspective of your job description or singular area of responsibility ignores its potential impact on the rest of the organization.

Instead:  Be sure you consider the implications of your plans on all areas of the business, both customer facing and not. How will this affect customer service? Sales? PR? Product management? IT? The executive team cares about broader business implications as well as just how it’s going to improve or impact your world.

2. Skipping your Homework

There’s nothing worse than showing up for a meeting unprepared, and the executive team isn’t going to walk you through all the considerations you need to make. When you decide you’re going to pitch a social media initiative, come prepared to answer questions that go broader than your strategy or tactics.

Instead:  Ask questions and do research ahead of time to understand the global goals for your business, from sales to growth to product and service innovation, and be prepared to discuss how social media may or may not align with those things. Know what your competitors are doing in the space, and discuss what they’re doing well and where they’re leaving opportunities on the table. Understand the state of your industry overall as it relates to social media, and be prepared to present a case for why trends or opportunities exist for you to lead or join as an organization.

3. Speaking In Tongues

“Join the conversation”. “Be human”. “Return on Influence”. “Build relationships”. Too often, we try and sell our bosses on the idea of social based on our passion points and phrases we’ve become comfortable with. The trouble is that few of those phrases have any meaning in a hard business context whatsoever.

Instead: Skip the jargon. Avoid social media lingo and all the verbal shortcuts we use to sound smart or line up with what we read. Use real words, business terms that have meaning and substance, and say what you mean. Know the true definition of ROI and use it properly. Understand the difference between impact, correlation, and causality when you’re justifying strategy.  If you want to discuss qualitative metrics, that’s fine, but keep them away from fuzzy emotional ideas and tie them to qualitative business goals like awareness or customer loyalty and satisfaction.

4. Forgetting Dollar Signs

Social media people recoil sometimes at the notion that sales and commercialism can be part of what we do. That the connections and conversations we’re facilitating are driven to enhancing nothing more than the bottom line. So instead, we talk of furry cuddly things, of relationships and people connections. Those do matter. But:

Instead: Sales are the ultimate success metric. The notion is that better relationships, better communication, more people that like us all eventually drive dollar signs. That’s okay. That’s why we’re in business after all (and even if you’re a non profit, this counts for your donations, too). Make sure your social media strategy explains how you’re going to help the company ultimately get its bills paid and make the shareholders happy, even if it’s not a direct revenue channel itself. The relationships and conversations and openness along the way are catalysts for growth.

5. Lacking a Blueprint

Hypothesis is good when based in research, but it’s important to back up your educated assumptions with a true, well thought out plan. You don’t have to (nor can you) guarantee results, but you do have to craft a blueprint that minimizes the variables to getting there. If you walk into the executive offices with nothing more than “everyone has a Facebook page so we need one too”, you’re going to get laughed out of the office. Trust me.

Instead:  Build a plan, even if it’s simple. Include elements like goals and objectives, risk assessment, resource planning for money, people and time, costs (both soft and hard), training and education plans both internal and external, measurement and reporting.

6. Overlooking Plan B

If you’ve got a goal, there’s more than one path to get there. Don’t make the mistake of presenting a plan that’s the one-shot deal, or one that doesn’t have any alternative paths to success.

Instead: Create contingency plans. If your blog doesn’t take off as expected and your goals aren’t met in six months, what then? Outline a strategy for assessing success or failure, and illustrate what you’ll do with the learnings when you have them. Demonstrate flexibility in your plan that allows you to optimize it as you go.

7. Greenwashing

No really! There’s no downside! It’ll be fabulous! People will love it!  Everyone’s doing it! Your boss doesn’t buy that, and neither do I. If you’re selling a plan, don’t make the error of presenting it as though it’s infallible, or that there’s no potential downside. There’s no such thing as bulletproof.

Instead: Do a solid risk assessment. Consider worst case scenarios for your plan and walk them through, including recommendations for how to deal if something does go wrong. Be honest about execution challenges, like unpredictable resources or measurement that’s hypothetical to start with. Lay out reasonable expectations for goals you can achieve instead of what you think the boss wants to hear.

Ultimately, you CAN sell a solid social media plan into the executive suite. But you need to speak their language, and consider that what you’re presenting is a business plan. Your boss wants to see that you’ve thought it out thoroughly, given it broad consideration, and mapped out clear goals, strategy, and tactics. Demonstrated responsibility and accountability can go a long way to ensuring that your plan gets the attention it deserves.

So what would you add? What have you done successfully to make the case for social media? Or if you’re brave enough to share, where did you fall short so we can learn from you too? The comments are for you.

Ah, measurement. How we love to have a gauge of whether what we’re doing is working or not. No more telling me that you can’t measure the impact of social media. Here’s a pile of metrics you can consider. Try benchmarking them before you start your online outreach or community efforts, and tracking them throughout and after.

Your Metrics Should Vary

As you embark on this list, you ought to work backwards. Start with your objective in mind, and from there, work back toward the measures and metrics most likely to drive toward that goal and support the intelligence you hope to gather. Measure those. You can’t and shouldn’t measure everything. You should measure the indicators and drivers of what you want to accomplish.

What You Might Measure

Revenue and Business Development: (benchmark before and after SM initiatives begin)

• Speed/length of sales cycle
• Number or % of Repeat customers
• % of Customer Retention
• Number of customer referrals (new business), net number of new leads
• Transaction value per customer
• Customer lifetime value
• Conversions from blog/email subs to leads or customers
• Website conversions for leads or sales
• Organic search rankings > converted leads
• % of Converted leads from online vs. offline sources

Potential Cost Savings:

• Shorter customer service/issue resolution time
• % of issues resolved via offline vs. online channels
• Number of support calls before/after outreach effort
• Recruiting costs through online presence (vs. recruiters)
• Training costs
• % of quarterly or annual customer/account turnover
• Overhead costs for communication (measure costs of online outreach vs. analog as compared to resolution ratios)
• Number/ ratio of viable community-driven product ideas
• Length of concept-to-development cycle (use of online community as testing/focus/idea development)

Value, Awareness, Influence

• Brand Loyalty
• Sentiment of posts online – advocates, detractors
• Share of conversation/voice
• Number and frequency of mentions in media (online or print)
• Net Promoter Score (likelihood of recommendation)
• Subscribers to blog/email/newsletter
• Comments/engagement on posted material, downloads of ebooks, etc. (interaction with content)
• Inbound links to site/blog (total as well as on-topic/relevant)
• Number of Tags, votes, social bookmarks
• Fans/followers/group members for social profiles (implication of a brand following)

A note about Cause and Influence:

For all the metrics you track, you have to realize that the path from initial contact to desired result is a winding one when it comes to marketing. Direct marketing efforts like “get postcard, enter code, buy said product” are more obviously causal and can outline a clear sales path. But in a social and online world where there are literally hundreds of touchpoints in effect at any given point, metrics themselves don’t indicate success or failure.

In most cases, it’s a combination of several factors – need, awareness, cost, sentiment, reputation, availability – that drive a business/purchase decision. So what you’re really after is not “we do X and Y happens”. What you’re after is a combination of both qualitative and quantitative measurements that – in combination over time – increase the likelihood that when a revenue decision is on the table, your business is the likely recipient. Individual metrics are snapshots of behavior, but what you’re striving for is a stronger, more consistent tie with your business for the long term.

Make no mistake that value-based metrics are as important as numbers-based ones. Awareness and loyalty aren’t immediate, but they add to the whole. In this great post by Dave Evans of ClickZ, he says (emphasis mine):

“Rather than planning a campaign with defined start and end dates and a certain spend that’s guaranteed to produce a specified exposure (reach and frequency), social media is an ongoing effort that builds and converges toward an objective. By understanding what’s happening now on the social Web and measuring over time, you can see the trend emerge. The dynamic trend, rather than static measures like reach and frequency, becomes the quantitative guidepost for your social media program.“

My Last Word…For Now

I’m going to take the last bit of this mammoth post to say something critically important. Every single metric above – every single one – is tied to something else that doesn’t have it’s own metric. It’s the strength of the relationships between people. That’s nearly impossible to put on any kind of yardstick, but it’s the underpinning of ALL of these things. Better relationships drive better business, period. You may not be able to measure the relationships themselves, but all of the metrics above are indications – the results, if you will – of how well you’ve cultivated those relationships on a human level.

So what do you think? What other metrics do you use? Still want to tell me that social media isn’t measurable?

Photo Credit: Charlyn W on Flickr