What's your story?

And how are you telling it? Social media's the best for seeding a story organically, in an inviting way, and letting people know about what your company cares about and how it's going about doing something about it.

I coach clients to think about it like a battle. You need a strategy to come up with the plan from which the tactics will flow to achieve your objective. Simplifying that, if your objective is to let people know more about your company, your strategy has to connect the people you want to reach with what your company means to their lives. Why would they care, what can you do for them? 

Your plan flows from that to decide how you're going to make yourself relevant to the people you want to reach with empathy. Your vision, your passion and empathy all play a part here. Your plan would include broadly the kinds of things you'd want to share. You're not just going to be talking about yourself. The plan should include a genuine interest in the issues of your target audience to connect with them so surely they won't care about you if you don't care about them.

The tactics are the nitty gritty of what gets published where. Put together, this sometimes is confused with a strategy or a plan. Though tactics flow easily from a good strategic plan, too often I see clients trying to skip the strategy to go straight to tactics. You have to know why you're there to determine what kinds of content is going to be posted on what platforms, and when, with an awareness of when your audience is online and most receptive. As the tactics are executed, there's always a lot that can't be predicted so constant listening allows for ongoing adjustment in every set of tactics.

A social calendar helps organize content and platforms so everyone has an awareness of what's going on so they can repost, share and add their particular voice. Public perception affects everyone's work so this allows people to supplement and personalize their social presence in a way that supports the brand authentically.

This is a board generalization and it's easier for small companies to be adaptive and iterative on the fly. For larger companies, there are social media management tools and software to activate employee engagement as companies are looking to build on trusted connections though their social networks. One company I've got to know as an advisor, Post Beyond, has developed a software solution for companies to deploy content through large groups of employees with social dashboards that make it easy to manage.

As email falls out of favour as a marketing tool, especially in Canada where it's becoming tightly constrained by anti-spam laws, it opens the doors for more engaging ways to connect with people, become a trusted authority that people seek out and help people deal with the problem you've found a solution for. Social's been around forever, but I think we've just seen the start as advertisers and marketers start developing new concepts made for the platform.