Thinking Strategically: Goals
This week I want to take the time to talk about thinking strategically. I am going to take a little more general approach and cover some broader concepts when thinking about social media. Seeing how some people and companies use social media it is obvious to see that they don’t have a strategy behind what they are doing. Now I know some people are going to push back and say that social media is supposed to be natural and fun, not everyone needs a strategy. If you are messing around with some of these tools to connect with friends do you really need to plan how you use them? Well if you are applying for jobs and your profiles are using your real name and information then yes, you do need to plan.
The first topic I like to talk when looking at strategy are goals. What are your goals for using a social media site? Is it to have fun with your friends without people from work watching what you are doing? Is it to drive traffic to a site? Is it to sell a product? Is it to provide better customer service?
Whatever your reasons are you need to outline them and determine how your actions impact those goals. These goals help define your strategy, they help impact the direction you are going, and they are your litmus test against your actions.
Without goals things can tend to be overwhelming and when you are overwhelmed you tend not to go anywhere.
What are your goals?
My goals, and the goals of Social Media practitioners, should be to do strategy on behalf of the customers. Too many times we try to do it for our boss, or our leadership, or our own personal interests.
I try to focus on the problems my customers are having, and then figure out where to apply Social Media to solve them. The worst thing we can do is be a “cure chasing a disease”, and just apply cool technology to a problem that customers don’t even have.
More important to this post, is why do people not do this…it seems obvious! Start with goals, then solve. Is it laziness, ignorance, and/or selfishness???
Ben I think that it does seem obvious but so many people don’t. I have consulted for or have taken calls from people that have just dived in without thinking about what they want to accomplish. Or they just say “more sales” or “more leads” like it goes from step one to step four with no thought in between.