As part of a National Science Foundation grant received by the Educational Development Corporation in Massachusetts, Mike and I have been involved with a group of small business social media experts from around the country defining a step-by-step social media process for Social Technology Enabled Professionals. These small business people build, maintain, manage and leverages online social networks to engage with customers, business partners, employees and key influencers with the goal of building organizational success.  In this podcast, we cover part one of the first duty and discuss some of the tasks involved. 

All businesses and organizations desire greater engagement with their audiences. However, many are not leveraging the social media platforms that allow for the best opportunities for engagement. From static postal flyers, electronic newsletters to a lack of regular communication, engagement becomes difficult.

Social media platforms call for regular, sustained communications and conversations between the businesses/organizations and their audiences. Blogs allow for that engagement by allowing readers to comment on postings, share links and/or rate postings. Some blogs allow for other interaction functionality like including a poll in a posting. On Facebook and Twitter engagement, in the form of “like,” comment, and re-tweet, is much more the norm than perhaps on blogs.

This podcast will briefly introduce the listener to a three tiered social media strategy approach:

.    1)  Primary (Blog or similarly organized content on an organizational website)

.    2)  Secondary (Platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc that can deliver supportive content 
to the primary platform via hyperlink)

.    3)  Broadcast (Platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter which can aggregate audiences 
and are engagement friendly)

Social media platforms call for regular, sustained communications and conversations between the businesses/organizations and their audiences. Given the explosion of new media platforms and social media networks during the past few years, there is significant justification for all businesses and organizations to adopt strategies to leverage these platforms more effectively.