Charlene Li of Forrester has come up with a useful method for companies to follow when creating social media strategies.
It is called the POST method. It is pretty simple. P stands for people (assess the social activities of your customers first); O stands for objectives and what you want to accomplish; S is strategy and planning for the kinds of relationships you want to have with your customers (supportive, collaborative, engaging etc) and T is for the technology you wish to use.
Charlene Li has credibility. She has been writing about social media way before it became fashionable and I can remember quoting her work in a piece for The Guardian about blogs several years ago. I think the method though misses a couple of elements. Firstly I think it is important that companies spend time getting up to speed with social media. They have to understand the social media culture in order to be able to plan strategies and secondly social media is not just about technology solutions. The characteristics of social media (sharing content for niche groups, co-creating etc) can be applied offline as well.
http://blogs.forrester.com/Charleneli/2008/03turning-radic-1.html
www.itsopen.co.uk
