Recently I was invited to speak at two different conferences about social media in a corporate workplace.

At both conferences I spoke alongside other speakers and in both instances my fellow speakers talked about social media ‘facts’ and hyped the audience about ‘what they are missing out on’ but none of them actually spoke about how to do it or what is involved.

We all know the facts about social media. Let me give some right now, just to annoy you with the same old same old…Australian social media audience is estimated at 9.9 millions users, if Facebook was a country it would be the third largest country in the world after China and India, nearly 40% of Australians are now interacting with companies via social networking sites, 59% of Australians have a Facebook profile, etc, etc, etc.

Who cares about the stats if you haven’t got a plan, strategy or resources to support social media in your work place. If I hear one more person talk about ‘how to get rich’ on Facebook one more time, I think I will scream.

So here’s the thing you should know. Social Media should form a part of your total communication strategy. It requires the following considerations:

1. Know your customers and understand where they ‘hang out’ online. Try and understand their behaviour to give you a true picture of who they are and what they do online.

2. If you can, try and set up a focus group and conduct a survey. You will collect data that you can use for other parts of your communication planning.

3. Once you have analysed your customer profile, get creative and think of ways to get to your desired audience.

4. Start to design a 12 month plan with key milestones of how you envisage you will use social media.

5. Assign resources to the milestones (internally and externally).

6. Get team members involved and get creative. Speak to your PR, design and web team and get them involved.

7. Work out how you will measure the success using tools like twitteranalyzer.com, Facebook Insights, etc.

8. Ensure you can successfully measure the ROI to prove to management that Social Media is essential for your organisation.

9. Start slow and build up your success, and

10. Social media is a part of your multi-channel communication plan. It is not a stand alone. It should support every aspect of your business.

Remember Social Media is a team effort. It requires dedication and resources. It cannot be a success if you don’t create, push and monitor your content. It requires a high level of creativity and most important – patience. Get it right and you will reap the rewards!