In a succinct presentation, Charlene Li from Forrester Research presented a process that can be used to create a social media strategy, identified some examples of how companies had used social media to their advantage and gave the audience some tips on where to start. While several members of the audience expressed disappointment (through the Meebo chat) that the strategies used in many of the examples Charlene provided are now fairly common place or part of most social media strategist’s consideration sets, I think those audience members missed the point.

The point was that the social media space evolves so quickly that there are always new and revolutionary ways to work it to you or your companies’ advantage. The framework she presented provides companies moving into the social media space with a way to begin to think about what their strategy may be. The examples provided were meant to serve as inspiration, not a road map. Revolutionary strategies do not come in the form of blanket solutions, but are born out of the unique circumstances that each company or client finds themselves in.

One point that Charlene had made really stood out to me as a key component of a successful social media campaign was the idea that someone important needs to be in charge of the campaign. I often find there is the perception that all a social media campaign involves is pouring content into the Internet and then sitting back and watching people become converts by virtue of your ability to regularly upload videos to YouTube. As a result, the person responsible for the managing the campaign on the client side is often an entry level employee who may be incredibly capable and savvy but is handcuffed by their lack of authority. In order to thrive, a social media campaign needs the ability to continually engage and quickly react. If the person running it does not have the authorization to respond to the conversation that has been created and alter the tactics of engagement when necessary, what was once a wide window of opportunity will quickly close as approvals are moving up and down the chain of command. As a result, the campaign will often slowly die or worse, explode.

Another thing that I enjoyed from Charlene’s presentation were the statistics she presented of the social technographics (how users interact with social media) categories broken down by age in the US. As expected, the rates of adoption for social media has an inverse relation to age although I expected the gap between Generation X and Generation Y to be considerably larger than it is for most of categories.

Percent of Each Generation in Each Social Technographics Category