Social media should not be a “special” activity for AR, just part of the overall AR plan

You do have an AR plan, don’t you?

Your strategic AR plan, the one with the charter and objectives, lists of all interactions types to be used for each purpose, service levels by analyst tier, calendar and priorities?

Ok, unfair question as many AR teams are so under the gun that a plan is often considered a luxury. The main point is that social media (e.g., blogs, Twitter, podcasts, wikis and so on) should not be considered something big and special, but merely just more forms of interactions to add to the mix.

Obviously, the various types of social media are still new to many individuals and AR teams. As a consequence, there is a learning curve to climb and a process you will need to go through to adopt these new forms of interactions. However, social media are not “special,” just like e-mail is not special. Oh, those folks that have been around for awhile will no doubt remember when there was heated debate whether e-mail was an appropriate form of interaction with analysts.

SageCircle Technique:

• Educate yourself about social media, including setting up accounts and playing with various types
• Talk with your tier 1 and (optionally) tier 2 analysts about their personal and professional usage of social media, now and in the future
• Determine how social media will fit into your portfolio of interaction types for what purposes at what level of service
• Develop policies for how social media will be used including how and who will respond to analyst blogs
• Incorporate social media into your analyst opinion monitoring program
• Add social media into your interactions calendar

Bottom Line: Social media can be powerful interaction tools when incorporated into your overall mix of interactions. At some point, social media will be considered an everyday tool, so get ahead of the curve and be an early adopter in order to reap the benefits associated with being an innovator.

Question: How are you using social media? If you are not using any forms of social media today, do you have plans to pilot social media?

Do you need to create an AR strategic and tactical plan that incorporates social media? Are you thinking about experimenting with social media? SageCircle can Help – Social media represents new opportunities and challenges to AR teams. SageCircle can help AR teams by:

• Providing on-site or distance learning sessions to get AR teams up to speed on social media and how it might be adopted
• Acting as a sounding board as you brainstorm how to add social media to the AR tool box
• Advising on how to develop a pilot program to experiment with social media
• Playing the role of analyst in social media experiments and providing critiques of how the experiment went
• Through our AR Plan Builder workshop, strategists can help create AR plans that incorporate social media

Call 650-274-8309 or e-mail info (at) sagecircle dot com for more information. Also follow Carter’s commentary www.twitter.com/carterlusher to get a feel for how information is now being transmitted using micro-blogging.

SageCircle

Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.