2011 is your time to deliver. The clock is ticking.

There’s so man people writing about what 2011 means for social media, it’s almost not worth listening to any of it - the echo chamber is in FULL effect. But the clock is ticking:

“It’s the year of mobile”, “the year of location-based services”, social networks, twitter makes money and er…doesn’t change the world, Facebook makes a multi-billionaire of everyone who has invested in it and overtakes everything…social (even Facebook) currency replaces real currency (Linden dollars anyone !!) so where do you start?

Well…whatever you read or are thinking about doing, let me tell you that this year won’t be about ANYTHING related to technology or platforms - it will be about 2 things:

1) Justification

2) Time Management

a) clear (i.e. defined)

b) understood

c) bought-into (by various part of the business that are affected)
2) Time management

The correct management of social media and finding the time to make sure that whichever part of the business social media affects, is probably going to be your killer challenge this year - and you won’t be given any slack for cocking it up now.

Remember all the late nights you were working to get done in the day, all the stuff you never had time for because you were acting on behalf of a client during the day? Ah, yes. Won’t work this year. You’ll be expected to plan, cost, sell-in and deliver - on time and on budget like everybody else in the business.

If you did a half,-decent job, your client will likely have renewed their retainer and be expecting much more than a few tweets here and there, or several tweets at night (when their customers have gone to bed). You’ll need to be much smarter with your time, more disciplined, booked-in and better understand your customer’s customer better than before. In a way, it is time to peel back the old cliche’s and understand intimately and precisely,why they became cliche’s in the first place. i.e.:

1. Understand exactly where they are (which channels, specific sites, pages, groups they hang out on/in)
2. Understand precisely their content preferences (i.e. what they talk about most and with what tools/channels - categorise and tag their content, are you matching this?)
3. Understand and gain a natural instinct for the posting styles, types and patterns  - match your content output to theirs, times and type.

To help you on your way, remember, the (campaign) objective defines the time allocated to it:

1. Customer service - tends to be little and often, all day/night
2. Reputation management - sometimes a little bit of content infrequently, sometimes a lot, sometimes a lot, often
3. Content creation - less often, longer to create, long(er) approval process
4. Content curation/bookmarking - frequent, all times of the day, (sometimes) time-consuming

Taking the volumes of content of each of these types of “uses” into account (ex. how many positive Facebook comments or images occur, how many negative Twitter ones occur, how many blog comments you need to reply to etc.) gives you a much better idea of how much time you need to respond to each. Try these as a starter:

• 2 minutes per tweet
• 10 minutes per un-researched blog comment reply
• 2 hours per properly-researched blog post - allowing 10 days for legal sign-off

Remember: the objective defines the channel, the channel defines the type and quantity of content you create, the volume of comments defines the time you spend engaged with customers.

You’ve been talking about it for a long, time, you’ve been practising it for a fair bit - now is the time you will be expected to deliver.

Go forth and deliver.

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