The reality, everybody realizes, is somewhat more complicated. As my colleague quipped, “A Corporate Social Media Strategy is about as useful as a Corporate PowerPoint Strategy.” Social media is both a set of tools and way of using those tools to communicate. It’s not just Yet Another Marketing Program, and it’s going to be used in different ways across the organization. My smart colleague then followed up by comparing social media to email. Everybody uses email in the way that makes sense to their job function, but we don’t have a single thing called a “Corporate Email Strategy” that applies across the company. On the other hand we do have  corporate policies in place for email usage, and we do have corporate process and rules in place if you want to do bulk email externally.

We’ve grown our social media usage gradually and in a distributed way. Our main community site has been thriving for 6 years – we’ve been executing on a community strategy the whole time, and now that community strategy includes social media tools. Over the last year or two, we’ve put down a number of chips on various social media pilots, programs, and channels. Some have worked; others not so much. This year has been a year of internal programmatic growth. Throughout the year, I’ve met with dozens of groups inside our company to talk about social media, to capture their requirements and to discuss ways they could be participating. Some of those groups had already jumped in with both feet before they called me, and some have felt that their involvement can be smaller for now. The company is doing social media already, and quite successfully.

Complicating creation of a single “Social Media Strategy” is the changing landscape — proliferation of sites and tools, changing ground rules on those sites, and the trends and changing use patterns of the people we want to talk with. You can set up all the strategy you want, but once you get past the big bullet points, the instantiation of that strategy into tactics has to take into account this changing landscape. Twitter wasn’t a factor 18 months ago, and has opened up an entirely new approach in how we interact with our community and how individual programs can participate. How we’re approaching Facebook has been rapidly changing, with changing demographics and changing functionality and ground rules. I always try to not get caught up in the newest shiny social media tools of the week, but these kind of details do matter in our policy and our execution.

We’re now in a good place to  evaluate where we are, up-level the grass roots discussion, and make sure we, as a corporation, have a shared understanding of how we are using these tools. Some of the areas of our social media policy that we are discussing:

1. Overall stance and policy. Corporate blessing that it’s OK to use social media for your program, and how to be personally involved. We have this, but isn’t uniformly known across the company.
2. Centralized corporate social media channels. How are we using our corporate channels — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.? We’re now a big business, and we have a lot of news – are we effectively getting the word out?
3. Policy, messaging, and training. Best practices and help for individual teams and people from around the company to use social media. This is less about control and more about giving people the proper tools and training to be effective.
4. Integration with outbound & inbound marketing. We do a lot of direct email marketing, and we buy a lot of online ads. How does social media integrate with this, how do people choose to get information and offers? How does social media help to bring people back to our website?
5. Listening and respondng in public. Every part of the organization already talks to its constituents, but it’s usually in private. Now that it’s in a social sphere where everything, both good and bad, can get magnified, what tools and policies can help?

If we can successfully get some shared understanding on these points, we’ll have a nice Corporate Social Media Strategy going in to 2010. It won’t be in a box, and it won’t be one-size-fits-all, and the expression of our social media strategy will likely look different by the end of the year, but we’ll at least have some common ground about what we think we’re trying to do here in social media land.