You know that everyone’s buzzing about social media. Facebook is attracting more than 600,000 new users every day. Twitter has 1400% year-over-year growth. Blogs have practically become a generic term, while newspapers are filing for bankruptcy protection.

But why?

How can your brand or clients benefit from using social media channels to achieve measurable business goals? Which ones are right for your business?

My social media consulting services aren’t about chasing the buzzwords. Rather, they’re about helping your business create a framework and practice for coupling your culture with social media, achieving your business goals, and being prepared for what comes next. Social media engagements are about helping your brand get on its feet and do it yourself:

Workshop: What is Social Media, and How Does it Impact My Business?

In this participatory 2.5 hours, you’ll get a thorough look at not just what the big social networking platforms are, but how people communicate within them, and what it means to your brand. Each workshop is tailored to the needs of your group.

This method is a great way to introduce your senior leaders to the dynamics of Social Media, how they change the marketing paradigm, the conceptual models at work, and why it’s important for your brand to start getting involved.

Strategic Social Media Consulting

Listening Phase Engagement

Sure, you know about what your share of voice in a marketplace is, but what about your share of conversation? Engaging in the listening phase is a six-week process. We’ll start with an in-depth meeting where we review your current marketing channels, messaging, brand goals, demographics, successes and failures.

Armed with the stakeholder information and marketing data, we will use both industry-leading tools and low-fidelity methodologies to gain insight over a month to give you a clear understanding of who your audience is in the social space, where they’re congregating, and what they’re talking about.

When we reconvene, you’ll know your footprint across the social Web, where your competition stands, and what the possibilities are to achieve your brand goals.

Not only will this work inform the conversations happening around your brand, it develops a constant channel of listening far better than any focus group. It’s your potential and current customers discussing their needs in a relatively unfiltered environment.

The Brand Framework

No one wants to just talk about your product in Social Media: they want the brand to be personified, and to participate with meaning. Now you know what the Social Media landscape is through your listening engagement, it’s time to unify your brand purpose under a guiding principal, what I call The Brand Cause.

This engagement typically lasts around six weeks, and meshes the behaviors found in the listening phase with stakeholder interviews to understand the internal and external brand identity. These findings are then translated into the Social Media Brand Cause and Brand Articulation Report: giving you the practical strategy you need to participate with purpose and content strategy at the highest level.

The Participation Framework

After understanding your audience’s platforms and behaviors, along with internal culture and brand cause, we can work together to create a Participation Framework that creates win-win practical communication scenarios for executing a social media strategy. Benefiting your brand, your employees, and your bottom line. Following the Report, Respond, Reflect, Curate, and Share methodology, you will have a report that: 1) Prioritizes the social platforms important to your business 2)Identifies operational areas and employees who should be participating in those platforms 3)How the company will interact on a day-to-day basis with the audience and 4)How to measure effectiveness in those channels to meet your goals.

Start the conversation about how I can help you build your own social media presence by emailing ml at michaelleis dot com now.