Where I start with clients is breaking down the communications into report, reply, reflect, curate, and share. Here’s a quick sketch of what each one means:

Report

In the state of social and distributed content as it stands now, basic reporting is the foundational building block for creating an effective presence. Observe what is happening around you. What are you listening to, working on, or thinking about that provides a positive peek into your daily life?

From the perspective of the creator, this activity sometimes feels like wading in a mixture of narcissism and banality. But if you’re talking with people who are interested enough to friend or follow you, these are the pings of personality.

Most detractors immediately cite the notion of someone “tweeting what they ate for lunch.” The reality is that the lunches are what they remember most, and they’re surprised to have such a visceral response to a seemingly trivial message. Of course, if you tweeted what you have for lunch every day, it will get tedious and tuned out. Just like any over-repeated message.

Reply

When people talk to you, about your brand or products, or just say something interesting in your community, reply. This seems self evident, but the existential weight of the position holding the brand out for everyone to see sometimes outweighs the tendency to send out a response.

In social media, there’s a kind of moral obligation to respond as much as possible, within appropriate boundaries (and there’s a whole framework for creating these boundaries, but that’s another article).

Even when people are bashing your brand, at least reply that you hear them, and are working on it. Even though the corporate in you says, “take this into email or private messaging,” resist. Reply to people as publicly as you can, for as long as you can. Demonstrate that you are a person, too.

If people in your network post a funny picture of their cat, say so. People really like getting replies. They know you’re in the network. You shouldn’t lurk, waiting for the perfect business scenario, like FAQs come to life. It doesn’t exist.

Reflect

Reflecting is a little more abstract. In the most basic sense, it’s a ReTweet on Twitter, or a “Links of the week” on your blog. It’s featuring the parts of that public you find valuable, and reflecting them back into the community. Reflecting does the work of both providing the social proof that you’re paying attention to the platform which you are a part, and the social object that strengthens your one-to-one relationship with those authors.

At a more granular level as a creator yourself, reflecting provides you the opportunity to learn how the people in that network structure communication, turn a phrase, set up a link. This exercise should be training you on how those people in that public want you to communicate with them.

Curate

As you see all these incredibly valuable updates and posts come down your activity streams, don’t just aggregate, curate. Curation is the act of cataloging, categorizing, as well as adding context and insight to the information you receive. Not only the content created by your marketing department, but of the community, where it fits with your brand cause.

By curating the information you get from social networks in social bookmark communities, your blog, and wherever else your audience is, you’re helping your own organization’s knowledge base, finding new valuable relationships and related content on those platforms: Everyone wins.

Share

While the concept of sharing encompasses everything a social media presence is about, in this practical framework we’re specifically talking about sharing content from within the organization and between networked publics.

First, it’s really common to take for granted that the information you see in the course of your job is the same as the information your audience knows about. Any time you run a survey, or have an R&D effort, bring what you can back to the places you engage. Create a graphic to express the information visually if you can.

You will be surprised at how much people appreciate the knowledge, the sneak peak at what’s coming next, or insights on the future of your industry. Just keep it casual and usable. Make it easy for people to scan and find value. In the case of surveys, release interesting data points in related groups over a few days.

By the same token, the information you see in the different publics is not the same perspective the people in those networks have. If there’s a hot topic on Twitter, share those links in your StumbleUpon, blog, Facebook, and MySpace. You’ll have to contextualize them differently depending on how the group works (see reflecting), but you’re most likely sharing content that group hasn’t seen before, and will find worthwhile.

Of course this isn’t the be-all, end-all. Hopefully it spurs you to think in a more practical sense about how to apply social media strategy.

What do you think? Do you use any similar frameworks? Let’s continue the conversation below in the comments, or on Twitter @mleis.

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