Social Media Strategy

Strategic Content Management

Done well, strategic content management humanizes your brand in a digital world. Every post must be intentional—supporting one or more of your unique marketing goals related to reputation enhancement, visibility, recruiting, conversions, and others.

We use the 70-30 rule of content management. Thirty percent is focused on the client (tastefully and non-salesy). Seventy percent is about other things…but things that subtly reinforce the client’s goals and strategy. Our message discovery and development process features an extensive ranking system to uncover critical communication areas. That’s about as much as we can say here about our secret sauce.

Franchise and Multi-Site Solutions

Social media ideally is local but brands are corporate. In a franchise or multiple-site facility situation, that can lead to a natural tension, missed opportunities, and plenty of mistakes. If you’re in this situation, you may only see two options: micromanaging all social media activity from corporate or trusting and hoping that local efforts will reflect and reinforce brand messages.

Our proprietary Socialme™ service provides the structure and safeguards to balance these imperatives. We first developed it for the real estate industry and later brought it into additional markets for companies with franchise models or those with multiple, local corporate-owned facilities. The local social media sites have the polish and consistency that reflects the brand while seamlessly incorporating local relevant messaging. We love win-wins.

Personalized Reputation Management

Fame truly is a two-edged sword. Sometimes a transgression or misunderstanding won’t go away just because of who you are. When your sad story is stuck on the first page of your personal Google search, you need a social media partner to put things right. It won’t happen on its own.

Unfortunate as it is, we have experience in this area working with executives and celebrities who got on the wrong side of a news story. Social media is all about trends, and we stop bad trends by creating new, positive trends. We win the battle for the first page of Google.

Globally Localized Social Media

You know as well as we do that your customers, future employees, and strategic partners can be over the ocean or south of our border. You need to reach them where they live using compelling content that’s brand-consistent and culturally appropriate. And yes, in their language.

Our localization and foreign language capabilities are powered by Cesco Linguistic Services. We chose to work with Cesco because they know that translation is not just about words. It’s about relevant localized marketing messaging and quality writing. Through Cesco, our clients can share marketing content in 16 languages. Du är välkommen.

Crisis Management

How many accounts have you read about bad things happening to basically good companies? Company execs always jump on traditional media to explain their side…the truth. Unfortunately, truth usually has nothing to do with it. The masses believe what they want to believe, and what they usually want to believe is that companies suck. Since many of these doubters live on social media, social media quickly becomes the crisis.

Get ready for our fire analogy…The social media crisis is like a fire and the fire won’t die until the last tweet fades away. That’s our job. Slowly but surely we strategically manage the social media battle using strategic messaging and targeted engagement. Soon the fire is 20 percent contained, then 45 percent contained, then 70 percent, and as everyone in the western U.S. knows, after that it no one talks about the fire anymore—it drops from the news.

Engaging Storytelling

Of course, words are still important. But they’re used best when they’re strung together in a story—a relatable message that expresses humor, drama, excitement, mystery, wonder, nostalgia… The list is endless because human emotion is limitless. Appeal to it.

We maintain a diverse team of writers—from public relations pros to industry insiders that work in our specific technical verticals. Their material highlights our clients’ values, differentiators, successes, generosity—you know, all those emotion-driving, story-telling things. Their material is flawless—it has to be because we’re our clients’ surrogates. (Our writers wanted us to put that word in there.)

Creative Hashtag Campaigns

You may find them annoying. They’re rarely used as intended. Hashtags. Think of them as a filing system to store and share information on a topic. Sure, use them to find conversations about your company or your industry and then join in. But how about steering or even initiating that conversation? That’s a # campaign.

We use hashtag campaigns for our clients very strategically…but most of all immediately. Just like “The Wave” at a baseball game, societal trends happen in fits and starts, and sometimes they even get legs. But they usually don’t last. We initiate, weigh in, or tag along on hashtag campaigns to increase our client’s exposure, promote their brand, and reinforce their thought leadership.

Targeted Social Advertising

Two things. First, when it comes to social media impact, we’re in a pay-to-play world. Paid advertising gets you seen and ranked. Second, advertising must be directed and intentional. No more shotgun social media campaigns. You need to understand and honor the algorithms and techniques. It’s work, not play.

We’ve been doing social media advertising since before people began complaining about social media advertising. Yes, we know the techniques and algorithms, and those go hand-in-hand with our creative side. We’re not only hitting the targets but hitting them with memorable messaging.

Social Media Event Representation

Live streaming and reporting is one of the fastest growing trends in social media. Did you create any live reporting buzz at your most recent annual conference? When your corporate team ran in your local Race for the Cure, did you magnify the message by streaming live? No? Oh.

SME’s proprietary Team Social™ service puts our sneakers or dress shoes on the ground at our clients’ events. Our social media savvy and business-experienced team members are on the scene, posting and interacting live online while wearing our clients’ golf shirts or sweatshirts. (You should see their collections!) Team Social helps our clients wring every drop of social media value from live events.

Public Relations

Your social media program shouldn’t live alone, tucked away in the back office or spread out on the table by the window at the coffee shop. Name one element of Public Relations that isn’t amplified by social media. Community engagement? Public speaking? Media outreach? Social media has changed Public Relations. Social media messaging is no longer an add-on, it should be an equal partner in any public outreach program. Both have a role, but each has limitations.

We understand the interdependency between social media outreach and Public Relations. That’s why we have teams that also can help in the more traditional PR areas—like media outreach, leadership strategies, branding, issue management, and executive training. In too many organizations there’s friction, distrust, and a lack of respect between traditional PR and social media professionals. Not at SME. We actually like each other and get along! And that leads to consistent messaging and coordinated tactics.

Digital Recruiting Strategy

If your digital recruiting is limited to posting entry level jobs on job boards and accepting resumes online, well, times have passed you by. Today you need to compete for the best people to fill multiple positions at all levels of the company. You do it by proactively promoting your company and your employer brand. Sound familiar? Yes, you need an ongoing social media campaign.

Back when you could count the number of social media platforms on one hand, SME got its start using social media to help corporations in healthcare, tech, and other labor-competitive industries attract and recruit top talent. The digital recruiting principles are the same today, but we have many, many more tools and tactics at our disposal. But it’s all still centered around strategically projecting the company’s brand—knowing the target, crafting the ideal content that will engage the target, and then presenting that message where the target hangs out.