Owyang presentation was based on months of research in which 140 enterprise-class social strategists across various industries were interviewed.  The seven key tips for building a successful social media program are as follows:

1. Be proactive, not reactive.  As a true strategist you will steer the organization in the right direction before staff knocks on your door to call for a Facebook page. As we say: Get your ‘interact’ together.
2. Be a program manager, not evangelist. As social media programs become more advanced, a new set of skill is going to be required and a program manager is responsible for resources, timelines, Gantt charts, ROI models, analytics, data modelling, resource management and program management. This set of skill is very different than those of the evangelist role.
3. Educate your business units. It is important to not only lay down guidelines, but also provide training for employees who want to learn more and get involved in the social media program.
4. Organize for success. Owyang recommends that social media programs be organized in hub and spoke or dandelion models in order to scale. In the hub and spoke, there’s typically a cross-functional team that’s serving multiple business units, with the strategists at the center of the formation.
5. Be an enabler. Owyang believes that it is crucial for social media strategists to slip into the mindset of an enabler because it is unrealistic to think that one strategist can stay at the center of every social media effort or that he or she could even hire enough community managers to stay on top of an entire enterprise’s social activity.
6. Deploy scalable social media programs. Dialogue and one-to-one communications does not scale. Community programs, advocacy programs, social media management systems and social customer relationship management are all worthwhile social media efforts because they are scalable.
7. Transcend marketing. The report found that 71% of social media programs fall under the domain of marketing or corporate communications. In order to make an impact, Owyang says that social media programs must transcend marketing. Think about how social media can be applied to support and service customer experiences and improve products and services. Strategists should take note and act accordingly.

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We started in the 3rd quarter of 2009 with setting up a Facebook Page, Twitter page and YouTube channel together with process descriptions on the effective and integrated use of the social media. At the same time, we also worked on a SEO program. Apart from including the proper tags, improving link popularity, content and submission to popular directories, we also converted the dynamically generated URLS with query strings into Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs. Within a few months, site traffic increased by around 50% and listings in Google improved superbly.

As an example, if you search in Google on e.g. ‘export services cebu’, the BSO will be listed number 1. Search on ‘cebu eporters’: number 1. Try ‘Philippine export coaching’….. You guessed it. Now if you search on ‘market highlights philippines’, the Facebook page of the organization is listed number 1…. (note: the search engine result page listings were measured monthly in the first half of  2010). A case that demonstrates that SEO and Social Media campaigning can definitely pay off to drive traffic to the BSO website. And that’s where the actual conversion needs to take place!

One of the Bolivian BSOs we work with has done a pilot campaign displaying advertisements in Facebook. A short campaign (approx 4 weeks)  generated thousands of new visits to the website which resulted in 40% conversions, meaining subscriptions to a webbased service. It was very clear that  the campaign was successful, it exceeded the expectations.

We are confident that active use of social media can bring substantial benefit to BSOs. However, it should be well planned and integrated as a social media strategy in a wider  trade promotion strategy.

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