What Is Your Social Media Motive?

I had a great time speaking this morning with the Jewish Community Foundation.  It’s always great to talk to new audiences with different backgrounds, as well as, talk with non-profits on ways they can leverage social media to help their organizations. Which, in my view, isn’t that different from the public sector.

There are several commonalities between the public and private sector, but the one that stands out the most and should always be considered first by any organization is establishing your ‘Social Media Motive’.   The idea of ‘social media motive’ came up via a comment on a great blog post done by @SusanBaier as a guest post on @JayBaer‘s Convince And Convert blog titled Do You Know Your Customers Enough to be a Social Media Hit? (incidentally, they are both great people to follow on Twitter)  You can see the exchange below.

Comment Exchange On Social Motive

I am a huge fan of NCIS and Criminal Intent, and obviously motive is critical in legal situations, but for our purposes, we’ll define motive as:

Something that causes a person to act in a certain way, do a certain thing, etc.; incentive.

So when you and/or your business are looking at social media, be sure to be clear on WHY you are deciding to spend your precious time, money and energy on social media and the actions you want as a result – both internally and externally.  Some motives you might want to consider include but are in no way limited to…

• Build relationships with online influencers in your industry so that you have a community to interact with to help you improve your current business model or help you solve business challenges and overcome obstacles.
• Share your existing or create new rich media content on new channels so your content can easily be shared across the web to gain greater exposure, influence and provide value to current and potential clients.
• Equip online content creators within your industry with facts that can easily be shared so that you can help reduce the amount of incorrect information and/or become known as the trusted source for information.

Also be sure to not only know your own ‘incentive’ for social media, but also consider the incentive for your community to follow, friend and interact with you via social media.  What are you going to provide via social media channels that adds value and fills a need for you AND your audience?

Once you know why you are implementing social media into your organization, you can enter the planning phase, ask what your success metrics are, answer how much time you will you spend, and what tools you will use.

But without first establishing your motive, I can promise you, you’ll never be found guilty of social media success.

And as promised at the presentation, the slides from the presentation are included below.  I hope you’ll leave a comment and let me know what you thought of this post and/or the presentation today.

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• How to Put Together a Corporate Social Media Policy in 5 Minutes (futurelab.net)
• Recommended: Jay Baer’s Twitter 20 of live interview on Twitter inclusing free E-book (fredzimny.wordpress.com)

Tagged as: how to, LinkedIn, Non-Profit, SM Strategy, Speaking, Strategy