Seth Price, Placester’s Director of Sales and Real Estate Marketing, published an article on InmanNext this week on social media and content creation strategy. His take? Expertise is closer to home than you might think.
“You don’t need a social media expert to participate on the Web in a meaningful way,” Seth writes. “The people in your organization have the knowledge and the skills to be a part of your social media strategy.”
Instead of outsourcing the work to an agency or “marketing,” you should be getting your team involved in the conversation–after all, social media is about the connection between your customers and you, not your marketing division. The good news is, you can get the ball rolling quickly. Here’s a sample from Seth’s two-day “boot camp” for social media and content marketing:
Session 4. Brainstorm.
With everyone in a room, get a bunch of sticky pads and start asking about the “silly” questions your customers ask. (Why silly questions? Because they’ll break the ice and get the ball rolling.) Write one question on each note and stick it to the wall. Keep writing down customer questions until the wall is filled. Make sure to pick nonparticipants out of the crowd and elicit some answers from them. I’m sure everyone has fielded a seemingly silly question from a customer.
Session 5.
Rank the questions in some order of frequency, with the most asked questions at the top. Combine any duplicates.
Session 6.
Starting with your most asked questions, do some role-playing with your team to start thinking about answers. The idea is to show the group that everyone in the organization has expertise in answering customer questions.
Session 7.
Compile the top 100 questions. These will be your first 100 content topics. Give everyone a pad of paper and ask them to brainstorm some answers to the top questions.
For the full article and the complete agenda for Seth’s social media boot camp, click here.
