Most top ten social media lists are about technologies. They’re all about Twitter, Twellow, Facebook and Friendfeed. In this post I’d like to give you an alternative top ten list to make your social media activities a success.

Yes, it’s yet another “Top Ten” but I think you’ll find this one is a bit different, especially considering this post. For a while now I, along with many others, have been banging on about how it’s important to consider the big picture in social media and how it’s never about the technology. This conviction is reflected in the list.

Most of this list was relevant 100 years ago and will still be relevant in 100 years. Whether you’re a Walmart, a Nike, a vast public sector organisation or a baker of speciality bread in Chichester, if you put all this stuff into action then you’re likely to see some great results.

10 – Know Your Audience

Who do we want to converse with? Where are they right now? and when we do find them, why will they want to talk to us and our brand?

It’s easy to forget that behind all the posts, tweets, comments and profiles live organic, squishy things called people. These people not only smell organic but act organic. They need to have reasons to converse and to come back for more. Funnily enough these reasons are generally along the same lines as their criteria in the real world. So if we always exceed expectations here we will have a fighting chance of success. Remember, it’s about quality here, not quantity.

In other words, always consider the ‘who’, the ‘why’, and the ‘where’ before the ‘how many’.

9 – Sweat

We’ve got to be willing to work hard and reach out time after time, day after day. It’s important to be active in our chosen networks and communities and not to rely on automated tools or expect to be able to use old ‘push’ broadcast and branding techniques. Because a lot of this happens in front of the screen, many people seem to think that we can just push some buttons and the clever applications will do the rest.

All real-world networks and relationships need nurturing with a human touch and our online presence requires even more effort in this area, not less. We need to stay away from auto responders and be willing to allocate resource to fully engage.

Take the online shoe shop zappos.com as an example. They diverted all efforts into developing customer service, with 400 out of 700 of their staff actively and directly engaging with their customers on Twitter (“We are a service company that happens to sell…..”). This development of relationships combined with incredible customer service sweat ensured the creation of a $1 billion (yes) word-of-mouth marketing success story.

*UPDATE* Hear what Jane Judd, a senior manager at Zappo’s customer loyalty team has to say about their efforts here

8 – Give It Time

It’s important to recognise that, however fast news can spread in the World 2.0, it will take time to build up our online relationships in that same space. News, rumours and virals are short term flashes whereas relationships have a much longer lifecycle and can be far more substantial.

If CxOs procrastinate about getting involved in social media because of the possibility of negative sentiment then they need to be shown that the negative stuff is going to exist out there whether they take part in the conversation or not. Also, news and rumour is hardly ever more powerful than relationships with strong foundations (watch this space for a post expanding on that soon). If we get to grips with this early then we can plan now and be ahead of the competition in the future. Build the foundations and things will be a lot easier when building online relationships using social media becomes a horrible land-grab. Which leads us on to…

7 – Have Patience

Deciding to make moves in this new Wild West online is just the beginning. Once the decision is made we have to have patience. It takes months to develop in this space and we have to be careful not to get impatient and get messy. If we keep engaging in a meaningful and valuable way, being open and genuine, interested and interesting, then we will be building solid foundations.

6 – Have Guts and be Forward Thinking

Whether we’re a small cog in a big corporate wheel or a one-man band, we’re the ones who can see and hear what’s coming and we’re the ones to make the changes happen. It’s up to us to stick our heads above the trees – not just internally in our organisations but also out in the big wide world. The area of social media is already big news but there’s still huge inertia. Overcoming that takes guts backed up by forward thinking.

This stuff isn’t going away and the wave (no Google pun intended) is developing faster than anyone could have imagined only 10 years ago. How steep do you want the learning curve to be when you finally hop on? Knowing what we know, there’s a far higher chance that, with our strategy and resource in place, we can beat the benchmark if we act soon.

5 – Use Eyes and Ears

Reading, listening and understanding. We may have defined our target audience but do we listen to them on a regular basis? Do we truly understand what they want and what they’re saying? This does not have to be done using some crazy, expensive, full blown research commission (we’ll just have to make sure we get the same budget allocation next year by spending money on something else, won’t we!). Grunig and Hunt’s 1993 public relations theory speaks about two-way symmetric communications at the heart of PR excellence. We’re now in a multi-way comms environment that has extended and supercharged Grunig and Hunt’s theory. To capitalise on it we’re going to need to pay close attention to those feedback channels and this is going to take a lot more of number 9 (see above).

The more we listen, the more valuable our interactions will be and the better our relationships will be. This in turn will affect our business and allow us to meet the needs and wants of our customers. Not rocket science. Also, the better our relationships become, the better positioned and more resilient we will be to withstand and tackle any of the dreaded negative, viral online PR.

4 – Know Your Strategy

Seeing as this is the social Media KISS* blog then I’m pleased strategy has made it into the top ten! My personal thinking is that it’s better to do something with social media than nothing but it’s ten times better to be strategic i.e. before taking the plunge, consider your objectives, consider your audience(s), listen to what’s already going on, pick your priorities and get everyone bought-in to the plan. Also pay special attention to resource constraints and success measures.

Things will change and we will have to adapt but build that flexibility into the strategy, not out of it. With this thinking in place we can be confident in our consistency and can adapt our activities collectively within the organisation.

3 – Expose Yourself and Show Transparency and Empathy

Please don’t dust off your flasher-macs, but by ‘expose’ I do mean a willingness to show our true selves to the world. We need to participate in a way that is much more than an exchange of business cards or a push of information about products. The only way to engage meaningfully is to offer something of value and to do that we need to expose our valuable assets, whether that’s knowledge, data, culture or entertainment, while showing our personality too.

This is potentially the biggest challenge and some businesses are understandably fearful of rejection or damage to perception of the brand. The arrival of social media is a bit like the arrival of websites into the mainstream. Back in the 90s many big brands were saying “well….we can see why some companies might have a use for them but we won’t ever need one”. However customers pretty quickly expected every company to have an informative website. Not having one, or having a placeholder, was seen as backward and a bit of a snub. Well, history is repeating itself again.

Soon customers will expect all brands, big and small, to be active, open and participating. This doesn’t mean placing traditional push messages in social spaces, this means actively encouraging dialogue with the brand and providing something of value to keep the relationship engaging, worthwhile and valuable.

2- Monitor and Measure

We now have the ability to find out what people are talking about on a given topic at a given time using both free and paid-for tools. Make no mistake about it, this is incredibly important. It’s as if we’ve given a box that can eavesdrop on every phone call that people are having about a particular brand at a particular time and report back what they are saying. Put it like this to your old-school colleague and see if he has an ‘aha’ moment. In addition, not only can we eavesdrop but we can also participate, thank, correct and engage in those conversations too.

Whatever we choose to do, those connections and conversations and recommendations are going on online right now and will only get louder. Whatever your goals are, from customer acquisition through to online support, listen, measure and adjust. Plug that box in.

1- Be Authentic

The number one commodity online from now is trust. We tend to buy from brands we trust, unless forced to do otherwise, in which case we do it grudgingly and will quickly change as soon as an alternative comes along.

In our strategic document I think the number one objective is very likely to feature trust pretty significantly. The best way to develop trust is to be authentic. To be ourselves. To show personality. To say thank you. To say sorry. Hang on – this is all the stuff that’s important if you want to develop trust in the real world too, isn’t it? Well fancy that! So we don’t have to go looking for that ‘authenticity building’ piece of software? We can’t get that whizz-bang agency to write our blog for us? You mean punters can sniff out ghost-written tweets and blogs immediately? Exactly.

There’s no silver bullet. It’s not about numbers of followers to your Twitter stream. It’s about quality, authenticity and true engagement.

Good luck and let me know your thoughts.