What's Top of List in Your Social Media Implementation Plan?

Sanofi-Aventis recently experienced a FaceBook fiasco and learned from the experience (listen to this podcast: "What Has Sanofi-Aventis Learned from Its Facebook Experience?"). In fact, it probably learned more from that experience than it learned from reaching out to people like me who were asked to provide some insights.

IMHO, every company should have a social media implementation plan in place. It may not prevent crises like the one S-A was faced with, but it will help your company deal with them.

To determine the relative importance of elements of a social media plan, I started a survey that asks respondents to indicate how important the following action items are in implementing a social media plan:

• Unblock corporate access to social media so employees can monitor and use applications such as Facebook while at work
• Have a sustained vision/goal
• Become a dialogue company - learn how to listen and respond, not just push messages out
• Get everyone - including marketing, regulatory people, corporate communications, C-level execs - on board
• Develop guideposts, internal and external standard operating procedures
• Train people who will be interacting directly with consumers
• Develop a moderation strategy
• Marshall necessary resources - use the best tools available
• Create a social media Tsar position to oversee all the company's SM projects to assure compliance with guidelines

Respondents can answer

• Should be TOP of list
• Very important, near top of list
• Somewhat important
• Good idea
• Ambivalent (not sure how important)
• Near bottom of list
• At very bottom of list

These items were suggested to me at an interactive session I moderated at a recent industry conference. The results to date from this survey are presented in the following chart:

Please take the survey and tell me what you think: