It’s clear that more and more companies are getting the green light from their leadership teams to get started in social media. That’s right…you’ve fought long and hard and patiently explained the rationale. You’ve shown examples (including a bunch from the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki) and statistics and even set out some clear objectives. Whatever you did…it worked. You’ve got the green light. Question is: what now?

When it’s finally time to get started, here are the simple steps you need to follow.

9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media

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1. Define business objectives
2. Monitor with intent
3. Choose the proper platforms
4. Secure and create profiles
5. Learn the lingo
6. Dive in
7. Go offline
8. Track your progress
9. Automate

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1. Define business objectives

No, you can’t skip this one. It’s probably the least “sexy” of the nine steps, but it’s also probably the most important and will help define what you do in the next 8 steps. Ultimately, it will be the difference between a successful social media effort and a failure. There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself as part of this step.

First: Why social media? Why now?

If you don’t have good reasons for this beyond “we just want to try some stuff,” then forget it. You’ll probably be better off spending your time and money elsewhere.

Second: What do you want to accomplish?

This is a bit of a trick question. DO NOT define a “social media strategy.” You should not have a social media strategy. Instead, you should brand objectives. This might  be something like “increase market share to 25% by December 2010,” for example. In order to achieve these objectives, you’ve put together a set of strategies that will get you to those objectives. To deliver those strategies, you’ve come up with a number of tactics. Social media is one of those tactics. Nothing more, nothing less. If you create a social media strategy, it’s highly likely that your social media efforts won’t line up with your overall business objectives. This will make it even harder to measure the impact of these efforts or will outright fail. Perhaps you need social media, perhaps you don’t. Look at it as part of a larger marketing plan to figure this out.

2. Monitor with intent

I’ve talked quite a bit about social media monitoring on this blog including Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring and Monitor This, Forget That — “The Monitoring Continuum.” Catch up on those two posts to get my entire take on monitoring. For those looking for the short version, monitoring is important, but you need to ensure that you have a purpose for that monitoring. One important quote:

“The point [is] not that everyone should truly forget about monitoring, but that they should forget about it if they don’t plan on doing anything with what they find. In other words, if you’re not going to respond to discussions or don’t have a FORMAL plan to use what you find in some research setting (presumably to inform some brand strategy), then you’re wasting your money. Monitoring for the sake of monitoring or to “see what people are saying about your brand” (my favorite consultant quote) is useless. It’s a bit like getting punched in the face to see if it hurts. I’ll save you the time…it does.”

Of course, since you’re ready to get started in social media, you have a reason to monitor. First, you need to get a gist for the volume and tone of discussions about your brand, but more importantly, you want to figure out where most and the most significant discussions are taking place. That’s a formal goal. A simple one, but still a formal goal.You don’t need to spend a fortune on this. Instead, for this purpose, you can rely on free tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, or Who’s Talkin.

That leads us to the next step.

3. Choose the proper platforms

This is where you’re going to pick the platforms where you’ll participate. There are a number of factors you’ll need to consider here. First, the discussion volume you measured in step 2 should be a big factor. Second, you need to consider where your target audience is online. It’s likely that these two will overlap, but not necessarily. What digital tools (including social media) are your key targets using online? Some of you know that I have a “mini-book” in the works that will help with this step (tentatively called “Digital Savviness”). If you want to know more about this or be informed when it’s completed, head over to the Digital Savviness page.

Another consideration here is how you might be received if you do participate in discussion. Are outside brands welcome? Is there a formal way for them to participate? Check this all out before you dive right in and start chatting it up. The final consideration is your risk tolerance. Each different social media platform has a slightly different risk profile. I’m referring to regulatory risks here. Specifically, the more open the platform, the more risk. For example, it might look like this, with riskier platforms on the left. The less you can control the discussion, the greater the risk.

Determine what your company’s risk tolerance looks like and factor that into your platform decision.

4. Secure and create profiles

Another seemingly simple, but somehow regularly overlooked step in the process is this one. Once you’ve settled on the platforms, then your first step needs to be to lock down your brand names. What you’re trying to prevent is squatters from stealing your brand names and, at best, locking you out or, at worst, posing as you while doing significant damage to your brand. Go out to the sites you’ve targeted and see if your brand names are available. If so, great. Secure the profiles now. Not next week or tomorrow…now. You’ll thank me later. If your brand name is taken by someone else, you’ll need to dig a bit further to see if you can secure it from them. Each platform has different rules here with some being more willing to help you get back your trademarks and others just the opposite. If you don’t do this early, you end up with this:

Suffice it to say, this isn’t the actual Pfizer (though the image of “big pharma” enjoying Family Guy makes me smile). For the record, the actual Pfizer account on Twitter is @pfizer_news.

Rather than going to each site one by one, you can use a service like KnowEm, which will secure your name on hundreds of social media sites (for a fee). This is great for locking in profiles even on those sites that you might not have any intent of using at this point, but you never know what you might want to do in the future. Better safe than sorry.

After you lock in the right user name, spend some time on this next part: creating profiles. I can’t express the importance of this enough. What I’m referring to is completing those profile boxes like “About you” and “Websites” and adding a picture of yourself (or your brand). You know the ones I mean. You probably haven’t done this on most sites. There are a number of reasons why you should. First, on Twitter for example, many people will not follow someone who does not have a competed profile. This means picture, description, and website (like mine). Second, most of these profiles on social media platforms are indexed by search engines. If you’re like most companies, you can use all the help you can get in the way of search engine optimization. Take it where you can get it.

5. Learn the lingo

Nothing will end your social media foray quicker than not playing by the rules. That is, you need to participate in way that follows the accepted norms of that site. (There are a bunch of other rules that healthcare folks need to follow. You can get them from this presentation: Annotated Version of Healthcare and Social Media…Know the Rules (1308 downloads).) A big piece of this is learning the terms of service (TOS) for the site you’re interested in. These TOS documents will include things like what’s considered spam and other obvious violations, but it will also cover more subtle, but equally important guidelines.

Case in point. If you are planning to edit your company’s article on Wikipedia, do you know how to properly do it? Sure, you can simply go and edit it, but I can assure you that your changes will be undone almost instantly. If it’s your company, according to the accepted norms of Wikipedia, you have a conflict of interest and should follow the guidelines they clearly define. This explains that you shouldn’t edit the page directly, but rather should use the discussion (talk) pages and include this tag on your entry:

If you dont’ follow these rules, you’ll quickly find the community “mob” making you into an outcast. Beyond rules, you need to understand the way people talk and the jargon they use. If you don’t know what an “RT” or the “#” symbol means in Twitter, study up before you get involved. If you don’t know, look it up. Even better, observe some of the community’s leaders. You’ll also find that these leaders (in general) are open to helping new people use the site correctly, so ask questions. They’ll appreciate that you value their opinion and that you want to play by the rules.

6. Dive in

We’ve come to the fun part. After months (or years) of wrangling with your regulatory team and studying the different communities, you’re finally ready to actually go online and participate. One major recommendation for this step is to participate personally first. That is, try out everything you’ve learned as a regular person and not a brand. Do this with using personal accounts. This will give you a little leeway to make some mistakes without damaging your brand.

When it comes to finally participating on behalf of your brand, there’s one simple rule that I like to follow when figuring out what to do or say and what not to do or say. The “Golden Rule” tells us that we should treat others as we’d like to be treated. My social media “Platinum Rule” is basically the same, but with a key difference. Here it is: Act as if YOU are watching. That’s right. You. If you’ve gotten this far in getting your idea approved, you’re probably pretty smart and know a bit about marketing. You’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. You’ve seen it as a marketer and as a consumer. So, here’s what you do. Take a look at what you’re planning on doing and think how you’d honestly react if another brand did the same thing. Would you roll your eyes and quickly log out or would you find it interesting and useful? If you’re honest with yourself, you can be your best critic here, but it requires being honest. Bring your normal dose of skepticism and cynicism just as you would as a consumer and apply that to what you’re about to do. How does it fit?

If you still can’t tell, then send it to me and I’ll give you the honest truth.

7. Go offline

After you’ve had some success and are starting to get a following and some good reactions from your social media efforts its time to take it offline. I know that sounds like counterintuitive advice after all the effort you’ve put in to get online, but hear me out. I’m not saying to abandon your online efforts. Rather, I’m saying you should augment them with some offline work as well. While the relationships we form solely online can be useful, there’s still no substitute for meeting in person like humans have for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s simpler to communicate and often easier to build deeper levels of trust since you can see and read someone’s behavior and create deeper mental connections as well.

That’s not to say that you should invite all of your Twitter followers over to your house or all of your brand’s Facebook Fans to your headquarters, but from time to time you can bring together several key influencers from your network for a face-to-face, in-depth discussion. You can do this when you travel to different cities by putting together a “Tweetup” or making it a formal meeting with other members of your company. Either way, know that you can only go so far in a relationship with another person without meeting that person in real life.

8. Track your progress

I won’t get into how specifically to measure your social media efforts here, that’s a series of separate posts. The bottom line is that you need to measure your efforts opposite pre-defined goals. The pre-defined part is the key here. It’s possible to meet just about any goal that you come up with after the fact, so those don’t count. Whatever you choose to use as objectives for your efforts, define them ahead of time and create a plan to track your progress against them. This will allow you to not only gauge success and failure, but also to make adjustments while you’re still running the program. Keep the good (and add more) and throw out the bad. A good measurement plan will give you guidance on how to make changes on the fly.

If you’re looking for some advice on how to measure ROI for social media, check out this Mashable post that contains a ton of great resources. If you’re stuck on how to measure your social media efforts, here are 100 different options.

9. Automate

Last but not least…automation. While some of you are breathing a sigh of relief that the hard work is over, I’m not talking about that kind of automation. I’m not recommending you simply run your RSS feeds into all your social media profiles and walk away. Quite the opposite. What I mean by automate is to make social media participation automatic. There are three key parts to this: integrate social media as a standard marketing channel, implement tools that make it easier for more people to participate and manage, and make participation a standard part of your day.

As I’ve already said, don’t create a social media strategy, but rather add it to your list of tactics to deliver the strategies you already have in place. Use tools like CoTweet for Twitter to allow multiple people to use and manage one account (and provide better service to consumers). Lastly, you’re participation (and your brand’s) can’t be a one time affair. It needs to be ongoing. The best way to do this is to make it a standard part of your day. If you’re one of those people that only look at email at set times of the day, set a time for social media as well. If you aren’t one of these people, then find another set time. This will both ensure that you actually do it and also limit the amount of time, so you aren’t spending too much. Everything in moderation.

Those are the nine steps. Follow them and you’ll be among the best. I’ve created a PowerPoint presentation that covers the information in this post, so that you can share it with your colleagues at your next company meeting (or whatever you think makes sense). It’s basically the hugely abridged version of this post. If you’re interested in getting a copy,head over to the Dose of Digital Fan Page on Facebook. Fans get all the content from this blog plus sneak previews and exclusive content like this PowerPoint. You can get the link to download the presentation right from the Dose of Digital Facebook Fan page (check out the Wall).

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring
2. 10 Things I’m Tired of Hearing About Pharma Social Media
3. The Seven Uses of Social Media in Business — The 7 “C”s