First and foremost, let me state that this post is just an introduction to a Social Media Strategy, – and as such, will quote a lot from other authoritative sources in the field. Among those experts that helped elaborate about this issue are well-known Web Strategist and Gurus like :

• Jeremiah Owyang
• Brian Solis
• Sparkplug blog, by Wendy Piersall
• Chris Brogan

First of all, let’s take a look at why should we need to learn more about Social Media and utilizing it in your Public Relations strategy. There are so many apparent reasons for this, but among the most interesting ones are :

• Mainstream media is increasingly looking to social media to connect with site visitors
• Mainstream media is using sites like Digg, del.icio.us and Netscape to source content. and ideas for their own articles/news stories .
• Search Engines pay attention – the posts that do well on social media sites rank extremely well – and nearly instantly. This also influences your overall site rank (I can only say this second part speculatively, can anyone confirm?).
• Site exposure to new readers/visitors that would never find your site otherwise.
• Significantly increased Technorati and Alexa ranks which translates into higher advertising revenues
• The ‘Secondary Gain” includes all of the above, plus an influx of activity from many smaller social media sites such as DogDott, PopURLs, YCombinator, DiggRiver, DiggMirror/DuggTrends, and many others.

To be more concise, Chris Brogan sums it up succinctly as this list of goals :

• Increase customer base.
• Generate leads.
• Drive sales.
• Build awareness.
• Make money from your content.
• Establish thought leadership.
• Educate customers.
• Customer-source part of your product development.
• Reach new channels of customers.
• Improve internal communication.

Seems obvious ? Indeed. But there are some more important factors to remember before you devise your company’s Social Media PR Strategy. The essential things-to-remember must include :

• Listening: implement at least a rudimentary listening platform. We’ll cover this in a later post.
• Communications: build a starting place to hold your conversations. And by this, I mean a blogging platform.
• Methods: determine the mix of content you intend to create, and build workflow around it.
• Community: most social media strategies have to address community and how you will embrace the people you seek to gather around your business.
• Neighbors: develop a plan to reach out to others in your community, comment, and share.
• Outposts: develop social network outposts where you can communicate with other communities, and also share the way back to your own platform.
• Marketplace: if your strategy involves making money, build a marketplace external to your community. Keep these separate.
• Attention: learn how to build awareness and encourage relationships with the media you’re making.

I encourage you to dig more about this if you aspire to succeed in using Social Media as part of your PR strategy. As I said in the beginning of this post, there are some valuable written gems ( read : blog posts ) out there. Read them up. You can start with the following well-written advices from the experts :

• “10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations” by Jeremiah Owyang

• “The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships” by Brian Solis

• “An Introduction to Social Media Strategy and Socially Driven Content“ from Sparkplug

• And finally, “Starting a Social Media Strategy” from Chris Brogan