Implementing a social media campaign needs thought and much planning to ensure the end outcome is the desired one:

Initial research: Find out what people are saying about your brand on the most popular social networks for your country as well as general business information. Track and monitor what is said and check out competition, find out what they are doing and record anything interesting (search results, feedback etc), which you may be able to implement at a later stage in the process.

Goals: What goals are already set in your business? What is it you want to achieve? Have you achieved it yet? How can social networking and a social campaign help/assist you to achieve your goals?
Research how you will achieve your goals and how you will track each step you have made in order to achieve a positive outcome or to tailor it to work better. Ensure the goals you set out to achieve are monitored closely so you can make the most impact on your campaign.

Tools: Try out the range of different tools on the web, discover which tools best suit the needs for your reporting and meet the needs of your goals, use several if that suits the needs of helping you to achieve your goal – creating a mix gives the best of every world – always research for new innovative tools on a regular basis as there are APIs being created all the time!

Performance measuring: There are many ways in which you can measure your performance – using tools on the web which will track your social media campaigns or develop your own in-house tools, monitor this on a regular basis so you can adapt your strategy to achieve your goals – remember – the results may not be what you’d hoped they would be.

Reporting: Create your own reports using the data you have gathered along the way, ALWAYS include positive and negative remarks as they provide a basis for development or help choose which direction needs to be tailored, the positive will show where you have got the direction right to help achieve your set goal and strategy.

An important factor is to remember that a social media strategy is not set in stone, it can be changed! Once you start your social campaign it is very difficult to go backwards if you have a sudden change of mind or direction. Make sure your research is thorough and you are confident with all you have set out to do – there is always plenty of help to be found so don’t be afraid to seek it out!

* Figure plucked out of the air for purely illustrative purposes

If you are suffering from hayfever (like me and 50% of my colleagues), there’s a good chance that you might mention it on Twitter and Kleenex (one of the major tissue brands) is exploiting this potential buzz with a Twitter-based marketing campaign…how are they doing this and is their Twitter marketing successful?

Kleenex are currently monitoring Tweets where people talk about their hayfever and replying with the friendly messages that ask people to share their hayfever experiences to build a map of where the sufferers are across the UK.

This is a nice way of using Twitter’s real-time information and capability to create, or big up, a current buzz topic.

They’ve actually put some thought into this, so they are technically promoting their campaign rather than their products. You can all too easily imagine a clumsy campaign with crass replies like “Gesundheit…you need a tissue LINK”

The aim is that they will
a) Have a valid news story about the nature of hayfever – of great interest to medical professionals and the poor people with allergies.
b) Have a valid story about Twitter being used in an innovative way – of interest to Tweeters, marketers and geeks.

So far I like this, but while writing this post, I’m doing some experiements.

Twice today I’ve tweeted about anti-histamines then I tried #sneeze and #sniff and #tissue– still no response. Come on Kleenex (or your marketing company) – broaden your search terms!

How do you feel about being contacted in this way by Twitter marketers?

Are you running this campaign? It would be great to hear how well it goes…

Update – they are following me now!