The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

Chapter 43. Your Implementation Plan

This chapter helps you:

• Define your personal social media strategy.

• Define a 12-month social media macro strategy for your business.

• Work through a six-step process for implementing your strategy.

Rich Senopole is a connector. He connects people to other people, businesses to other businesses, and experts to the people and businesses who need them. As executive director of the Maricopa Community College's Small Business Development Center (SBDC) in Phoenix, Arizona, he's worked with thousands of businesses, helping many become successful and watching some fail. Recently anointed "the small business guru" of the Southwest by a Phoenix business reporter, Senopole is not shy about the importance of having a social media strategy.

"Social media is probably one of the most important changes to have ever come about in business," says Senopole, a former marketing professor and experienced business owner himself, a combination that mixes just enough of the academic with the real world to make his perspective that much more valuable.

For years, either as an instructor of marketing or helping people learn to market, marketing has changed very little. You still have the five P's of marketing, you still have to do a marketing plan, you still have to do marketing research. What's really changed is the media that you have available to you to do marketing in a whole new way, and an affordable way. Social media means that you're not using the general media, and you're ...