The Social Media Marketing Book

Chapter 10. Strategy, Tactics, and Practice

Introduction

Strategy and tactics are inseparable. You can't design a strategy without deep, firsthand knowledge of the tactics you'll be using, and tactics are aimless without a strategy to guide them. In the preceding eight chapters, I introduced you to eight different categories of social media tools and how you can leverage them for marketing. Now it's time to start thinking about them as parts of your whole marketing mix.

If you've been doing other kinds of marketing for your business, you'll have some understanding of your "brand" and positioning in your market. This is your vision, and your social media strategy should fit with your established identity. But don't let the dead hand of history limit the new ideas you're willing to try out or the risks you're willing to take. One of the worst mistakes a new social media marketer will make is to apply the same strategies from the offline broadcast world to the social Web.

Before you launch into a social media conversation, listen. As you do when joining a new forum, lurk in every medium you're going to enter to get a sense of the rules and customs, and of who the influential people are.

Figure 10-1. I entered "zarrella" for the keyword I wanted to monitor in Yahoo! Pipes.