“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter social media marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

Why Should They Care? – Danny Brown explains what a brand needs to do in social media, a space in which many brands are trying and saying the same things.

Key Takeaway: Making consumers care comes down to understanding what the brand can say that consumers will also care about. Brands can say a lot, but the key is identifying the relevant intersection of what a brand has to say and what has value in the lives of consumers. Both elements must exist. That’s the only way a brand will prove that it deserves consumer attention.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place – Digiday breaks down the challenges Facebook has with proving the value of its advertising.

Key Takeaway: Are Facebook ads effective? Are Facebook ads ineffective? The answer to both questions is sometimes. Facebook is losing the PR battle. Brands have been burned. Brands are skeptical. They don’t trust Facebook, and I’m wondering if the time is coming for Facebook to take a pro-brand stance.

Stop Skipping Strategy to Get to ROI – Danna Vetter outlines the necessity of establishing a social media strategy before determining ROI. He states, “…giving yourself no real direction or the accountability of a strategy, your channel has a high probability of dying a very public death, joined possibly by a hallow Twitter egg, months or years of inactivity, and, oh yeah, the company name.”

Key Takeaway: ROI cannot be an afterthought. It also can’t be a question that’s raised before a strategy is in place. What’s the ROI of Facebook? That question gets you nowhere if you don’t know what you hope to get out of Facebook. Determine the return you desire, and then evaluate your ability to deliver that return.

Small Business and Social Media Stats – AllTwitter featured an infographic on the impact of social media on small businesses. Stats including 73% of small business use social media and 81% of small businesses plan to increase their social media efforts make a good case for going social before being left behind.

Key Takeaway: Social media has evened the playing field with businesses. Both large and small businesses have opportunities to beat each other. Large businesses can appear to be smaller and more personalized, while small businesses can take their ability to deliver customized, expert information to their customers on an ongoing basis and at greater scale.

The Social Media Bubble Didn’t Pop – Mitch Joel puts perspective on CNN’s article regarding the popping of the social media bubble. He explains that social media is a blanket term that encapsulates very different kinds of companies, that businesses are looking in every corner to be social and that social media is very, very young. There’s time to evolve.

Key Takeaway: Social media has been classified by far too many as a “silver bullet” of sorts. It’s not. As Joel points out, the hype may be dying down. Expectations are being tempered, but the excitement is still there. That’s where we should be. Let social do what social does well, and don’t put it on too high of a pedestal.

Source: stock.xchngIt’s always so interesting to see and hear about the different approaches brands have taken to enter the social space. Sometimes the approach just comes out of nowhere. “Jimmy created a Facebook Page for us, so I guess it’s time to engage with our consumers!”

Oh boy… Brands that decide to hold their breath and jump right in often find themselves lost and in a situation that lacks direction, doesn’t generate results and requires a great deal of time and resources.

There’s nothing wrong with taking risks, but there is something wrong with taking risks without practicing risk management. Every time a brand executes a marketing tactic, it’s a risk, but for some reason when it comes to social media, planning is all too often thrown out the window.

The truth is social media planning starts with the same pieces of the puzzle that any marketing effort starts with: clear objectives and sound strategies, which come from a clear vision and lead to sound tactics.

As with any marketing effort, you want to make sure that:

Measurable goals are in place
Everyone understands the goals
Each department is on the same page and clear on roles and responsibilities
The end goal is clear and focused with alignment on timing, ownership and deliverables

Each piece builds on the piece before it, and if you skip one, something's not going to be quite right. Alright…let’s get started at the beginning.

The Vision

Social media offers attributes that no other media out there can. It also requires a different kind of attention and attitude. Determine what the purpose of social media is to your organization at the very beginning. Why social media? What will it help the organization be better at? Hopefully, there are some good answers, but feel free to be a little “out there” with lofty expectations. This is your vision, after all.

The Objectives

I’ve talked in the past about objectives a lot. These allow you to align on what it is you’re trying to accomplish.

The objectives need to be very specific (who are you targeting and what action is trying to be achieved), measurable (specific with numbers) and based on what the business can truly achieve within a specified time frame (put a date on this). The more specific the objectives, the easier success and ROI will be evaluated.

Objectives should also relate to overall short- and long-term objectives for the business as a whole. Social media can help with those! They shouldn’t be separate social media objectives only.

For example, “We will increase the number of customers referred to us by 15% by December 31.”

The Strategies

So you have the objectives in place. Now, you get to figure out how they’ll be achieved, but we’re not getting tactical here. We're simply talking about our general approach to achieving the objective(s). For example, with the objective above, the strategy might be, “Get our customers to share their product experiences with their social graphs.”

The Tactics (It’s Time to Do)

Now comes the fun the part—actually bringing the pieces together and doing something. Too often, this is the first thing brands jump to doing, which after seeing all of the upfront work that should be done, it’s not surprising to discover that those brands don’t see a great deal of success.

The tactics take your strategies and turn them into action. Tactics to help with the strategy above might be:

Start a social media referral program, encouraging consumers to write an honest, open review of our product by incentivizing them with a discount on an upcoming purchase.
Hold a photo contest with an application on our Facebook Page based on votes that allows consumers to post photos of themselves using our product in unique ways and solicit votes from their Facebook friends.

Start from the Beginning

Alright… please, forgive the lame examples.

The point is don’t jump into the deep end before you’re ready to swim. Get started at the shallow end and work your way there. Social media is no different than any other marketing effort. It requires planning with measurable objectives and clear strategies in place. The tactics are fun, but they’re a whole lot more effective with the upfront work completed first.