I run the risk here of regurgitating the advice of a thousand articles on the subject of customer engagement.  But, for the sake of continuity, I’m going to do it anyway.

I’ve already posited that we’ve come a long way from the closed system of customer interactivity that we saw in the first decade of e-commerce and online marketing.  What was once a “pushed” model of information sourced from the marketing offices of Brand X, is now in the process of being replaced by a social model of product review, awareness and selection.

So, what do you do about it?  Here is my gratuitous and highly redundant list of best practices to set you up for at least a chance at success in the social space.

• Explain to Me Why:  If you can’t answer the basic question about “why” you want to get social with your audience, then stop.  Figure it out.  Be able to explain it to anyone in 10 seconds or less.  Once you can answer this question (and answer it well), then you are probably better off than ½ the companies out there today.
• Know the Channels:  Face it, if you don’t know how Twitter and Facebook work, you are setting yourself up to fail.  Understand what the opportunities might be in the leading social channels.  Understand how the platforms work and, most importantly, understand how and why your audiences might be using them.
• Decide What You Want to Listen For:  Are you looking for general product feedback?  Concerned about what’s being said about your brand?  Want product development ideas?  Want to know what your competition is doing?  Decide what you want to look for.  Listen.  Likely, someone is talking about your product or service somewhere.
• Identify Customers and Prospects:  Find customers in the social channels…you know, the ones who are talking about products and services that they already own.  If they are mentioning you, they are giving an opinion.  Identify the detractors.  Identify the evangelists.  Listen.  Find out where prospects are hanging out online.  See what activities they are conducting, and what they might be saying about their needs.
• Gauge Social Permission:  Once you’ve identified where your audiences are engaged, see if there is an opportunity to contribute to the dialogue.  In other words, are you welcome here?  For a great blog post and opinion about this, read How Marketing Will Kill Social Media
• Have a Monitoring Plan:  So, now you know the who’s, what’s and where’s.  Keep an ear on it by having a plan to monitor the conversations.  Specifically, know what conversation triggers you are looking for, and what sentiments you might want to react to.  Keep listening, and bring the verbatims into your decision-making processes.
• Define Success:   How are going to know when your social efforts pay off?  Are you using a traditional ROI calculation?  If so, good luck.  It’s time to question how you are measuring investment:value ratios, and what metrics you are going to use to define a successful social strategy.  There is a great article here about where the market is on measuring social ROI.
• Have a Strategy:  Your approach to customers and prospects will be quite different.  Also, approaches to customer types (evangelist, detractor, etc.) will be quite different.  Decide how you will engage your audience types, and through which channels.  How will crises be managed?  What is the process of converting those with neutral opinion to evangelists?  Prospects to customers?  You wouldn’t be random in any other marketing or sales related initiatives.  Don’t be random in social.
• Identify Ownership & Resources:  Chances are your plan will touch many different operational groups in your organization.  Are you clear about who owns it?  Do you have the multi-disciplinary resources to support it?  Do they have the bandwidth and communication skills you need to make your social programs successful?  If they don’t, outsource…or don’t do it at all.
• Build Social Equity:  It takes time and energy to make social media work for you.  You need to take the time to establish trust-based relationships wherever possible.  You need to provide valuable insight and opinion at the right time, in the right place.  Be informative, responsive, transparent and relevant.
• Measure Success:   As above, this is a toughie, but on everyone product marketer’s well-conceived question list for social media.  For my $0.02, see my post about Measuring Social Media Effectiveness.