Six Ps of Planning – Prior Planning & Preparation Prevents Poor Performance

In my previous post on Social Media Process – PLEASE – I introduced the first Magic Hexagon looking at the process of being actively involved in Social Media.  I don’t want to call it a campaign.

 

 

This Process – PLEASE – covered Planning, Listening, Executing, Access-orising, Searching and Evaluating.

 

 

 

 

 

I now want to take you down into more detail – the next level of Magic Hexagons below this one.  These look like this.

 

 

 

In this post, I am going to discuss the Planning Magic Hexagon in more detail.

I have identified six core segments (of course!) and these are shown in the Planning Magic Hexagon.

The first key decision is to decide what subject matter you want to cover.  This can be personal or professional.  The best advice that I have been able to glean is the following.

How ever you come at Social Media you need to be original and to create great CONTENT.  You should be passionate and expert, ideally at the same time.  You should come at Social Media because you feel you have something to contribute to the conversation rather than just joining the conversation for the sake of it. This is not intended to put you off but to encourage you to think about what you are good at – and everyone is good at something.  It is important to remember above all that you are sharing this with your audience.

Think about the WHY?  What is the objective of your Social Media engagement.

It can be financial – to make money. Nothing wrong with that.  At the other end of the spectrum, it might purely be for the pleasure of getting out there, it could be personal – to engage more, or professional – to raise your personal profile and develop your personal brand.

What ever your objective is you need to work it out – how can you travel if you do not know the destination?

Your next task is to consider carefully your Audience.  Without stating the obvious, you should ensure that you align the objective with the audience.  Furthermore, the style of your blog should be appropriate.  Are you going to focus on one part of the age spectrum or will your content have a broad appeal?  Consider where and how you might reach your audience? Ultimately the aim is to bring them back to your site, but you will need to know where to find them.

What medium will you use to put out your message.  Blogs started out as written text but now platforms such as wordpress make images, audio recording and video all possible.  They can be used on their own or in combination.  Making your message multi-media will certainly improve its appeal and traction.  You will need to consider the search engine optimisation (SEO) implications but that is a subject for another blog.

You must be prepared to make the time commitment.  Presenting your subject, to your target audience to achieve your objective – takes time.  Time relates to commitment, consistency and quality.  Making the commitment over a period of months or years.  This is not a one week project.  Consistency is important to your audience.  They want to grow with you and learn from you.  You must therefore feed them with regular and high quality content. Again its that CONTENT word back again.

Here at last is some good news.  The plethora of free sites, sources and tools means that today this does not have to be an expensive undertaking.  I will look at the details of hows and wherefores in future posts but apart from your time/opportunity cost, nearly everything (or indeed possibly everything) you need to do can be done for free, including all the software, hosting, tools, platforms and applications you will need to reach your audience.

So there you have it – the Six Minute Strategist’s introduction to planning YOUR Social Media engagement.

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