A Successful Social Media Strategy (A Post That Needs Work)

Someone recently asked me to share an example of a post that I considered to be poorly written. So, per their request here is an excerpt of something that I wrote and dislike.

Part of my real world existence involves daily discussions about how businesses can craft a successful social media strategy. Every one of these discussions begins in the same manner. We sit down and have a brief conversation about campaign objectives. Is it branding, is it lead generation, is it crisis PR etc.

Once we establish what the overall objective is we can start outlining goals and action items. Basically, it is not much different than putting together a report such as we did as school children. You develop an outline and follow it.

Now that is a very rudimentary explanation that doesn't take into account establishing benchmarks or constructing any sort of system of metrics that you can use to try and measure the success of your campaign. Metrics are important as they help give you guidelines that you can use to see if what you are doing is working, but it is also important not to overweight them.

I can't tell you how many conversations I have had with clients and prospective clients in which they tell me about these elaborate proposals and presentations that were made to them. Every one of them filled with the latest marketing jargon and gibberish.

That sort of stuff is nice, but I wonder how much of it is smoke and mirrors. If you ask me a lot of it is fluff and padding that is thrown into the pitch because they are not confident with their services. I won't present myself as being the best out there at what I do. Others are better and that is ok.

But I am effective and efficient and that is what I want in my social media strategy. I want to see a plan that I can understand and follow. I want to see simple metrics that