The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

Chapter 42. Evaluate and Organize Existing Resources

This chapter enables you to:

• Introduce the Social Media Awareness Index to others at your company.

• Aggregate the numbers based on your colleagues' social media tool scorecards.

• Locate your social media starting point.

• Determine your company's social media readiness from a technology standpoint.

Here's what this chapter assumes: you have read all previous chapters and completed the exercises yourself but have not involved others at your company in the process. If you have involved others, congratulations. You're ahead of the curve. The goal of this chapter is to help you evaluate and organize your existing resources (and knowledge) prior to implementing a social media strategy. Depending on the size and structure of your business, we encourage you to involve as many people in your company as possible. Their experience, perspective, and capabilities can be quite valuable to the social media strategies that you ultimately implement. You will find that people in your company have different levels of social media awareness and different degrees of experience. It is likely that you already have active bloggers in your midst. You most likely have people whose daily lives already include Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and other social media applications. It's entirely possible that people within your company have outside relationships with your customers, suppliers, and vendors—relationships enabled by social networking tools. Many of these folks ...