Chapter 2

Hello everyone and thanks for reading my blog.  Just to define a few terms before we start, a marketing plan is pretty much a plan that takes into account the product, pricing, distribution, and promotional strategies that will help in the achievement of certain marketing objectives.  One reason why it is not successful to begin the trial phase without further research is because it is just a phase to test out social media, it doesn’t actually consider how effective these strategies are going to be later down the road.  This phase is meant more for learning a new way to communicate and so forth.  I think it would be beneficial to do the research and figure out what social media methods work best for the particular situation.  You need to know the targeted market and the way to approach them.  

There are three phases in the social media marketing maturity life cycle.  The first phase is the trial phase, which we just discussed above.  It consists of testing out social media platforms but not really considering how it can play a roll in the overall marketing plan.  Next, the transition phase occurs when more social media is happening but it is more s however, a more organized way of thinking starts to occur within the organization.  The third phase is the strategic phase.  At this point, a formal plan to use social media marketing strategies is put into place and it is more effective.  

Organizational structure is used in three ways to help support social media marketing.  The first way is through centralized structure.  The social media department report s to a CEO and they are responsible for all the social media activities that happen.  The problem with this is that all the social media activity may not be properly presented.  The second one is distributed structure.   All employees represent the brand and work social media into their roles.  This happens through training and used across the organization.  The down side to this is that the wrong message could be sent because any employee could respond.  The third is combination structure.  It involves both centralized  best practices and decentralized execution.  A committee or social media leaders is formed in order to make decisions on the social media position or voice.  

The seven steps to the social media strategic planning process is to conduct a situation analysis and identify key opportunities, state objectives, gather insight into and target one or more segments of social consumers, select the social media channels and vehicles, create and experience strategy, establish an activation plan using other promotional tools, and execute and measure the campaign.  

Hope this was helpful and informative.  See y’all next week

-Blake