The 4 Must-Do Items for Social Media Startup

A friend of mine (and former colleague) is a public relations consultant in another market. She, like many of us in PR, is being asked for good counsel in social media for her PR client. She sent a note, asking me for quick basics to share with the client, and to give her a framework for what the client should be doing with social media.

Here are the four absolute musts for her client to be doing with social media, and the structure with which she should be building a plan to address her client’s needs:

1. Listening — they should be reading local bloggers and have RSS feeds set up/alerts to tell them when people are posting online, looking for key words and phrases that indicate people searching for their services — you can use Ice Rocket, Social Mention and Google Alerts to create feeds for good monitoring of the social web.
2. Connecting — whomever represents the company online needs to expand their social network as wide and deep as possible. That means ALL contacts uploaded to LinkedIn, a new list on Facebook for business connections, with all contacts uploaded there, a Facebook page for the business and exploring Tweepz to figure out who to follow in the community.
3. Engaging — this is what takes a lot of effort; replying to others, responding to those you’re following, in short, interaction!
4. Publishing — sharing the stories of the customers, the company, the vendors, etc. and news releases as well (and republishing content published by others, e.g., sharing links to news clips about the business.)

This is probably the quickest, simplest answer I can give for getting started with social media.