Social Media: Charlene Li's 5 Specific Business Goals

The How to Integrate Social Media Into Your Business Strategy Webcast was a valuable listen. Charlene Li* really clarifed how businesses can and should use social media and really got me excited about the possibilities of engagement. (View the Webcast here).

There were a lot of takeaways but for me the main one is Charlene's insistence on the importance of setting objectives for your business' use of social media and using them as a framework for all of your social media interactions.

She said that there are five social media goals for businesses and a business should pick one to focus on and do it really well before moving on to anything else.

Charlene Li's 5 Specific Business Goals for Social Media

• 1) to listen to customers;
• 2) to talk (as in having a conversation, not just blathering to oneself);
• 3) to be energizing - energizing your most passionate fans to do the talking for you;
• 4) to support people - Charlene gave the example of Comcast using Twitter Search to find people who are having problems with their products and offering them help;
• 5) to embrace - going beyond asking questions to implement suggestions.

And another big takeaway - if you don't know what you're doing there, get out of the space. If you don't have an objective and a strategy, you're just wasting your time.

What do you think? Is it necessary to focus on only one goal at a time? Are all of these goals even possible for small businesses? How might you know you were doing something really well and it was time to move on to another stage? How might you energize your business' fans?

*Charlene Li is the co-author of Groundswell and founder of Altimeter Group. Named "One of the Most Influential Women in Technology" by Fast Company magazine, she is a much sought-after speaker.

More on Social Media

• Poll: What Types of Social Media Do You Use?
• What is Social Media?
• Social Media Marketing
• How to Promote Your Business on Twitter

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