So you’ve created a facebook page, Twitter account and you’ve started a blog and downloaded the latest i-phone application. But now what? Will the right people see the content you’ve created and if so, can you keep them engaged in your brand?

While designers continue to create tools to compete and keep up with the latest social media craze, marketers struggle to determine how to leverage their brand amongst all the social media clutter. To properly utilize the widgets, pages and other tools that you’ve created, you have to make sure you have a strategy behind it all, and you’re likely to need a little public relations. To truly gain leverage from social media, we’ve identified a game plan to help you gain awareness for your brand. Maven has created a social media 101 presentation as well.

Before your start social networking, create a plan. It’s important to set clear, measurable objectives for your social media plan. Why should your brand create or even take part in an online community? How will that brand be represented in these communities? What is the goal of engaging in social media? Is it to receive feedback from an exclusive group, drive traffic to your web site or raise awareness? No matter what the reason, define the “why” before the “what”.

Get a grip on what tools your target audience is using. Now that you have the why, it’s important to look at all the tools and figure out what’s appropriate for your brand. In order to do this, it’s important to look at who your target audience is. Will they read a blog that you create? Are your customers using Twitter and facebook? Will photos and videos help them to better engage with your brand? Do some research to see what the statistics for each tool show on who the users are. LinkedIn for example may be more appropriate for a professional audience compared to facebook or Myspace. You need to fully understand your target audiences and why those audiences are important to your company’s success.  This step is often overlooked, which can result in a disconnected campaign, product launch or PR fiasco.

Once you’ve done your research, determine how many of these tools you can actually manage. Good PR strategies usually employ a number of diverse tactics to reach target audiences, including incorporating social media to build online communities, thought leadership and meet influencers. Social networking has become such an important marketing tool for companies, that now jobs are being created to maintain a company’s brand proactively and reactively. That said, managing these tools is a full-time job, and most companies don’t have the resources to do that. Therefore, prioritize which tools are most important to reach your target audiences and concentrate on those.  However, don’t forget to regularly stay on top of other social media tools to see what the public is saying about your brand.

Maintain your brand. While easy access and interconnectivity are huge advantages of social media, control is something that is hard to maintain. You may have strong messaging, the best brand identity and the most innovative content in cyberspace, but if you don’t know where your target audiences are talking to each other online, you’ll never get their attention. Likewise, if that same target audience is bad-mouthing your brand online, than you’re likely to see things spiral out of control. Therefore engaging your fans and followers to help shape your product or service can be invaluable.  Comcast is a great example of a company that reaches its customers complaints directly through @comcastcares on Twitter. Rather than shying away from negative comments, Comcast addresses them directly by answering their questions and concerns rather than letting unhappy customers fester. While you might not be ready to executive your strategy, the first thing you can do is reserve your space in facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. so that someone else doesn’t try and misrepresent your company or create a name that dilutes your brand.

Manage the crowd but don’t control it. Some of the best brand interactions throughout social media communities are those that are organic. The point of a community is not to be directed by the brand manager, but rather to create a comfortable decentralized space that allows all members to interact and be their own authors.  That said, it is important to have a community leader that helps generate and guide the conversations among members of the community who is transparent and authentic and knows how to allow the community to develop its own identity.

Measure your impact. While it can be difficult to truly determine your ROI from your social media presence, there are few checks and balances that can help you to better understand how effective your campaign is working. A few examples on Twitter are an increase in followers, direct messages and retweets; web traffic can be analyzes using Google analytics; blogs can be measured by the number of comments or references to posts on other blogs; and the increase in customer and employee engagement which can be determined through surveys or questionnaires. Remember for maximum ROI, “build communities” instead of “doing communications.”

Much has been written about social media recently, including an article in the New York Times that discusses the impact social media can have on smalls businesses. The article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/business/smallbusiness/23twitter.html?_r=1