As businesses struggle to understand and then leverage Social Media, we posit that there are 3 Core Principals to building an effective Social Media strategy. These Core Principles provide the subsequent framework to manage Social Media. Currently, most businesses tend to see Social Media only as a one-way marketing tool in the sense of direct customer acquisition. But Social Media is a two-way channel; enabling not just acquisition, but retention and insight. Additionally, Social Media applications can play a key role across an organization in terms of productivity and innovation. Here’s our 3 Core Principles for Social Media in Business.

Brand & Reputation:

A good brand builds a strong reputation and building a strong, positive reputation is intertwined with your brand. Both take a long time to develop and both are developed by the market, not by the company. Implementing good Social Media and Traditional Media monitoring tools can help you gain increased insight into your brand value and reputation.

Innovation & Intelligence

Using Social Media can provide insights that lead to innovation. Without innovations, businesses stagnate and can suffer market depreciation (Peter Drucker noted that the two main functions of a business are innovation and marketing.) Using Social Media for intelligence gathering on consumer sentiment and trends and competitive information can also fuel innovation by providing insights to product usage, uptake and competitive strategies. This will help a business formulate better corporate strategies - and innovate.

Productivity & Process

Leveraging collaborative tools like Wiki’s, shared bookmarking, Web conferencing across work groups and chat groups can improve productivity and ensure a team is on task, on track and identify emerging issues. With productivity comes process. Despite the Web often being thought of as a place of chaos, processes can be achieved in knowledge work, subsequently feeding into productivity.

Working from these 3 Core Principles for Social Media in Business can provide the framework that helps you align marketing, investor relations, communications, finance, production and administrative functions to go beyond just “one-way marketing” via Social Media. Can these be improved upon?

Note: This is an excerpt from the upcoming eBook The Conversant Corporation due for release in August 2008