Orange County Register

sOCial sunday will frequently ponder how institutions — private and public, big and small — juggle social networking’s challenges and what wisdom we can derive from their ventures. Orange County new media consultant Ron Ploof (@ronploof) recently published released a free e-book (HERE) on how Johnson & Johnson — a 123-year-old multinational under FDA regulations — dealt with it. Here’s a sample of what he found …

New media technologies offer both a blessing and a curse to companies who must relearn how they create their marketing content. With all of the tools to choose from, corporate philosophical changes, and government restrictions, where does a company start to develop its Social Media strategy?

• There will always be excuses. No excuse is strong enough to ignore that your customers are online and already talking about you.
• Write about your history. If your company is too skittish with regards to writing a contemporary corporate blog, consider looking backwards for your inspiration. Nobody can be accused of forward-looking statements when writing about history.
• Learn from the experience. Put a stake in the ground and start some place. Learn from the experience and then build upon it.
• Build your home first. You must own the foundation that you build your online content strategy upon. Before going to third party sites such as YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, build on your own online property first.
• Talk about the problems that you solve. Build an online audience by becoming the expert that people seek to solve their problems.

[ MORE: TWITTER | LINKEDIN | QUESTIONS | MARKETING ]

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.