*This content was previously published on Social Conversations in November 2009.  Social conversations was a product of Serengeti Communications which closed in 2012.

This piece is a prelude to my Social Media Marketing Column on Search Engine Watch that will appear on Monday November 23, 2009.

While I’ve always taken the approach of sound strategy over just “throwing spaghetti against the wall” and deploying various marketing tactics (including SEO for Social Media), Serengeti‘s CEO Nan Dawkins has put it quite eloquently as “tactics in the absence of strategy is like doing nothing at all“.  In social media this is never more true.  Just doing something in social media, like setting up a Twitter account because Oprah’s now doing it is likely one of the most errant reasons to venture into twitter if you are a business.

A Social Media Strategy isn’t about SEO coming first, or grabbing accounts on social media sites.  That should be an inherent and FUNDAMENTAL part of your social media strategy.  You honestly can’t have SEO first if you don’t know why you are doing a social media tactic in the first place.  Planning a social media strategy should come first.  That includes researching and understanding why you are going to do certain tactics over others, why you should be investing time and resources into something and understanding how to approach it, whether its optimizing the profile or just starting a conversation, planning the strategy is really what should come first in social media marketing.

There are many layers to a social media strategy, in my column on Monday I talk about 4 pieces of a strategy in social media that companies should consider, however there’s a lot more.  Beyond understanding your audience, setting goals, deciding how to approach the community and re-evaluation of your strategy there’s the other pieces you need to consider as well.  Strategy is much more than just a laundry list of sites that fit your keyword research that your SEO company tells you to fill out profiles on to gain another spot in the search engine rankings or starting a blog named on a key word that you really don’t have a prayer of ranking for.

In addition to the subjects I write about in Monday’s column, companies need to think about and plan how SEO, PPC and even EMail marketing fit into your overall social media strategy.  They should complement and aid your social media strategy, not be treated as separate entities “to be dealt with”.  Keyword research is just as fundamental to a successful social media strategy as it is to properly optimizing your website’s pages.  It’s not a question of when it should be done, its a matter of it fundamentally being done at the very beginning of ANY online marketing strategy.

Another layer of your social media strategy that should be considered is the whole issue of deciding who owns the conversation, who’s voice do you use,and  which members of your staff are best suited to implement what parts of your strategy.  Don’t forget bringing legal into the equation either, not including them in on how your strategy is formed from the start can have devastating consequences to your social media strategy.  Having your legal team help you out from the onset can make your social media strategy that much more sound as well as successful.

Have you thought about contingency plans?  What happens if one of your tactics gets misinterpreted and ends up being a huge public relations nightmare?  What is your plan to handle something like this?  What if one of your employees while thinking they were following your guidelines and ethics your company set in place, slipped up?  What if it’s found out your SEO was tweeting and writing your content for you, instead of someone from your company and it creates a firestorm?  Your social media strategy needs to account for issues like these that could arise.

As you can see while it’s easy, free and quick to grab those social media profiles and just start hammering away on them, the harder part is understanding if its really going to work for you.  Planning a strategy is never easy, but those companies that do end up being way more successful with their social media efforts than those companies who start accounts at random because they read and article or were told they “need to” and then abandon the accounts 6 months down the line because there’s no interaction going on and they feel social media has failed them.

Chess Photo Credit:  Flickr user pshutterbug
Map Photo Credit:  Flickr user New York Public Library