By Jeffrey Hoffman

Why do you have that little blue T & F on your site?

Most organizations are simply chasing the trends when it comes to using social media. There is often no real strategic plan behind including a “follow us on Twitter (or Facebook)” link.

The reality is that no one will follow you on Twitter and Facebook unless you give them a good reason to do so.

Leverage your expertise

For most organizations, the compelling reason that someone would follow them is the specialized knowledge or information they can provide to their customers. Usually this knowledge or information resides in the SMEs (subject matter experts) within the organization – those individuals that have deep product knowledge, specialized sector expertise, or problem solving savvy.

Leverage the benefit of having these SMEs on your team by using T & F to build communities around them. Identify the most compelling SMEs in your organization and make it part of their job to provide a regular flow of content for your social media initiatives.

Your customers (and potential customers) that want access to the information which your SMEs possess will gravitate to these communities. They will become signposts pointing other visitors to you as they blog/retweet/etc the information you are sharing.

While the SMEs are the sources for the content of these communities, they may or may not be comfortable interacting with T & F or have the time to do so. Identify others in the organization (often younger team members) who already thrive in this space and would welcome the opportunity to have T & F become part of their jobs.

Use a content management system

It should be their role to not only distribute the SME content, but also to engage and interact with community visitors so that the community becomes a living discussion rather than a static billboard.

In order to make this a dynamic part of your online resources, build a publishing platform around a CMS (content management system) in order to streamline the process of deploying SME content to various targets (T & F, blogs, etc). The goal should be to create an immediate path from your SMEs to your customer base.

Jeffrey Hoffman, President and CEO of webslingerz, is responsible for business development, marketing, and strategic planning at webslingerz. He has served in this capacity since founding the company in 1995. During this time he was also a founding partner at the law firm of Lockhart + Hoffman where he oversaw client strategy until the firm was acquired by Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in 2002. www.webslingerz.com

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Tags: content management systems, expert communities, facebook, Jeffrey Hoffman, social media, twitter, Webslingerz