1. Create & follow a Social Media Campaign Plan
Obviously it is important to plan out any project before starting out. At the very least, establishing a basic idea of what you hope to achieve means it’ll be easier to keep everyone involved on the same page.

(In a similar vein, don’t overdo the planning or it’ll end up hurting more than helping. Be like water.)

2. Empower campaign personnel
Who manages your communication channels? What tools do they need? Do they work in an environment that actually helps them work better? Thankfully, the tools needed to run social media campaigns are well priced (read: virtually free) and you don’t have to break the bank to get a top notch toolkit.

3. Minimize red tape
Bureaucracy slows things down, which is always ugly. Always. If you’re starting from the top, a successful social media campaigns will require contributions from a wide variety of people (design, writers, customer service, marketing, PR and a host of other little pieces. Please think carefully before you clog the channels of communication with unnecessary (and pesky) obstacles.

4. Establish baselines & manage changes to it
“Social media campaign” is just a fancy term that basically amounts to allowing people to communicate with others online. Because the keyword in that sentence is people, there are certain goals you cannot establish as requirements because people can (and will) make up their minds for themselves. Social media isn’t a magical pill that will change minds in 2 days, 6 months or even 5 years. Nothing in real life does (except maybe fear, but that’s another story).

5. Take periodic snapshots of the campaign’s progress. Replan if necessary
Things happen: a new tool comes out you can’t get into (just yet),  the “competition” comes up with a better feature, etc… In other words, real life happens and you’re better off learning from what did or didn’t work right now. Make sure you don’t go overboard on this one. Points #3 & #4 are your guiding principles on this one.

6. Re-estimate size, effort & schedules periodically
Yes, this is related to taking campaign snapshots (#5 above) and although they are similar on the surface, reestimating or replanning without first finding out why you need to do so waters down the effectiveness of your great re-organizational effort.

7. Foster Team Spirit
Content is king only when people enjoy it so pay attention to how happy the team creating the content is. Google provides world class food, 37signals give their employees credit cards and others use the time tested “Thank you” to keep the team spirit alive. Regardless of how you choose to do it, just make sure you are doing it.

This is the 2nd of 3 posts on the general framework of a social media campaign. Read the first one here and come back next week for the last post. Better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed and get posts automatically delivered to your RSS reader.