At Forum One, we spend a lot of time thinking about social media: we run the Online Community Research Network, we lead many social media events every year, and we have provided consulting services to several hundred organizations. We have even published the Online Community Report newsletter for 13 years (yikes).

So when it comes to designing our company's own social media strategy, it should be simple, right? While it's true we have a big head start, social media are changing so quickly, we need to strategize and experiment just like everyone else. 

Here is how we currently are approaching social media as a company.

Goals
Before we are overwhelmed by countless opportunities in social media, we need to be very clear-headed: why are we doing this stuff? In our case we have four specific goals for our social media efforts:

1) Enhance our marketing efforts for consulting services, events, and products we sell such as ProjectSpaces;
2) Strengthen our ties with existing clients and colleagues;
3) Learn about social media, so we are in better position to advise others;
4) Increase Forum One's overall visibility.

All of our social media efforts need to tie clearly to one or more of these goals.

Channels
We currently manage 14 digital media channels at Forum One:

• Web sites (five)
• Blogs (five)
• Newsletters (two)
• Twitter (six accounts)
• Electronic press releases
• LinkedIn page
• Facebook page
• Scribd
• Slideshare
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Delicious
• Events sites (eventbrite, upcoming)
• Paid channels (Google, Facebook)

We periodically review each channel to evaluate if efforts are tying to our corporate goals, and to analyze costs / benefits. At this point our efforts are prioritized into three categories:

• Receive high effort: Web, Blogs, Twitter, Newsletters
• Receive some effort / appear to be useful: Press releases, Slideshare, Delicious, Event sites
• Receive low effort / watching: LinkedIn, Facebook, Scribd, Flickr, YouTube, Paid channels

Our corporate circumstances are different than many of our clients. We don't really use YouTube or Scribd internally, for example, but have had good luck with clients that produce lots of video or documents.

Metrics and Reporting
Social media offer great opportunities for gathering useful metrics. While it is hard to directly tie social media to outcomes (do our blogs really drive sales?), it is possible to watch outputs (posts, tweets, etc.) and actions (clicks, re-tweets, etc.). We have set up comprehensive social media reporting systems for a number of clients. We confess that internally we do something lighter weight than we typically advise others -- quarterly channel reviews to prioritize upcoming efforts, and quarterly performance tracking on a relatively small number of metrics which demonstrate reach.

In all of this it is necessary to experiment. At any one time we have a half dozen totally experimental new services underway (anyone else using Yammer, for example?). We also do what we can to learn from others in our own professional events and other events. Things are moving so quickly, other practitioners are really the only source of useful information. (The Online Community Research Network also provides this sort of information sharing.)