There's no escaping it, marketers: Amid a flurry of headlines, bestsellers, and reports documenting social media's meteoric rise to the mainstream... the future has arrived.

But for a B2B executive tasked with making sense of wikis, WOM, blogs, and buzz, wouldn't it be nice if the future came with a road map?

Follow this 10-step guide to ensure your social-media program starts smart, launches strong, and allows you to get the most out of these new media.

1. Determine program goals

Though it's a brand new era, the place to begin is with the age-old exercise of goal-setting: Will you be working to generate new leads and sales, increase awareness of your offerings, decrease marketing spend as compared to traditional media, ensure the relevance of your company, decrease purchasing cycles, extend the reach of your market footprint... or achieve other goals?

Remember, you'll be investing time, budget, and resources into your social media programs, so the first step is to determine exactly what you're seeking to achieve in return.

2. Conduct three-point research

A well-planned initiative always involves research at the outset, and with social media there are three key types of research that you'll need to conduct—customer, competitive, and community:

1. To ensure that your programs deliver a high level of value, identify your customers' business needs, challenges, and technology preferences.
2. To differentiate yourself from your competitors, understand which programs, tools, and content they are (and are not) employing.
3. Learn which online professional communities—and influencers—are relevant to your business sector so that you can start building relationships with them.

3. Set a strategy

Now that you've determined your goals and done your research, you can move on to setting your strategy.

A (very) common misstep by marketers starting out in social media is that they identify a tool before setting a strategy: They just know "we need to get on Facebook, stat!"—but don't know why they should, much less how they'll use their presence to achieve business benefits.

Once you've set your strategy for reaching your goals, the set of tools you'll need becomes very clear—whether your strategy is  to educate your audience on a business subject, produce an outlet for like-minded professionals to network, initiate a new communications channel or application that saves executives time and solves business problems, or create a new outlet for crowdsourcing product development.

4. Identify your Marketing 2.0 toolset

Providing an unprecedented array of tools, technologies, and platforms, social media offers B2B marketers more choice than ever, at the most affordable costs. So choose wisely and make sure that the tools you choose support your strategy (step 3) and map to your audience's comfort levels (step 2).

Some professional audiences are more comfortable participating in online forums than they are using Twitter or Facebook, whereas others might prefer content delivered in text, such as in the form of a blog, rather than via audio podcasts or online videos.

5. Define ROI metrics

Now that you've designated your goals, strategy, and tools, it's time to define a set of metrics to evaluate your program's ROI.

Depending on your goals, metrics might measure the number of leads generated, increase in sales, the number of brand mentions and whether they're positive or negative, improvement in search engine rankings, level of user engagement, and so on.