Back in December of 2007 Forrester published a method for creating a Social Media Strategy called the POST Method. It was revolutionary at the time because as most who marketers were beginning to experiment with Social Media fell into the trap of implementing the latest "shiny object" which naturally over-focused them on the technology rather than finding the right audience (or P for People), identifying your objectives (O), creating a strategy to reach them (S) and then finding what technology would work best (T).


But I would argue having worked on several social media strategies now that this approach no longer holds.
The problem is the (P) in the POST method.
It dawned on me when the CMO of Avaya asked me to show her how we would reach certain audiences, like pospects and business partners etc., with our Social Media efforts. it was hard to find a "pure" grouping of these out on the socialsphere. What you typically find is a "Conversation" and in that conversation you have a few prospects, maybe an existing customer, a business partner, a few employees and even a competitor or two.
The goal of your social media strategy is not to find the P for People it's to find the C for Conversations!
If you can effectively listen and monitor to find the conversations where the people are talking about topics you want to participate in then you are 90% of the way to a successful social media strategy. And if you play your cards right to generating leads with your social media strategy.
But that would infer that the POST Method should really be the COST Method for creating a Social Media strategy and that just doesn't sound very good!
What do you think of POST vs. COST?