Ok, you get it. Social Media is the way things are headed, and you’ve gotten top brass to sign off on an initial strategy to get your brand out there as part of the conversation. You’re feeling good and excited to get started.

I hate to be the wet towel, but there’s a big difference between willingness and preparedness, when it comes to getting social. So many brands are taking tentative steps into the world of social media marketing, but many are scalding their feet when they realize that they aren’t staffed or prepared to cope with the inevitable influx of responses to their opening gambits.

The following are a few tips to make sure you have a good foundation in place to set your social media strategy up for success:

Take a good, hard look at your website
Any social media strategy worth its salt will generate a lot of interest around your brand, and therefore drive visits to your company’s website. But guess what? If your website isn’t up to scratch, you’re not only disappointing the people who took the time to engage with you, but missing out on the huge boost in traffic that can be generated via these channels. Specific things to look out for:

• Is it easy to subscribe via email?
• Do you have robust web analytics in place to track where people go in your site, after arriving from a social media platform?
• Are you collecting actionable data from these visitors, and are you prepared to incorporate observations from these visitors’ interactions in the social space into what you already know about them?
• Can people interact with you on your website as much as they can on social media platforms?

Make sure your infrastructure is in place
Ok, great, you’ve gotten your Facebook page up, and your Twitter account is spitting out tweets like there’s no tomorrow. Who is responding to your followers’ DMs? Who is responsible for keeping the Flickr stream updated? Who’s going to watch the Fan page for negative comments? Please don’t say your intern…

• Are you staffed for a responsive and regularly updated social media presence?
• Have you clearly outlined internal responsibilities and expectations for managing your brand’s social media presence across all platforms?
• Have you established a process for maintaining a consistent brand experience across multiple social media platforms, to prevent your Twitter guy saying something different from your Facebook gal?
• What’s your crisis plan for when one of your employees sticks a customer’s cheese pizza up their nose, and posts the video to YouTube?

Get ready for the long haul
We’ve already talked about there being no turning back once you open up your brand to the conversation, but this has huge ramifications for your marketing operations in the long run.
•    Are you writing social media maintenance responsibilities into your job descriptions for hiring purposes?
•    Are you offering training resources to employees who are now taking on these additional responsibilities?
•    How are you monitoring, tracking and evaluating your employees’ work-related social media interactions?
•    If you’re using a spokesperson as the frontman for your brand, think long and hard about this one: what happens when/if they leave the company? Have a plan in your back pocket for this scenario.
•    As an alternate take to the spokesperson situation, how can you help this person cope with the sheer volume of customer questions and interactions that can be generated by putting them out there as the face of your brand?

What do you think? Are there any other items that should be in place as the foundation of your social media strategy? Let us know in the comments!