It this days where everybody is talking about new social technologies, ranging from blogs to profiles on social networking sites. But almost all of these efforts are one-off technology deployments, instead of being part of a master plan on how to engage customers and employees on a strategic level.

Some ideas on how and why companies need to build their social strategy:

People: You have to understand how your target customer uses social technologies today—and in the future.
Objectives: Given how your customers use technologies, what business objectives can you realistically meet with social technologies? We believe there are five objectives companies can meet better and faster because of Web 2.0 technologies:

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting, and
5. Embracing.

Strategy: After identifying your business objective, what is your strategy on how you are going to achieve it? A deep understanding of which Web 2.0 technologies and approaches work for which objectives is essential.

Technology: Once the other steps are done, then, and only then, should companies focus on which technologies to use. All too often, we have companies asking us “Which blogging software should we use?” when the question should be “Why should we have a blog at all?” Knowing your objectives will make winnowing and selecting the right technology vendors a much easier process.

One of the things that I ca me across lately is the idea of making/having your own TV-channel, besides just putting your videos on YouTube.
Instead of Twittering, which I from a business point of view, doesn’t find to have any ‘usp’ (If you have some, please let me know, I curios!), why not use the the TV media to stand out amongst all this social networks. I think it’s an easy way of communicating and really have to use the TV-media for what it’s worth. I know that TV is usually is a passive way of communication, but doing it the proper way, together with an rss-feed for example to downloads and notifications.
Ideas and business cases, let me know.