Developing a New Media Plan

Once you know who your audiences are and what they need, you are ready to develop a new media plan. There are different approaches you might consider.

At AIDS.gov, we have found Forrester Research's POST Method to be a useful framework:

P = People. Who is your target audience? What tools are they using?
O = Objectives. Are you starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your clients to share HIV prevention messages with others? Or are you trying to collaborate with them?
S = Strategy. What do you want to accomplish? Do you want to increase HIV testing rates? Increase HIV awareness?
T = Technology. This might be a podcast, wiki, social networking site, or a blog. Once you've defined your people/audiences, your objectives, and strategy, then you can choose the most appropriate technology.

Mapping Out Your New Media Strategy

We've also used We Are Media's "Social Media Strategy Map" to think through core areas and questions such as:

Target Audience: Who do you want to reach?
Objective. What do you want to accomplish?
Integration: How will your social media strategy support and enhance your existing online strategy (if you have one)?
Culture Change: How will you get your organization to embrace your strategy?
Capacity: Who will implement your strategy? Can you allocate a minimum of five hours per week to your strategy?
Tools & Tactics: What tactics and tools best support your objectives and match your targeted audience? What tactics and tools do you have the capacity to implement?
Measurement: What data points or metrics and qualitative data will you use to track your objectives? Do you have the systems and tools set up to track efficiently?
Experiment: What can you implement first as a pilot?

While developing your new media strategy, there are several principles to keep in mind:

Create once, reuse often: technology allows us to reuse existing content in new ways. For example, you can summarize a conference presentation in a blog post, post it on your website, link to it your Facebook page make it available in an RSS feed, and reference it on Twitter. You can make it available as an audio podcast. Then upload the presentation to SlideShare and use it as the basis for a live webinar. And, of course, you can make it available in print form.

Appropriate technology: Let your audience determine the best tools - avoid letting new technology drive your activities.

User-centered design: See things from the point of view of your users. As we discussed in Understanding Your Audiences, creating user personas can be helpful. When designing your new services, take this one step further and create scenarios for how your personas might interact with your new services.

Iterative design: Develop your new media tools in small steps. Let users experiment and provide feedback. As social media strategistBeth Kanter recommends, "Strategize, then experiment. Learn, then reiterate. Listen, Learn, Adapt". Make sure you provide opportunities for users to give you feedback and suggestions.