OK, so you have set up your "Buzz" monitoring, planned your engagement strategy, launched your Blog, opened your forum, set up your Twitter accounts, seeded your Facebook app, populated your Flickr group, uploaded your videos to Vimeo. Phew that’s good. However, as your role in online marketing requires you’ve got other SEO work to do and a usability study to commission and a new homepage redesign to manage etc etc etc. Hold on where does social media engagement fit in to that working day? The answer is it doesn’t! You need specialists and that is part of making your company "social media ready"

So how much time does managing a social media campaign take? At a high level in engagement you will be split between being proactive and reactive. Following is a simplified example of our experience. It is not comprehensive by any means but gives you a flavour!

The "Reactive" activities i.e. listening and moderating principally could pan out as follows:-

1. Listening and analysing the Buzz around your key topics – 2 hours per day (10 per week)
2. Moderating your forum – 1- 2hrs per day (5 per week). Depending on the number of posts. This amount of time would cover approximately 30-40 incoming posts per day
3. Flickr account management 1 hr per day (5 per week). If you have an application that uploads photos automatically for you to approve and tag or not, you might have to trawl through 50-75 images to ensure they are suitable.

The "Proactive" activities i.e. creating content and engaging with key influencers may be as follows:-

1. Researching and writing Blog posts – 2 hrs a day (10 per week). That should deliver at least one blog post per day and allow time to move your stock of 4or 5 others close to publishing.
2. Blogger outreach – 1 hr per day (5 per week). This is direct contact with your key influencers. Remember more often than not they may not be in the same time zone as you.
3. Commenting – 2hrs per day (10 per week). This is the leg work which may involve you actively in say, 20-30 3rd party forums, blogs or news sites where you are commenting on other peoples posts to improve the sentiment of your brand within your key topics.

That’s a total of roughly 45 hours a week or more than one person full time. The likelihood is that the skills you will need will probably mean more than one person. You can see that the skills required being proactive are different to those required when being reactive.

If that isn’t enough, a final thought to leave you with is that you should also remember that conversations online that require engagement, forum posts that need moderating don’t stop at 5pm when you go home or at the weekend or on Christmas Day. Social media management is a 24/7 job!

We hosted our first Social Media Marketing workshop today and, like the previous blogging workshop, it was a great success.

We had a great turnout. Organisations represented included the Co-operative, the University of Nottingham and United Utilities.

Paul started the workshop by running through a few ways we can monitor online conversations about a particular brand, product or organisation by tracking various online communities.

In the second half of the workshop, Paul and I guided attendees through the process of searching and monitoring twitter, technorati and other aggregator sites, in order to find out in real time who is discussing the topics the attendees were interested in. The attendees then set up twitter and wordpress.com accounts and thought about who they should be engaging and how they could get involved in relevant conversations.

It was a busy session that covered a lot of ground and most people I spoke to afterwards seemed to take away lots of ideas on how they could apply the things they learned to their organisation.

Slides from the event will be available shortly. In the meantime, have a look at this slideshow of pictures taken during the workshop.

Many thanks to all who came along – don’t forget, if you have any more questions you can get hold of me on twitter (my username is GezD).  I can be easily summoned with an @reply! And while you’re at it, you can find out about the latest news from InBlackAndWhite by following us on twitter. Why not send us a message right now?

Due to the popularity of this event, we are hosting an additional workshop on the 11th February. We’re expecting this to sell out too, but there are still a couple of places left if you want to book your ticket.

**UPDATE** The Social Media Marketing workshop on the 11th of Feb is now sold out. The next event is a Blogging Workshop, taking place in Manchester on the 11th March. Book early to avoid disappointment.