Despite all the attention social media marketing is getting within the marketing and PR community, we’re finding most companies are still apprehensive about leveraging social media to help tell their stories. By applying traditional marketing disciplines to your social media plan, you can successfully attract new, relevant audiences without the risk associated with an “open forum”. If executed well, social media can add significant awareness and search engine visibility to your marketing programs. To this end, we recommend every company add a social media component to their marketing plans in 2011. Here is a simple, 5-point guide to help you kick-off 2011 using social media best practices:

1. Start with your own employees. In an information vacuum, employees will make up their own rules so make sure they know what’s appropriate and what’s not. Lay a positive foundation by providing social media guidelines for your employees. Always start with your legal team to review your corporate non-compete and Intellectual Property policies. The legal team can help with trademark and domain questions that often arise. You don’t want anyone tweeting about a new product prematurely. You want the legal team involved early to help inspire social programs that encourage employee participation within the rules of your existing communication policies.

2. Next, consider your best customers. Focus on your primary marketing objective, and include them in your social networking. They’ll be flattered and contribute great insight. Define your social communications program as an extension of your business strategy. Give customers a chance to respond to new ideas. Content that is relevant to your best customers is also relevant to prospective customers. Apply this discipline and I guarantee it will shape your program with intelligent rigor.

3. Monitor other social media sites that are relevant to your business. There are great tools to follow company names and keywords to help you stay in front of opportunities. These will help you stay relevant and help you contribute to the quality of the conversation.

4. Develop a crisis strategy in advance and anticipate eventualities and how you will respond. Time is of the essence in social media and your response time will determine your ability to successfully participate in the conversation.

5. Build measurement tools into back-links so you capture the data that will help you determine success or failure. There are powerful link strategies that allow you to gather data beyond “follows” and “friends”. Even if your measurement goals are more perceptual than quantitative, you need to establish goals. Unless you have your eye on a target, you’ll never know whether social media is contributing to your business.

By applying these marketing disciplines to social media, you’ll bring more credibility, accountability and innovation to your marketing and Public Relations plan.