Social media strategy—definitely a hot topic. Does your company have one? Do you know what it is-and can you explain what it is and how it influences decisions?

Being an editor, I don’t often get exposed to discussions of strategy—but I know that having a strategy  is crucial at many levels of our operations. Without one, how do we know where we’re headed—or where we should head? How do we decide which path to take in the social media world? When our clients’ interests are at stake, we need to be smart. Following baseball legend Yogi Berra’s advice won’t cut it in our fast-moving business. Yogi famously said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Well, that always works when it doesn’t really matter which fork you take. But if companies are going to survive and thrive in the world of social media, the fork does matter and will be influenced by the strategy.

In a current journal article,* the authors identify four primary strategies that companies are using in the social media arena. They arrived at their results by analyzing strategies and operations at more than 1100 companies and by interviewing initiative-leading executives. They conclude that the type of strategy chosen depends heavily on two factors: the company’s ability to tolerate uncertain outcomes and the level of the results desired. Their four types are described below.

1. Predictive Practitioner. Confines social media use to a specific area within the company and minimizes cross-functional contacts. This works better if the company wants to avoid uncertainty and wants to get results it can measure with established tools. Example: Clorox created a website to enhance its virtual R&D activities. The site facilitates brainstorming with customers and suppliers.
2. Creative Experimenter. Embraces uncertainty using small-scale tests to find ways to improve defined functions and practices. Projects are positioned as experiments, with the overriding objective being to learn. There is interaction with employees and customers on Twitter, Facebook, or other platforms. Example: The IT service company, EMC, created an internal test platform to help its 40,000 global employees network and connect on projects. Goal was to reduce the use of outside contractors by locating and applying internal company expertise. EMC estimates that this effort has saved more than $40 million to date.
3. Social Media Champion. Has a central group and executive leaders dedicated to coordinating and managing social media projects across multiple functions and levels. They also may utilize external influencers. Results and learnings are widely shared within the organization. Example: Ford used this approach in its 2009 campaign to reintroduce its Fiesta model to the US. It lent 100 of the cars for 6 months to carefully selected drivers who then used social media to describe their experiences. The results? 60,000 posts, millions of clicks, and more than 4 million YouTube views—which in turn generated 50,000 sales leads, 35,000 test drives, and a 37% awareness rate among Millennials. The cost? About $5 million, a fraction of what a traditional campaign would have cost to produce these results.
4. Social Media Transformer. Often involves large-scale interactions that include internal employees as well as external stakeholders such as customers and business partners. Social media technologies are tightly integrated into the business and are used across functions. Centralized groups study ways that social media can inform business strategy and culture. Example: Last year, Cisco launched “a social business platform designed to facilitate internal and external collaboration and decentralize decision making. It functions much as a Facebook ‘wall’” and includes a real-time news feed with broad coverage.

This article provides more information on the characteristics of each of these types and how they operate within the organizations. It also comments on putting social media strategy into practice. One of the more intriguing elements is a small section on pitfalls that can cause stumbles when companies jump into the social media world without a cohesive strategy. There could be some learnings here for us—possible new approaches to using social media that we may want to consider, along with practices to avoid.

But maybe the most important takeaway is the need to take a very thoughtful and focused approach at the appropriate managerial levels to developing, evolving, and managing social media strategies. The authors are not big fans of haphazard, scattershot approaches.

*Wilson HJ, Guinan PJ, Parise S, and Weinberg BD. What’s Your Social Media Strategy? Harvard Business Review. July-August, 2011.