“In the near future, I’ll be publishing a research report about the corporate social strategist and their program. In our survey these decision makers within corporations over social media programs, we asked about their goals for 2011.

Out of balance, the Corporate Social Strategist plans to integrate social media with the corporate website. Social Strategists have deployed social media in existing social networking channels like Facebook, Twitter, and beyond.   Yet there’s an inbalance as they’ve joined customer where they are, but have not tied it back to their overall corporate website.  This is due to a few reasons: primarily stemming from the reactionary nature of “we must have a Facebook strategy” and not thinking it through, and also the freedom to not rely on legacy IT and web publication systems.  To restore balance, strategists will start to infuse the most trusted conversations of prospects and customers back to the corporate website closer to the point of purchase or during customer support.  Expect that the first steps will be simple sharing tools, then aggregating discussions from branded communities to then Facebook features.  Savvy strategists will know the risks and benefits of each of the 8 Stages of Corporate Website Integration and Social Media framework.  Vendor set: Community platforms, Aggregators like Echo, and the existing integration protocols and embeds provided by the social networks themselves.”