For those who aren’t familiar with the POST (People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology) Method, this is a technique devised by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff and written about in their famous book, “Groundswell”. This method is designed to help companies and individuals define their social media strategies. Social media strategies are invariable a grey area for many businesses, and so this method really helps provide some structure and clarity to ensure businesses have a more effective social media presence.
In brief, the POST method can be broken down as follows:

People – Understand WHO you’re targeting. Li and Bernoff advise segmenting your intended audience by measuring and categorizing their ownership, use patterns, and attitudes toward information, communication and entertainment technologies. Think “where are your customers online? What are your customer’s social behaviors online? What social information or people do your customers rely on?” This is known as Socialgraphics/Technographics.

Objectives – What is the purpose of the campaign? Do you want to engage with your customers or to listen to them? Or both?

Strategy – How do you plan to measure the success of your objectives? What will be different after you’ve finished the campaign compared to the situation before the campaign?

Technology – Only at this point, should you think about which social technologies to use. Based on P,O and S, should use a corporate blog , multiple blogs or even Wiki?

The above structure may sound fairly straight forward, but it requires discipline and a great deal of though to implement. Yet if you can follow through on implementing the POST method, your business will have a clear, structured and well thought out social media strategy that will hopefully lead to great results for your business.