Yesterday, the Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang presented a webinar on developing a social strategy. This webinar was the second in a three-part series on social media for the enterprise and you can now register for the third webinar on “Social Strategy: Getting Your Company Ready” scheduled for Wednesday, April 14. Yesterday’s webinar was well-attended, drawing an initial 1,000+ online registrations with an actual 495 participants attending, a great response as expected due to Charlene and Jeremiah’s huge following.

The actual presentation is embedded below and you can also access the recording at drop.io. Charlene and Jeremiah included some very helpful best practice case studies in the presentation to illustrate how companies such as Wells Fargo, P&G, Fiat and Starwood are successfully experimenting and learning with each social media exploration. I know from personal experience that clients and internal stakeholders always want to see real-world examples of actual social media implementation and results, so these are great resources to keep handy.

Here are my notes on key takeaways for consideration in building your next social strategy:

1. Social Strategy is More Than Promotion: I wrote about this in one of my earlier posts, but many companies are missing a huge opportunity when they implement a social strategy for promotion only. Charlene noted that one of the key goals for any social strategy should be learning, and that social outreach can be a tremendous monitoring tool for listening to and learning from your customers. Think of it as “ethnographic research for free,” says Jeremiah.

2. Don’t Forget Your Employees: With the tendency for companies to implement social strategies for external audiences, it’s important to apply that same energy into your internal organization. There are opportunities to customize that social strategy for application internally towards empowering your sales and field organization, creating employee advocates and improving your overall internal communications programs.

3. Understanding the True Value: Charlene noted that when thinking about the ever-elusive search for more meaningful ROI, it’s important to understand the true value of your social strategy and asking the question, what’s the true value of a fan or a follower? It’s not the number of followers you have, but what you do with those followers to achieve your business goals. Check out her explanation of the new customer lifetime value calculation.

4. Social Strategy Means New Workflows: Social technologies often disrupt traditional organizational structures, so it’s important to review your current organization and optimize that structure to adequately accommodate new workflows. This is an important, and often overlooked area. Companies tend to focus on just the external distribution of content and outreach, but they also need to look internally to determine how their internal organization will administer policies, respond to incoming feedback and potentially re-organize for different types of new openness.

5. Practice Open Leadership: Also the subject of Charlene’s next book, she defines open leadership as “having the confidence and humility with the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.” Elements of openness include information-sharing, planning to “fail well” and building trust to manage risk. Charlene noted that if companies spent more time on identifying the right target, and reaching the most influential in the social sphere, they would mitigate and reduce risk.