JD Lasica has put together a great list of conferences for upcoming year. There are a couple of local events I will attend here in Boston including the Enterprise 2.0 in June and the New Marketing Summit in October.

Which events are you thinking about attending this year?

A social media plan is built by first understanding the audience or the people who will be using the social media tools. One must merge a company’s business objectives with its desired social media objectives to create a strategy that also meets the needs of the audience. With a defined strategy, one is free to choose the most appropriate technology and social media tools.

Okay, let’s break this down. Forrester has come up with a nice acronym for building your social media plan – POST.

Social Media Plan = People + Objectives + Strategy + Technology

I have found that this is a very effective means of building a social media implementation. In the next post, I will explain how to define your audience so you are targeting the right people.

Yesterday, the first social media president was inaugurated.

Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to effectively use the Internet to converse with his audience. Other candidates had used the Internet to broadcast or raise a ton of money (Howard Dean), but candidate Obama took it to a new level by first listening to the needs of the country through twitter and his website. Once these messages were received, he incorporated these needs into his plan of action. The level of success of his social media strategy was demonstrated not just by the election results but by yesterday’s massive level of participation and enthusiasm on the Washington streets and throughout the rest of the country.

The ongoing challenge will be to see how this administration continues to mobilize this energy as he has transitioned his social media enegagement to Whitehouse.gov. We will be watching.