Our e-mail inboxes are inundated daily with offers of social media training. Titles such as "How to Use Twitter to Advance Your PR & Marketing Efforts," "Tapping the Online Video Boom," and "Using Facebook to Survey, Gather Data and Generate New Leads" are definitely intriguing.

While the content is timely and useful, the prevalent focus, however, seems to be on tactics and not on planning or strategy. The pressure on businesses to keep up with social media as an effective communications tool can create the tendency to jump in without a clear path. Our hope is that businesses will begin to embrace planning as much as the tactical side of social media.

Last year saw steady growth in the number of companies becoming active in the social media space. For example, according to a study released by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 22 percent of Fortune 500 companies had blogs in 2009, up from 16 percent in 2008. This trend will undoubtedly continue in 2010 and beyond.

When we talk with our clients about the value of social media, it is within the context of how social media can support the company's overall PR, communications, marketing and growth objectives.

The steps to creating a social media plan include answering the following three questions:

1. What are you hoping to accomplish? (objectives)
2. What is the best way to reach your objectives? (strategies and tactics)
3. How are you going to implement the work? (responsibilities, timelines, etc.)

In the last year, we have developed a social media plan for our firm. Our experience serves as a jumping off point to discuss a social media planning process that could work for your organization.

Objectives

It's critical to begin with objectives, otherwise you may meet the same fate as many organizations who enter the social media landscape. You will have tactics - a blog, Facebook page, etc. - that wither and die on the vine.

Our planning began with the question, why are we doing this? This initial discussion is important because it will help determine which social media actions/tactics are appropriate for your business.

We ended up with six key objectives, including to drive traffic to our website. Your objectives will be different than ours. For example, you might want to develop relationships with influential bloggers who follow and comment about your industry.

Strategies and Tactics

Our next step in the planning process was to address the all-important question: "How are we going to use social media to get there?"

We recommend taking each objective one at time. At the end of the process, you most likely will find, as we did, that your strategies and tactics may overlap and support multiple objectives.

When we examined our objective to drive traffic to our website, a blog became a natural strategy.

Why a blog to drive website traffic? Because our blog posts on topics such as media training, opinion research and public relations, will make it easier for people who are searching for these terms to find us.

Going through this process will help you focus on the social media strategies and tactics that make the most sense for your organization.

Implementation

Probably the most important step in implementing your social media plan is determining the who, the what and the when.

We have built accountability into our plan through the inclusion of action steps such as creating a blog editorial calendar and assigning an editor and author for each post.

For you, it might mean small, specific implementation steps such as writing a standard description for your organization that all of your staff will post on their LinkedIn accounts. Remember to assign responsibilities and timelines.

Without this step, you will accomplish very little. For example, a recent visit to a technology firm's Twitter account showed the last Tweet was posted nine months ago. Most likely, this company didn't build implementation processes, timelines and expectations into their plan (assuming they even have a social media plan).

Put it in Writing

There is no doubt that your social media tactics and actions will change and evolve. Most likely there will be new social media platforms launched by the end of the year that deserve your attention.

But don't let this stop you from putting your plan in writing. Your written objectives will help you evaluate what you are currently doing and provide the foundation for future social media tactics.

We don't have a crystal ball, but we know one thing for certain. If you don't clearly define and state your objectives, you will never reach them, and in the meantime, you will be wasting valuable time and resources.