For years our family saved to visit the Magic Kingdom and last year we finally got a chance to visit.  It was a wonderful experience for all of us.  In addition to being a wonderful place to visit, Disney provides social media marketers powerful lessons:

Our partners start as potential clients, just like yours. We've stopped calling them "clients" as often as possible, because the kind of business relationships we hope to form are more realistically a partnership, because instead of seeking to sell someone a strategy document and walk away, we want to get our hands dirty, educate as we execute, and build something that the combined team of New Marketing Labs and our partner will feel proud of when we're done.

When we work on social media projects for companies, we still start with the basics:

1. How do you make money?
2. Who buys?
3. Where are they?
4. What do they respond to (as far as you know)?
5. What's working right now?
6. What do you need MORE of?
   
   

We work out how we can set into place the following:

Dashboard - how will we measure everything?
Methods - which approaches do we think will work?
Materials - what can we create and what's already in place?
Database - how will we capture and make business from the information we gather?
Effort - who will play roles in the process, both at NML as well as our partner organization?
Education - what do our colleagues need ahead of time to be successful in using social media in their business communications and digital marketing mix?
Interfaces - what parts of our partner's organization have to be ready to receive new information from our social media efforts?
Crisis - what do we do when something goes wrong?
Deep Wiring - do we want to make this more than marketing, and make it business communications?

It's fun working these questions out. It gets us to some very interesting points in our process, and we don't end up just talking about Twitter. When we work from this methodology, we find really interesting opportunities.

When I think about these questions and how they've evolved as part of our New Marketing Labs methodology, I get more and more excited about what we have coming up in the months to come. See, we learn from every project. As we build something of interest for one partner, we go back and see whether we could have served our other partners in a better way. The evolution means that we can share our lab experiments and bring things even further faster. Because we're not just talking and writing, we have hands-on experience with what works and what can be improved.

Rolling into 2010, we're all about the needle movement, and how we can help partners improve their channels. We'll keep you posted as things move ahead. I'm excited to get pushing into 2010. We've got some new partners that have come on in the last several weeks, and still more that I want to build relationships with. Each opportunity is another chance to find something that drives the space as a whole forward.

What's your first big idea for 2010? (There I go with another question again!)

Photo Credit: Transguyjay