Recent posts by Stacy Whisel and Jim Everhart provide good reasons WHY B2B marketers should consider adding social media to their marketing communications programs.

As we engage marketing people about B2B social media, the conversations usually starts with HOW, whether it's externally (the technologies and channels) or internally (the company policy that governs social media participation).

Both of these are important, but what tends to be a secondary conversation is WHAT should be communicated. Maybe that's assumed, although the "wild frontier" nature of social media brings with it a lack of focus, so we don't like to assume away the need for a solid messaging plan. It's an essential part of brand guardianship in the social media arena.

What's more, there isn't much conversation about how to ensure that core messaging is conveyed in an effective manner. Or measuring the effectiveness of message delivery.

Most of the discussion about measuring the ROI of social media is focused on engagement, web traffic, leads and sales. We agree that those are more important as "end results" (to use one of my favorite redundancies), but effective message delivery is an important metric in the overall process.

Planning and measuring message delivery via B2B social media is a key to keeping the effort focused so you get the most out of your investment in time and/or money. And there's an easy way to structure and guide this through implementation across multiple bloggers, Facebook and LinkedIn champions in your organization.

Keywords.

Just as you develop and map keywords to your web site structure (or should), and integrate these same keywords across your other marketing communications activities (or should), they are the best and easiest way to discipline and measure the delivery of your key messages via social media.

In the keyword mapping process we use, keywords are identified for every level of messaging, from "corporate" to values to issues to markets/industries to applications to products. Once this mapping process is completed, the map can be applied to the areas you want to participate in via social media.

As part of your social media policy, you can include "rules" or expectations about keyword use, to make sure that every post or comment reflects one or more keywords that are important to you. And you can measure people accordingly.

In the meantime, since you are using the same keywords that are part of your web site optimization strategy, you'll be improving your ranking on those keywords.