How can you steadily improve your social media presence and involvement? What should you do to continuously improve the results delivered by your projects? How can you steadily work on your personal development?

While investigating social media approaches by several social media agencies, I came across strategies that looked a lot like well-known sequences of development and improvement activities. One agency lists presentation, analysis, goals, strategy, realisation, and metrics as their 6-step approach to creating social media solutions. Another one lists presentation, quick scan, strategy, and realisation as separately identifiable activities. And I’m sure there are many other variants of similar sequences.

We can recognize comparable steps in software development methods. For example, there is planning, development, demo, and retrospective in Scrum; inception, elaboration, construction, transition in RUP/OpenUP; and speculate, collaborate, learn in ASD. I won’t bother you with the rest, as there are already too many software development methods to choose from.

But that’s not all! There are similar sequences in various process improvement frameworks. A famous one is plan, do, check, act in the Deming/Shewhart Cycle. But there’s also assess, analyze, metricate, improve in AIM; and define process, map process, define measurement, set targets, analyze process, improve process, manage process in CPI-7. And I found plenty of others as well.

Apparently, there are many ways of sequencing development and improvement activities. But whatever sequence you choose, I believe that any sequence should fulfill the following three crucial criteria:

1. There should be some form of measurement of progress: no metrics => no knowledge;
2. The sequence should be cyclic, starting from the beginning, over and over again;
3. The cycles should be small, because when you’re looking feedback, faster is better.

In an ambitious attempt to improve upon the improvement frameworks, I created my own version by mapping all activity sequences I could find onto one definitive cycle of improvement. This is the 7-Step Cycle for Social Media Management. Feel free to copy it, and adapt it to your liking:

1) Determine Problems

For example: I’m writing a book, and I’d like to increase exposure by attracting more Twitter followers, so that more people know about the book that I’m writing. It’s a (real) example of a problem for which we can attempt to find a solution.

2) Set Goals

I would like my audience on Twitter to be ten times as large as it is now, before my book is released. That’s a SMART goal. It is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

3) Define Metrics

On Twitter Grader my current rank is 9794. I could try and aim for a rank of 979. While on Twinfluence I have 2,867,000 2nd-order followers. I could try and get this number to climb to 28,670,000. And according to Twitterholic I’m ranked 34,580th in the world. I might aim and try to be the 3458th before my book is finished.

4) Identify Improvements

There many articles with useful tips on how to get more followers on Twitter. Identification of improvements means to seek out and find information, and select the improvements that can help you to achieve your goal (though you can only really know after you’ve tried).

5) Implement Improvements

This is the part where you do the real improvements. I updated my Twitter background, added my Twitter name to all my on-line profiles and presentations, added myself to the WeFollow directory, added a TweetMeme button to my blog posts, and revised my Twitter reading-and-writing-schedule. Hope it helps… (fingers crossed!)

6) Execute Processes (implicit)

And then the waiting starts… The length of the cycle depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. But as soon as you have some results, you should check them in Step 7 and then go back to the beginning, with Step 1.

7) Check Measurements

Every week I’m checking the metrics I selected. If something’s not working out as I had hoped (and yes, that’s usually the case), I go back to Step 1 to see what the problem is. And if things are going forward as planned, then there’s always some other problem waiting to be solved. And again, I go back to Step 1.

You can perform these steps for each of the projects you’re working on. It doesn’t matter if it’s about social media presence, software process improvement, or personal growth and development. If you value the stuff you’re working on, then you should value your improvement activities too.