Amongst the many marketing and leadership gems heard at the New Marketing Experience conference this week the most important take-aways for me came from discussions on how to build effective foundations for social media marketing. In other words, as one of the participants put it (might have been Amber Naslund @ambercadabra), you can’t have an intern run your marketing.

So how do you get buy-in, structure teams, build content frameworks to set yourself up for success?

Whether we call it social media, new media, inbound marketing, or other catchy terms, it needs to be done with purpose, in a planned and structured yet flexible manner. But I’ll let the notes from the conference support this point:

1. Purpose – what defines success to you?
-Define success up front
-Set a baseline so you can judge the future of your efforts. For example, “drive more traffic to your website” is a goal people can understand. Then map social media efforts to goals. – David B Thomas @davidbthomas and Justin Levy @justinlevy, New Marketing Labs.

2. Structure
A. Get organizational buy-in and support:
-Plant seeds in different areas of the organization – Steve Furman, Discover
-Get HR and legal support off the bat
-Create guidelines – David Thomas
-Launch an internal PR effort – shout it off the rooftops – Paula Berg, @paulaberg Linhart PR

B. Get your house in order. Who owns what?
-Define people, process, plans. – Paula Berg
-Integrating social media into a business plan doesn’t have to be a turf war, it has to be fluid and changeable. – Sarah Evans, @prsarahevans, Sevans Strategy

3. Flexibility
– Get tough. Be willing to fight, be prepared to be wrong. – Paula Berg
-Make your new media efforts portable, personalized, participatory -Sarah Evans
-What did your social media move the needle on? Be prepared to measure how your marketing moved the needle somewhere else than where you originally expected – Tom Webster, @webby2001, Edison Research
-Have an exit strategy – Sarah Evans

What say ye? Do these points resonate with some of your challenges and solutions as you try to build new media marketing teams?