Adopting Social Media Company-Wide
The concept of social business is quickly becoming a reality for companies. And a number of advantages come with adopting social media as a company. Your entire organization can share the responsibility of communicating on behalf of your company - beyond just Marketing.
Customers, prospects and industry pros now expect to be able to connect with your brand. And if you're not yet thinking about how to roll out social across all teams in 2012, there are a few things you can thinking about, and planning, now to help you on this path.
Buy in at the corporate level
Adopting social media across the entire enterprise isn't something that can be achieved without stakeholder buy in. This ranges from having sign off from the executive team to having a conversation and agreement with management from the various internal departments who need to agree on the value of social for their specific business needs.
A few ways to start thinking about this include:
-Illustrating competitors who are utilizing social successfully.
-Emphasizing the how social media can be used for areas outside of communication, like recruiting, finding new prospects, keeping customers happy and informed and sharing product insights and knowledge.
-Monitoring social media activity for your brand and highlighting missed opportunities for engagement today.
-Creating conversations to drive thought leadership in your industry.
Properly organizing teams
A huge challenge for companies is figuring out how to organize activity when it moves beyond one team or individual. More people often equates to more chaos in the minds of departments leaders. By thinking about this in an organized way, this chaos can be turned into coordination.
-Decide departments who will be active in social media and who can serve as the "lead" in helping to manage and triage social media activity.
-Determine the employees who will be expected to engage regularly, identifying what level these employees should be active.
-Identify the goals of each team and make these success milestones part of their ongoing performance metrics.
-Outline the levels of communication that need to take place across social activity and create a plan for engagement and response.
Providing Proper Training
The etiquette and proper ways to engage in social can change over time. Equipping your teams with ongoing guidance on how to use different channels, the best ways to engage and any insights on best behaviors can help enable better activity that behooves both your company and your networks.
Decide how your company feels the best ways to communicate are in social media as a brand and individuals representing it. Equip internal people active on your channels with the proper ways to talk, respond and about the expectations and preferences of your online networks.
Also connect the dots on how to use social to further business goals and objectives. The way your market devilment team utilizes social will be different than your customer care team. This communication should connect to the roles and goals they have as employees and will help further business goals and also to communicate with networks to create positive experiences with your network.
Provide Ongoing Guidance
If you're already using social as a Marketing channel, you know the guidance and ongoing enablement is needed for the team. This is even more true as social becomes more wide spread. Consider how ongoing guidance can be provided in a way that helps the overall company, individual employees and ensures your networks' needs are being met. This may include:
-Curriculum and ongoing training on the best ways to engage in social channels.
-A communication plan to aggregate and share external resources like industry conferences, third party webinars and industry articles to share social media knowledge.
Corporate wide social media adoption may add complexities to your communication plan but doesn't have to be scary. With proper planning, organization and guidance, it can help companies of all shapes and sizes further their business goals and provide better service and experiences to their networks. Especially as social becomes a more ubiquitous part of all our lives.
Happy 2012 social planning!
Spredfast | www.spredfast.com | @spredfast