Once you have taken the big plunge and "DTR" with social business (see: It's Time to Define the Social Business Relationship), you're ready to start integrating social into your organization.
Since 2006, I've had various "social titles" (community manager, community marketing, social media manager, social specialist, social business manager, etc.). Despite all of this evolution, one thing always remains the same - you will run into people that think social is merely a way for new moms to share baby pictures on Facebook and will only reduce productivity in the office. There are several ways to combat this and ensure that your organization has Social DNA.
The first step is to find a leader who is willing to back (or at least experiment) with social. I've spent a great amount of time (and sleepless nights) trying to convert the non-believers. However, I learned it's better to find and empower an executive who can champion your successes. Otherwise, you will spend wasted energy trying to get the entire leadership team to jump on the social bandwagon.
Once you have some executive support, you're ready to begin genome mapping internally. There are various models for how to structure your internal integration; however, the one that has worked best for me is the Hub and Spoke.
At Jive, we used our own social intranet to create a virtual "social business team" with contacts in key departments that help integrate the social into their primary functions. For example, a sales rep drafts content for the rest of the sales force to send to prospects and current customers when we create a new Facebook App. This group meets regularly to discuss strategy, review employee social guidelines, and get trained on specific social technologies. The goals of this group are (1) to ensure all of our employees are empowered and rewarded for participation and (2)that we successfully meet our social targets.
Once you have a social team aligned, you can start integrating all of your Social Strategies. We formed one core team to handle all promoted, earned and owned social media in order to drive activity, reach and engagement. In doing this, we were able to create a social funnel and prove that social acquisition of fans and followers plus increased engagement equals leads and measurable sales.
The final integration, and possibly the most important, is to determine how to integrate social throughout the customer journey. This unprecedented level of connection means we can successfully impact, nurture and track from a "like" on Facebook all the way to a advocate using social technologies!
In summary, integration is key in order for social to work at, well, work.
Here is the previous post in this series:
Pillar 1: It's Time to Define the Social Business Relationship.
What problems have you encountered in your journey to integrate social into your organization?