7 Social Media Roles You Haven’t Considered

When you think of social media roles, chances are you think of a community manager or the oh-so-generic “social media manager”, which is usually some function of the marketing department managing strictly social media programs. But there are loads of other potential roles that can integrate or represent social media alongside other business areas.

Considering these is one of the primary ways to really integrate and entrench social media and its implications throughout the business, not just isolated in the communications department. Let’s take a look at what I mean.

Social Phone Operator

At Radian6, we have folks that help us man the front lines of what we call our Listening Grid. They’re responsible for manning the dashboard, picking up the alerts, and routing posts that require engagement or attention to the right people on the community, support, or account teams. In the case of mature organizations, this can easily be a full-time role, but for companies just getting started in social media, it can probably be part of someone (or several people’s) jobs.

Existing Roles that might incorporate this: customer support specialists, tech-savvy receptionists, department assistants or coordinators

Lead Generation

Yes, there are leads making themselves known in social media. By listening carefully to the discussions around your brand, competition, or specific market or industry, you can spot when people are seeking out the kind of products or services you provide. We call this Listening at the Point Of Need. There’s also plenty of opportunity to just track down where your prospects are present in social media, and start contributing and participating in the discussions they’re having to get acquainted in a non-threatening, friendly way.

These can even be more junior roles (if overseen by someone who understands the social space), wrapped into other kinds of lead generation activity like research or direct response programs.

Existing roles that might incorporate this: sales coordinators, sales assistants, community coordinators, marketing coordinators, development assistants

Social Business Development

Hush with you that social media can’t be good for B2B (I’ve been doing social media in B2B for two years and it’s working just fine, thank you). Yesterday, we just took people to the golf course or dinner to get to know them more intimately. Now, geography isn’t an issue, and we can have a meaningful conversation with a prospect via Twitter, or make an initial connection in the comments on our blog. (Remember, the tools are what you make of them).

If your prospects are out there using forums, blogs, social networks, or anywhere you can have a discussion, you can supplement your offline business development with some great online touchpoints.

Existing roles that might incorporate this: community managers, sales/business development professionals, account managers, development or fundraising pros, client service teams

Social Customer Service & CRM

Perhaps the most obvious role is that of dedicated customer service for social media channels. Whether that’s a Twitter fleet or a blog or forum posse, you can dedicate resources to handling customer service issues in online environment and either solving them directly, or getting them to more efficient and thorough existing channels.

You also have the opportunity to add social media channels to the arsenal of client and account management. And yes, this can be one part of a community role, but folks in your account, support or service departments with an interest in social media can also be outstanding resources.

Existing roles that might incorporate this: customer service or support roles of any kind, client services, account management

Internal Community Manager

It might be obvious to segment your community managers’ responsibilities into specific markets or verticals you serve, depending on the complexity of your company or organization. But what might be less obvious is that you have an internal community that needs support, too, namely your employees and team members. Having someone dedicated to listening to them, creating content, and providing a bridge to management and other areas of the organization can be a valuable consideration.

Existing roles that might incorporate this: human resources or training/professional development roles, internal communications

Social Logistics/Operations Managers

The social media work doesn’t always have to be on the front lines. For companies deploying more robust social media programs, there are information technology needs/requirements, guidelines and policies to be written and maintained, teams to manage and coordinate in varying disciplines, and budgets to manage. Perhaps you have staff that uses social media personally but not professionally, or they have an interest but on the more strategic side, rather than being out there engaging on their own. You might consider how to give some of the operational responsibilities to folks with those skills.

Existing roles that might incorporate this: operations managers, IT professionals, managers of departments engaged in social media

Analysts

You may or may not already have a research or analyst department, but there’s a whole slew of insights that come through the social media sphere. Looking closely at the data and extracting some key indicators and ensuing recommendations is what can really take your social media efforts from surface-scraping to wired into the business.

Existing roles that might incorporate this: data analysts, project/department managers with analytical skills

There are undoubtedly more, and I’m sure I’ve missed some potential matches in the existing roles.

But does this get you thinking? Are you experimenting with integrating social stuff into roles inside your company, or do you have ideas? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

image by David Spender

Driving Social Media From Behind the Firewall

This is a guest post from Michael Brito, and the fourth and final installment in the Internal Social Media series. Michael is here to share with us some of his actual, real-life experiences with implementing social media inside organizations.  Special thanks to Michael for sharing his experiences from the trenches. You can follow Michael on Twitter or check out his social media blog.

Most of my professional career, I have been fortunate enough to work for some fantastic global brands; Hewlett Packard, Yahoo! and Intel. Within these organizations, my core focus has been driving consumer engagement using tools and strategies of the social web. And even though HP, Yahoo! and Intel are completely different organizations, many of the same challenges and conversations have arisen quite consistently.

Here are some things I have learned a long that way that I hope you can start thinking about within your organizations or small business:

Measuring Social ROI

A few years ago, it was the standard to measure growth rates in Twitter followers, Facebook fans and RSS subscribers.  Couple that data with a few slides from Omniture and management was all good; they rarely asked any questions. Even today, these are still very important metrics to analyze and report on but the bar has been raised.

The question we need to start asking ourselves is “how do we go about quantifying these numbers to show how they drive true business value and/or revenue?” Some have done a really good job, like Dell and the Dell Outlet Twitter account; but even then, there are several unknowns like the whether or not the sales from that program cannibalized higher margin sales on Dell.com or elsewhere.

I have read post after post that talks about “100 ways to measure social media”; and while these may be really good ideas, I think that having 100 ways to measure social media is contributing to the problem.  There is a lack of focus and specificity; like having metrics A-D-D.  If I am leading a marketing organization, all I have time to look at is 2- 3 metrics max.

So, these metrics should give me the insight to determine if the amount of financial investment I contribute to social media is actually driving sales, retaining customers or cutting costs. I don’t have the magic formula because there isn’t one. It will be different for every organization. And driving brand awareness won’t cut it anymore.

Research

There was a time in my life when I hated research; especially since I spent three years in grad school, yes three.  But research is a valuable asset if you do more than just talk about it.

The Forrester Social Technographic Latter of Participation is a great resource that allows marketers to understand how their users interact and behave on the social web. At Intel, we hired Forrester to map our internal audience segments to the technographic profile and the insights we learned were eye opening.  Since then and during my tenure at Intel, we used that data (which was not public) to drive many of our social media engagements; some of which are still in existent.

For example, last year at Intel we launched Digital Drag Race as a part of the Core i7 product launch. Digital Drag Race was a contest that focused on user generated video. We knew from the research that a high percentage of our segment was considered content creators (i.e. those who create content and share it on the web) so we built the entire program around that specific behavior.  The results were fantastic and we exceeded the metrics goals we decided upon prior to launch.

Top-Down Organizational Support

If an organization is not ready to embrace social media 100% internally from their leaders, they will not succeed in driving effective customer relationships externally. Embracing social media is more than simply saying “we want to join the conversation” and then investing a couple hundred thousand on a Facebook app promoting the next product. It’s a cultural shift that starts at the core of the organization; with the very people who represent the brand.

It is critical that management empower their organizations to work collaboratively. Building communities from behind the firewall is no easy task. There are a lot of things to consider; and collaboration across the organization (marketing, legal, PR, business units, customer support) is imperative. Decisions can take months and sometime years. Having adequate support and empowerment from senior management is important, especially during the budget planning process.

Full scale integration with other marketing channels: launching a blog, twitter account and Facebook page is useless unless there is tight integration across the board with retail, online, search, channel partners, resellers, paid media and the list goes on.  I don’t think it’s realistic that every piece of external communication has “social” built into it but it should at least be explored. In my experience, social media is usually an afterthought and this needs to change. Social media is an excellent way to humanize a brand; and adoption of it is growing exponentially across the globe. It’s important that brands think about integration from the beginning to prevent themselves from having disjointed, irrelevant communications.

Seeking Participation Across the Organization

A blog is good, but a blog without a solid editorial calendar, a human voice and a subject matter expert is not good.  Too many times, marketing and PR departments launch blogs and expect for people to actually read them.  I am sure it happens in some cases, but the true value in social media is when you have subject matter experts engaged with consumers on the social web answering product relates questions and/or offering customer support.

This brings up a whole new set of challenges, especially if the organizational culture has not fully embraced social media.  Usually marketing and PR departments have to seek out “volunteers” in the organizations or find the employees that are already active in the space. And even then, most employees who are interested in volunteering and are passionate about their products have other responsibilities so bandwidth becomes an issue.

The last thing you want to happen is for an employee to build up a solid reputation online and become a “trusted advisor”; to then have to abandon the community because of bandwidth. One solution would be to hire dedicated “technical advisors” where their sole responsibility would be to engage online; or seek management support in adding in “social participation” related job responsibilities within various job roles across the organization (i.e. a network engineer would code 80% of the time; and blog/tweet/whatever for 20% of the time). It would be part of their job and they would be measured on it.

Global Social Media Programs

This was part of my responsibility at Intel and it’s not easy. What may work in the US, Canada and maybe the UK will not necessarily work in India. For global brands, this nut has yet to been cracked but there are some good learning and best practices that can help brands manage this.

At Intel, there was a team that launched and managed a “social media integration forum” conference call once a month. Marketing leads from across the world attended and shared a little about any past or present campaigns or promotions. The calls were excellent but the challenge was that they were rarely actionable.  It was more about sharing and less about planning.

Marketing departments must not only share what’s going on in their regions; but they should also work together on integration with these various programs.  It’s going to be a challenge because social media is culturally driven.  However, there are certain things that US teams can do to help other regions succeed in the social web like providing digital assets (videos, widgets) that can be translated in various languages. Also providing a tool set or framework that will help global teams to create blogs/communities; and then consistent sharing of best practices and key insights.

Your Turn…

Thanks again, Michael, for sharing your practical and tangible experience around internal social media! What do you say folks? What questions might you have for Michael, and what experiences have you had that might be similar or different? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments.

Internal Social Media: Building A Plan

This is the third post in the four part Internal Social Media series. If you’ve enjoyed this series or others you’ve read here, consider subscribing for free!

Building a plan to deploy internal social media has a lot of the same elements and considerations as building an external plan. But there are some nuances, and your discussion and presentation may need to be in smaller, more methodical steps if this is a new idea for your organization.

Goals

This is always the very first place you need to start. When talking about internal social media, bring together the people that have interest in helping shape the plan, as well as the critics and those people that it will directly impact if deployed. Ask yourselves:

• What things can internal social media help us with, either existing business goals or new ones?
• What can it NOT help us do?
• What is the primary need we’re hoping to fill with social media? Information flow? Idea generation and innovation? Networking? Training? Morale?
• How much do we want to weave in personal experiences/interests for employees in their company social media experience?
• What kind of involvement and participation do we want from our employees overall?
• What is success for us? Failure? Over what time period?

There are plenty more questions to ask, but knowing what you want out of internal social media and articulating it alongside definitions for accountability is key to long term success.

Resources

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for any social media adoption is failing to determine who is involved, how much time or money will be spent doing it, and ultimately where accountability for success lies. The team approach is one I favor, mostly because you can bridge several different disciplines in your organization and have collective goals (and group accountability).

You’ll want to consider:

• What your team looks like and which departments/areas are represented. Think communications (marketing, PR, internal comms), HR, finance, IT, sales, customer support, product management, legal, etc. Who has a vested interest?
• How many hours per day/week/month will be required during the development, launch, and maintenance phases of your social media plan. This includes meetings and planning sessions as well as project work. You figure this out by drilling down into the details of execution as best you can, and making educated guesses about time expenditures based on similarly scoped undertakings in the past.
• What software, infrastructure, and other capital expenditures might be necessary to implement the plan
• What the approval channels/information flow looks like
• What other processes and practices might shift, change, or be replaced by what you’re doing with internal social media

When you present the plan to management or the team, having this area addressed with concrete information is really key to getting it considered. Even if your numbers are approximations based on research and related experience, they’ll let folks know that you’ve considered carefully and realistically.

Content and Participation

As you frame out your plan, and depending on the focus of your internal efforts, you’ll want to address what kind of content and information will need to be prepared, or what existing information should be housed and distributed through your social media efforts. Outline:

• Who your key subject matter experts are, and who is capable/willing to help with content creation
• What subject areas you’ll need to focus on, like company news and updates, corporate culture and brand materials, training, product information, knowledge bases for other functions, calendars, etc. Think both by department and by content or media type.
• What formats for content work best for your employees.

As you frame out what your employee participation might look like, you’ll also want to discuss things like:

• How folks get access to your social media efforts
• What mechanisms you’ll give them to respond to and engage with the content you create
• How participants can create and share their own content
• Whether you should draw up guidelines for participation and what issues they should address

Part of planning needs to be envisioning what your social media efforts will look like when they’re in full swing, based on the goals you’ve outlined. Planning for launch is one thing, but discussing the long term nurturing and facilitating of growth, conversation, feedback, and purpose needs to be part of your planning efforts.

Measurement and Results

Your plan really needs to include information on how you plan to measure against the goals you’ve set. And please stop thinking that measurement needs to be complex to be effective. For each concrete goal you have – say, improving the availability of product information across the company – discuss:

• Are we measuring it now? How?
• If we’re not measuring it now, what sorts of indicators would tell us how well we’re doing with that effort? In the above example, perhaps you’d look at surveys of employees reacting to availability of information, downloads/access for existing materials, FAQs asked and answered internally of the product team.
• If we ARE measuring it, what is our goal for improvement, and will the measurements we have help point us to whether or not we’ve achieved that?
• If we don’t have mechanisms in place to measure things properly now, what do we need in order to do that?

Pick no more than two or three things to measure relative to each goal or objective you set. It’s not realistic to track and report on more than that, and clarity is what you’re after, not quantity of statistics. You want indicators that point to progress or lack of it, and ones that can help you understand what to improve, change, or continue in order to stay on track. (Don’t forget to have a conversation about what you’ll do with what you learn).

Illustrate how you’ll report on your results, and where you’ll disseminate that information inside the company.

Presenting the Plan

You know who cares about this in your organization, and you likely know who you need to give you the green light. It might be a combination of the people that hold the purse strings and the people that oversee your day to day activity.

Invite those people into a room for a 30 minute meeting that outlines the goals, resources, participation, and measurement activities you’ve illustrated above. If you’ve done your homework about the hesitations and fears people have about this, be prepared to address them directly in your presentation and discussion.

Be sure that your department/function goals can be rolled up to larger goals for the organization. Talk in business terms, not in social media jargon. Illustrate what social media will help you accomplish inside your organization, and be realistic about the potential downsides or issues that social media won’t solve.

What Else?

There’s plenty more to consider with an internal social media plan, to be sure. I’m giving you some skeleton thoughts in hopes that they’ll help you frame out your own efforts, since there’s no one size fits all solution. What would you include? What considerations do we need to make for particular types of companies or industries? What’s helping you illustrate these efforts inside your organization?

Let’s have a chat about it in the comments.

Internal Social Media: Addressing The Fears

This is the second post in the four-part Internal Social Media series. If you’ve enjoyed this series or others you’ve read here, consider subscribing for free!

Much like with external social media programs, some companies have consistent hangups and fears that prevent them from even getting started. Some risks are very real and necessary to consider: regulatory issues, compliance, and disclosure stuff. But most companies’ fears stem from a few key places, all of which are addressable with some patience, process, and open discussion.

Negative Comments

“But what if something says something…bad?”

For many businesses, the fear of having something say something negative about them is one of the most compelling reasons to stay far away from social media. Sometimes it’s a matter of “out of sight, out of mind” (if we didn’t see it or hear it, it didn’t happen), other times it’s more an issue of not having an idea of how to respond.

Internally, the fear is that employees will trash their bosses, badmouth the company, or even share confidential information where they shouldn’t. But employees aren’t eager to put their professional reputations (or jobs) on the line simply to write a few nasty words about their boss on the company blog, and they’ve already got all the tools they’d need (like a phone, email, and countless social sites like GlassDoor.com that they can access on their personal time) if that’s their goal.

Having a conversation up front about participation guidelines (more on this below) is a good start, as well as outlining your expectations for professional behavior on internal social tools. If you already have more private feedback mechanisms in place through HR or other avenues, pay attention to the comments and suggestions you’re getting as a company. If you have a habit of either not asking for input from your teams, or asking for it but ignoring it, that’s a problem that’s much more cultural and operational, and will be exacerbated by social media, not solved by it.

The truth: criticism is happening anyway, even if you aren’t listening for it now. Empower your employees to provide constructive feedback in a professional manner and demonstrate that you’re listening, and it becomes a constructive and progressive exercise. If the negative comments appear, learn how to deal with them in a positive fashion, and address them head on. But recognize that what your employees want is to be heard and acknowledged.

Resources

But who owns this? Who’s going to manage it? Who’s responsible for responding and engaging and participating? Can we mandate participation, or does it have to be voluntary?

Lots of questions surround how to deploy social technologies, and the answer to most of them is “it depends”. In many cases, multiple people have to be involved in owning and managing it, from:

• IT to help integrate and provide access to the technologies
• HR to help encourage and guide participation based on company goals
• Varying department management for helping provide the information that gets shared and discussed

They’ll need to work as a team, all outlining common goals for the initiatives and mapping out plans to get there. Those goals will help guide employees on participation, which you can’t mandate effectively. Just like in their personal lives, employees use technologies and social networks differently, but if you build effective tools that serve needs for information, training, feedback, and connection between employees, folks will find the pieces that are valuable to them.

Employee Productivity

At the crossroads of professional teams and social media is the concern that employees will “waste” time using these tools and that their productivity and work contributions will suffer as a result. Mashable recently reported a survey wherein 54% of companies completely block external social media sites.

One study in particular, conducted by the University of Melbourne, says that employees are actually more productive when allowed to use the internet for their leisure. And many employees today, born and raised in a digital world, are incredibly more adept at leveraging technology to do their jobs more efficiently and better while accomplishing multiple tasks at the same time. Their expectations for companies, moreso now than ever, is that their technological access and experience at work will mirror what they have at home.

If employees are interested in social networks, they’re going to find ways to use them on company time, most likely through their mobile devices. Internal social networks can have the advantage of providing a gated environment in which employees can connect and converse that still has professional purposes and usefulness in a work environment.

What employees are craving that compels them to use social media in the first place, either personally or professionally: access to information, a voice in a larger conversation, and connections with people that they relate to. All of those things can work in a business environment, and even help team members do their jobs better.

Guidelines for Participation

In many ways, creating simple and straightforward guidelines for internal social media engagement can address many of the potential fears above. Guidelines should reflect the codes of conduct that employees are expected to adhere to in their ongoing work, and discuss specifically the expectations that both team members and management has for how internal social tools should be used.

Ideally, guidelines should be drafted and made available for some feedback from team members so they feel invested in the process and the outcome. There are dozens of examples here of both external and internal social media policies to help guide your efforts and find the style that works for your business.

Guidelines tend to work better than “rules”, and discussion of social media participation and expectations in open forum at your company can go a long way to addressing the fears you or your management may have about adoption. If you cannot trust your employees to participate on an internal social network professionally, it’s likely your hiring practices that need evaluation, not your social media policy.

What Else?

What else would you add? What other reasons are employers fearful of social media inside the walls, and how can we help them address those concerns? I’d love to hear your takes and experiences.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about building a plan to roll out an internal social media program, and what to consider.

Internal Social Media: Building A Case

Today, we’ll kick off a series on Internal Social Media, talking about why it can be valuable, and some of the ways to make it happen. Stay tuned for more posts in the series, culminating with some thoughts from the trenches.

When we talk social media, we often focus on the relationship between business and its external audiences or communities, and how technology can impact communication within them. However, there’s a very real case to be made for why social media can and should be used inside the walls of your company, even before you consider an external strategy: as a testing ground for ideas, as a mechanism for improving internal communication, and as a diagnostic tool.

Cultural Assessment

As I’m fond of saying, social media adoption and implementation in companies is often more of a cultural shift than an operational one. It touches on issues of role and responsibility change, skills evolution, communication style, risk tolerance, and trust that have sometimes rested very comfortably inside an organization for some time.

Leading with social media internally can highlight some of the potential cultural shifts and obstacles that might impede broader strategies. Whether it’s fears over criticism, uncertainty over productivity issues, or breakdowns in communication or information flow inside the company, setting up social media tactics on the inside can bring them to the forefront and increase the likelihood that you can address them within your walls first.

Risk Discussion

Implementing social media programs internally can help spur discussion about some of the biggest barriers to broadscale adoption: risk assessment. Considering the implications of opening up communication channels, allowing feedback and commentary, flattening hierarchies or dedicating time to new strategies can lead to discussions about potential risks: cost, productivity, confidentiality, accountability, technology access.

Having these discussions first and in the relatively confined walls of your own company can mean laying out a plan to mitigate and address those risks in a manageable timeframe, and with the ability to test solutions before making them externally visible.

Internal Branding

Companies sometimes do a weak job of translating their brand internally, and social strategies can improve that. Internal social networks can encourage broader discussion of company goals, purpose, and vision, and can allow those conversations to happen within levels and across silos in the company (instead of the typical top-down approach).

Employees and team members can gain a greater understanding of larger company strategy through information sharing and dialogue, and executive and management teams can garner feedback and input on the brand and its presentation from the point of view of the workforce. Broader understanding of company purpose can often uncover better and more effective ways for departments and teams to work together toward common goals.

Idea Generation

Ideas – and great ones – can come from all parts of a company. Small changes or transformational shifts in thinking can be found right in our own backyards. What often keeps those ideas hidden, however, is the lack of a mechanism to share them, and the sense of permission to do so (especially for those that may be outside one’s functional area of expertise).

Social technologies – wikis, forums, idea sharing tools like UserVoice, or simple suggestion boxes in the form of blogs or message boards with comments – can provide ample opportunities to share, generate, and build on ideas in a collaborative, open format that has visibility across the organization.

Network Building

At our core, humans crave connections and affinities with others like us. In companies, however, organizational design sorts us by our skillsets and functions and geography, not typically our interests, personalities, or ancillary talents and skills.

Giving employees the opportunity to gather around points of common interest – whether they be personal or professional – online and outside the bounds of physical location can unlock collaborations powered by complimentary skills, friendships, and stronger working relationships. What can all of that lead to? Morale improvements and an increased sense of collective purpose, for starters. Companies earn reputations for empowering and connecting their team members, and retention, recruitment, and even alumni networks can see an uptick.

Knowledge And Information Sharing

Spock didn’t say it exactly, but the knowledge of the many can far outweigh the knowledge of the individual. Collective and collaborative knowledge bases can be rich stores of information, taking tribal knowledge and the information that lives in people’s heads and giving it a tangible, searchable, annotated and permanent (editable) home.

Having central and accessible knowledge could perhaps have a positive impact on training and onboarding programs, as well as continuing education initiatives and cross-functional information sharing within companies to help people do their jobs more efficiently, more thoroughly, and even more creatively.

These are just a few of the ideas, of course, to get started thinking about social media inside business. What other purposes can you see? What are the benefits, and potential reasons why internal deployment can help pave the way for other things? Let’s have your ideas in the comments?

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about addressing some of the fears and hesitation that social networking brings to the forefront.