Hiring For Social Media: What I’d Look For

In my previous posts on, I pointed out some good and some bad on the social media job front. A few asked what I thought social media jobs should look like, so I’ll do my best. But I’m not going to write this like a typical job description, because I think the content is more important than the format.

Social media-exclusive jobs are okay for now, as foundation building for companies needing to learn the ins and outs, understand intent and strategy, and educate their internal folks. But eventually, these kinds of jobs will fall by the wayside (or at least evolve) when social media becomes part of each and every role in one way or another, perhaps with specialists that have particular experience in application of the tools within their roles. (Think of it this way: we don’t have email managers that do nothing but. The *use* of email and digital stuff touches every role, whether it’s inward or outward facing).

Attributes

In my experience, the folks who grok social media best have a lot of attributes in common:

Curiosity: The desire to explore new ideas, in detail, and without specific direction to do so. Curiosity about the intersection of human interactions and technology is a specific aspect that’s helpful, and a passion for the potential of the work and the organization’s purpose is key to instilling that in others, both internally and externally.

Innovation: Ignore the buzzy nature of this word for a moment and concentrate on what it really means: the introduction of something new. Social media implementation requires new approaches to existing processes, both internally and externally, including communication, strategy, execution, measurement, reporting, and training. (This needs to be carefully balanced with realism and pragmatism, too, but I’d rather rein someone in than have to prod them forward.)

Motivation: Folks thriving in social media jobs are self-starters, often capable of creating clarity from a bit of chaos, and devising their own marching orders without constant direction or specific instructions. If you can instill and nurture this in others, too, so much the better.

Collaboration: “That’s not my job” and “get out of my sandbox” don’t play well in these kinds of roles. They’re far too new to be that rigid, and they definitely need cooperation and work with others across the organization.

Translation: In many companies right now, we need people that have the patience and clarity of explanation to teach others about the impact of the social web, and who work well across departments within a corporate culture. These roles, most critically, need to know how to work and educate across silos, in the terms that make sense to the relevant colleagues.

Humility: The goal here is to elevate the entire company and your colleagues as contributing, valuable members of the community and leaders in the industry. Not you and your “personal brand”.

Diplomacy: Social media roles are today’s change agents. If you expect instant sea change inside your company without a lot of legwork, communication, negotiation, discussion, education, and trial and error, this job is NOT for you. And the outside community will present challenges to you; you need to be able to handle them with patience and tact. It’s a balance of emotional intelligence here.

Connectivity and Awareness: This is a people job, inside and out (and I don’t just mean community roles). You need to be able to talk to people, work with them, socialize with them, connect with them in multiple places. Understand how the network and the people in it need you (and don’t), and how all of those interactions work together to encourage more, deeper, and better connections that ultimately elevate the quality of your work and company.

Expertise

Business Process/Planning and Analysis: From the mid level on up, you want someone who understands financial frameworks for profit and loss, strategic and long range planning (including how to write goals and objectives), and how to map out execution at a tactical level. The key here is the ability to think at a global company level, not within a silo, and not in a linear fashion.

Social Media Anthropology & Participation: If you have someone spearheading social media, I feel pretty strongly that they need to be using it themselves in order to fully understand its implications and unique culture. Yes, that means familiarity with the most widely known tools and technologies, and some of the most consistent and popular applications (for better and for worse) of same, and interest and observation of what’s new on the scene (without the tendency to chase everything new because it is). Academic knowledge is good, applied is even better.

Hedgehog Management: Social media programs that are well thought out have lots of moving parts to manage and drive. People who excel at social media jobs can tackle projects that span multiple networks or areas, and keep all the pieces moving toward a bigger, crystal clear goal (or in Jim Collins’ terms, Hedgehog Concept).

Customer or Client Service: Whether it’s a formal title or not, you really want someone who has experience communicating with customers directly, and fostering those relationships in order to meet their business goals. The most powerful bit of social media is in mobilizing those relationships.

Written Communication Skills: Yep. Sorry, folks. I think this one is really imperative. So much communication and engagement online is in the form of written communication. If you can’t write coherently and professionally, you’re going to struggle. On this note, I also think a lot of social media positions will and should include elements of content marketing, which means that the ability to create and contribute solid content is key.

Social Media Roles And Responsibilities

Again, let me say that I’m writing this from the POV of a job that’s heavily or exclusively social media, and I don’t think these jobs will exist like this forever. And this is a broad, sweeping list that’s not meant to tie to any one job description (though I’m quite certain I have experience bias), but instead give you things to consider if you’re in need of a role like this in your company. A few things that might fall under this umbrella:

• Establish and use listening platforms to gauge the health of the brand online, and potential for participating in new communities
• Build outreach initiatives outside of sales or marketing goals to give our brand a personality and voice within the industry and the communities we care about
• Engage the community actively and responsively, both in relevant outpost communities and existing resident channels (like brand communities), and teach and empower team members to do the same, with consistency and clarity
• Build training programs to help other areas of the company learn and tap the potential of social media for their roles
• Collaborate on internal communication programs to inform and educate around social media initiatives and their broader implications
• Create and facilitate content in multiple media to further engagement goals, both internally and externally, and contribute resources and expertise to prospective and existing community members
• Consume, curate, and share relevant, interesting industry information and content with internal and external communities.
• Understand and observe the parallels and implications of other online activities, including web analytics, email, and search
• Communicate and collaborate on how social media activities impact other business operations, including customer support, human resources, product development, sales and business development, and translate online community and social learnings into business insights
• Establish relevant metrics (new or existing) to map the impact of social media activities in both a qualitative and quantitative fashion, and amend strategies based on learnings and patterns

Reporting wise, I’d put this position under whomever is charged with driving customer experience and a sustainable, positive company presence through online channels, and whatever business function is being most heavily supported by these initiatives. That might be someone in PR, marketing, customer service, client or donor relations, even product management. It needs, in whatever case, to report in to someone who gets the importance and potential of this, even if they don’t necessarily understand the “how”.

Your Turn

There’s no way my list can be exhaustive, nor can it possibly cover every subtlety and nuance of individual positions based on unique business needs. I’m painting with a broad brush, with the hope that it gets the gears turning for all of us to think critically about how these positions fit into business, from multiple perspectives.

So I need to hear from you! What’s missing? What would you included or have you included in your job descriptions? What have you seen that articulates the need for these jobs well? I can’t wait for you to weigh in. Comments are yours.

Failure Is Not Always Crisis

It’s really important that we talk more about failures in social media if we’re ever going to shine true, tangible light on what’s working and what’s not. I know there are lots of you out there that agree. But there’s an important distinction to be made.

When we reference social media failures, we often focus on debacles. Big reputation crises or massive failures in execution that became public and widespread examples of what not to do. But failure is NOT always synonymous with crisis. Failure, in the simplest terms, can be as straightforward as falling short of a goal. And failure is not always disastrous.

When we’re planning social media initiatives, we have to be thinking of two important things. First, what does success look like, and how do we know when we’ve crossed the line to say “we succeeded”? This is part of solid goal setting. If the goal is clear, so too is success criteria.

What we often forget, however, is to do the same thing for failure. When will we say we fell short? Is not reaching our goal considered “failure”, or is failure if we miss that goal by, say, more than 10%? Is failure in our eyes only when our results are catastrophic? And most importantly of all, what will we endeavor to learn from our achievements either way?

I want us, as a community, to stop looking at failure and crisis the same way. When we gather our teams around tables to talk about social media implementation, we should be asking ourselves:

• If we fear crisis or disaster, what’s the worst case scenario we can imagine for our specific situation and company? If it happens, how will we respond? Thinking through the worst and crafting a plan can often make crisis seem less scary.
• Is the “failure” scenario we’re imagining truly a tangible risk for our company in terms of financial or operational loss, a reputation or brand damage issue, or is it merely a situation we’re not comfortable facing? There’s a big difference between these types of situations.
• If we fall short of our goal, what kind of failure criteria means that we won’t attempt this again or will shelve the concept altogether, versus the type that allows for adjustment in strategy and another try?

Lastly, be sure and determine what failure looks like from all impact angles. If an effort achieves the reach you want but fails to accomplish an articulated customer service goal, which pieces will you adjust, and who from your team will you involve?

I’d like for some brave companies to step up and help folks see some of their social media failures and what they learned from them, especially if they readjusted and found success later. Both strategically, and tactically. If you’ve got stories like that, won’t you point us to them in the comments?

Crisis and failure are not the same thing. Both require forethought and scenario planning, but they need to be looked at very differently and methodically. Both can be important guideposts for how social evolves in your organization.

So, what say you?

image by vagawi

Social Media Time Management: 9 Guiding Principles

This is the last in our series on Social Media Time Management, but you’ll really find that these are less ideas about managing just social media and more ideas for managing online life in general. It’s a balancing act. And ultimately, you’re in the driver’s seat.

1) Manage Disruptions

The key to managing disruptions is to have daily priorities. Sounds simple, but isn’t. Pick three things that you have to get done today, and focus relentlessly on those. (Hint: they should always be tied into your bigger picture goals, or you’re wasting time). If that means you have to say “I’m blogging for an hour”, do that, and let nothing but emergencies stand in your way.

Realistically, unexpected stuff pops up. Document it, find a home for it so you can address it later, and give yourself permission to forget it until the time comes where it makes the priority list. If you have to address it now, take note of what you’re working on and come straight back to it when you’re done.

2) Control Information Overload

Stop trying to be everywhere. Just stop. In social media, information overload is yours to own and manage. Pick your two or three social sites and, unless your JOB is to spot the next big things, stick with them. Adopt new tools or strategies only when there is a compelling business reason to do so.

Subscribe only to the blogs you read, and unsub from the ones you don’t, without apology. Delete email you aren’t going to respond to (be honest), and never use your inbox as a to-do list (see #6). Turn your IM off when you’re trying to work. Lots of ideas getting in the way of execution? Create a parking lot for them so you can capture them and get them out of your mind. Visit this once a week, and see if any ideas on the paper warrant a move to reality.

3) Leverage Tools

Use a desktop tool like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, CoTweet or HootSuite to streamline your Twitter use. Blog using a fluid tool like WordPress that has a suite of plugins to make your life easier, and use the scheduling function to write posts in advance. Make folders in Google Reader so you can prioritize your blog reviewing depending on how much time you have available.

However, resist the urge to automate your interactions. Automate and consolidate everything you can up to that point, but the engagement on social sites needs to be you, not a robot. THIS is where you need to spend the time.

4) Annotate and Share

If you don’t have one already, get a Delicious.com account and use it for your bookmarks. I say bookmark freely, even if you never get back to reading it. If you want to find something, it’s easier to go back to it. If you don’t, your links can be a valuable resource of information to others (and you can send them to your specific tags if you get repeated requests for the same information).

Use sites like Slideshare.net to share your presentations, and get ideas or frameworks for ones of your own. Try Flickr Creative Commons for sourcing images and sharing your own. Get to know and love the collaborative power of Google Docs or Zoho, so you don’t have to send stuff around in emails. Leverage your intranet or project tools like Basecamp to share information. The less time you spend looking for stuff, the more time you have to DO stuff.

5) Sometimes Templates are Okay

If you’re asked the same question several times a day in an email, write up a little framework of a response that you can personalize for each recipient, but that contains the bulk of the information you need to share. Same with Twitter. No, this doesn’t mean an autobot, this means having a set of standard links on hand or responses to common questions that you can respond to as needed without having to recreate it every time.

Build an FAQ page on your site to point people do. Create sharable documents that contain frequently requested information and have them on ready five in a folder for easy access. Build your tags in Delicious so that you can send people there for broad categories of related information, like statistics or case studies.

6) Wrangle Task Management

When you’re processing email or items in social media, every time a task pops up, you need a place to put it. I use Things for Mac, but there are lots of programs that will work, even the (gasp) task list in Outlook.

When you’re overwhelmed by what you’re supposed to do (say, the notes from a seminar you just attended or the volume of stuff in your inbox), process one thing at a time and ask yourself “What do I need to do with this as a next step?”. Whatever that task is, create an item for it on your task list and archive the rest of the information for later reference. Bonus step? Tag the items on your list that are doable in less than five minutes so you can take time each day (say, 35 to 45 minutes) to plow through a handful of those.

7) Communicate Expectations

Sometimes, you don’t have the answer. Sometimes, you don’t have the time to get to something right now, but you will at some point. Honesty and humility go a long way to helping manage expectations for responsiveness online. Try these:

• “I’d love to get that information to you, but I need 48 hours. Will that be okay, or do you need it sooner?”
• “I don’t have the answer to that, but I’d like to send your request to someone who does and have them respond. Is that okay?”
• “Hey there, I got your note but need a little time to respond. I’ll be back to you within the day.”
• To your boss, perhaps: “I’d like to complete this project, but here’s the information/resources I’m missing to get it done…”

This is another reason why it’s crucial to infuse some humanity into your conversations online, so folks know that you’re just a person over there, not a superhero or a robot. You need time to spend with your kid, feed the dog, spend with your spouse, read a book. Yes, you should still do those things. Being sure that folks know you’re responsive in a reasonable fashion but not going to be able to handle things ’round the clock is super important.

8 ) Establish Routines

If you have regular tasks and tactics to focus on, you’ll want to try and carve out time for them. Some examples:

• Blogging
• Reviewing and responding to email
• Listening and Monitoring (unless you have a dedicated staff person for this)
• Reporting and Analysis
• Checking in on social networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums, Community sites

If you set aside specific hours in your day, turn off other distractions. (Yes, it’s okay to close your email program). Put your phone on Do Not Disturb or let it go to voicemail. Even 30 minutes of focused time on a single task, on a regular basis can ramp up your productivity. It is NOT “inauthentic” to set times to interact on your chosen social networks. It’s all a matter of balancing priorities.

9) Unplug.

Please. Get offline. Go outside. Take a bath. Play with your kid. Go to the movies. Or go to an in-person event or Tweetup. There is nothing that will derail your social media efforts more than never walking away from them.

You need perspective from an unplugged view so you priorities stay in focus. You need time to scribble your goals on paper, or just think. Productivity isn’t always about how many balls you’re juggling. Sometimes, it’s about very careful editing of how you do – or don’t – spend your time.

So, I’m sure you have tips and tricks for how you manage all of your social media efforts. Where do you draw the lines and say enough is enough? How do you prioritize, and are you allowing yourself to set realistic limitations and goals? I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

image by st_a_sh

Social Media Time Management: Selecting Tools

This post is the third in a multi-part series on Social Media Time Management, intended to supplement the content of the presentation I gave at BlogWorld Expo 2009. Click here to see the collection of posts in the series.

When you’ve planned and are ready to actually start engaging in social media, selecting the right tools can go a long way to helping you manage your time.

Remember, the tools you select should reflect what you’ve learned through your listening efforts, and help you accomplish the goals you’ve set.

When it comes to social networks or types of social media, select two or three. Don’t try to be everywhere or do it all. That’s an inevitable time sink, and you’ll do nothing well.

When it comes to the tools themselves, avoid shiny object syndrome and pick the ones that get you to your goals, and no more. Low tech is okay. Some suggestions for the varying areas of focus are below.

Listening and Monitoring

If you’re bootstrapping and on the DIY track, look into tools like Yahoo Pipes to build yourself a nice little aggregation environment. Or, try putting together a dashboard using NetVibes, and pull in the RSS feeds for your searches from sites like:

• Twitter Search
• Technorati
• Google Blog Search
• Backtype.com
• BoardTracker and BoardReader
• SocialMention.com
• YouTube
• BlogPulse

Or, if you really want to start with some basics, tap your search terms into a site like Addictomatic or IceRocket and get the pulse of what’s happening around you.

Disclosure: I work for Radian6, a social media monitoring company. I am, without question, biased in favor of our tool in terms of paid monitoring solutions. So if you have some budget for a listening solution, I’d recommend learning more about Radian6.

There’s a huge case to be made for investing in a monitoring tool. Once you’re spending more than a couple of hours in a day aggregating posts and information, and more than a couple of hours a week doing analysis on the data, it’s time to look at graduating to a solution that can help automate some of the work and free you up to actually discover the insights that can move your business forward.

Responding, Initiating and Creating

The number of social tools and sites available to you as a business are seemingly endless, right? The thing is, the only ones you need care about are the ones that are hosting conversations you want to be part of. That’s where the listening bit comes in. That’s how you know where to be. It’s never about what cool new toys and sites “they” are talking about. Dig?

I’ve covered a few of the most popular (and useful, in my book) social sites and tools in an ebook called the Social Media Starter Kit. It’s free, and it goes into detail about Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and LinkedIn and a few tidbits about some of the productivity and content creation tools that I’ve found useful. That should give you a start. (And by all means, if your industry is still chatting it up on forums and such, be there.)

Also, please don’t forget about “legacy” tools like email. Coupled with solid social media outreach and engagement, well crafted email newsletters and communications can be an essential part of what you’re doing, and help you cross pollinate your communities.

If you’re blogging, please do yourself the favor of using a platform like WordPress. The plugin resources and development community alone make it well worth the investment (you can get a snifty blog, built on WordPress, customized and prettied up for as little as a few hundred dollars. This beats the pants off of a lousy website). And get yourself a Google Reader account to stay connected with the blogs that matter most to you. Spending time commenting and contributing on other blogs is most likely an important piece of your engagement commitment.

Measuring

First things first. Have a spreadsheet program? Good. Calculator? Good. When it comes to measurement at a basic level, you really can get by with these things (though it’s going to take time, yes). The key is knowing WHAT to measure (which is a whole different post series, but for a start, here’s a presentation I did recently on social media measurement that might offer a few suggestions).

Deciding what to measure is super straightforward if you have clear goals in place. For instance, if your goal is to increase your overall awareness in social media across the next 12 months, you might track metrics like Share of Conversation, overall on-topic post volume (posts that are about you or mention you), and your specific share of posts in your selected social media types over that period (watching how your volume increases or decreases over time on, say Twitter, forum posts, and blogs.).

Benchmarking is crucial. You can’t track progress against something you aren’t measuring in the first place. If you want to increase customer loyalty, you need to know what indicators you’re tracking that point to that goal (repeat activity or purchases on an account, number of referrals from that source over a set period of time, increase in average purchase size, etc.).

For each objective, pick no more than three metrics to track. More than that, and you’re in the rabbit hole of measurement. The win isn’t that you measured. It’s that you measured something that provided an insight into your progress toward business goals. Choose wisely, and stay focused.

Some tools you might consider:

• Social media measurement and analytics: Radian6 (Again, I work for them, and I think it’s a superior paid solution)
• Twitter Analytics: HootSuite, Twitter Analyzer, TweetStats
• Web Analytics and Tracking: Hubspot, Google Analytics, Compete.com
• Blog Analytics: PostRank, Google Analytics (try the Social Media Metrics plugin, but it’s not perfect by any means)
• URL Shorteners like Bit.ly
• Facebook Ad analytics and Facebook Lexicon

When it comes to time management, selection of tools and resources is important, but it needs to be done with an editing eye and with a systematic approach. Random and haphazard tool selection leads to similar results. Do your homework, and the tools you need will often make themselves clear. Ignore the rest.

Next….

To close out the Social Media Time Management series, we’ll talk about some tips, tricks, and helpful hints to stay focused and on track when you’re navigating social media. Has this series been helpful to you? Please leave your feedback in the comments.

Social Media Time Management: Resource Allocation

This post is the second in a multi-part series on Social Media Time Management, intended to supplement the content of the presentation I gave at BlogWorld Expo 2009. Click here to see the collection of posts in the series.

Organizations that are embarking on social media are going to be at different levels of maturity. That’s okay. What’s most important is that you recognize where on the spectrum you sit, so you can plan your efforts accordingly, and focus on how to get to the next level. Here are a few models you can consider:

Passive
Passive organizations are in observation mode. You’re getting the lay of the land. Listening, paying attention, absorbing what’s happening around you. The goals here are to learn what conversations are happening around your company, competition, and industry, where they’re happening and how often, and start laying out your approach in line with what you learn.

Responsive
Responsive companies are taking the first step in engagement online. They’re still listening, but they’re also making forays into responding to the active dialogue. Usually, that means basic responses to company or brand mentions, but it can also mean contributing to industry conversations on social networks that are of interest and strategic focus.

Engaged
At this point, your company is ready to not just participate in existing conversations, but to start a few of your own. That can be anything from starting a blog to foster home-grown dialogue, to initiating conversations on your community or social networks like Ning, Twitter, or a Facebook page. The point here is that you’re leading the conversation, not just following where it goes.

Creating
Creation is a step beyond engagement. It’s more than just conversation. It’s the generation of meaty, useful and valuable content for your community and potential community. Blog posts are the beginning, but here we’re looking at a full content marketing strategy that includes development of independent content designed to be distributed and shared for the purpose of establishing a thought leadership position in your industry.

So – how much time does that take?

Here’s my take on it, from a generalized perspective (and your mileage will and should vary). Listening will always, ALWAYS be the biggest chunk. It’s how you know where you’re going and where you’ve been.

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You’ll note the top two levels have an asterisk; it’s how I’m telling you that if you’re serious, you’ll need more than one person (however well intended) to do it well. The last level I even break out into two lines of responsibility, one for content creation and one for engagement and outreach.

What about people?

If you’re an individual or a small business, this is how I’m suggesting you might break out your team. I understand that it’s often one person, which means you have to make choices about which pieces of this matter most to you and create the most value. Listening and measuring can sometimes coincide and overlap, and content can be repurposed and re-engineered for the web. But for this size business, auditing your online efforts to make social media an OR instead of an AND is really critical.

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If you have a larger organization and are looking to develop a team approach, here’s what that might look like. You’ll need to think about how to create workflows in your organization to get information throughout your team and into other areas of the organization that need it in order to inform business decisions.

click to enlarge

As an example, you might have a few folks on the front lines collecting, routing, and assigning posts for follow up. You might have one or two exclusive “behind the scenes” content creators that help seed your libraries and outposts, and select people that handle the bulk of the visible engagement  and outreach activity. The measurement folks and the listening folks are often one and the same, dividing time and processes with input from the rest of the team.

Ideally, you’re growing into an organization that has point people on this team from each department. You’ll have customer service, sales, and community folks on the listening and engagement side. You’ll have marketing, PR, and community people building content. You’ll have HR, product, finance, legal and executive people on the reporting and communication pipeline so they stay plugged in even if they’re not actively participating. Your workflow will be very individualized, but think it through globally, not just in the silo of your department.

So, that’s a high level view of what your resource allocation might look like, and the time commitment it’ll take to do it well. Is it easy or fast? Heck no. No one said it would be. This is a business model. Not a tactic. What’s your take? Does this make sense?

Next….

In the next post in the series, we’ll explore some of the tools you might consider for listening, engagement and measurement. And later, we’ll talk through some tips and tricks on wrangling the social media time suck and making sure your efforts are focused.