Getting Your Colleagues in the Game

When you’re trying to make the case for social media inside your company, it’s not just your bosses you have to convince. Management matters, but often times, your colleagues and co-workers need some education, too.

Especially if you’re planning long term and expecting that social media will become part of your business model, not just a channel (and I sure hope you are), you’re going to need the help and involvement from the people around you, and outside of your department.

Getting their commitment and building their enthusiasm is key. It’s not just about a mandate. It’s about helping them understand what social media is, how it works, and why it can help them do their jobs better.

Communication

Good internal communication is really hard. But it’s critical for ANY larger scale initiative to succeed, but especially for something that may be as unfamiliar as social media.

Designate point people on your social media team to act as information stewards. They should be folks with good relationships throughout your organization, and they need to connect with point people in other departments that may be affected – now or later – by social media endeavors.

Ask them to keep these folks posted on a regular basis about your plans and initiatives – both the ones being implemented for sure, and the ones you’re tossing around. Ask for their feedback. Let them air their interest and concerns, and ask lots of questions. Put the responses somewhere for everyone to find and see. That can be a weekly email update, a Google Doc that all can access, your corporate intranet, a wiki, whatever works for you.

People are remarkably comforted by the availability of information, even if they don’t always use it.

Training

Please, please spend the time educating your teams as you go along. You don’t have to have it all perfect (and you probably never will). But be willing to SHARE how you do what you do, down to the details. It’s surprising how enlightening it can be for people to understand what you do by seeing it in action. And if you want people to adopt social media as part of their business practices, you need to make them comfortable with it.

Simple is okay, too. Some ideas:

• Setting up social media profiles
• Social media culture and philosophies (the fluffy stuff, yes, but still important)
• Engaging 101: What to say, when to say it, and what to avoid
• What to listen for and why, relative to their jobs
• Case studies on social media gone right (or wrong), and how that relates to your work
• Real examples of how they can be using social media in their focus area (customer service, business development/sales, HR, internal communications, product management, etc.)
• Measuring social media – what you track, why, and how

Spend an hour over lunch. Order pizza. Skip the PowerPoints. Have a practical discussion that’s open to lots of dialogue, questions, and airing of concerns or doubts. Ask them what THEY want to learn about (versus what you think you need to teach). Training is as much about asking and answering practical, real questions as it is about lecturing.

Empowerment

If you’re opening lines of communication and training folks to get them immersed in social media, you have to let them do it. And they need to believe that you trust their judgment as professionals and colleagues to do it well.

Not everyone is going to do things the way YOU would do them personally. Mistakes will be made, and there will be plenty of learning opportunities for how to do something different or better.

Your feedback should be as much on the side of encouragement and positivity as it is about criticism or pointing out mistakes. Social media is still a BIG area of discomfort and misunderstanding for people, especially those who didn’t come up through their professional careers with digital media at the center. And it’s intimidating as all get out for some. Not everyone gets this naturally.

Being a good steward of social media internally means being coach, cheerleader, and psychologist as well as teacher and expert. It means speaking in plain English, not jargon and buzzwords and kumbaya, and putting things in business perspective for the people you’re talking to. Think practical.

Remember that this is a culture shift. It’s not just about the what and how. Be a resource to your teams as much as you can while they get acclimated.

Don’t Be A Perfectionist

Truth: I’m still working with all of my Radian6 colleagues to perfect this inside our own organization, so please don’t think you need to nail it out of the gate. We’re figuring out what questions people have. Finding ways to share information faster and better. Offering insights about what’s working and what’s not and where we’re hoping to head.

Just DO IT. Get started, somewhere. Waiting until you have all the details hammered out isn’t realistic, because they’ll always be shifting (and that’s not unique to this, either). Move past the “wow, nifty” part of social media, and get started talking about how it really matters to your work.

So how about you? What challenges are you facing getting your colleagues to understand and embrace social media? Are they on board with the idea, but lost about how to apply it? Have you considered your internal implications?

The comments belong to you.

The Social Media Team: Roger, Roger

An aspect of social media execution that I think often gets lost in the shuffle is communicating among your internal team. It’s so very critical to doing this stuff (okay, any business stuff really) well, but it’s like the shoemaker’s kids having crummy shoes. We forget to take care of our own.

So let’s talk about this in two pieces; the things you’re going to want to communicate about and why, and then a few tools you ought to consider to help you do that.

The Information Highway

On a daily basis, there’s so much happening across the company that it’s nearly impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff, and know what your colleagues and compatriots need to know. It’s not the minutia that matters so much as the things that could potentially affect the way someone else does their job, for better or worse. Especially as it relates to social media, the intelligence that needs to be shared is the meaty stuff that influences how your team interacts with your customers and community. Just a few examples:

Sales and Biz Dev:

• New account wins
• Significant account losses
• Sources of new leads
• Upcoming significant pitches/presentations
• Significant decision drivers for prospects/customers
• Goals, both short term and long term

<

Support and Product Development

• FAQs and recurring issues among customers, including which are being looked at for implementation
• New product/service updates/schedules
• Testimonials/Use Cases/Feedback

Community and Communications

• Share of Voice vs. Competition
• Overall sentiment for the brand
• Media Coverage (traditional and social)
• Testimonials/Use Cases/Feedback
• Upcoming events/speaking engagements

Executive and Management

• New Hires, Promotions, other HR
• Changes to compliance, regulatory or legal issues/policies
• Strategic Planning & Business Goals
• Partnerships and Alliances (and their purposes)

Everyone:

• What you need from other team members/expectations
• What other team members are doing that’s valuable (not sunshine blowing, truly meaty feedback)
• Ideas for other team members outside your role
• Cultural issues: the positives that keep you coming to work and the challenges that make your job harder

All in all, this is a guidepost. It’s not meant to be comprehensive, but rather to get you thinking about what might be important in your company. And I’m not advocating that you churn out dozens of reports and spreadsheets and graphs and sit around the conference table looking at PowerPoint slides. I’m suggesting that in the format that works for you and your culture, you need to be talking to each other: regularly and openly. Social media is about communication, after all. Don’t ignore each other.

The Power Tools

Communication really isn’t about the technology, it’s about the intent and the effort. But having some of the right tools around you can be super valuable. Let’s talk about a few things that are available so you can consider what might work for you.

Micromedia Platform: With the explosion of Twitter, there’s a strong movement for similar products that are meant to be used internally. At Radian6, we use Yammer for quick bursts of internal communication, and mostly to share news like media coverage, interesting links, or sales wins.  Another application that serves a similar purpose is SocialCast, though I can’t speak to it’s capabilities.  These tools are helpful for many-to-many communication and useful for sharing quick bites of information that would otherwise clog people’s email inboxes.

Instant Messaging: When IM arrived, email volume for me dropped dramatically. It’s great for the one-off ping to someone. The downside is that it’s not captured in an archive (unless you deliberately do so) and it’s only one-to-one communication, but sometimes, that’s all you need. I’m a fan of Adium, an IM client that integrates all the popular platforms into one easy to use interface.

CRM and Engagement Tracking: Let me disclose one more time that I work for Radian6, so my comments come from that perspective. Our platform happens to have a feature that allows each user to respond to and track responses to posts and comments across the social web, as well as post comments to internal team members about specific posts so we can talk to each other about how to respond (or how to disseminate important feedback). This kind of audit trail is invaluable, because you can not only track what you’re doing, but report on it later.  Whether or not you’re using Radian6, you’ll want to devise a system for tracking and capturing the interaction your team members have online.

You’ve also got to have a solid system in place for tracking your customer and client relationships. Don’t skimp here; if you’re small, find a system that you can grow into. We use and like Salesforce, but there are literally dozens on the market, all the way up to enterprise-level (and incredibly complex) software like SAP. It’s pretty straightforward, but you MUST be able to keep track of the path of communication with, among, and between your customers and prospects, and have it available for everyone to see.

Blogs: Internal company blogs can be a compelling way to disseminate content and information around the enterprise, but they also take a dedicated effort by the team (read: time and access to information). But they can be a streamlined way to share information, stories, ideas and challenges, again without cluttering the email system. Since they’re readable on the reader’s schedule and allow for comments, blogs also serve as a great archive of information and resources across the company. Dell and Best Buy have done amazing things with their internal blogs, everything from innovating new product and service ideas to simply sharing news and successes. Platforms like WordPress are easy to install and integrate into secure areas of your company website or intranet.

Social Networks: These are going to be overkill for some companies because they take significant human, capital, and technical resources to make them work well. But companies like IBM, Deloitte, Microsoft and Best Buy have been leveraging the power of social networking internally for sharing everything from employee-generated ideas to communication among disparate offices and collaborating on product and service innovations.

There are enterprise providers like Awareness Inc. and Jive’s ClearSpace that offer compelling and robust white-label social network platforms, but even something like a private network on the Ning platform can be a great starting point for companies looking to take the next step toward internal and multi-channel social communication.

The Old Fashioned Way: Please, please don’t underestimate the importance of our “old school” tools like the phone and email, or even the (gasp) in-person meeting. I’m not a big fan of meetings for the sake of them, but with a purpose and a clear agenda, there’s no substitute for taking time out of your day to get together and communicate with voice. You can only digest so much in text before you tune out. But don’t just use your meeting to report in to each other, use it to tackle a particular question or challenge and aim to come away from the meeting another step closer to the solution. Distance in the way? No worries. That’s why they invented GoToMeeting and Skype.

So. What are you communicating about amongst your team? What do you WISH you were communicating about more? What’s signal and what’s noise, and what makes your job easier? I want to hear your input in the comments so we can all learn and think alongside you.

Photo credit: Thunderchild tm

New Series: Equipping a Social Media Team

I started to write a post about Equipping your Team for Social Media. And it grew and grew and grew until it became clear to me that this was much more digestible as a series.

So today’s the start of what’ll probably end up being 4 or 5 posts about building, equipping, and empowering a social media team. I’m coming at this from the corporate perspective, assuming that you’re building mostly an internal team (though I’ll touch a bit on the roles of consultants and vendors later in the series).

What Do you Mean A Social Media Team?

Let’s assume for a minute that you’re already convinced that social media is something you need to be integrating into your work. (If you still need convincing on this front, sift through my archives or any of the myriad blogs on social media out there right now).

When I refer to a team, I mean exactly that. A group of people inside your organization that are tasked with strategizing, executing, and stewarding social media initiatives inside your company.

Those initiatives can be anything from just listening and mining social media conversations for insights about your brand presence to participating actively through blogs, Twitter, forums, or other social networks to engage with your customers.

So, Who Should Be Involved?

I’m going to get into specifics about recruiting, skills/attributes and succession planning later on, but for now, suffice it to say that if you’re only considering adding people to your social media team from your communications department, please stop there, and let’s chat about this for a minute.

I know we communication types think that since the word “media ” is involved, it should live exclusively with the communication department. And I think that’s selling it all very short.

Your customer service, product development, and business development teams really have stakes in this game, and you ought to consider a cross-disciplinary group that includes people from all of these departments. Why?

The information you glean from social media is going to affect more than the way you talk to your customers. If you’re really integrating it, it should be affecting the decisions you  make about how you help those customers, and ultimately inform the products and services you provide to them. So my team would have folks from:

* PR and Corporate Communications
* Marketing
* Customer and/or Client Service
* Business Development or Sales
* Brand Management
* Product Development
* Executive Team

If you’ve got multiple people in each department, select a point person or two for each to help streamline internal communication, but everyone needs to be engaged and involved.

Team members are responsible for strategizing and executing the social media initiatives that are relative to their department function (which sometimes means active social media participation and sometimes implementing internally), communicating back to the team and management about results and challenges, educating and training internally about social media initiatives, and finding ways to integrate the learnings from social media into their work. We’ll dive more into specifics on that later, too.

Why The Hell Do I Need One?

I’m going to be brief here because I’ve already written at length about the fact that social media isn’t going anywhere. Call it what you will, but socially charged communication is changing expectations in business, both for customers and potential customers alike. There’s no backwards now.

So given that, you need a social media team because having one champion in your office forever doesn’t scale. You cannot conceivably manage a comprehensive and properly integrated social media presence with one guy (or girl). And done right, social media bleeds into almost every aspect of the business. That doesn’t mean that everyone gets on Twitter, but it does mean that what you learn through social customer engagement can and will inform decisions and ideas about much of what you do. And the right people need to be empowered to do something with that information.

To me, building this team is a first step to getting departments to work across borders, but all with the goal of improving the customer experience, and building a more solid foundation upon which your business can grow and thrive.  It means managing the monolith of social media by integrating it into what you’re already doing, not completely reinventing the wheel. Dividing and conquering, and building a system of people and tools that make the ultimate value – consistent and dedicated customer outreach – much easier to manage.

What You Can Expect

So for the next several posts, we’re going to talk about things like:

• Recruiting and developing your team members, the characteristics of solid social media team members, and planning for turnover
• Roles and Responsibilities, some ideas for deliverables, and some tips for engagement and outreach
• The Team Toolkit: some of the tech and stuff you need to manage all this
• Measuring Success: When you know you’re doing something right

Anything else I’ve missed? Comment, email, whatever you like. And then, off we go….

photo credit: khrawlings