Originally published in AdWeek
Who should own social media? It’s a question asked by a lot of organizations. I’ve heard of two schools of thought: One says social media “belongs” to the employees. The other says it belongs to the PR department or another team that knows the “rules” of the brand and is authorized to communicate with the world on behalf of that brand. So, is it one or the other, or a healthy blend of both?
Every brand is after word of mouth, which is usually created by loyal fans and customers. Most of the time, employees are a brand’s No. 1fans—and many of them realize that as part of their marketing efforts they need to establish long-term relationships with customers. But how do employees know what the best practices are around building these digital relationships? There are a lot of things for them to know, including which tools to use, which strategies and tactics to deploy, how to correctly communicate the brand’s voice, and whether they should “listen” to online conversations before jumping in. The list goes on.
I believe any employee who engages with a customer is a brand ambassador. Without their engagement, relationship-building would be less effective. But I also know that making social media experts out of all such employees is an impossible task. However, you can still empower them by giving them the relevant guidelines and tools in order to engage effectively online and without risk to your brand.
I believe the best approach is to create a small team of people to provide guidance. You could call the team the Social Media Center of Excellence (the name we use at Intel) or any other name that works. This team would sit centrally in the marketing organization and know about all things social, including: the latest social trend; the most effective tools; any impactful case study; other brands’ experiences (good and bad); key influencers; and examples of what did and did not work for your company in the past.
The team can provide value in many ways. For one, it could put together social media guidelines and develop an overarching strategy in support of key business and marketing objectives. It could also create point-of-view documents on the latest industry and social trends, and show how they would impact your organization. Other ideas: the team could record best practices and develop playbooks; research and recommend the best tools to use, whether they’re for listening and monitoring or content distribution, and help roll out these tools throughout the company; provide recommendations on the best social media agencies with which to engage; produce a crisis-management plan; and represent your company’s leadership at industry events
According to this model, activation is still driven by the teams/groups responsible for a specific product/program, but they are now well equipped with the relevant information to ensure the effectiveness of communications goes up and the risk to the brand goes down. The strength of such a team is its ability to work closely with all of the key stakeholders within the organization (HR, PR, legal, privacy, Web teams, etc) and ensuring that whatever guidance is issued to employees, it takes into consideration all of the concerns and requirements of these stakeholders.
The other reason this model works well is because everything in social media moves fast. It’s easy to get distracted by the next shiny object (the next popular tool) and it’s hard for every single person to keep up to date on all the changes taking place. The presence of a team like the Social Media Center of Excellence helps employees make sense of what will be beneficial and impactful for the brand in the long term and what might not.
There is one thing to remember about this model, though. The bigger your organization is, the harder it is to ensure that the existence of this function is well known organization-wide. You will have to put an internal plan in place to educate all departments on the advantages such a team has to offer. But in my opinion it’s a minor price to pay for the value the team would provide.
So back to our question: Who owns social media? The answer: every single person who engages in online conversations with customers. How impactful this engagement is will depend on the support the organization puts in place to help enable its employees to be successful.
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Hi Ekaterina,
Great Post! I agree with a lot of what you are writing.
Working with many Fortune 500, here is the trend I see happening:
A corporate group is being created, usually with someone from PR, someone from marketing and a community manager.
This new team is responsible of social media coordination. It’s not about owning but more supporting all business units to use social media intelligently, with responsibility and in the best interest of the company. This corporate team writes best practices, selects vendors, supports business teams in their different needs and challenges.
Social media is a new communication approach and it is disruptive and overwhelming for most companies in regards to understanding how to integrate and use social media throughout their organizations.
I think that one of the key challenge is managing the relationship, which can lead to your above comment about “owning”. Often, Marketing, support and engineering will have to collaborate to best manage the relationships with customers, partners and users. And that’s not an easy task. Each company has it’s own culture and organization and I don’t think there is one fit all solution yet.
Best,
Virginie
Virginie,
thank you for your comment. You are absolutely right in that every organization is different and it needs to figure out how to adapt to this huge shift in thinking as well as empower their employees to work effectively together on the common goal of building relationships with customers. The bigger the company, the tougher it gets to find that organization model and approach that would make every department and function happy.
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Ekaterina,
You are irrefutably correct – spot-on per say. In today’s world, the constant strive for improvement paired with the growing desire amongst consumers to interact more frequently with corporations has spring-boarded Social Media into a whirlwind of every-changing progress and an “I can’t wrap my head around it” mentality amongst C (E, O, T, F.)O’s nationwide. It is goes without saying that it is impossible for every employee to become a Social Media Expert and both you, and Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence is one of very few ways to successfully manage a Social Media campaign.
As to the ownership of Social Media within an Organization, again I agree with you. This is a theme here I guess. “Each person who engages in online conversation with customers” is closely to how I would describe it. This is why it is so important to implement some sort of Social Media Policy of some sorts – no? (A way to set rules & regulations, as well as disciplinary actions for employees who misuse social media and in turn harm the brand – AKA “bad social.”)
Which brings me to my question to you –
What are your thoughts on “bad social”?
Are there proper ways to appropriately deal with the situation?
How severe should “bad social” be considered?
Love reading your work. Never stop..Lol!
Creatively,
Clayton|WALTER
Clayton,
thank you for the thoughtful comment.
With regards to “bad social” I would say each company need to identify for itself what this means to them and how to gage what is “severe” and what isn’t. I’ve seen sompanies that are extremely strict about it (mostly financial institutions) and companies like Zappos that are more laid back and forgiving.
However, I definitely believe in the company setting the right expectations through guidelines first before taking any action. If the company isn’t clear what is considered appropriate and what is not, then it would be very hard to address this. But if they are very clear on expectations up front and have training in place then it is easier to identify what’s considered OK and what isn’t (and honestly then every employee should understand the expectations set forth).
Hopefully this answered your question.