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Permalink to 5 Ways to Distribute Social Media Responsibilities Among an Internal Team

5 Ways to Distribute Social Media Responsibilities Among an Internal Team

by Angie Sanders|on January 14, 2013 |in Social Media |tagged , , , , , , , |Leave a comment

team credite onemillionskatesdotcomWorkflow management is crucial to any social media team supporting a small-to-midsized organization, including yours. A team of four or five people maintains all your organization’s social media accounts, but small tasks can accumulate and overwhelm. Just like your communications team, your social media team needs the support of all departments to succeed.

Which team member handles which social media account(s)? How will the team get content to share? What are the ground rules for speaking to journalists through a social media platform? These are all examples of important questions that need definite answers so that your organization’s social media strategy is deployed effectively.

Here are five ways that your internal social media team can distribute work among the group and execute your organization’s strategy seamlessly:

Designate department social media liaisons.
If your team handles organization-wide social media engagement, then they’ll need content from just about all departments to provide your audience(s) with a composite picture of your organization’s work. The team should work with these departments to designate at least one person within who will flag shareable content and funnel it to the team.

Set deadlines.
Department liaisons should be clear about when and how often the social media team needs content. The amount of content to be shared will be left to the departments’ discretion. However, if those staff members care about the visibility of their work, then this shouldn’t be a problem.

Divvy up social platforms.
Your social media team should be assessing their workload and making clear determinations on which team members will be responsible for what. Maybe your organization holds multiple Twitter accounts, so two team members may split those and handle an additional two or three other social media accounts each.

Revisit the social media guidelines document with department liaisons.
Your social media team should review this document with department liaisons so that they understand how content is shared, what content is appropriate and how the team responds to a variety of situations like speaking to members of traditional media, customer complaints and negative comments.

Create a workflow diagram.
Your department liaisons know their deadlines. Your social media team has split responsibilities among team members. Department liaisons and the social media team are clear on engagement guidelines. Now it’s helpful to diagram the workflow so that an easy-to-understand visual exists of how content moves from department staff to your audience(s). This diagram will also help your team see and correct holes or stumbling blocks in the workflow.

Share with us: What techniques does your social media team employ to obtain and share content? What roadblocks do you encounter and how do you overcome them?


Read 6 Myths Blocking Your Social Media Engagement, our special report that addresses misconceptions that are keeping your company from investing time into tools that will can help increase two-way communication with your customers—current and potential. Print this report. Read it on the train ride home. Highlight key points. Share it with your colleagues. And please, jump in the social media marketing game and get started. 

 

 

 

Permalink to 4 Ways Internal Social Media Teams Can Benefit from Outsourcing

4 Ways Internal Social Media Teams Can Benefit from Outsourcing

by Angie Sanders|on January 2, 2013 |in Social Media |tagged , , , , , , , |1 Comment

social team overload credit business2communitydotcomYour social media team is overextended. Yep. I said it.

You don’t believe me, do you? You’re thinking, “A four-person team should be able to adequately manage our social media presences, funnel content from necessary departments, write content when needed and track and measure the results of their work.”

If this same team worked for a small or mid-sized organization, then yes. But they serve the behemoth which is your organization. Not only is this team charged with maintaining your presences across numerous social platforms, but they’re responsible for a staggering number of accounts on these platforms. They must figure out an airtight content flow from millions of silos within the office, devise and enforce guidelines for a million more silos that insist on managing their own social media accounts, and even write original content from time to time.

But a small social media team like yours could benefit from outsourcing a portion of the workload to an outside team. I know. You’re thinking, “We hired a social media team so that these duties can be handled in-house.” True, but the social media space and your engagement goals are ever-changing and have probably expanded beyond your internal bandwidth.

There are four ways that a contract digital team can make your internal team’s workload more manageable and ensure that your social media strategy is executed more effectively. An outside team can:

Fine-tune your social media strategy.
Perhaps your team has been working from the same social media strategy since 2009. Although I applaud them for even devising a strategy and sticking to it, this strategy was probably written to be a working document. Unfortunately, your team may be too close to this document and the parameters it has set to make necessary changes. An outside team can provide a fresh perspective, reviewing it against your fluid communications strategy and making some much needed adjustments.

Assist with the execution of your social media strategy.
Social media may or may not be your team members’ only jobs. Perhaps other duties—most likely ones that are communications or marketing related—have fallen in their laps or were there from the beginning. Even if maintaining the organization’s social media presences is their only function, frequency of posting, response to customer inquiries, effective measurement or other duties may have waned. An outside social media team can help pick up the slack and perhaps make suggestions for how social media work can be better distributed among the team.

Distribute workflow across platforms.
Your organization may only be engaging audiences on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but each division within your office has its own account that it expects the social media team to maintain. And you know that your office is heavily siloed. Funneling relevant news and information from these divisions and posting to social platforms in a frequent and timely manner is a considerable challenge. An outside team can shed light on ways to improve the information flow.

Help manage multiple properties.
Revisit the above example. Your four-person team is responsible for managing multiple accounts for each platform on which your organization engages. Not to mention that there are at least three other social platforms in which divisions within your office have expressed interest in experimenting. Again, this is a considerable challenge for a small team. However, an outside team can assume the maintenance of at least one of these platforms and explore the viability of the new platforms that interest some in your office.

Share with us: Does your office have an internal social media team or does this team comprise employees from other departments? How are you handling the rapidly changing social media climate and the diverse needs of your organization?


Read 6 Myths Blocking Your Social Media Engagement, our special report that addresses misconceptions that are keeping your company from investing time into tools that will can help increase two-way communication with your customers—current and potential. Print this report. Read it on the train ride home. Highlight key points. Share it with your colleagues. And please, jump in the social media marketing game and get started. 

 

Permalink to Why Facebook Engagement Beats Television Advertising

Why Facebook Engagement Beats Television Advertising

by Angie Sanders|on October 17, 2012 |in Social Media |tagged , , , , , , , , |Leave a comment

“Brands with more than 1 million fans reach only 3% to 5% of them a day,” Jeff Widman of PageLever, a Facebook page analytics solution, told Fast Company. The magazine labeled this their Unpleasant Truth No. 4 as part of their special “The Social Media Road Map” section in the September 2012 issue.

But is this truth really that unpleasant? Maybe not. Engaging 3-5% of one million fans works out to 30,000-50,000 Facebook fans talking about a given brand. These people may represent a small sample of the total Facebook fans this brand has, but these are people the brand knows detailed demographic information about and has engaged in two-way communication. And 30,000 to 50,000 is a lot of people.

Compare this level of communication, demographics and engagement to television advertising. Lucas Donat—founder of Santa Monica advertising agency Donat Wald—explained in a December 2009 Ad Age article that, “When it comes to measurement, most TV advertisers know audience reach, some demographics and probably some level of top-line results.” This information doesn’t match “the depth and granularity of data we can get for online campaigns, where we know who’s responding to our ads, what they’re doing on our websites, how much time they spend there and whether or not they complete a purchase.”

However, Donat says his agency has developed a method to gather and interpret data from television advertising that fills in the gap between imperfect, incomplete information and a clear picture that communicates the results of an advertising campaign.

“To deal with the relative ambiguity of TV ad measurement, my agency adapts the concept of fuzzy logic into what we call ‘fuzzy analytics,’” Donat says. “Here’s how it works: Find a level of tracking we can do, accept its imperfections, gather data, analyze it and improve our ability to understand it as we go. It evolves into a system that is nearly as accurate as following a click online.”

As an explanation for the “low” Facebook engagement numbers, Widman asked social marketers if they ever visit fan pages as users. “Oh, never,” they replied. This information could be viewed two ways: either social marketers don’t have a clear picture of how to engage Facebook fans because they’ve never visited fan pages themselves, or the social marketer isn’t an accurate representation of the audience set that would visit and interact in this space.

Whatever the reason, these numbers probably shouldn’t be viewed as “low” or a “failure.” Demographic information, two-way communication and any type of engagement and attention from 30,000-50,000 people is a win.

Share with us: How does your company use its Facebook fan page, or does it have one? Can a brand achieve a high number of fans and a high percentage of engagement, too?

This post is the fourth in a series of five posts discussing ideas presented in Fast Company’s “The Social Media Roadmap” section (September 2012 issue).

Permalink to Fast Company: A Social Media Executive’s Biggest Gripes about Working with Brands

Fast Company: A Social Media Executive’s Biggest Gripes about Working with Brands

by Angie Sanders|on October 15, 2012 |in Social Media |tagged , , , , , , , , , |3 Comments

For our past few blog posts, we’ve been pulling interesting tidbits from Fast Company’s “The Social Media Road Map,” featured in the magazine’s September 2012 issue. First, we discussed 13 key takeaways from the special section. Then we talked about why social media engagement responsibilities will always fall into the hands of a chosen few individuals inside or outside the company.

We’ll continue rocking with the Road Map today by discussing another short article from the section (Insiders’ Secret No. 5) titled, “You Hired the Wrong People.” In the article, an anonymous executive at a social media platform reveals some of his (I’m only assuming this person is a man) biggest gripes working with brands.

“Their CEOs now articulate their social media strategy,” he said. “They track how they’re doing against their rivals But by the time they come to someone like me, whose job is to actually put their plans into action, they have no idea to get what they want.”

The executive’s problem is one that we’ve been noticing lately with our potential clients, which is a huge gap between social media strategy and implementation. Consultants and even internal employees are getting a better grasp on social media and its capabilities. But when it comes to acting on those capabilities, setting reasonable goals and producing results based on those goals, these teams are clueless as to how to proceed.

However, the executive in this article is concerned with the lack of qualified counterparts to work with on the client side to execute strategy. “Companies haven’t empowered the right people, and they’re not hiring or training or converting the right people for these jobs. To be a good social media person at a brand, you have to have a background not just in digital or marketing but also in your product. There are so few people with that kind of blend of experience.”

To the client’s credit, if employees existed with this perfect blend of social, marketing and brand experience, then there’d be no need to contract with the social media executive. There may be employees on the client side with one or two of those characteristics, but it’s unrealistic to expect a counterpart with all three because social media is still just a toddler.

Companies won’t invest in hiring or training or converting the right employees until they can see value in social media overall. It’s the consultant’s job—in this case the griping executive—to show this value until the client decides to invest in internal staff or it continues to pay the consultant’s retainer.

On the other hand, this executive seems bothered by clients who shove social engagement responsibilities into one department. “People are always shoving social into marketing, or they’re shoving it into digital. It’s actually all this stuff: It’s marketing, it’s digital, it’s creative.”

We discussed in last week’s post why this shoving is to be expected, but just to reiterate: Social media will always be shoved into any department that serves an external communications function simply because these are the people within the organization who are deemed best equipped to handle it.

And we should look on the bright side. At least we’re slowly moving beyond leaving social media to the interns.

Share with us: How does your company handle its social media engagement? Is it the responsibility of the marketing communications department or a separate digital strategy team? Social media strategists: do you also struggle with the lack of a counterpart on the client side? How do you work around this?

This post is the third in a series of five posts discussing ideas presented in Fast Company’s “The Social Media Roadmap” section (September 2012 issue).

Permalink to Why a Chosen Few Will Always be Responsible for Company Social Media Engagement

Why a Chosen Few Will Always be Responsible for Company Social Media Engagement

by Angie Sanders|on October 10, 2012 |in Social Media |tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |2 Comments

In last Wednesday’s post, we gave you 13 key takeaways from Fast Company magazine’s “The Social Media Road Map,” that ran in their September 2012 issue. However, their Insiders’ Secret No. 3, an article titled “What Your Social Media Consultant Should Tell You,” warranted a post of its own.

Anjali Mullany, the magazine’s social media editor, says, “If social media consultants are doing their jobs, they should put themselves out of business. Your company will never be truly social if you silo social activity within a consultant or staff manager.”

Well, yes and no.

Saying that a company isn’t truly social if one person, small team or outside entity handles this function is like saying that that same company doesn’t really perform marketing or communications functions if everyone in the company isn’t doing it, too.

Shared responsibility for the actual act of engagement is a respectable goal, but it may be a bit lofty and impractical. Communications and marketing departments have a hard enough time getting buy-in from other departments to reach out to the company’s audiences outside of social media. Expecting all employees to participate in social may be a stretch.

Plus, by keeping responsibilities for social media engagement with a certain internal team or outside consultants keeps a good handle on messaging within the social space.

Because social media engagement is an external communications tactic, it will probably always remain in the hands of those who are already responsible for external communications—unless the company decides that developing a designated digital strategy team is warranted.

Now we’re not saying that the rest of the company should take a completely hands-off approach to social media because it shouldn’t be taking this approach to its overall marketing strategy. Whichever team(s) is responsible for both marketing communications and social media need support from the rest of the company in the form of free-flowing information.

The only way these teams can tell your company’s story to the audiences that live outside the four walls of your office is if you funnel the information to them that’s necessary to tell this story in a compelling way. This involves keeping these teams abreast of company milestones, achievement and impact.

If there’s a new product launch or breakthrough, new clients or partnerships, client or customer testimonials, video or photos from the field, or any other groundbreaking information affecting your current or potential clients, your marketing communications and social media teams need to know. The success of both these teams depends heavily on your ability to ensure that these teams get the compelling information they need to engage your audience and get them excited about your brand.

Share with us: How does your company funnel information through to your marketing communications and social media teams and out to your external audiences?

This post is the second in a series of five posts discussing ideas presented in Fast Company’s “The Social Media Roadmap” section (September 2012 issue).

Permalink to 13 Key Takeaways from Fast Company’s “The Social Media Road Map”

13 Key Takeaways from Fast Company’s “The Social Media Road Map”

by Angie Sanders|on October 3, 2012 |in Social Media |tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |5 Comments

Fast Company published “The Social Media Road Map” in their September 2012 issue—the one with The Office star Mindy Kaling {@mindykaling} on the cover looking like a sexy geek. I curled up in bed with a batch of homemade trail mix (dry roasted almonds and dried banana chips and cranberries) to see where this map would take me. So here are my key takeaways from these 19 interesting yet far from mind-blowing pages that paint the picture of social media’s current landscape:

  1. A YouTube home page, half-page auto-play video ad is $500,000—for one day. This ad reaches more than 26 million unique U.S. visitors, but if you’re paying half a million dollars for that, then what’s your total marketing budget?
  2. Lady Gaga stole the title for most Facebook likes from Skittles, but Big Spaceship CEO Michael Lebowitz says there’s no way to tie this this bragging rights title to a bump in sales.
  3. Fast Company, along with a whole gang of other media outlets, really wants Mindy Kaling and her new show The Mindy Project to win, so I guess we should, too. But will realizing how much of a television industry insider she is make me watch her new show? Unclear.
  4. Let’s just set the record straight that it’s officially uncool and generally frowned upon to refer to yourself or anyone else as a “social media guru.”
  5. The women in the sexy photos used for spam bot profiles on Twitter are real people, and those chicks just might ban together and sue you for using their likenesses. Maybe.
  6. What the hell was Kraft thinking when they asked Klout to refer to their scoring as a “fun score”?
  7. There are already whole books about how to use Pinterest. How does it feel to write a book filled with information that’s probably instantly out-of-date upon publication?
  8. There are at least eight services that help you back up your social media platform archives. Never knew there was a need for this, but I guess it’s always good to keep a record of everything you’ve said or shared for future reference.
  9. “We use the phrase ‘social media’ but they’re really communications services, not media properties,” said Bo Peabody, creator of Tripod (the web’s first social network that debuted in 1992). In actuality, we probably refer to the collection of these platforms this way because each of them serves as a medium through which we communicate. And the plural form of “medium” is…
  10. If you want to see some forward-thinking ways of employing social media, then study the fashion industry.
  11. FourSquare’s first major deal was with BravoTV. Tristan Walker, FourSquare’s former business development executive, said the network had great local content which the digital company used to get people “to get out and explore new things, based on shows like ‘Real Housewives’, which felt very much in line with the product but without a sales pitch.”
  12. To support relief efforts following the Haiti earthquake and the tsunami that struck Japan, social gaming titan Zynga created items within their games for players to buy and donated the proceeds to charity. “In the first 24 hours, we generated $1 million, and it got up to more than $3 million over a week or so,” said Zynga Executive Director Ken Weber. “We had people paying for items in the games, but we also had players who don’t ever pay for anything who got their credit cards out to do something good.”
  13. It’s officially uncool and generally frowned upon to refer to any video you create as viral, unless it truly does become, well, viral. “Rather than ideas propagating for generations, almost everything terminates within one degree of the seed,” said Microsoft Research’s Duncan Watts. “If you want something to spread, generate an enormous number of seeds.”

Share with us: Did you read Fast Company’s “The Social Media Road Map”? Was this truly a road map for you? What new information did you learn from this piece?

This post is the first in a series of five posts discussing ideas presented in Fast Company’s “The Social Media Roadmap” section (September 2012 issue).

Permalink to For Businesses, Social Media Means Nothing Without These 3 Things

For Businesses, Social Media Means Nothing Without These 3 Things

by Angie Sanders|on September 26, 2012 |in Just good business, Social Media |tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |6 Comments

When I tell people about aiellejai and the services we provide, they’re often surprised to see me sitting in the audience at some social media panel discussion sessions. I like to attend these sessions to understand why people come, what they’re hoping to learn and to hear the questions asked. This helps us keep gauge the pulse of our market and develop products and services to best serve them.

I find that people who attend these sessions fall into three camps:

Do I need to set up a Facebook page?
These are the individuals or business owners who are new to social networking and how to use it to their advantages.

Why am I on Facebook or Twitter?
These are the people who are looking for strategy for participating in the social media space.

How do I measure success and how do I ensure results?
These are the people who are already maintaining social media presences in some sort of strategic way and are looking for ways to evaluate the success of their time and effort.

Most of the people I meet fall between camps two and three. But as they ask their questions and get good answers that still leave them scratching their heads, I suspect that these answers would be clearer to them if they had the following three elements in place:

A clear business model: Some of us business owners—especially those with service-based businesses—aren’t totally clear about the services we provide or the value of these services to our clients or customers. For example, aiellejai usually takes the standard, hourly-rate approach to our service offerings. We recently had to take an objective look at our business offerings, what services were most popular and how to create other products that will best serve the needs of our existing and future customers.

A laser-focused description of their ideal client or customer:  When I ask potential clients who their ideal client or customer is, they often say things like, “small businesses,” or “nonprofits.” It’s especially tricky to identify specific demographic information about your ideal client or customer if you run a business-to-business company. However, when you’re marketing your services, most likely there’s one type of person or one point of contact who you’re trying to attract. Work on identifying who that person is, what they look like, what their challenges are and any other information you can think of that will help you see your clients as individual people instead of whole companies. Visualizing your potential clients/customers this way will help you market to them specifically.

An overarching communications/marketing strategy: Some business owners are having a hard time wrapping their brains around social networking because they aren’t clear on how to reach their audiences outside of the social media space. Once you establish clear communications and marketing strategies and goals you’ll then be able to understand how to use social media engagement—along with other tactics—to reach these goals.

Share with us: How does your company’s communications/marketing strategy influence your social media engagement? How do you define and measure success?

 

 

Permalink to Is Social Media Really Surpassing Traditional Media as a Top News Source?

Is Social Media Really Surpassing Traditional Media as a Top News Source?

by Angie Sanders|on August 20, 2012 |in Social Media |tagged , , , , , , , , |5 Comments

During a walk home from the bus stop in June 2009, Twitter told me that Michael Jackson was dead. After dinner at my in-laws in February this year, Facebook told me that Whitney Houston had died. However, in both instances, I relied on the confirmation of news sources like CNN and TMZ to confirm the facts.

Socialmediatoday.com released an infographic in June that details how we now get our news. Although the article’s title notes “How Social Media is Replacing Traditional Journalism as a News Source,” social media is still third behind TV news and newspapers as a top source for news. In fact, thanks to social media, traffic to news sites has increased 57%.

Though more than 50% of people learned about breaking news via social media versus traditional news sources, the infographic also shows that about half the news that breaks via social media turns out to be false.

So what does this tell us about the way we receive news today? One, the news cycle is definitely condensed. News outlets used to have time to confirm facts before reporting. However, the internet and social media have upped the pressure to be first and accurate. Two, as news consumers, we must be diligent about confirming the facts for ourselves and not feeding into the “be the first” mentality.

Hold off on retweeting that news story or sharing it on Facebook, especially if it seems outrageous or downright unbelievable. Poke around to see what other news outlets are saying.

Share with us: have you ever read breaking news via social media outlets only to find out later that it’s false or inaccurate? How do you judge the accuracy of news information before you share it with others?

Permalink to How Our Children Will View Our Digital Photos in the Year 2032

How Our Children Will View Our Digital Photos in the Year 2032

by Angie Sanders|on May 30, 2012 |in Social Media |tagged , , , , |2 Comments

During B-Fly Entertainment’s Liner Notes show last month, a photo of bassist Kris Funn appeared on the screen behind the musicians. He appeared to be about five or six years old at the time the photo was taken.

When we visit Omari’s parents, they bring out the photo albums to show us how much Nailah looks like him when he was her age.

I appreciate old photos tremendously, because I only have one photo in my possession of myself as a child. Seeing Kris’s and Omari’s old photos got me thinking about how we collect and share photos today. Nailah turns one year old on May 28. When she’s in her twenties, how will I show her the photos from 2012 of our family? Will I be scrolling through an iPhone or iPad? Will I access them from a USB drive?

Photographer Patrick Onfore recently addressed my concerns about the permanence of our digital photos:

We probably have photo albums and old Polaroids of our childhood memories. Twenty years from now when our children peruse photos from their childhoods, what will they be viewing?
Our images may get lost in the continuous dross that floods our lives in the shape of social media. We spend a lot of time on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and though Facebook allows people to search through a user’s history, it’s easy for photos to get lost in the digital sea. I think our children will be cleaning up computer hard drives to search for any records of our lives. Imagine that! Instead of sitting with photo albums, families will be gathered around the fireplace at Christmas or Thanksgiving with a hard drive in hand, searching it for photos of holidays past.

Has technology made our photos/memories less permanent?
It’s easy to see our images getting lost. I think the impressions these photos have nowadays are pretty unsubstantial. And because our attention spans are very ADD-like, I’m not surprised if people have a hard time even recalling memories.  I think the memories will always be there, it’s just how we record them that might seem less permanent.

What can we do with the photos on our phones, computers and other devices to make sure they’re around for our children to see?
Print them! Why not? There are tons of great sites that print excellent quality images and in creative ways. Even though I loathe my photos, I still print them out. Apps like Hipstamatic make it easy to print your photos, and I can see other apps working with printers more in the future. While there’s a big push to move everything digital, I don’t see print ever going out of style. There will always be a desire for printed images, much like there will always be a desire to watch live musicians perform classical music or even rock concerts. It’s all a matter of doing it for the experience.

A self-proclaimed “light and shadow warrior,” Patrick Onofre left the restaurant industry behind to follow his passion for photography. Follow his blog and watch the results of his “experiment of leaving a steady paycheck.”