Watch your blindside
There's no clear understanding of where social media belongs in the big picture. It calls on skill sets and disciplines that might be scattered across the company. Whether it "belongs" in marketing, customer service, corporate communications, or elsewhere is certainly up for interpretation.
Similarly, different types of marketing communications companies lay claim to social media in different ways. You might hear claims of social media expertise coming from your ad agency, your digital agency, your media agency, your PR agency, and even your search agency. (Even if many or all of these functions are consolidated with one company, expect to hear from different people at the consolidated entity.) Every communications partner is going to have a different take on social. And it will likely be colored by each partner's particular profit motive.
For instance, a digital agency might think a Facebook program consists of putting up and managing a brand page. A media agency might recommend buying a bunch of banners on social networks to drive traffic to a brand page. The PR agency might recommend organic outreach and seeding of Facebook groups. Coincidentally, what each entity believes is the right solution has a lot to do with how they get compensated.
But that's not the point. The point is that if you're in charge of your company's social media programs, a lot is going to be whizzing at you from a lot of different angles. Not only are you going to have to deal with the input of someone you might not directly interface with at your company, but you'll also be dealing with every communications partner on your roster recommending programs and trying to gain a foothold in social.
The best way to combat all this, of course, is to share your social strategy internally and with external partners. Internally, it will make your positions more easily defensible. Externally, it will show your agencies how you're evaluating potential programs. (Who knows? It might even get them to cooperate in order to put together a comprehensive recommendation.)
You need to share your strategy -- if for no other reason than it will keep you from having to evaluate five different Facebook recommendations.
Avoid bandwagon-jumping
I've discussed it in columns before. It's really easy to let enthusiasm for a particular vehicle set rogue efforts in motion. This is particularly true if the champion of that vehicle is someone who outranks you in the corporate echelon. Somebody asks, "Why aren't we doing anything on Twitter?" and next thing you know, you're having to justify why you're not there.
This is yet another reason why it's important to have a social media strategy. With all the innovation and excitement within the social media sphere, it's really easy to get carried away. Your job is to bring stakeholders, both internal and external, back down to earth by getting them to understand how programs fit into the strategy. It also entails being able to explain why something doesn't fit into the strategy.
For instance, if the role you've determined for social media for your line of lawn mowers is to communicate the detail behind the line's superiority to the competition, you might decide that Twitter can have only a limited role due to its lack of strength in communicating deep detail. (It's tough to convey a complex message in 140 characters.) Maybe Twitter's role in that case is to tweet teasers and links to more in-depth pieces on your company blog. Or maybe you decide that Twitter doesn't have a role at all.
Point is, these decisions become a lot easier (and a lot easier to defend) when you have a strategy in place that includes hard-and-fast rules for evaluating new vehicles. When you have a strategy and the CEO demands to know why you're not on Twitter, you have an answer at the ready and you can shut down any attempts to refocus your social media programs on less-relevant vehicles.
<< Previous page | Next page >>
