You Cannot do Social Without the Support of the Organization

In other words, if you just hired a junior person or team to get you on Facebook and give you a helping of Twitter - good luck to you. This is the reality of business, and these days of the marketing side of business, that it wants to shave costs as much as possible. In fact, it trades growth for a predictable (if lucky) future.

Of course, you know that you can indeed have a few people on social media, even on behalf of the organization, without the organization being fully vested in its own success with social. It's an experiment, something we'll see if it works, for a limited time only. Maybe.

The experience part

As we discussed last night at the Mediabistro panel on community management, the emerging role of community manager deserves attention. The chart by Dion Hinchcliffe shows a very interesting portfolio of skills and experience suggested for the role.

A role for the depth of insight and execution Amber Naslund brings to Radian6, the knowledge of the editorial process and work Shirley Brady brought to BusinessWeek, the many case studies of successful examples Saul Colt contributed to making customers sit up, notice and spread information about a company (word of mouth).

Beth Harte shared her experience succinctly recently - I am a marketing professional who gets PR and social media. I have 15 years of integrated marketing experience. She is now community manager for MarketingProfs and doing a fine job of it, because of her deep passion for the profession and the years of experience as a practitioner.

Like Beth, I have years of integrated marketing experience under my belt and have augmented my knowledge by volunteering my spare time to understanding how you build community, along with the dimensions that need to be a consideration if the organization is to truly leverage social.

For more experienced community builders and community evangelists, check out the Twitter lists I created. What you will find is experience in the field the role supports. The position needs to be internal and the person needs to have a very good understanding of the business model, purpose, and path to growth - in layman terms, how the business makes money.

Hiring an experienced professional or team of professionals and allocating resources to them is step one in providing support for social. To make social truly operational, you need to take the red pill and step up your social media efforts.

The execution part

Integrated is the operative word here. This is necessary in order for you to integrate social in the organization, to do it so that it not just barely scratches the surface, but has real impact beyond positive sentiment and better reputation and awareness. Here I'm talking about money.

For that to take place, you need the support of the organization. The community manager role goes across departments and silos, it's not a marketing role, it's greater than that. That's why Dell created the communities and conversations group.

And it is Dell that once again provides us with an example of what's next. They got an early start, 3 years and going strong with Direct2Dell, @DellOutlet, IdeaStorm, Support.dell.com, and many other outposts on Flickr, YouTube, Facebook.

Lionel Menchaca outlines the details of the company's presence in a post that indicates our destination for this conversation - and yes, Dell's Twitter outposts have netted the company $6.5MM, perhaps a drop in the bucket to you, not chump change in terms of experience with their customer base. Dell now touches a community the size of the city of Chicago - 3.5MM people. That is the important number.

In Lionel's words (emphasis mine): 

Twitter numbers and growth in Dell’s presence in other social networks is one thing, but what does this mean to our customers and for Dell’s social media strategy overall moving forward? In my mind, it boils down to a few key strategies:

• Streamline our presence in social media networks, create meaningful content for customers and continue to increase our connections with them in those places
• Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, our Dell Community sites with our presence in social networks
• Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units

For Dell (or any company for that matter), isolated social media efforts won’t lead to long-term success in this space. Our long-term success depends on how well we execute on the key strategy points I outlined earlier in this post. My belief in the promise that social media brings combined with Dell’s commitment to our long-term social media strategy is why I continue to do this job.

This is why you need an experienced community manager. Lionel brings years of technical experience and customer service to his job. You may see him as a blogger, I know him as a very well rounded and skilled professional.

Thanks to him and the emerging role of community management, social is evolving from strategies to increase sales, improve reputation, and create better relationships with customers and partners into creating a better business.

***

This is a lot to digest in one sitting. Many organizations are still grappling with the question of how they get on Facebook. I suggest you pause and think about your long term strategy. It's the only way this social stuff will truly be an investment in your business.

What's next for you?

Now that you know this, you probably still have questions about selling social media to your boss, or teaching your team about crowdsourcing and online collaboration. What I'd like to do is for you to outline your challenges or questions in the comments, and we can take those one post at the time. Sounds good? Fire away.

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Elena Benito-Ruiz]

Thanks Valeria for bringing this up. I agree with you that community management is not marketing. They can work together, or can be a part of it if done by the same person (which I do not recommend to my clients).
And you are very right: the community manager can't be working on a company silos, somehow I always say the CM has to be like Big Brother, always knowing what's going on & beyond. Problem is when the organization doesn't collaborate, because they don't have the tools, or usually because it's not rooted in their behavior.

Things like this should be avoided: the case of a client saying there is nothing interesting to share on the blog and then find out by a press clipping or somewhere else sth that was worth blogging.

I think a community manager or a CCO can be perfectly someone as an external collaborator if following conditions are felicitous: you like the project, the value, etc and you become 200% involved in the project, you are like just another employee, although on a different payroll, for that matter. And of course there's always the possibility to train in-house, to change the box (not thinking out of it, but plainly changing it :))

I guess u already read it but there's a great tweet by Charlene Li that goes as follows:

"Does having a 'chief community officer' make sense? Initially, yes, but community *engagement* needs to be responsibility of every employee" Charlene Li, 2:01 PM September 04, 2008.

Greetings from Spain.
@ubikuos

[Paul]

I think one of the biggest problems in social media is the gap that is perceived by some clients to exist between it and other marketing mediums.

For example between social media and off-line PR for example. They need to be treated as one and the same in both content and deadline.

We have a neat little video on our website at www.cube3marketing.com that we use to try and convey this message on integrated marketing to some of our clients who maybe 'dont get it'!

Regards,

[Rich Becker]

Bravo. Perhaps more so than anywhere else, I've noted that our local market continues to struggle with the idea that they cannot supplant what you, me, Amber, Beth, etc. share onto their least experienced communication professionals or recent interns and earn the same results.

I was even more surprised to find that the rally cry to place interns in charge of social media is being nurtured by some of our own online colleagues, creating the impression that it's so easy, anybody can do it. The net result has been making social media become exactly what some companies are afraid it is ... someone playing on Facebook.

I haven't experienced this out of market, which represents a larger portion of our client base. But here, even while teaching, I meet new "social media directors" who are still struggling with the basic tenants of communication, let alone how to apply them online.

All my best,
Rich

[Eric]

I have to agree with Rich. I have seen so many circumstances where companies just throw a low level employee at "that social media thing" because they think just having their name out there is enough. As with any corporate initiative community engagement requires high level strategy, constant adaption, and a strong understanding of multiple advanced principles in marketing, communication, and management. And this post does a great job of making that point.

@opinionatlarge

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Elena - the community manager is someone passionate about communications, knowledgeable about business, capable of getting things done through networks and connections, with a solid grasp of people and group behaviors. Depending on the complexity of an organization's structure and the maturity of the organization (which doesn't mean how old the company is, it means how sophisticated and evolved it is in knowledge sharing terms) it will need a senior person in that job. One with a young hearth and a curious mind. You make a good case for external collaboration - Amber Naslund started that way. For it to be effective though, eventually the function needs to be embedded in the company.

@Paul - many organizations still don't understand the role and value of public relations and marketing beyond "getting more leads" and "doing the promotional thing". So yes, education and success stories continue to be important.

@Rich - many companies underestimate the value experienced players bring to the organization. It's easy when you focus on the tools and not on a profitable business strategy. You know what they say, you become what you focus on, thus you bring to bear upon yourself/your business the worst fears and stories that are in your head. Are there true communication courses and practicums in business school? Learning to negotiate a sticky issue, listening, responding, engaging. it looks to me like many business administrators (the BA in MBA) spend a lot of time thinking alone and presenting, instead of thinking together.

@Eric - how about adding a bunch of blogs for media outreach and a week of tweeting during the news release time? Surely that is doing social media, right? Thank you for the opinion, love the Twitter handle!

[Akash Sharma]

I think brands still consider that all these tools are just to show up when someone looks for a particular brand name on these sites and thats why they have completely misunderstood the analogy of social media professionals and hiring people who have accounts on all these sites.
Again integration is very important so we need people who understand every part of the cycle From involvement in the conversation, building the community to getting the right kind of ROI from the work done.
Thanks for sharing your words on this Valeria!!

[Sasha Kovaliov]

Valeria, you've just depicted a situation I had in our company a while ago. My boss told me - why don't you just hire an intern for $300 a month? Well, my position on this is exactly like yours: "Shit in - shit out".

After countless presentations and explanations that we indeed need a decent social media strategy both inside and outside the organization, I was told that in B2B market SM doesn't work O_o.

Anyway, my team started working in that direction without management's approval and in our free time. We were all certain, that our efforts will soon be rewarded. And indeed that happened - after 1.5 months of strategy we got our first lead.

Without experience, profound planning and great skills my team possessed it would be impossible to create a new marketing channel in such short time and bring value to community simultaneously.

My message to all the companies out there is: social media is as hard as directing an orchestra. People with no musical education don't understand why there is even a director at first place. Luckily, we all know how to get our message heard ;)