Getting Started in Social Media? Stop Creating, and Start Joining and Listening
Friday, November 13, 2009 | Add a Comment
Tags: conversational listening, engage online, getting started in social media, Social Media, social media listening
Posted in: Guest Blogger, Listening, Social Media
Is social media fundamentally changing the way companies do business? Likely so. One need only look at the work being done by Scott Monty at Ford, Frank Eliason at Comcast and Ferg Devins at Molson, among many others, to realize that the one-to-one relationship they are developing with customers is creating a paradigm shift within the business community. That type of relationship model for businesses isn’t common and, quite frankly, isn’t all that comfortable for them yet either. So how do we make them more comfortable? How do we get them started with social media?
One of the ways that companies, big and small, have come off the social media “railroad tracks” is in the rush to create tools without ever considering whether those tools make sense for reaching their customers or even supporting business goals and objectives.
Maybe we should take a step back to the moment in time when you (as a C-level executive) realized you wanted your company to get involved in social media. What was your first instinct? Call your corporate communications or marketing folks? A likely scenario, I think. What did the corporate communications or marketing professionals do with that information? If they were on the ball, they would’ve started by creating a social media team. What does a social media team look like? Ideally, it’s a cross-functional group that includes representatives from several key areas, including:
- Corporate communications/PR
- Marketing
- IT
- Human Resources
- Legal
- Investor Relations
- Ethics (if your company has an ethics Group)
- Sales
- Customer Support
I’m not going to go into more specifics on team building because you can check out Amber Naslund’s excellent e-book on the subject.
Unfortunately, we know that in many cases we aren’t forming social media teams. We are leaving it up to the PR or marketing folks to handle it almost exclusively. As anyone who has spent about 20 minutes in the social media space can tell you, it takes far more than one person to manage a company’s social media presence.
After the team is created, or maybe even while the team is being assembled, you should start listening. Yes, listening does take a significant investment in human capital. It can’t be done by only one person, but there are ways that you can break it up to ease the burden. I can’t emphasize the importance of listening enough. It can help you determine what your audience is saying, where they are saying it, when they are saying it and why they are saying it. You’ll know where you should join (notice: I didn’t say “create”) and what you should say when you get there (and no, it isn’t straight from your corporate messaging playbook). By the way, you shouldn’t stop listening just because you’ve started engaging. Listening is one of those “steps” that is interwoven with all of the other social media “steps” (strategy development, engagement, etc …).
So instead of calling your corporate communications or marketing folks and asking them to jump on Facebook, or Twitter, or insert new social network here, think about creating a team, doing some listening and then joining the conversation. There’s plenty of time to create tools, but if you do without ever engaging and listening to people first, your social media efforts might be dead on arrival.
About Chuck
Chuck Hemann is the manager of research and online reputation for Dix & Eaton, a communications consultancy, based in Cleveland, Ohio, with specialized expertise in social media strategies and tools. You can connect with Chuck on Twitter and at his blog that tackles a myriad of PR/social media-related topics. The views in this post belong to Chuck Hemann and do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of his employer.
