Sunday 22 July 2012

So, your organisation is going social (Part one)

This post is the first in a short series on setting up and managing a social media presence for your organisation, you can find the rest here.


You’re a social media evangelist in an organisation that doesn’t have a social media presence, you’ve managed to convince your boss that it’s essential to start doing that Twitter thing, now what?

Well, the bad news is that you’re behind the curve, with 94% of corporates and over 90% of non-profits already using social media. The good news is you can learn from the mistakes already made and make the most of a swath of best-practice case studies. Before all that, there are a few key questions you should ask:

Why are you getting on board with social media?

If the answer is “because everyone else is”, you need to rethink your position. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t jump on board, but you should have a sound business case. Good reasons for developing a presence in the social sphere might be:

  • To increase brand visibility/awareness
  • Develop leads and drive sales/subscriptions
  • Strengthen campaigns
  • Improve customer service
  • Network with key stakeholders

There are loads more reasons, and your strategic plan should be able to help you identify them. The initial reasons you outline can help you to develop your key performance indicators and create a formula to measure return on investment.

Who’s going to manage it?

This is one of the key questions, who do you trust to be able to manage both the technical and communications side of engaging with people on behalf of your organisation online?

Ideally, you’ll be in a position to appoint at least one full-time person to manage social media. Speaking in the most basic terms, you have two options from here:

  • Appointing someone internally that may make a fantastic online ambassador
  • Appointing a social media professional from outside 

Both of these options have pros and cons, a professional new to the organisation may take a little time to familiarise themselves with the organisation (although, you would hope they do much of this before they take up the role), whilst appointing someone internally may mean you run the risk of some early social media faux pas and that you may need additional investment to cover training.


What channels will you use?

If you hire a social media professional, they will be able to help you make the right decisions. The right channels will be influenced by your demographics, your sector and your ability to produce content. I’m a big fan of experimenting with new channels (usually with a personal profile initially), but one thing that you should avoid is spreading yourself too thinly across too many platforms.