On Thursday March 7th, Sentiment Metrics CEO Leon Chaddock will be speaking at a free webinar on Managing Social Media for Teams. Also on the panel is Tom Messett (Nokia) and Luke Brynley-Jones (Our Social Times).
It’s safe to say that most organisations ventured into the world of social media without much of a structure in place. In most cases, it was an initiative of the Marketing department and was often managed by the intern. Things have since evolved and social media now involves staff from all parts and levels of the business and there are several tried and tested models for managing social media as a team.
These points will be discussed in detail during the upcoming webinar, but in the meantime here are a few points to consider…
What structure should you adopt?
One option is to keep things centralised with a ‘Command Centre’ approach, involving a small team of trained social media specialists. Another popular structure is the ‘Multiple Hub and Spoke’ approach. This differs in that trained experts are there to oversee and assist with the social media activities of various departmental teams. Other companies, such as Zappos, have adopted a holistic approach which empowers all staff to use Twitter, but whilst this may be the holy grail of Social Customer Services, it’s a potential PR nightmare.
How do you integrate different departments?
Traditionally Marketing departments have been the dominant force on social media and research suggests that they still play the biggest role. However, all departments stand to benefit from social, whether Marketing, PR, Customer Services, Sales, Product Development or Legal. When looking at Enterprise Social Networks, it’s even been suggested that Finance Teams have the most to gain since they are the least integrated department within most companies.
With this in mind, strategies need to cast a wide net.
Which department should lead?
Although it’s usually Marketing or PR, there’s an argument that social media should be Customer Service led and others advocate a multi-team department. What is clear is that there needs to be a close relationship between the different departments. They have to accommodate each other’s needs at short notice and it’s important they’re on the same wavelength. In another recent webinar, we heard from Ronan Gillen, who heads up Social Customer Service for eBay in Europe, and he emphasised the importance of daily interaction between all the departments involved in social. There should also be regular face-to-face contact to strengthen their relationship.
What processes need to be in place?
To identify what processes need to be implemented or improved, live simulations are a worthwhile exercise. These often flush out the obvious things that have been overlooked.
It’s also wise to take advantage of automation as it can greatly improve team efficiency. For example, mentions from influential users or tweets that contain defined keywords or requests for help can be automatically assigned to a specific team member or department.
What tools and services you need to facilitate this?
The tools you use will play a big part in ensuring effective teamwork is possible. Looking at it from a social media monitoring perspective, we have made significant changes to our platform to accommodate the growing number of people and departments involved in social. For example, users need to be able to see in real-time what actions other team members are taking. As soon as a user clicks on a tweet, it needs to instantly lock out all other team members avoid duplication.
It’s also essential that you are able to see the full conversation history when engaging with a mention or query, including any tags or notes that have been added by other team-members.
What staff should you choose?
The social media team should include staff with a high level of customer focus that can be trusted to make their own judgements. There is also a level of flexibility required and it’s important that team members understand the ‘big picture’. After all, they may have to adapt to the needs of other departments without much notice.
When looking at social customer service, of course it makes sense to bring in people from the existing customer service team, but they will need some retraining. Traditional customer service staff have always conducted conversations on a 1-to-1 basis and will often have followed a script. Suddenly social media can make exchanges quite public.
Have a crisis plan in place
You can’t always predict when things will go wrong. A spike in mentions can happen at any time, so you need to be prepared to deal with it. A common strategy is to have backups that are trained to engage on social channels, but it isn’t part of their normal responsibilities. O2 (a UK telecoms company) have a large backup team from all parts of the business that were brought in and used to great effect when they suffered a network outage last year.
We will be discussing these points and more in detail during a free webinar on March 7th – Managing Social Media for Teams. Speakers include Tom Messett (Nokia), Leon Chaddock (Sentiment Metrics) and Luke Brynley-Jones (Our Social Times).