When you’re assembling a team of people to head social media efforts, it can be a daunting task.  What characteristics and skills do you look for? What departments/disciplines should be represented? And how do you prepare for the inevitable turnover? Let’s take these in turn.

Nunchuck Skills, Bow Hunting Skills…

Communication skills might sound obvious, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, really. Here are a few standout qualities I’d look for in members of your social media team:

Work Ethic
Social media doesn’t fit neatly into job descriptions, and lots of it you’re going to be sorting out as you go. Seek out people eager to extend a bit beyond their job description, roll their sleeves up, and dig in amongst and with a team. This sort of role requires someone who is agile with their projects and can shift gears relatively quickly without losing their place or getting completely overwhelmed. And it’s helpful if they have an interest in roles and areas of the company outside of their own.

Diplomacy
You know the people that are great at building bridges: in meetings, among colleagues, with customers. We might have called these just “customer service” skills back in the day, but it’s more than just responding when called. It’s anticipating needs, and being willing to be truly helpful at a personal level (sometimes before you’re asked).

Team members should also be strong educators, carrying the social media torch back to their teams and departments and communicating well and often about what the team is up to, and how it affects them. It’s important that they also know how to build relationships *inside* the company. With their managers, with other departments, with HR, IT, and with legal. They’ll need them.

Balanced Corporate Perspective

You certainly want to be working with the people that are knowledgeable about their varying disciplines within the company. But you also want those that aren’t just drinking the company kool-aid, since the packaged corporate speak won’t play well in social media. (Note: you don’t want the people who are the perpetual naysayers, either).

Look for people who have a positive attitude about your company and your potential but are forward- and independent-thinking enough to see what could be made better, both within their own roles and globally.

Product/Service Knowledge
No matter their function internally, you need to be assembling people who really understand the inner workings of your company, or have the relationship skills needed to build alliances and learn quickly. This kind of practical, functional knowledge is critical so that social media strategies can be approached and employed with company-wide implications in mind at all times.

And if the people on your team are going to be actively participating and contributing to social media endeavors, your customers aren’t going to care what department they’re from, they just know they’re part of your company. Everyone needs to be armed with enough information (or access to the information they don’t have) in order to help get customers the connections and solutions they need.

Problem Solving and Listening
This might go in the “duh” category. But team members need to be listening to what’s happening inside your company so they can be effective stewards of that information to your team and to the customers.

Team members also need to listen carefully what your customers are saying – even when they’re not saying it directly to you – in order to shepherd that information back and determine what to do with those insights to move things forward. This implies that all the members of the team need to have listening tools at their disposal, a point I’ll get into in a later post.

Not everyone will have all of these skills. But if you focus on finding people that have a few of them and spread the love around, you’ll have a well-equipped group of people that will help you launch a sound strategy.

Build Across Borders

You want to assemble a team of people that have certain skill sets, representing as wide a swath of departments as you can manage. This piece is really important because it ensures that your social media strategy will be built and executed with as wide a perspective as possible internally. That means understanding the potential benefits, the potential pitfalls, and opportunities to leverage both across all the different aspects of your business.

In an ideal scenario, you’d have people representing:

  • Corporate Comms and Public Relations (this can include agency partners if you have them)
  • Marketing
  • Brand/Product Management
  • Customer/Client Service
  • Business Development and Sales
  • Human resources
  • IT
  • Legal and/or Investor Relations

The right mix probably includes people with the right mindset first and foremost (or at least the open mindedness to consider social media as a promising strategy), and a mix of levels of responsibility. You don’t want all managers or all executives or all junior staff members. You probably need a couple of upper-level folks to champion the initiatives up the ladder, and the rest should be people doing and managing the day to day work.

And you need the people at the table to ask the hard questions. This shouldn’t be a fishbowl brigade of all the social media evangelists, but a mix of people that will allow and encourage healthy discussion with open minds about what the pros and cons of social media can be for your particular company.

Planning for “That Day”

A prevalent issue in social media today is “what happens when we train these people, put them out there on behalf of the company, and then they leave?”

My flip answer is: and this is different than any other person you recruit and train and they leave because….?

But I understand that the bigger concern is that you set expectations for “faces” of the company that may or may not be there someday, and that losing them means that you’ll lose customer loyalty because they were attached to the person and not the brand.

This is why it’s so important that you create a *culture* of social media in your organization, and empower many different people to be involved in your company efforts. Then the conversation becomes about “that company really wants to talk to its customers” as opposed to “that guy is really their social media guru”.

This really is about starting small, with a cadre of people that can champion the cause, because ultimately you want everyone in your organization to function with this mindset. Yes, you’re going to have a few people that stand out and carry the flag a bit higher than others. Yes, likely at some point they’re going to leave. But if you’re infusing a social communication mindset a little bit into all of your business functions gradually over time, there’s always going to be someone eager, willing, and more than capable of taking their place.

In other words, having a company spokesperson is great. But they need to be an indication and representative of an entire approach, not the approach in and of itself.

So, that’s a start to get you thinking about what your team might look like. What else would you add? What have I missed, and what considerations are important to you that we haven’t talked about? Tomorrow, we talk roles and responsibilities.

photo credit: bobster1985 via Flickr

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