I started to write a post about Equipping your Team for Social Media. And it grew and grew and grew until it became clear to me that this was much more digestible as a series.

So today’s the start of what’ll probably end up being 4 or 5 posts about building, equipping, and empowering a social media team. I’m coming at this from the corporate perspective, assuming that you’re building mostly an internal team (though I’ll touch a bit on the roles of consultants and vendors later in the series).

What Do you Mean A Social Media Team?

Let’s assume for a minute that you’re already convinced that social media is something you need to be integrating into your work. (If you still need convincing on this front, sift through my archives or any of the myriad blogs on social media out there right now).

When I refer to a team, I mean exactly that. A group of people inside your organization that are tasked with strategizing, executing, and stewarding social media initiatives inside your company.

Those initiatives can be anything from just listening and mining social media conversations for insights about your brand presence to participating actively through blogs, Twitter, forums, or other social networks to engage with your customers.

So, Who Should Be Involved?

I’m going to get into specifics about recruiting, skills/attributes and succession planning later on, but for now, suffice it to say that if you’re only considering adding people to your social media team from your communications department, please stop there, and let’s chat about this for a minute.

I know we communication types think that since the word “media ” is involved, it should live exclusively with the communication department. And I think that’s selling it all very short.

Your customer service, product development, and business development teams really have stakes in this game, and you ought to consider a cross-disciplinary group that includes people from all of these departments. Why?

The information you glean from social media is going to affect more than the way you talk to your customers. If you’re really integrating it, it should be affecting the decisions you  make about how you help those customers, and ultimately inform the products and services you provide to them. So my team would have folks from:

* PR and Corporate Communications
* Marketing
* Customer and/or Client Service
* Business Development or Sales
* Brand Management
* Product Development
* Executive Team

If you’ve got multiple people in each department, select a point person or two for each to help streamline internal communication, but everyone needs to be engaged and involved.

Team members are responsible for strategizing and executing the social media initiatives that are relative to their department function (which sometimes means active social media participation and sometimes implementing internally), communicating back to the team and management about results and challenges, educating and training internally about social media initiatives, and finding ways to integrate the learnings from social media into their work. We’ll dive more into specifics on that later, too.

Why The Hell Do I Need One?

I’m going to be brief here because I’ve already written at length about the fact that social media isn’t going anywhere. Call it what you will, but socially charged communication is changing expectations in business, both for customers and potential customers alike. There’s no backwards now.

So given that, you need a social media team because having one champion in your office forever doesn’t scale. You cannot conceivably manage a comprehensive and properly integrated social media presence with one guy (or girl). And done right, social media bleeds into almost every aspect of the business. That doesn’t mean that everyone gets on Twitter, but it does mean that what you learn through social customer engagement can and will inform decisions and ideas about much of what you do. And the right people need to be empowered to do something with that information.

To me, building this team is a first step to getting departments to work across borders, but all with the goal of improving the customer experience, and building a more solid foundation upon which your business can grow and thrive.  It means managing the monolith of social media by integrating it into what you’re already doing, not completely reinventing the wheel. Dividing and conquering, and building a system of people and tools that make the ultimate value – consistent and dedicated customer outreach – much easier to manage.

What You Can Expect

So for the next several posts, we’re going to talk about things like:

  • Recruiting and developing your team members, the characteristics of solid social media team members, and planning for turnover
  • Roles and Responsibilities, some ideas for deliverables, and some tips for engagement and outreach
  • The Team Toolkit: some of the tech and stuff you need to manage all this
  • Measuring Success: When you know you’re doing something right

Anything else I’ve missed? Comment, email, whatever you like. And then, off we go….

photo credit: khrawlings

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