Role of teams in

social media.

Key points in this presentation:

Mission, Vision and ValuesHow to build Social Media TeamTypes of people you need in your teamTeam DutiesCommunity ManagerSocial Media Department

How to Build an All-Star Social Media Team

• Social media is increasingly touted as a crucial part of the marketing mix, but things can go terribly wrong if campaigns are poorly executed. If you want your company to engage in social media, you need to put together a team of outgoing, passionate people to act as the digital face of your company.

• You must choose this team carefully, as it will represent your business. You must make sure they work as a team, as a tight-knit team will always outperform superstars acting as individuals. You must be willing to experiment in order to grow, but you must also make sure that you do not waste company resources on things that don’t work.

The Mission, the Vision, the Values 

• The mission to build into one another as we build bridges to our community

• The vision to be a multicultural body of fully-devoted followers and love to reach our community, our culture and our world

o B - Building Into One Anothero R – Reach your audienceo I – Interact with your targeto D – Develop perfect social media strategyo G – Generate more followers and fanso E – “Evangelist” on Social Media in your industryo S – Search the right people

How to Build an All-Star Social Media Team

Step 1 - Social Media Goals & Objectives

• Before you can start any journey, you have to know where you want to go. The same can be said for any social media activity. The goals and objectives of a social media team should reflect the needs of your company.

• What exactly do you want your social media team to do? Social media can introduce your company to potential customers or clients who are high up the sales funnel, or it can drive sales by advertising offers.

• Social media can also act as instant customer service, or it can be a place for your community of customers can discuss your products or services. 

Step 2 - Your Social Media Policy

• You must define your social media policy before you hand over social media activities to your employees.

• You need to make sure employees know what is and isn’t appropriate to discuss on your social media channels. You will obviously want to ban offensive comments, but you may also want to ban comments on a rival company’s bad fortune or allow your social media team to express their personal thoughts on industry-related topics

• You may also want to define the tone of your social media team.• As one final note, you must remember that your social media policy

should be a living document. It should change when times and technologies require it to change, and you should always make sure it is up to date.

Step 3 - Which types of people do you need on your team?

• "I'd always look for somebody who is social and understands people coupled with a strong focus on being able to understand data and analytics.“ ~ Niall Harbison

• The most important thing is that the social media team are passionate about social media and your company. They also need to be able to integrate completely with your current processes, so that the right department can address issues – whether positive or negative – immediately.

• Remember that one person may well be able to fulfil more than one of the roles, and whether or not you need all of these roles filled will depend on your objectives and goals.

The 'Digital Native'

• The digital natives at your company are probably the easiest to spot. They participate in many different social networks, they probably blog; and they know how to find and gain followers, how to engage with other users and the opportunities in and limitations to the media. They will be the most enthusiastic to work on the team, since they will be able to enjoy one of their favorite activities in order to help promote the company.

• They can come from any department, but they are likely outgoing and keen conversationalists, so they might easily be found in the marketing, PR, tech or online departments.

• What you should look for?

- Socially active using mediums like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn- Regular users of social news sites e.g. Digg, Reddit etc- May already have their own blog

*A digital native is a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technologies and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater comfort level using it

Coordinator

• Coordinators need to know how social media activities fit within the company as a whole. They need to be able to forward queries, conversations, leads and issues to the appropriate departments as quickly as possible.

• They need to be able to get those issues and queries in front of the people best placed to answer, not just a generic email address, so they need to know the company inside and out.

• Knowing who to forward a query to can be learned, but the person responsible for this should have impeccable organisational skills. They will have to be able to handle issues as they arise, make sure old issues have been resolved and probably engage in some social media activity, all whilst also doing their daily work responsibilities.

• What you should look for?

- Someone who knows a variety of people in departments across your business- ‘Safe hands’ – someone who ensures things get done- Strong organizational and/or project management skills

Communicator

• The communicator of the team will interact directly with customers and the general public. 

• Whilst everyone on the team will probably chat with a fan or a follower at some point, the communicator will need to know what the company wants to say, when it should be said and how best to phrase it.

• They will also need to be professional, calm, friendly and open, especially when things get a bit heated.

• For this role, you may want to look in the customer care or PR departments for someone who is well practiced at keeping their cool and keeping communication on-message.

• What you should look for?

- Great written communication skills- Someone who really cares about giving great service to your customers- Someone who keeps calm in a crisis

Product Expert

• Product expert needs to be on the team to quickly and easily answer customer queries or complaints.

• People often go to a company’s social media sites with these issues, and you do not want a product query sitting unanswered on your profile page for very long.

• What your company sells should be the one thing your public-facing representatives know inside and out. Still, it is unlikely that every person you hire will know every detail about all your products, so you should have someone on the team who can answer most of those kinds of queries.

• If you develop and sell your own products, your product expert should be from the product development team, but otherwise they could be from customer care or other customer-facing function.

• What you should look for?

- Someone who knows your products and services inside out- Excellent problem solving skills

The Analyst

• Analyst should be someone who understands tracking, analytics and statistics.• They should know what to track to show the ROI of your social media efforts, and

they should be able to use web analytics to demonstrate whether or not your social media team are reaching their goals.

• It is obvious that this person will be essential at first, helping determine baselines and metrics for tracking goals, but their work will continue. It is through the tracking and measurement of metrics that you test the effectiveness of your strategies and approaches, so this person should be as committed to the success of the social media team as anyone else.

• The analyst could be from finance, marketing or other departments that are used to measuring the monetary value of their work.

• What you should look for?

- Strong analytical skills- Someone who is detail oriented

Step 4 - Sales

• Most companies want their social media activity to eventually help boost sales and create a social selling culture in their business.

•  It simply makes sense that someone from the sales team should be in the social media team.

• Social media is about being social, and no one likes someone who only talks about themselves and how great they are. The person from sales is there to make sure that any sales queries that come via social media are handled appropriately.

• The person from sales should be made aware, however, that their job is not to tweet ads all the time

Step 5 - Marketing, PR and Customer Service

• Social media efforts need to keep followers up to date with what the company is doing and the new products or services it offers, and the efforts also need to ensure that fans and followers feel like they are being taken care of.

• This should all feel like a seamless social customer experience that fits in with the other marketing, PR and customer service activities your company is engaged in.

• Even more than that, social media are often the first channels through which people try to contact a company when they have a customer service issue or when they want to know a company’s position on a particular matter

• These things need to be addressed quickly, or the community can begin to feel ignored or even betrayed.

Step 6 - IT

• Some social media platforms, like blogs, forums or the more advanced Facebook apps, may require some IT support in order to get the best results or to fix issues.

• Someone from IT should be on the team so that the right tools for the analysis or implementation of the social media strategy can be selected and set up, so that updates can be done smoothly and so that technical issues can be fixed.

Team Duties: Listening and Replying

• ListeningReal-time monitoring of online mentions of the brand and company names and other relevant topics

• ManagingDetermining social media conversations that require a reply

• Replyingo Sending out tweets and commenting on blogs, forums, and social

networkso Usually responding to negative comments and complaintso Sales inquiries - related to product and other company information

Participation in discussion relevant to the industry

The Community Manager

• The simplest way of structuring a social media team is to have a single person responsible for monitoring all social media content across the entire organization.

• A Community Manager's responsibilities include:o Listening to all social media conversations and determining

mentions that require a responseo Being the company's online voice by responding on the company's

behalf on various social media channels such as in Blogs, Facebook or Twitter.

o Reporting weekly and monthly on the organization’s social media activity.

o Development of social media campaigns

Social Media Call Center

• This listening team is structured exactly like a inbound customer support call center. The team’s responsibilities include:

o Sorting relevant content from irrelevant content. o Ensuring social media mentions are effectively categorized. o Determining which mentions require a response and the appropriate

one for that particular situationo If a team member comes across a mention from a high authority

user or one that may be viewed as sensitive then the mention is then passed onto the PR Team

Social Media Switchboard

Depending on the size of the organization, either a single individual or a team will be solely responsible for routing social media mentions to the appropriate department.

The switchboard model works by analyzing incoming mentions from a SMM platform, checking for relevancy and then directing the mentions to the appropriate department within the organization.Once the mentions have reached the appropriate department they will be responsible for deciding which mentions warrant engagement. Each department will also be responsible for developing rapport with regards to social media activity

Social Media Department

The hierarchal structure works best when an organization has large multiple brands. Each brand will have either a individual or team of community managers who will then report to an executive community manager who will oversee all social media monitoring and engagement related activities. 

Career Profile for Social Media Manager

What should a social media team track?

• Topics and subject of conversations• Sentiment (complaints & complements)• Share of voice• Geography and demographics• Product & service-related commentary• Brand mentions• Competitor activity• Trends (relevant industry news & communications)

Questions you should ask in your SM team

• Why are we engaging in social media?• Who should be part of our social media team?• Where should we focus our efforts?• What social media content should we monitor and

create?• How should we produce content?• How do we coordinate efforts across the organization?• When and how often do we produce content?• How do we measure our success?• How do we monetize social media?