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I work at a great company -- we do a lot of things very well, but social media isn't one of them...yet. We've been slowly easing into conversations about how we can use social media, but like many companies, we're facing barriers from senior management, IT, security and others. You know how it goes.
In spite of that, I just found out yesterday that we're hiring a social media intern. He will only be working a couple of hours a day offsite, so while I'm very excited about this opportunity, I want to make sure we're using his time as wisely as possible.
If you were just starting out with social media, what would you do at your company? Right now, we have not grabbed any twitter handles, Facebook pages, etc. The only social media type application we’re using is the ShareThis feature on our public website.
I think that getting into social media can be a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing in that you can contact people directly and let them know instantly about any events your company is hosting, or any other news from your company. It can also be a curse because if you talk too much, your followers may start to get annoyed.
Although I haven't done any social media for a company, I am an avid user of Facebook and Twitter, and will subscribe to many companies feeds. However, unlike a lot of my friends, I can be very picky about who I subscribe to. I think social media works really well with some companies, but not so well with other companies. If you are selling a product, I think that social media can work great. For example, if you were a retail company you can send out messages as to when sales will be held, or give fans exclusive offers. But I think it's harder for companies that offer services to get into social media. You really have to weigh whether it's right for your company and your needs.
We launched a new employee intranet site called "Pulse" in October 2009. The executive director wrote a welcome message but was unwilling to participate in any daily entries, except to reply to employee comments submitted via computer and through a group of "Pulse" suggestion boxes we installed in each one of our 5 offices (which are scattered around our county). It seems like it took forever to get people to submit comments, though we heavily advertised the fact that all comments submitted (via computer and through the comment boxes) were anonymous. But 9 months later, employees are starting to participate more and more. The difficult part was being able to post timely responses to comments.
We decided at the beginning that almost all the replies would come directly from the executive direcctor. That, of course, meant that we in the public affairs division had to write the responses and get them approved by the director before posting them. This involved getting a suggested response from whatever manager was in charge of the subject area, editing and a lot of rewriting and then a lot of back and forth on getting them to buy into the response we created. It was a surprise to me how hard it is to get the managers to directly address the issue or problem being raised, but we felt it was absolutely critical that the responses weren't just typical bureaucratic-speak (we're a small government agency).
We also started to have a lot of fun with the site, learning how to use Adobe Fireworks to quickly post slide shows of events taking place within the agency. Or, I should say, one of us started to have fun doing that ... a recalcitrant co-worker who viewed this as just more work rarely contributes to the effort....but no matter!
I feel we've taken off and our numbers are growing everyday.
Then we launched a Facebook page -- a move that got a lot of criticism from employees who are barred from accessing Facebook at work....
We're still dealing with that, but we post a lot more on PULSE than Facebook and we keep reminding everyone of that.
We're getting ready to post a short survey on the PULSE site and have arranged for a new (fancy) restaurant that just opened nearby to donate two free lunches which we'll raffle off as an enticement to get staff to anwer the (short) survey. We haven't tackled the technical problem of keeping the responses anonymous but still being able to conduct a lottery to give away the lunches...but I have been told it can be done.
It's exciting to start a new program and important to take advantage of the momentum that's beginning. The trouble with an intern doing the work is that may not be connected to your marketing strategy as a whole. What's the goal? Given that though, one good way to start thinking about it is to use it to listen. Set up a hootsuite or tweetdeck search and monitor some conversations about your business and/or industry. You may find some discussions going on that help you decide which direction to take. The intern could help you start building relevant followers. They could be journalists, analysts or other influencers in your industry. Good luck on your project.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I just found out about this intern through about a 3 minute drive by conversation at my desk, but I'm meeting with our Director next week to get more instruction. Thanks, Mary, for the suggestion about hootsuite and tweetdeck. I've been doing some monitoring on my own using search.twitter.com, but I'll have to check out those other sites.
Hi there! First of all - congratulations about taking the first step with social media. It is time consuming, but the benefits can be supremely gratifying.
I have to agree with MaryCochran. So many people think that interns are the way to go because they are so familiar with the platforms. But social media is a communications tool, not a toy. It is critical that this person understand organizational goals before being set loose to represent your agency on the social web.
Your social communications efforts need to integrate with your traditional campaigns. You need to plan to be responsive and "there" to see the best results. You need to plan a "listening" campaign to see what people are saying about your brand. And you need to be ready to shift if things aren't working as you hoped.
Some interesting comments here. My two cents worth:
Start at the end. What does "done" look like for your social media efforts. What are the measures of success from your initiative? Are those metrics based upon volume of messaging? Sentiment of messaging? Number of impactful authors that you have engaging with your social media presence?
"Dabbling" in this field is an excellent way for you (and said intern) to learn a great deal about social media, however the ROI on the investment made by the company in terms of your and the intern's time is never going to be realized without you first agreeing what it is the company needs to get out of this effort.
You need a strategy. This will involve Advertising and Marketing if you're going outside the company to establish a corporate presence. You will most likely also want to get Legal and HR involved to see how the external efforts align with the social media policies established to govern employee use of Web 2.0. (Don't have those? Fail! Go back and establish these first and then you'll have an awesome results to demonstrate the value of you and the intern!)
Your policies need to establish monitoring processes to guarantee you came demonstrate the value the company has obtained by supporting these initiatives. It can not be "hey look at this pretty Twitter feed". It needs to be - "We can demonstrate that social media efforts resulted in these new customers/products/messages being impacted to a positive degree of X".
IT is a science. It lends itself well to measurement. Your IT department should be able to help you greatly with your quest, but probably hasn't been all that engaged in this area because Social Media takes place outside of their direct domain and the recent economic difficulties mean that their budget is so thin that caring about things outside their domain is a luxury they can't afford. However, they do have the approaches and experience to guide you through your efforts and could probably give you the assistance you need in their sleep.
Hope some of this helps. I also would be happy to discuss further with anyone.
I vote nay on turning over your organization's social media efforts to an intern. In fact, it's a topic I dedicated an entire blog post to: "Intern Wanted! Must Have Social Media Experience" http://ow.ly/2am0l
I believe an intern can do social media for you if you have identified organizations goals and the purpose for your company using social media.
The question to ask is: Will the intern be a tool operator or a strategic thinker that can lead your company in the right direction.
Both are very different and require a special set of skills and knowledge. Just about anyone can use facebook but do they know why they are using it and how to measure success.
Your intern could very well be your tool operator but ensure you have leader taking in the right direction with a solid strategy.
Hope this helps.
-------------------------------- Monique Terrell, Sr. Manager of Social Media
@moniqueterrell
If you're going to let an intern manage your external social media efforts, you better be letting that intern speak at press conferences, be quoted on the record in traditional media, and go on CNN, FOXNews, etc. too. Because that's effectively what you're doing by putting him/her in charge of social media too. Once I say that, I find that my clients tend to start putting a little more thought into choosing/training their social media managers
It is a cheap and very risky option by any company to have their intern speak publicly for their organization. The risk is having someone who has not been with the company long enough to know the inside and outside image of the organization, (yes-there is a difference), to sufficiently speak for that organization in the delicate arena of the social media. It is cheap, because, there are veterans within the organization who may or should have been trained to professionally and confidently represent with little to no foul. It is safe to say that $10/hr. for three months puts the organization at a great risk.
Perhaps you could employ this intern in a third option, other than tactical (actually posting tweets, etc) or strategic function?
I find that many people are simply too busy to take the time to learn what the various tools are and how to use them, so they avoid them completely. However, a basic LinkedIn or Twitter 101 session, including some arguments for and against these tools, could be helpful in opening the conversation up at your company?
Sometimes just hearing about some of the ways others have used social media tools to great effect (e.g. Dell's used/refurbished computer sales via Twitter) can help decision-makers start to create their own ideas.
Sometimes, even, just showing them how to login and what a tweet stream looks like, or how other tools like Tweetmeme, HootSuite, etc. work, is a great place to start. One session every two weeks, say...
The intern will learn a lot, including the kind of push-back that executives will give, and so will your executives... If the intern does a fantastic job of it, at least!
Great idea to start with aligning interests between your company and the new intern. Also agree that the next step is search and sifting content using hootsuite or tweetdeck. My third step is interact with customers by asking questions like, "How can we make your life easier?" or "What can we do for you?"
One comment: Who will handle all the work when the intern is gone? I had to supervise all the interns "creating" web pages for their well-intentioned bosses. Then those interns left, and I was left with dead pages.
Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.
There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again.
If you are selling products/services or just publishing content for ad revenue, social media marketing is a potent method that will make your site profitable over time.
Those who ignore the efficacy of social media usually fall into three categories; the ones who don’t know much or anything about social media, the ones who are interested but don’t know how to use it and those who don’t believe in the value that a social media strategy can bring to any site or business.
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