Who be owns social media?

 

Who be owns social media?

Social media is not a channel so much as a tool set. So, asking the organizational

question, “Who in our enterprise owns social media?” is not a hundred percent

on the mark. Many departments in your organization (market research, customer

service, legal, PR, investor relations, marketing) may use social media as a

research or listening tool. Or they may leverage social channels to amplify the

public communications they send out as a function of their jobs.

So you will certainly have many stakeholders in social media. But you do need

to have one overarching “owner” of social, to serve several functions:

To establish company-wide rules, certification, and processes for publishing

to, and interacting in, social channels

To develop and execute overall social strategy and tactics

To coordinate messaging and liaison between various stakeholders. 

To report holistically on overall social media program performance

To oversee adherence to the rules and to escalate issues if needed

In most businesses, the social media team lives in the marketing department,

with dotted lines to customer service and legal. Where I work, we maintain

online communities for each major brand. Marketing brand managers set the

strategic and creative direction for their brand communities. Public relations

specialists oversee the process—ensuring coordination among the players,

encouraging cross promotion, and enforcing the rules of the road.

Another organizational consideration is to leverage the relevant digital skill sets

that already exist within your organization. That’s generally the province of the

e-commerce or digital team, which is usually under marketing.

“Bring the three facets of digital—paid, owned and social—under one roof,”

advises Shiv Singh, global head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages. “That’s

extremely important. I’m lucky in that PepsiCo recognized the importance of

having all facets of digital in one place… I believe the only way to drive

maximum value is to look at digital holistically.”

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Because social media offer such powerful communications platforms, they have

many stakeholders across an enterprise. The most natural home for social media

is within the digital team of your marketing department. But there must be strong

“dotted lines” to legal and customer service teams, as well as robust processes

for internal communication, approval, and escalation of crisis response across

departments.

Planning Your Social Media Program

 talked about the need for a formal charter document for your

social media program—something between a marketing plan and a full-blown

business plan. You’ll also need more tactical daily and seasonal plans.

High-impact social media campaigns involve many moving parts, both within

the social media landscape and in traditional media. Such campaigns call upon

players in your marketing, legal, customer service, and operations departments.

They require technology development and a number of weeks or months of lead

time.

As a result, a social media program requires disciplined advance planning.

You’ll need to include some of the following:

Daily community management staffing plan

Monthly publishing schedules

Research, survey, and customer insights projects

Promotions and campaign strategy briefs

Creative design briefs

Technology requirements:

1. writing, vendor selection or in-house

development, user-experience testing, and debugging

2. Budgeting and reporting

While I urge you to write planning documents, we’re not asking for the Magna Carta here. 

3. Creative ad campaign briefs can be a couple of pages long,

describing the goals, outlining the offer or promotion, and noting the milestones

and moving parts needed to bring it to life.

4. Your monthly content calendar is no more than a couple of pages of bulleted

ideas for posts. Most successful online communities fall into something of a

regular routine, with traditions like “Fan Exclusive Deal of the Week” falling on

a Tuesday, say, followed by recipes on Wednesday, then “Fan Follow Friday” to

shine the spotlight on someone in your fan base. Also natural for your social

media publishing plan are holidays, including relevant “Hallmark holidays” that

fit your market and key anniversary dates for your business, as well as

commercial events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Scheduling and execution of social media campaigns can be done comfortably

with whatever project management tool you already use, whether it’s Basecamp,

Excel, or something else—as long as it’s not the back of an envelope.

Budget Accurately

What does it cost to run a social media program? Is such a program a bootstrap

operation? Or is it one that has the funds to deliver on its promise to the brand

and its fans, with sufficient staff, technology, and promotional dollars to make an

impact?

Based on my experience, I’d propose that the social media budget should be in

the neighborhood of 5–10% of the entire marketing budget. Within that, paid

social media advertising ought to receive 5–10% of the overall online ad budget.

Public data on social media budgets is very scarce. Many studies confirm that

companies plan to increase spending on social in general and social advertising

in particular. But they say nothing about specific dollar figures.

As one reference point, Rilla Delorier, chief marketing officer of SunTrust Bank,

was quoted in Ad Age as saying, “The great thing is less than 5% of my total

spend is in social media. We’ve reached over a million customers this year

through that mechanism. It’s a very efficient way to get feedback on what’s

working and what’s not.”

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John Bell, who runs Social@Ogilvy, the social media practice at Ogilvy &

Mather, constructed a matrix of suggested budget allocations for social media as

a percentage of total marketing budget. Delorier’s comment factored into Bell’s

thinking. At the low end, Bell places “obligatory experimenters,” spending just

1%. As a business progresses through “questing” to a “well-integrated” program,

and from “adoption” to a “go big” mindset, Bell sees the budget allocation for

social rising to 5%, then 7%, then 12% and ultimately as high as 17%. He

cautions, though, that by the time an enterprise reaches the high end, social has

become so well integrated into the overall budget that you can’t clearly connect

dollars solely to social.

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I’ve created a hypothetical budget to get you thinking about your likely expense

categories. 

1. Personnel: Whether dedicated in-house staff, outsourced agency, or

combination of the two, this will be the biggest slice of the pie.

2. Social media advertising: The money you spend on Facebook,

Foursquare, Twitter, and so on.

3. Software: Used for monitoring, publishing, campaign management, and

analytics.

Campaign design and development: Includes promotions, sweepstakes,

games, and apps to support free sample giveaways.

4. Prizes or free samples: Like it or not, these are key engines for brands to

drive engagement in social media. You need to fund these programs.

Social Media Certification

In the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters specialty coffee business, we have a

remarkable social media diva and cat-herder named Kristen Mercure. Kristen, a

senior public relations specialist, is responsible for overseeing and coordinating

the social media efforts of all our brand managers and their outside agencies. She

also serves as liaison between these dozens of people and the stakeholders in

public relations, legal, customer service, and other departments.

It is no small task, which is why Kristen manages several formal, full-day social

media certification classes per year, attended by anyone who will be involved in

social media campaigns, content posting, or interaction with our online

communities.

Social media certification is also vitally important. The legal department, for

example, has drafted a social media use policy for all employees to sign, as well

as a specific policy document for social media certified representatives.

During the certification course, we talk about what constitutes ideal behavior

(authenticity, responsiveness, fun, friendliness, knowledgeable answers, and so

on). We brainstorm about potential social media disasters—how to deal with

customer complaints that go ballistic, how not to divulge sensitive information,

and so forth. We discuss scenarios that we can resolve ourselves, as social media

reps, and which ones require an escalated response.

After the training, all participants take an online test to demonstrate that they

have learned the rules of the road. Only when they complete the course and pass

the test do we give them the go-ahead to publish posts or responses on behalf of

the company, on the company blog or in any online community.