Social Fresh: Managing social media with limited resources

Panel:

Moderator: David B Thomas (@DavidBThomas) with SAS

From the program:

    Implementing social media can often cost more money and time than the most educated company is prepared for. The most common solution to this is arming a company’s social media employees with fewer resources than most of us would like. What are some tips for improving this situation? What tools help produce a more efficient social implementation? How does one navigate the politics of it all?

Lisa Hoffman

Managing requests from various groups and departments to “use social media”:

  • Assess understanding and readiness.
  • Train others to monitor on their own. Teach them to fish. Figure out what they need and give them the tools.
  • Be a coach: There are people who want to do it but they’re afraid or they don’t know how. Being a coach isn’t doing it for them. Remember your role, and let them make their own mistakes. Let them learn as they go.

Brian Dresher

  • Empower employees to become the voice of the brand.
    • Journalists break their own news.
  • Demonstrate social media as a way to increase productivity, efficiency, and fun factor.
    • Twitter search. Pick up on trends that wouldn’t be obvious without social media. News curators. Sneak previews. Alternate ways to cover stories.
  • Understand key tools and then continually educate and inform staff on how to use them.
    • ex. Backtweets.com
      • Journalists can dive deeper and contact people who have retweeted them.
      • Can see how journalists from other publications covered same story.
    • People can contact journalists in new ways: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  • Celebrate the successes and share metrics, so that everyone stays on-board.
    • Fans and followers are not the only factor.

 Jennifer Ecclestone

  • Leverage your current assets (people, skills, outreach, branding, etc) to accomplish your goal.
    • Ex. Connect with customers. They will share with their friends.
  • Remember that the quality of the fans, followers and conversation is more important that the quantity of them.
  • Transparency in your communication in the social media space is key.
    • GM leaves negative comments on their social networks as long as they aren’t inappropriate.
  • Be sure to bring online relationships offline and vice versa.
    • More personal. You can be the face of the company. Every person on Twitter is an actual human being.

Chris Moody

  • Find ways to listen to what your customers are telling you and pull that into the product.
    • ex. User voice forum: feedback.bandwidth.com
  • Create the appropriate channels to escalate within the company.
    • Have a process to let the users and the company know what you’re doing, and get that information out quickly.
  • Understand where your customers are and engage with them.
    • Figure out where they are. Where are they talking about your product? Find a way to join the community.
  • Routinely ask yourself how you can make your tasks more social (events, promotions, repurposing content, etc.).