Social Fresh: Managing social media with limited resources

Panel:

• Lisa Hoffmann (@lisahoffmann) with Duke Energy
• Brian Dresher (@bdresher) with USA Today
• Chris Moody (@cnmoody) with Bandwidth.com/Phonebooth.com
• Jennifer Ecclestone (@jenecclestone) with General Motors

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.).