Social Media: Why It Can't Be Just Another Department in Your Organization

While most companies understand that a Facebook page can be useful, few understand the bigger picture of how today’s social web and its mass of social-savvy customers are fundamentally changing the business landscape. Even fewer companies have taken measures to make their organizations competitive on the social web, measures which extend further than having just a social media presence.

We are now in the 8th year of Facebook’s existence and in the 6th of Twitter’s; blogs and forums have been around much longer than that. In fact, practically every part of the web today includes some social elements predicated on users creating and sharing their own content.

By now, most of us have heard about the classical Dirty Domino’s Pizza (2009) and Dell Hell(2005). We’ve seen Greenpeace forcing fashion companies to detox. Nike, H&M, and Zara have already been forced to commit to the demands of Greenpeace.

I could go on and list companies that have been victims of people using Social Media to force companies into changing. Dell started talking to bloggers, Domino’s Pizza changed their Pizza recipe and fashion companies need to change the way the manufacture their goods.

Even if your company has not been, or ever will be, exposed to such extreme examples as above, you probably haven’t identified the opportunities social media tools & technologies can bring to your organization in order to give you a competitive advantage.

Why a Social Media department won’t function in the long run

In most companies I’ve come across, the Social Media function is sitting under Marketing, sometimes even deeper into the Marketing organization such as directly reporting in to PR or Advertising.

The problem is not that Social Media sits under Marketing. The problem is that Social Media ONLY sits under Marketing and nowhere else (Fig.1).

In such situations, social media activity corresponds directly to the elements on which the marketing function is being evaluated. The result is often pretty dull; what happens is that you have a Facebook page and Twitter feed nicely branded in your corporate colors and a lot of status updates talking about how great and good you are and what new offers you have. Advertising, in other words.

The result is rarely very good, and pretty soon your Social Media function will start to realize that sitting under the Marketing department isn’t all that great. Typical consequences:

• There are customer complaints on your Facebook wall
• People are talking about your products on third-party forums
• No one is re-tweeting your tweets
• HR setup its own Facebook page without your knowledge
• Employees are posting stuff on Facebook that they shouldn’t, some of which could even be considered trade secrets
• IT shuts down the use of Social networks on the company network and won’t approve the use of your cloud apps such as Hootsuite
• Customers are tweeting you about campaigns you have never heard about

I could make the list even longer, and you could also turn the question around and ask the other departments on how they are affected by Social Media.

Understand how Social Media can help your business at large, then install these functions throughout your organization

Developed by Charlene Liand Josh Bernhoffat Forrester Research, this is the best framework I’ve seen to-date for describing what Social Media really means for companies.

These 5 key areas (Listen, talk, support, energize and embrace) are not just marketing related, they are applicable to any business unit in your company (Fig 3.).

Here are a few examples:

• PR department talks to your customers via Youtube (See how we did it at Expekt.com here)
• Customer Service listen and support customers and prospects in social channels as well as sourcing product feedback to relevant department (Read about how we did it at Betclic.fr here)
• HR uses tools such as Jobviteand source candidates via LinkedIn
• CRM develops website features together with IT to enable website visitors sharing their positive experiences
• Product Management together with Customer Service can use tools such as Uservoice or Getsatisfaction to embrace and crowd source feedback
• HR and Legal distributes internal employee Social Media guidelines
• …and hereare even more examples.

Create a Social Media task force in order to implement Social Media throughout the organization

So how do you get all this stuff implemented in the organization? Change doesn’t happen overnight but takes time, hard work and patience.

To embark on a company-wide Social Media program, it’s essential to get the support of the CEO as you will need people to change the way they work and perhaps even allocate budgets differently.

You Social Media department should grow into a Social Media task force.

But before you can start implementing things you need to identify what to implement. Start small by inviting a key stake holder from departments throughout the organization. Meet and discuss how the 5 key areas can help each department in their job, find ways of collaborating with other departments on certain tasks. Slowly grow the Social Media task force to involve all the key stake holders you need in order to fully implement your program (Fig 4.).

In the driver seat of the Social Media task force sits a Program Manager. Maybe that is your former Social Media Manager or maybe it is someone dedicated at driving a change management program internally.

The job of the task force is to identify what should be done, it’s then the job of the departments to execute and report back to the task force on the progress.

The task force should help department enable the activities, it needs to be an expert in Social Media vendors, measurement, budget allocation, researching and teaching. Its sole aim is to enable the organization to be competitive on the social web. (Fig 5.)

Joakim Nilsson originally blogged about how to establish a social media task force in your organization here.