13. Assign Responsibility and Be Accountable

Ultimately, this needs to be someone you trust, someone you can rely on to speak for the company, to be the face of the company, and to deal with your customers. If you don’t have anyone at all in your company who fits that description, then you’ve made some poor hiring decisions. We talked about this in Chapter 2, “It’s Not Them; It’s You!” but it bears repeating: If you don’t have any employees you trust to talk directly to customers, you don’t have an employee problem, you have a management problem. And it all started with the people who hired untrustworthy employees.

But assuming this isn’t a problem, and you have identified the right people in the intervening 10 chapters, you now need to start looking at who will manage your social media efforts on behalf of your company.

The Question of Ownership

We’ve skirted the question so far: Who should be in charge of the social media efforts at your company? We sort of made a case for marketing in Chapter 5, “Make Some Noise: Social Media Marketing Aids in Branding and Awareness,” but that’s because we’re both marketers. But we’ve been able to make a case in the other chapters that PR should be in charge of it, or customer service, or sales. The crisis communication employees, who are often in the PR department, may be asked to take over during a major crisis. Or maybe it’s the community leaders and brand managers who are in charge of the messaging.

How’s this for a no-bullshit answer? There is no one answer. The answer is going to be right for your company, for the people you hire, for the personalities who will handle it, and for the level of trust you actually do have for each of them.

Maybe your sales force is a little older and they think Facebook is stupid. But if your target market is women between the ages of 50 and 60, that’s Facebook’s fastest growing demographic. Your salespeople are missing out on a great opportunity by ignoring Facebook. So they’re not the best candidates. Or your marketing department is going through an internal power struggle right now and you know that introducing social media to the mix is only going to create more problems than it solves, so that might not be the best place to put it. Your customer service department is wildly overworked and understaffed and there’s no budget to give it to them right now, although that might change in six months. But rather than put it off for six months, you decide to press on and see if you can lighten their workload in the meantime.

Ultimately, you’re going to have to choose which department might be best suited for managing a social media campaign.

A Quick Review of the Pros and Cons

Looking at the pros and cons of the different departments and how to overcome some of the downsides will help you find the right answer for your company. Keep in mind that these are generalities and not hard-and-fast truths, so it’s important to take a look at your own departments and staff before you base a decision on what we’re telling you here. These are just general guidelines to give you a place to get started (see Table 13.1).

Table 13.1. Pros and Cons of Social Media Responsibility by Department

Marketing

Upside: This is the most likely place to put it because social media marketing is basically what you’re trying to accomplish. These are the people who typically understand how to create a persuasive marketing message, are used to measuring the results of a campaign or overall performance, and are often more than willing to try a new tool or toy if it will help them increase market share. They are also adept at speaking to customers in their own language, helping them identify pain points, and showing them how to solve these problems.

Downside: They’re often willing to try a new tool or toy even if it won’t help them. They can get easily distracted, so while they think marketing on Twitter and Facebook sounds cool today, they could be distracted by the newest tool tomorrow, without actually making the others work first. They are also not prone to thinking in terms of customer service because they’re more focused on gaining new customers. These are also one of the two most likely groups to start blasting commercials via social media, thus alienating your potential customers. They are also most likely to revert to marketing jargon in their messages, so watch out for this.

Sales

Upside: Ultimately, these employees are most dedicated to seeing sales numbers go up as a result of a new campaign or effort. These people will most likely buy in if they know that they’re going to see more qualified leads, more closes, and higher revenue. A lot of salespeople are consummate networkers, and social media is the ultimate networking tool that lets them get in touch with potential customers and lets them bypass the gatekeepers.

Downside: A lot of experienced salespeople (read: older) are so used to jumping on the phones day after day that if they don’t think they’ll see immediate results, they won’t try it. Because social networking is all about building trust and relationships, they might not have the patience and time to build those, relying instead on face-to-face meetings and phone conversations. There’s nothing wrong with those, but this is a paradigm shift for a lot of old-school salespeople.

Public Relations

Upside: Public relations professionals are typically the individuals within your organization who have the most experience and training in communicating not just with the public, but in crisis situations. That background gives them the right pedigree to manage and balance real-time and potentially viral conversations that involve happy or unhappy customers. The disciplines of public relations—crisis communications, media relations, event management, community relations—have very logical parallels in the social media space as well: responding to detractors, blogger outreach, event management, building community.

Downside: PR people typically don’t think in terms of marketing, ROI, and sales. They think of eyeballs, readers, viewers, and total reach. PR people have their own ways of measuring results, but they often don’t cross over to sales and profits. You also want to make sure the PR people don’t make Target’s mistake of turning up their noses at “nontraditional media” (see Chapter 2) and possibly alienating a few thousand bloggers all at once.

Customer Service

Upside: Because a lot of people like to use Twitter and Facebook to complain, who better to be on the front lines communicating with them than your customer service people? These staff members respond immediately to complaints, questions, feedback, and compliments on a daily basis. Not only will they help solve the problems customers are complaining about on social media channels, it also lets your customer service efforts be more visible. That shows your potential customers that you’re responsive to problems, and the happy customers will tell their networks, which means you can spread your message to thousands of other people, via the people they most trust: their friends.

Downside: Customer service employees have the opposite problem marketing does: They focus on fixing current customer problems, not gaining new customers. So they’re not experienced in writing persuasive messages, measuring ROI, or trying to win market share. Customer service people might not be trained to follow up with sales or marketing questions from noncustomers.

Who Should Not Be in Charge

Who are the people who should not be in charge of social media efforts? The legal, IT, or compliance departments. It’s not that we have anything against those people. We’re sure they’re nice people. It’s just that in our experience, the legal department will often take days or even weeks to answer a single tweet, by which time a customer’s problem will either resolve itself or turn into a bigger problem, which PR has to deal with. (In fact, if your legal department feels they need to approve every single tweet before it goes out, that’s a sure sign you’re not ready for social media. Or you need to convince your legal department to loosen their ties a bit.)

The IT department isn’t equipped to deal with customer service issues, sales questions, marketing issues, or talking to media types. And compliance makes sure that your products or services follow the law. They don’t deal with customers or media types either. In fact, IT is often a hurdle that needs to be overcome when trying to implement a social media campaign. We talked about this extensively in Chapter 2.

Even though these people might insist that they need to be involved, we’re going to recommend against it for the most part, unless you work in a highly regulated industry. And then—and only then—the legal or compliance departments should have a seat at the social media table, but they still should not be in charge. If their indecisiveness or thoroughness gets in the way of you successfully interacting with customers, take away their seat. They can give advice and guide, but they should not be a hindrance to your responsiveness to your customers. We’ve already seen what happens when the lawyers get involved in talking to customers. Unless you want to have a big social media crisis caused by people who don’t like the way the legal department handled a customer service problem, you won’t let them get the keys to the social media car.

But if you think they need to be in charge because you’re worried about the risk to your company, put this book down. You’re not ready for social media, and you might never be.

The Ideal Setup

The best setup might be to take a “tiger team” approach and select one or two people from each department to serve on a committee. Put the committee in charge of your social media efforts. Pick a representative from each department who should have influence in your social media campaign and let that team manage it. Although the people on the committee would continue to serve in their regular day-to-day functions, the social media responsibilities would be added to their day-to-day responsibilities and become a normal part of their job. They would devote the appropriate amount of time to any social media matters that came up.

This is a nice democratic solution that will keep everyone involved. It will also crash and burn in about four months, if you’re not careful. If you take the social media committee approach, consider a few caveats before launching it:

• Don’t make this a democratic committee where everyone has an equal vote. The only thing slower than the seven-year itch is a committee. Remember Erik’s friend who worked at a university with a social media committee in a single department? After six months of regular meetings, they still haven’t started a single profile on a single network. If you want to kill an idea, give it to a committee. To kill it extra brutally, make the committee write a mission statement first.

• Put one person in charge of the entire social media effort. This person should be in charge of the committee and the social media campaign, and should ultimately be responsible for making sure everything gets done. Everyone else can make recommendations and give input, but this needs to fall squarely on the shoulders of one person. He or she will make the decisions and create the messaging and the editorial calendar. You don’t have a democratic method in any other department in your company; there is always one person in charge who makes sure everything gets done. This committee needs to follow the same model of management.

• A social media committee can also serve as a clearinghouse for the different departmental functions. Any customer service issues can be forwarded to the customer service department, any leads can be forwarded to the marketing or sales departments, and any serious crises can be sent on to the PR department or elevated to customer service management. This might mean that only one person is handling social media, and he’ll farm out the different issues as he sees fit; this is the hub-and-spoke model of social media management. It also means that someone in every department has access to a social media account. Tools like CoTweet let several people participate in a hub-and-spoke model.

• Don’t create a committee if that is the normal procedure for any of your interdepartmental efforts. That is, if your standard operating procedure is to create a committee, then don’t do it here. What often ends up happening is the same people end up serving on several committees, which means they’ll view this as just one more assignment and not give it the attention this needs if you want it to see a positive ROI. You’re better off only putting a few people, or even one person, on this assignment and reducing her regular workload to let her fit in her extra responsibilities.

Of course, the best course of action is to make social media a department all its own. Rather than just creating a committee, move one or two people to the new social media department and let them lead the charge. The department should be independent of any of the others because they each have different missions themselves: Marketing is about getting sales leads, sales is about closing the deal, and customer service is about fixing the problems created by sales.

The problem with letting one department run social media is that the others might feel slighted and either fight for control or try to go rogue and do their own social media program. Also, keep in mind that it could take at least 6 to 12 months before you begin to see noticeable results. You will meet some initial goals along the way: adding X people to your network or getting X visitors to your site per month.

Once you decide which approach you want to take, it’s a matter of finding who you want to have serving on your committee or new social media department.

Social Media Management Is for Senior Staff, Not Interns

Social media is not only for young people. It’s not an entry-level position, it’s not only used by entry-level people, and young people are not the only ones who are good at it. The minute you think that, you’ll start running into problems because there are plenty of Generation Xers and baby boomers who are on social media.

There are a number of companies who turn their entire social media efforts over to interns and entry-level employees because they mistakenly believe social media is a young person’s game. They think the geezers in management can’t grasp the complicated tasks of sending 140-character tweets or reading complaints on Facebook.

Even though the younger employees might be whizzes at Twitter and Facebook, they don’t necessarily know how to create an extended strategy, have experience responding to customer complaints, understand how to market and sell enough to be able to do it effectively online, or even know how to calculate the ROI and do basic market research. The net result is that the companies have a Twitter and Facebook presence, but not much else to show for it. They don’t know the ROI of their efforts, there are no goals to measure, and their strategy is a one-sentence statement to “do more social media.”

It’s real simple: Managing social media is not for rookies or the twentysomethings who just started with your company three months ago. Now, we’re not saying that these young employees shouldn’t do social media. If you can get them to be a part of your social media team, that’s great. They should be using it because they really do get social media and the idea of collaboration and rapid-fire communication. But they should not be in charge of something that would, by any other name, be a major department with a serious undertaking.

Think of it this way: The new PR associate doesn’t do media interviews during a major company crisis, the marketing intern doesn’t oversee the entire spring launch for your new product line, and the new corporate attorney doesn’t defend your company in a civil suit three months after graduating from law school. You would never dream of letting new employees do anything like that, so why would you let a rookie handle one of the most public-facing communication channels your company will ever have? Other than PR and marketing, no other channel reaches so many people so permanently and widely as social media.

By using a more experienced employee, you’re able to draw on his real-world, full-time work experience. He can recall similar situations, can understand the gravity of what he’s doing, and has experience building and executing campaigns, measuring the results, and speaking with customers with a sense of purpose and company mission. Although we’ve known a lot of great twentysomethings who are really smart and could make a social media campaign sing, they’re few and far between.

Who Are the Ideal Social Media Practitioners?

There is no one good social media person, but there is a limited field of possibilities. Typical social media people are generally going to come from marketing, PR, or sales. They’re used to dealing with the public and are generally outgoing and easy to get along with. They’re used to multitasking and can manage the sometimes fast pace of social networking and conversations. They also spend a lot of time, or are willing to spend a lot of time, attending conferences, visiting local and regional networking events (Chamber of Commerce, business networking, and so on), and are comfortable being in large groups of people.

Social media people tend to be more social in nature and view these online networks as extensions of their real-world connections, rather than a replacement or substitute for it. They’re happy to meet people outside the office and will evangelize for the company.

This is important because your social media people are going to be performing a number of different functions for your company: public relations, sales, marketing, and customer service. The big four functions that can use social media to their benefit are the same four functions that this one person will employ as your social media mouthpiece. So they need to be customer-focused, sales-minded, public-facing, brand experts. They’re going to be a self-starting, self-motivating, revenue-generating, problem-solving, media-earning force majeure. So they need to be the kind of people who can handle this all on their own without a lot of input from someone else. This is also why the social media person is not going to be found among the ranks of the most junior employees.

Typically when asked the question, “Who should be in charge of social media in my company?” we answer, “The person most passionate about doing it.” If that person happens to be a seasoned communicator who falls into the previous description, you’ve got your answer. If she doesn’t, then you have a candidate who might need some additional oversight. But passion compensates for a lot. Let the person who wants it lead the charges.

What If Your Employee Becomes a Social Media Rock Star?

Those passionate leads often fast-track themselves to becoming influential within their own market. If the social media industry breeds anything, it’s microcelebrities. Few influencers in any industry are as lauded or stroked as those in the social media world, deserving or not. If your company is widely known or your industry is a large one, you can almost count on an active and visible social media evangelist for your company becoming quite the hot ticket for conference speaking and beyond. It happened to Frank Eliason when he started the @ComcastCares account on Twitter and began handling people’s customer service complaints. It happened to Scott Monty when he became Ford Motor Company’s social media director and to Chris Barger when he took the same position at General Motors. Amber Naslund is another notable industry influencer in the social media world, and she is the vice president of social strategy for social media monitoring software company Radian6.

Some employers worry about what will happen to their employees when they become a big name in their industry or within social media circles. This is a viable concern. After all, with this kind of microfame comes more opportunities for speaking at conferences, being interviewed by bloggers and media members, and being asked to contribute to industry blogs and trade journals. These situations make those individuals more attractive in the job marketplace and potentially put your company in the position of allowing them to build a personal platform, only to leave.

The best way to consider this employee is as one more marketing channel, as one more way to get the word out about your company. If she is speaking at a conference, then she’ll be “Janet Haverstand from ABC Company.” If he writes a guest blog post or a trade journal article, his byline will read, “Bob Masterson, director of social media for ABC Company.” And, of course, any traditional media mentions will always carry that person’s name and job title. Remember, these are things your PR department wants, and your employee’s presence in online and traditional media is making their lives easier. These mentions and appearances can then lead to increased awareness for your company, which can lead to more sales.

For example, both of us speak at a variety of conferences and trade groups, regardless of industry. We’re often approached after a talk to send more information about our companies. And from time to time, one of those contacts will turn into a project or ongoing client. It’s a marketing and lead generation channel for us, and it can be for your company as well.

Think about the benefit Comcast got when Frank Eliason went to a conference to talk about @ComcastCares (or even now, in his role as VP of social media at Citibank). Former Comcast subscribers who left because of poor customer service got to hear about how the cable giant was improving its customer service. And what if that led to even a small handful of subscribers returning to Comcast? Now, Frank was speaking at that conference anyway, but Comcast got a little something extra in return in the form of returning revenue that could vary between $50 and $100 a month.

Understandably, the concern most companies have is that the employee is not going to be able to get her work done, will get an unmanageable ego, or will be recruited by another company and hired away.

This isn’t an employee management handbook, so we can’t tell you a lot about time management or hiring practices or even how to deal with someone with a huge ego. Our hope is that yours is the kind of company where the managers have a good relationship with their employees and they can talk to the employee before any of these things become a problem. The managers should talk with the employee about her workload and meeting her deadlines, about her expectations, and about working well with others. And hopefully your company can match or even exceed a competing offer from another company.

On the other hand, you should also be proud that you were able to train and develop an employee to become such a highly sought-after person that other companies want to hire. You already know that no one stays at a company for their entire career anymore, so the idea that someone leaves for greener pastures shouldn’t be a surprise. But your hope should be that your former employee is going to still be in a position to help your company through referrals or even more orders, like if she gets hired by a client of yours.

So it’s important that you let your employees shine, rather than trying to hide their brilliance. Let them be the voice and face of your company and let them become rock stars. If they feel like you’re giving them a chance to be awesome and to spread their wings, they’re more likely to work harder to earn that trust and belief in what they’re doing. That can only lead to bigger and better ideas from them, more exposure for them, and, ultimately, more exposure for your company.

The Models of Social Media Management

Regardless of who is going to be in charge of social media, or maybe because of it, it’s important to decide what kind of social media management model you want. A lot of approaches are going to be based on your own company’s dynamics, internal relationships, strength of personalities, and whether you think the people involved can work well in a particular model.

According to Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group, there are five different models of social media management. (Figure 13.1 gives a basic illustration of what each of them means.)

• Decentralized means that no one department manages or coordinates the social media efforts. Each department does its own thing without any guidance or coordinating clearinghouse. The departments may collaborate with each other.

• Centralized management puts one department, like corporate communications, in charge of managing all social media efforts. The benefit is that the messaging is centralized and consistent. The downside is that other departments might have a tough time responding to customers.

• Hub and spoke means that several cross-functioning teams report to one centralized position. These teams can be different individuals or business units. This could be a tiger team approach, where representatives from different departments all work on this as a committee. The central point monitors all the channels and assigns tasks to the appropriate department or person, who would then respond appropriately. There are online tools that a manager of the hub-and-spoke model can use to assign tasks as needed.

• Multiple hub and spoke is like regular hub and spoke, but used with larger companies and multinationals with different locations. This could be a company with offices in different countries and different identities or even a franchise operation where each location gets to maintain its own identity but coordinate its messaging through a centralized hub.

• Holistic management is the ultimate in trust in your employees. It means that everyone has the ability to communicate on social media. No one person is in charge, and everyone has the keys to the car. In Chapter 2, we talked about how Zappos shoe company used this model to great effect and was sold for $928 million while selling $1 billion worth of shoes per year. The one change we would make is someone should be able to remove certain people from social media duties and monitor the social media metrics to make sure goals are being met.

Figure 13.1. The Altimeter Group identified several widely used models of social media management, as they are found in different companies around North America.

All of these models require some form of collaboration and cooperation on the part of the people involved and even from those who aren’t involved but still need to contribute information or answer questions, like a customer service representative forwarding information to the social media member. This is why it’s important to find people who are willing to work together as a team when choosing a model. Although it might be possible to choose a model and say “this is the way we are going to work,” it’s also likely that you might just want to choose a team and let them determine their own model.

But don’t let the democratic process and social media feel-goodery get in the way of actually getting something done. Remember that this is a business decision, and like all business decisions, it needs to happen quickly enough to actually see a decent ROI. That’s not going to happen if everyone gets an equal vote and voice. Pick one person to lead the charge and let the others advise them.

Hold Your Team Accountable

This is where goal setting and measuring results with analytics and social media monitoring services will become important. Knowing what you want your committee to produce and asking for the goals and objectives up front will set the stage at the beginning of your endeavor:

• Clearly defined goals—Goals have to be crystal clear and singular. A good rule of thumb is to never include the word and in a goal statement. If you have one, split it into two goals. This clarity helps your team develop a litmus test. Is it helping us reach the goal? If yes, move. If no, move on.

• Measurable objectives—Where goals are general, broad, but directional, objectives are specific and measurable. “We want to increase sales,” is a goal statement. An objective would be more like, “We want to increase sales by 25% through visitors from social media websites by December 31.”

• Strategy—This is where you build the blueprint or road map for your success. Identify your audiences, where they are online, and the needs you can fill for them. Then delineate which channels you’ll use, how they’ll integrate, and what calls to action or drivers you’ll push in each one. Map out a content strategy for the channels you choose and build milestones in to continually measure and optimize your efforts.

• Tactics—Tactics are the steps taken to implement the social media strategy. This is where specific topics and messages formulate into blog posts, Facebook activations, and more. It’s where monitoring and responding happens. Think of these as your to-do lists.

Meet with your social media team or the director on a regular basis. Make sure the goals are being met and discuss any changes in the strategy that need to be made to reach them. Give your social media team the flexibility and leeway needed to meet those goals—social media tools are changing on a regular basis, after all—but hold them accountable and make sure those goals are met, both in terms of ROI and profits as well as the size and growth of the network.

Whether you choose one or two people or you create an entire committee or department, finding the right kinds of people to run your social media efforts is necessary if you want to see a positive ROI and increase in sales and your customer base.

Assigning responsibility and holding both yourself and your employees accountable for social media marketing is sort of the glue that holds your efforts together. The management and reporting will keep your organization on course and navigating through the waters, sometimes treacherous, sometimes not, of social media. And that just leaves the last piece of the puzzle for your company to be ready for the social web.