One of the biggest challenges for many companies is properly organizing teams to engage in social media beyond one department. Moving beyond one team who coordinates all social activity can get messy, fast. There is no one, single way to properly organize company activity in social. Rather, this should be personalised by taking into account the people, business goals and levels of activity and responsibility of different business units.
Start by thinking through preliminary aspects of people, permission and process:
- Decide which departments will be active in social media
- Find the key stakeholders on each team who can serve as the ”lead” in helping to manage and triage social media activity for their area
- List the people on each team, beyond the stakeholders, who will be expected to engage regularly
- Identify what level participating employees should be active and identify the roles for each of these people. For example: the team lead may be in charge of the strategy and administering the accounts (the administrators), where others may be in charge of managing day to day activity (Social Responsibility Manager) and others may be responsible for sharing and creating content to provide to the manager (editors).
- Identify the goals of each team and make these success milestones part of their ongoing performance metrics
- Outline the levels of communication that need to take place across social activity and create a plan for engagement and response.
- For example, simple content creation and sharing may be Level 1. Level 2 may be simple responses to questions and requests. Whereas Level 3 may be answering complex questions or require a higher level of thought or collaboration for response. Each of these should be mapped for the appropriate process to take place alternately you can outsource ‘Community management’ until you are comfortable with what is required and use a supplier that works with you on a ‘knowledge’ transfer basis.
Organising Teams
- identify participants, outline goals, define roles