Building your Social Media Team within your Organization - If you have not done so already, Need to Do it Now!

Social media’s widespread influence today is not to be taken lightly.  Integrating social media into your marketing plan, means that you must build a social media team and the team must be equipped with listening ability.  So many get sucked up in the social media and end up just playing games. To avoid this,  Maddie Grant delineates some high level thoughts on building your team. that should be considered before you get started.  We comment on a few of them. 

Start with a large group of people from different departments who have expressed interest. Try to get stars from each department involved.  Amber Naslund writes, The information you glean from social media is going to affect more than the way you talk to your customers. If you’re really integrating it, it should be affecting the decisions you  make about how you help those customers, and ultimately inform the products and services you provide to them. So my team would have folks from:

* PR and Corporate Communications
* Marketing
* Customer and/or Client Service
* Business Development or Sales
* Brand Management
* Product Development
* Executive Team

At times it is not obvious where social media fits in your organizational chart, so it is important to:

Decide on how the team will collaborate.  One person within the organization should ultimately be responsible for all social media activity.  However, each person will be responsible for listening and monitoring, and reporting back particularly interesting conversations or activity going on.  Some teams we work with have a regular weekly meeting; others use an online tool to post information for the whole group to be able to see – either internally like Sharepoint or externally like a Groupsite.  Everyone should know how to share something of interest, in some central location, even if it’s not specifically related to their own department.

Social media means ‘connecting’ so …

Have policies in place so that everyone knows how they are empowered to engage and respond.  Everyone on the team (at the very least, if not everyone in the organization) should be able to freely (and professionally) engage in a basic level of conversation with members and stakeholders. “Building this team is a first step to getting departments to work across borders, but all with the goal of improving the customer experience, and building a more solid foundation upon which your business can grow and thrive.” Amber Naslund

Monitoring It is vital your team monitors your industry's reputation on blogs and social networks. Set goals with time lines and develop ways to ensure that you are achieving them

What do you think?  Anything else to add?  Do you have a good team set up? You are most welcome to share with us!