Corporate Adoption of Social Media
Getting a corporation with established marketing rules and complicated communications departments to adopt a new way to communicating to its audience can be difficult. With the rise of social media, corporations are beginning to listen; but still require a process to get everyone onboard. The following is a framework that reviews an ideal process a corporation will follow when adopting social media as a new communications tool.
Define Initial Parameters
Define how many resources you can devote to social media
Define which sites you want to monitor
Define which tools you’d like to test
Define sampling size benchmarks
Begin Listening
You should never stop listening; so when you have enough information to start analyzing how your brand, or brands, is being mentioned, it’s important to keep listening.
During this phase, you need to define what your brands reputation is. This can be considered the “laissez-faire reputation”, meaning the reputation that existed for your brand prior to active participation from the brand.
After you’ve defined the “laissez-faire reputation”, it’s time to define how you want to change that reputation. (If you’re happy with the “laissez-faire reputation” it can be a bit trickier to define how to begin to participate; but I’ll define the process later.) All activities should help move your brand in the direction of achieving your ideal social reputation.
Once you define the reputation you’d like, you need to define how the brand will appear when engaging in social media activities. This doesn’t just mean its visual appearance, but also means its sociological appearance. It’s important to define your avatar schema, and update your brand style guide to take social media into account, but equally important is to define how you want your brand to be viewed as a part of society, and the community. This has more to do with what you’ll be talking about and the content you invest in creating, than what your visual appearance is.
Perform Internal Response Assessment & Identify Ideal Content Curators
Many corporations have some kind of intranet. The proven best way to achieve corporate adoption of social media is to integrate social systems into corporation-wide systems. 2 ideal candidates for social system integration are email clients, and the intranet.
A great way to define your optimum response assessment policy is by testing responses in real situations. Let’s say you’ve integrated a social system into your intranet, and the entire corporation has the intranet open on their computers. The system is primarily used as a collaboration tool.
What would happen if you started routing the feed you set up in the listening phase into the system? Everyone would get to see what’s being said about the brand. You could encourage conversations through the company intranet, on the posts you’re routing in. If you disable 2 way communication, all the company responses to posts will remain private.
This a great initial test to identify potential content curators: the staff that have a natural ability to interact appropriately with people on social networks. Additionally this testing will identify those who might not understand the benefits of social media and give you the opportunity to schedule learning sessions.
Once you’ve identified potential content curators; you can run iterative live tests. Rotating curators through specific social media channels to figure out who’s the best at participating on each channel you want a presence on. This live testing will serve to further refine who will lead the content curator team for each channel.
Live Iterative Optimization (LIO)
Many corporations jump directly to this phase; skipping some of the most important steps in getting social media adopted by the entire company. Many companies that jump directly to this phase experience social media failure. The reason for this is often that a key individual in the organization doesn’t understand how social media will benefit his department.Once you’ve identified who will lead your content curators for each channel, you can begin moving past simply being present within social networks, and begin really engaging your audience. (In smaller organizations, you might have the need for a single content curator.)
I’ve recently written a post on iterative brand equity, which can be representative of a social campaign. I don’t suggest running campaigns that don’t fluidly integrate and feed into each other.
That being said, the key to LIO is campaign evaluation and optimization. After running a social campaign; whatever it might be, it’s important to evaluate how it was interpreted by your audience, how it affected your audience, and how you can improve. Regardless of how successful your last campaign was; finding at least one way to improve is crucial. Synergies Across Networks
In addition to evaluating your campaign, you can examine your social platform & channel selection and find ways to synergize efforts across networks. If you’re running a campaign on Facebook and MySpace; how can you leverage responses of Facebook to amplify engagement of MySpace, and vice-versa?
Policy Correction & Optimization
You should constantly be re-examining your social media policy, and should set up formal post-campaign-evaluations to correct errors and optimize elements.
Ensure everyone has a voice; your audience, your employees, and all stakeholders. Make the social media policy as public as possible. Consider the impact of releasing the policy to the public. Weigh the options of releasing the policy with the repercussions of the policy being leaked.