Social Media Unplugged: The Framework and Guidelines

In this first post in the series, I’m going to focus on the core framework and guidelines that should be put in place for a company or brand to successfully engage in social media. 

You don't need to be a social media guru or expert.

You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

These don't have to be overly complex efforts or documents.  They just need to be appropriate to your organization.

Like most things, it takes a bit of planning, a willingness to learn-fail-adapt, and dedication.

I have whittled down the basic components you should have in place to the following five chunks:

1. A Strategy
2. An HR Policy (that addresses social media)
3. Key Workflows and Personnel
4. Training Tools  (includes Tone and Manner Guidelines)
5. Monitoring (ad hoc and systematized)
   

The Strategy

At its most basic level, I'd recommend that the following questions be answered

• Who are we?  Not to us, but to our customers and stakeholders?
• What must we accomplish?  What problem are we trying to solve?
• Who is our audience and where are they already?  What spaces?  What groups?
• What does our audience need or want?  How can we assist them in their spaces?  And can this be fulfilled by the "brand" or are individuals needed?
• What kind of commitment is needed from our organization?
• What spaces are we going to actively commit to for the entire year and moving forward?  How many can we realistically maintain a presence in?

Keep it informal. The days of media planning a year in advance are nearing their well-deserved end. Leave some flexibility to adapt your plans based on what is working and what is not.

The hardest part is determining how a brand and organization will behave in social media.  From this, the conversation can move to how individuals acting on behalf of the brand and organization must act.

HR Policy

It is becoming more and more important that a company have a policy that specifically addresses social media.  The days of simply outlawing it are over.  Yet many organizations I meet with still have not addressed the use of social media in their HR policies (aside from outlawing it.)

As Leigh Himel pointed out in a recent engagement, 17% of twitter users have tweeted from the toilet using their phone/device.  Your employees are already in these spaces and you need a policy that protects your employees, your brand, and your ability to engage with your audiences moving forward.

• Set the context
• • Where and when the policy applies
  • Define the appropriate macro use of Social Media (outreach, personal growth, leadership, etc.)
• Guiding principles
• • Define the guiding principles that align with your organizations values
• Use common sense
• • Give examples of how common sense applies
• Define the rules of engagement online that must be followed

I'm working on uploading a presentation that outlines the key questions to ask.  In the interim, be sure to check out this site where you can review some of the social media policies in use by other firms: Social Media Governance Policy Database

Key Workflows and Personnel

Whether you are planning to enable your entire organization to engage in social media or a core group of customer evangelists, simplified workflows are needed that help to identify the day to day interactions.

One critical area for any set of workflows is how to escalate issues.  This process should allow for at least two levels of escalation - simple assistance requests (second opinion) and what to do with a potential crisis.

I strongly recommend that the goal of any social media workflow should be to empower immediate action by the "people on the ground".  Any escalation or logging should occur after the individual has been able to engage with the individual or conversation.  This will go an insanely long way when it comes to stopping the echo chamber effect.  The days of circling the wagons and waiting 48 hours to respond are over.  Unless you enjoy making the front pages of every newspaper in existence for something that could have been easily addressed head on like Motrin and Taxi experienced.

I tend to not get too involved in the crisis escalation processes other than identifying the need for them.  Here is a great presentation from Ogilvy on Social Media Escalation.

Ogilvy On: Social Media for Crisis Management

View more presentations from 360digitalinfluence.

While it's important that escalation be thought through and a process put in place, there are other equally pressing issues to ensure are addressed.

Too many firms suffer from dead initiatives online.  As such, consider processes that highly incentivize the re-use or leveraging of your core social media spaces.  At Twist Image, we've generally done this by helping our clients commit to a set number of spaces and then setup processes that define the need for an exception if a new space is needed or desired for a campaign initiative.  This exception must showcase how the new space will be supported for the entire fiscal year and also include a migration plan for when they will no longer be supporting this space.

The people

Identifying the personnel needed to fuel and manage your social media efforts can be quite challenging. Many organizations are already struggling with properly resourcing existing programs let alone a new one of such breadth and scope.  Social media requires significant additional effort from a content and interaction perspective alone let alone monitoring and moderation.

Few organizations get approval to hire additional staff for their first forays into these spaces.  Many of our clients have had good success dividing up the responsibilities across a team of people that coordinate and share duties across the key spaces.  Using the training tools below and tools like HootSuite, it is totally possible to provide a great experience to customers, prospects and fans while also gaining key learnings and insight.

Quick note: I find that it's important that marketing be involved in this effort and that it not be shuffled off to a customer service function.  The best teams are formed from a combination of roles and areas from within the organization.

Training Tools

I would simplify this into two parts: core skills and behavioral guardrails.

• Core skills: I've found it very useful that a program be put in place to train all staff from executives down to part-time workers (as appropriate) on the use of key websites and software as it relates to social media.  Step-by-step training on how to use twitter, Facebook and Google alerts through to using software like TweetDeck to participate in and monitor conversations.  No starting knowledge should be needed as the training should bring everyone up to a decent level of competence on a customized list of platforms specific to your social media efforts.  Besides, if 12 year olds can do this, we should be able to as well (just maybe not as fluently)  ;)
  
• Behavioral guardrails: One of the tools I was able to introduce to Twist Image was what we are calling the Tone and Manner Guidelines.  In essence, this is a powerpoint presentation meant to provide the guardrails to an individuals' behavior online.  Where the social media policy defines the limits and rules, this presentation provides a bit more guidance on the tone, the type of language to use and even how to respond to specific issues. By building scenarios of actual conversations, we''ve found that we can quickly and effectively convey how to respond to a variety of positive and negative situations.  In its simplest form, we show a conversation online and then present what not to say and give guidance on what to say.  We've found this to be a phenomenally successful way to quickly escalate people with little or no experience to full fledged social media evangelists acting on behalf of the brand within a very short period of time.

Monitoring

Frankly, you need to be monitoring.  End of sentence.

That said, there are two approaches.  If you have the resources, I recommend doing both.  But if resources are tight, start with ad hoc.

Ad Hoc Monitoring

My holy triad of ad hoc monitoring is a combination of the following three tools

• Google alerts
• TweetDeck search columns (or HootSuite search columns)
• Technorati (unsure if this is still viable - anyone have any suggestions?)

Quarterly Analysis

We've explored a number of tools here at Twist Image since I joined and I have to say there are two leaders at this point in time:

• Radian 6: the most powerful and effective way to slice, dice and analyze social media monitoring data but not best if you just want a dashboard "out of the box"
  
• Sysomos: comprehensive and easy to use dashboards combined with the ability to overlay demographic data

I like both of these tools as they both allow us to analyze and dig into the data reported.  There are a number of tools that don't allow for proper investigation and analysis (some quite expensive) which I've found quite frustrating and a waste of money.

In my next post (sometime this decade?), I'll explore some of the tools and approaches in this unplugged series.