Page 211 - Social Media Marketing

In addition, create a strong internal policy that governs your organization and its 189
application of social computing. Include notification rules, disclosure, topics that are off-
limits—like trade secrets, for example—and expectations for conduct. Not only will this ■ ╇ W hat N ot to D o ( and W hat to D o I nstead)
give significant comfort to your legal and HR groups, it will make your social-media-
based marketing and business programs more likely to succeed. Refer back to Chapter 3,
“Building a Social Business,” and Chapter 4, “The Social Business Ecosystem,” for more
on the use of social computing policies, and in particular for pointers to IBM and other
great starting points when developing your own social computing policies.

Marketing Can’t Do Social Media Alone

Next on the “what not to do” list is limiting social media to marketing. Managing (or
leading) change while getting your organization ready for the adoption of social tech-
nologies is very often among the most challenging aspects of implementing an effective
social media strategy.

The starting point for social media is often marketing—probably because the
initial social applications were promotional or advertising related or the conversations
seemed most related to marketing and sales. However, the application of social media
in business carries far beyond marketing. This is evident in the view of the purchase
funnel and the role of the conversation as it impacts the marketing—think sales or
membership or donor campaigns here—functions within the organization.

It’s what happens after that makes clear how far beyond marketing social media
and social technologies can be applied. Consider a conversation about a service and
about an employee who is particularly adept at making customers feel great. This per-
son is a source of positive referrals and so is a contributor to an elevated Net Promoter
Score. What you need are ten more just like this one, and by listening to conversations
and carefully measuring results and following the customers associated with this agent
through your CRM Program you’ve made the case to hire more.

Hiring “ten more just like this one” means getting HR to understand what
makes a stand-out employee…a stand out. It means that the hiring team has to under-
stand how to assess the skills that this person is bringing in the context of the conversa-
tions that are being created, not just in terms of the right degree, the right background,
and three decent references. This is not to trivialize HR and the hiring process: I have
deliberately simplified this example to separate what is important in making the proper
hire—understanding how this person is likely to impact conversations about your
brand, product, or service—versus knowing how to properly hire someone.

When social media is seen as a marketing function, the application is generally
aligned with the outbound communication needs of the business—the “let us tell you
about ourselves” part of the conversation. By comparison, the conversations that exist
about your brand, product, or service on the Social Web—and impact that they have
on marketing—are not a result of marketing but rather the combination of HR, legal,