Six Processes In Corporate Social Media Management
I've been writing a series of posts on a critique of the cluetrain manifesto. Rather than a critique necessarily, the posts have expanded my thoughts: On how companies empower employees who are inspired to use the social web to connect with customers; the importance of building a dedicated staffing resources for social interaction management; monitoring and response, and why you should give social media training to everyone.
Here's a list of activities companies might undertake as an approach to the social web, adopting some or all of them:
1) Monitoring (Companies monitor for the following information)
-Competitive intelligence
-Commentary on the company
-Customer issues
-Understanding of current events in the industry, which drives PR opportunities and social media marketing
-Product development and market research
Tools for monitoring include, Google, Google alert, Technorati, Blogpluse, IceRocket, which are free tools, searches range from manual to automatic. Also RSS can be employed to search automatically, for example, AideRSS can identify the most influential posts, if that is important to your company. Text analysis and natural language programming can take a company to the next level in overall monitoring.
2) Response (companies will respond to what happens in the social web)
-Connect and resolve customer support issues
-Idea generation approval or dismissal explanation
-Crisis communications
-Conversation marketing, or blogger relations
-PR opportunities
Companies can either have a dedicated staff or an eco-system of passionate individuals respond to opportunities. The dedicated staff will catch everything (hopefully). While the eco-system employees/volunteers will do what they can.
3) Social presence (put out the welcome mat to connect with stakeholders on your site and as a way to reach out into the social web)
-Blogs
-Social Networking
-Social Book Marking
-Comment management
-Forums
-Live blogging
The unique nature of blogs; which are conversations between websites, put blogs at the pinnacle of the social web infrastructure due to the importance of search engines. Live blogging with sites like Twitter represent a half way house between personal networks and the social website. Think of email and IM and their importance for personal relationships; twitter is all about personal relationships in a public forum.
4) Social Interaction Management
-Comment tracking
-Comment response
-Content strategy, public relations & SEO
-Research support
The dedicated team of social interaction managers will support subject matter experts and eco-system employees with monitoring, response, social media training, and social interaction management. (Social interaction comes from Adrian Chan's concept of social interaction design)
http://www.gravity7.com/social_interaction_design.html
5) Social Media Training
-All employees receive social media training
-Guidelines for blogs, social media, especially social networking
Even though you might have some experts in social media on your team, all employees need a crash course in social media training to learn what works, what's acceptable for your company and what is not.
6) Eco-system
-Passionate employees will use the social web
-Empower employees
-Tools for vendor relationship management
Inspired by the cluetrain manifesto expect some of your employees to adopt the use of social media as part of their work, even if they are not paid directly to dedicate their time to social media. Empower them to succeed. The VRM issues may be a little out there, but I think its worth thinking about how to help your customers to manage their relationships with you and other vendors in the industry as this may be the next competitive advantage.
Some Links on Ecosystem issues:
The Nature of New Media: Its Neither the ClueTrain Manifesto (Nor Andrew Keen)
The Dark Side of the “Citizen Media” Revolution
Project VRM
Project VRM Twitter
Okay this is my take on what processes are involved in corporate social media management, what do you have to add?
