social media marketing - 2/15

7 reasons why companies need social media managers

June 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

There has been a lot of debate recently about the need for companies and organisations to employ social media managers and specialists in a dedicated role – the main criticism appears to be that the role isn’t needed because employees already use social media.

That might be the case in a limited number of small organisations, but someone will end up as an unofficial social media expert. And as someone who performed the role for a large organisation, I know there are a number of good reasons for having one person as the focal point – even if every employee is actively representing the group or company.

1. Justification: Are employees going to use social media effectively when they have senior managers questioning whether it’s worthwhile?

2. Guidelines: Most people have a reasonable amount of common sense, but if you haven’t got clear guidelines for employees to refer to if needed, you’ve got no excuse when they get things wrong. And all it can take is one personal attack for even the most responsible employee to make a mistake. That’s assuming they even keep up to date with the latest legalities of using social media in addition to their day job.

3. Analysis: Do you know what’s working? And is a social network referring the most traffic because of scale, or because other social networks are being ignored or done badly?

4. Co-ordination: Do you trust independant employees to know where exclusive news should be revealed first? Or could a status message or tweet destroy your carefully planned campaign? Is the right content going online at the right time, to coincide with the right development work?

5. Research and Development: Is Facebook more relevant to your company than Bebo? Will you reach the right people on Twitter? And should you be improving the forum on your site, or developing a widget for social networks? The answers are different for every organisation, and indeed, every campaign

6. Coordinating external resources: Do you know enough to decide between a good and bad external agency when it comes to social media? And in a large company, are you sure other departments aren’t hiring other agencies at the same time?

7. Crisis management: When something does go wrong, you need a plan in place, and someone who can manage an effective response.

Whether or not social media is a specialist role, or part of a wider remit, there needs to be someone with the authority and accountability to ensure that the work feeds into the wider business effectively, with an effect on product development, customer service, SEO, and business strategy.

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Filed Under: social media marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: Business, company, digital, manager, marketing, organisation, social media, social media marketing, social networks, Uncategorized

Soon everyone will have basic marketing and management skills

April 7, 2009 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

A bit of a half-formed thought I needed to share whilst spending some time removing a shockingly large amount of unused applications from my PC and trying to rationalise my ever-increasing collection of email addresses and online identities.

When it comes to introducing social media marketing and building content and community at Bauer Media, it isn’t a simple case of just deciding every brand should be on Facebook, for example, and it magically happening. A large part of the work is deciding and clarifying the objectives of using a new channel, and also looking at the benefits in terms of allocating resources, whether financial or human.

Hence why I spend a reasonable amount of time looking at work flows, and working out how we can most effectively work across various channels, and which elements of content work best when shared across various places.

In plain English, it means working out which content we should import into Facebook, or whether we should automate updates to Twitter for certain things, and which location makes most sense for teams to manually update etc.

The irony being that my own profiles and workflows for my two blogs, Twitter profile etc etc have been done on such an ad hoc basis, I really need to sit down and work out a workflow for my personal online world.

And I don’t think I’m the only one.

Which started me thinking about which specialist skills in content, marketing, strategy and management are going to increasingly become things that most people will be using:

For instance, when it comes to attention-grabbing headlines, how many people are learing how to craft effective content in their Facebook status or tweets on a daily basis, without even consciously thinking about it.
How many people are starting to think about which sites they want to use, and how to effectively update them efficiently?
How many people are starting to learn about sharing content and marketing it via social networks and social bookmarking sites simply because they want to be more popular, without ever realising they’re marketing themselves?
Are people doing their own personal PR, emailing and following people who might repeat their content?

I don’t mean this in terms of people using buzzwords like ‘personal brands‘ – that’s for marketing and aspiring marketing people to make it sound more glamourous and exciting.

I mean this in terms of someone who could come from any walk of life, using the internet, and almost subconsciously incorporating various skills because they want people to see their Youtube video, or to get more friends on Facebook or Myspace.

There’s an understandable backlash from experienced digital marketing people against the growing number of ‘social media experts’ who have a personal Twitter account but haven’t demonstrated their work for their own company or anyone elses. And I’m certainly not saying that this means anyone could run a marketing campaign without any experience or training.

But I just wonder, in addition to the rise of amateurs who are uploading great photography or editing videos etc, whether there is the same blurring of lines between professional management skillsets and what everyone is starting to do as a normal part of their internet life.

So help me out: What traditional management, marketing, publishing, strategy type skills do you see becoming used by everyone, even on a basic level – and what implications do you think it has for the future? Will everyone be more aware of what goes on within a company? And is that a good thing?

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