The 6 fundamentals of enterprise social media

Part One – 1 to 3

If my own experience is anything to go by, every large enterprise in the world has reached the conclusion that it is in social media, like it or not.


I estimate that every FTSE company with a UK consumer brand receives at least twenty thousand social media posts about it every month. From corporate news through product/service comments, sponsorship to marketing activity responses.

So now that playtime is over, what do corporate businesses need to handle this and future social media demand.

Governance
Marketing doesn't own social media in an organisation any more than any part of the business owns the telephone. However, it does, or should, own the voice of the customer, so it's a good place for governance to be initiated and led from.

The social media steering or leadership team must include executive representation of key markets and include senior responsible owners from service, sales, corporate relations, internal engagement and business continuity (risk management in financial services. The team should appoint a manager that has the authority to act and clear accountability to that governance group.

Roadmap not strategy
Like so many things that technology touches, social media continues to evolve. Therefore, large enterprises don't have time to hire expensive external advisors to carry out a social media audit that will only have a short shelf life and set a grand plan that will become obsolete as the ink is drying.

Set a course of action and move towards it.

As competitors, technology and your customers blow you off course, change it. The end destination will remain pretty fixed anyway. It will be described as something like: Creating a digital channel that £x generates incremental revenue, or y% brand awareness, or my favourite a z% promoter score.

Single management platform
This is harder than it sounds, not least because it involves IT people and procurement. You need a social media monitoring, analytics and reporting platform.

There are plenty to choose from and at a basic level, all do the same thing. But it's not until you have lived with it and the supplier that you can realise what you actually want is something else.

I can and will write a whole blog on this, but in the meantime, here are the most important things to consider:
         
Does it categorise posts as they are received?

Does it monitor all of the platforms you need?

Can it measure and reporting the metrics that are important to the business easily?

Does the vendor understand the difference between social media monitoring, analysing what has been monitored and just counting conversations?

Part two of this blog will be here next week – 28th August 2012.