Many Hands Make Light Work
Guest Post
How To Intelligently Integrate Social Media Into Your Organization Without Adding Headcount
By Jeff Julian (@jeffjulian)I work at a community college. To be more specific, I work at a community college in Illinois. Yeah, that’s the state that’s home to Governor Rod and in the running for the worst state budget deficit award along with California and Michigan.
My point? When you work at an institution or organization that is threatened by budget cuts or is attempting to operate in a leaner fashion because of economic uncertainty, it’s hard to convince the budget folks that you need a social media specialist to help with your day-to-day social strategy.
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Once they get done laughing at you and telling you to go back to your Tooter-verse and Spacebook posts, you still are faced with the same question—how do you manage your social media presence with the same staff size, a growing project list, and no new resources?
Include Everyone With A Passion
At Joliet Junior College, we’ve created a quality social media presence by sharing the responsibility. We work with other offices and departments on campus to maintain a presence on social media sites, to interact with students and community, and offer fresh, relevant content. Our most successful endeavor has been our Facebook page, which has become a virtual commons room for our students. Routinely, students use the page to look for books, discuss classes, and offer their suggestions about our parking (we need more).
This Facebook page is kept up-to-date not by anyone in PR or marketing, but by one of our tech-savvy student development staff members. She does a great job answering student questions, posting stories about faculty, and maintaining another conduit for news to our students. It’s been a positive collaboration.
Quickly Beefing Up Your Social Media Team
Find your on-site social media ambassadors
Your ambassadors are out there and many of them would enjoy the opportunity to help your organization by doing something they already love to do—tweeting, blogging, and posting YouTube videos. Involving them in this critical area of outreach tells them two things—you value their expertise beyond their assigned duties, and you trust them to represent the organization appropriately. Even customers, or in our case students, can be online ambassadors for your organization.
Provide guidelines
Your PR and marketing departments have already set the policy and direction for your branding and communication efforts, which can be extended to your social media outreach efforts. Creating a quick list of guidelines or FAQs for your ambassadors allows you to continue reinforcing the brand without having to be involved in every post about your organization.
Monitor your presence
With that said, someone in your PR and marketing areas should still be monitoring your social media presence on a regular basis. In addition to the paid services, there are many free services to help you monitor your social media mentions, which have been detailed by Steve here: 20 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools to Find Your Brand’s Social Mentions.
Document your successes
Keeping track of your social media success stories not only helps you plan future campaigns, it also provides you with ammunition the next time you approach the higher-ups about adding staff members for your burgeoning social media empire.
What are your smart practices for integrating social media into your organization? Leave a comment.
Jeff Julian is the director of communications and external relations at Joliet Junior College, the nation’s first public community college. When he is not tweeting and posting, he plays guitar for the band John Condron and The Benefit.READER’S NOTE: New to Digital Marketing Mercenary? Subscribe to the RSS feed, or get it by email.
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I work at a community college. To be more specific, I work at a community college in Illinois. Yeah, that’s the state that’s home to Governor Rod and in the running for the worst state budget deficit award along with California and Michigan.
My point? When you work at an institution or organization that is threatened by budget cuts or is attempting to operate in a leaner fashion because of economic uncertainty, it’s hard to convince the budget folks that you need a social media specialist to help with your day-to-day social strategy.
Once they get done laughing at you and telling you to go back to your Tooter-verse and Spacebook posts, you still are faced with the same question—how do you manage your social media presence with the same staff size, a growing project list, and no new resources?
Include Everyone With A Passion
At Joliet Junior College, we’ve created a quality social media presence by sharing the responsibility. We work with other offices and departments on campus to maintain a presence on social media sites, to interact with students and community, and offer fresh, relevant content. Our most successful endeavor has been our Facebook page, which has become a virtual commons room for our students. Routinely, students use the page to look for books, discuss classes, and offer their suggestions about our parking (we need more).
This Facebook page is kept up-to-date not by anyone in PR or marketing, but by one of our tech-savvy student development staff members. She does a great job answering student questions, posting stories about faculty, and maintaining another conduit for news to our students. It’s been a positive collaboration.
Quickly Beefing Up Your Social Media Team
Find your on-site social media ambassadors
Your ambassadors are out there and many of them would enjoy the opportunity to help your organization by doing something they already love to do—tweeting, blogging, and posting YouTube videos. Involving them in this critical area of outreach tells them two things—you value their expertise beyond their assigned duties, and you trust them to represent the organization appropriately. Even customers, or in our case students, can be online ambassadors for your organization.
Provide guidelines
Your PR and marketing departments have already set the policy and direction for your branding and communication efforts, which can be extended to your social media outreach efforts. Creating a quick list of guidelines or FAQs for your ambassadors allows you to continue reinforcing the brand without having to be involved in every post about your organization.
Monitor your presence
With that said, someone in your PR and marketing areas should still be monitoring your social media presence on a regular basis. In addition to the paid services, there are many free services to help you monitor your social media mentions, which have been detailed by Steve here. <insert links>
Document your successes
Keeping track of your social media success stories not only helps you plan future campaigns, it also provides you with ammunition the next time you approach the higher-ups about adding staff members for your burgeoning social media empire.Jeff Julian is the director of communications and external relations at Joliet Junior College, the nation’s first public community college. When he is not tweeting and posting, he plays guitar for the band John Condron and The Benefit.
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Stella
April 19, 2010
Great article – addresses key issues.
Canister Set ·
November 13, 2010
well of course community colleges are part of a good educational system too -`.
Shelly Kramer
June 12, 2011
Good luck with this. Sorry, but this sounds like a very naive strategy and, potentially, a recipe for disaster. Most businesses, community colleges or not, are not comfortable having just anyone be their “brand ambassadors” and, in my experience, are infinitely more comfortable with a more coordinated social media effort. At least in the early days.
This is a bit like saying that we don’t really have the money for art direction or for placing our display ads, so we’ll just let our brand ambassadors draw/create their own ads, place them where they think makes sense, and call it good.
Not good business strategy. And, if you use this one, I hope you have a good crisis plan in place.
Sorry. Not trying to be snarky or a Debbie Downer, but this is just plain dangerous advice. At least in my book.
Steve Farnsworth
June 12, 2011
Hey Shelley, Thanks for your comment!
In an ideal world, I’d like all organization to spend the money for professional help, staff, and guidance.
However, it sounds like you are saying that social media needs to be left exclusively to the professionals. If I take your point to its logical conclusion, your saying that unless an organization can afford qualified social media professionals, they are better off doing nothing. Between doing nothing or including passionate fellow employees into the process, I think doing nothing sounds like the real crisis in waiting.
As for letting anybody be your brand ambassador, your employees are all ready brand ambassadors. Aren’t they?
Kali (Frontstep) (@yourfrontstep)
January 9, 2013
I think you both make good points. I have to agree with Shelley’s point that this task isn’t to be taken lightly. A business can be absolutely ruined by sloppy, directionless or inconsistent social media. I also agree with you, Steve, that any business can do social media on their own if they take the right steps and, ideally, every business should have excellent ambassadors!
However, what I’ve found as a social media consultant is that many small businesses don’t know enough about social media to write appropriate guidelines/policies, or even know where to begin with monitoring metrics or even knowing which metrics are important to them. A business should always know WHY they are engaging in social media and what purpose they expect it to serve before launching. If the business doesn’t have a solid marketing plan, customer service policy or strategic direction, social media will just amplify their disorganization and will be terrible for their PR. On the flip side, social media can also make the most of a small business’s enthusiasm and quality products/services.
It’s ideal to have social media done in-house and for it to happen organically as part of how the business functions, but sometimes, it just doesn’t work out that way. Many business owners would rather spend their time doing what they know than invest the considerable time to learn social media well enough. It’s more common than I expected to have a business where none of the staff are proficient in social media. In that case, hiring someone to professionally manage all of that as part of your team is an intelligent decision.
thatsocialmediathing
October 21, 2012
Great article and I agree Steve – today your internal culture IS your brand.
I’m currently working on a project similar to the one Jeff talks about in this post. The key to success when using ‘ambassadors’ to drive your social strategy is collaboration – there is no way you can set this framework up in isolation and then leave it to run itself.
The key point I see is around guidelines. If everyone across the organisation is clear about what the framework is and how their role feeds into that, you go a long way to minimising risk factors (eg. whose role it is to monitor, to engage, to respond. Who reports on volumes, sentiment, emerging themes)
Bringing in specialist consultants to set this framework up and coach key staff to implement it is also another way for resource/cash-poor organisations to fast-track this process.
Steve Farnsworth A.K.A. @Steveology
October 21, 2012
Great comment, Fiona. Thanks for adding your insight!
thatsocialmediathing
October 21, 2012
I’ve just seen the original date on this….better late than never! ;)
You’re welcome Steve