9. Socially Speaking: The Social Business

The most common reason that businesses fear social media is that those companies believe the audience will criticize them. Worse still, those companies believe they won’t have an appropriate response. This fear is as common to large multi-outlet retailers as it is to a mom and pop corner store. No one wants bad news, and no one likes dealing with people who are perceived as “difficult customers.” Yet all businesses must face one inescapable reality at some point—it is impossible for a business to provide a product, service, or customer experience that meets or exceeds every customer’s expectations, every time. In a social media world, that means those customers now have an instant platform for sharing their experiences—both good and bad—via social location sharing and social media apps, such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, and Facebook (not to mention reviews on online shopping sites).

Ignoring social media is not the answer. People will post comments about your company, your products, your services, and your brands, regardless of whether you participate in the discussion. If your company is really unlucky, those comments will spread virally—far and wide—regardless of whether they are justified. With the recent rise in popularity of social media tools such as Twitter, many companies have learned this lesson the hard way.

By that, I mean that because people can post from anywhere with a smartphone, it’s easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment. This “heat” is the measure of the immediacy of the post. Some social media comments are made worse by the “heat of the moment” in which they are made. For example, let’s say you’re waiting to for a sales associate to assist you in a home theater store. After waiting for what you think is too long, you whip out your iPhone, fire up Twitter and in just a few seconds, you’ve written a scathing comment about how !$#@#! angry you are about how long you’ve been waiting for a sales associate to help you at store X. Now, you might’ve been waiting too long, but are you really that angry? Does the store deserve that kind of harsh criticism that could cost them business? Could you have toned it down just a touch? Would you have made the same comment if you had to wait until you got home to make that comment?

Prior to the advent of smartphone-enabled microblogging tools such as Twitter, we would be forced to put time and space between us and the incident that had incurred our wrath. In the pre-smartphone days, if we got angry while out and about, we would have to wait until we got home and in front of a computer before we could tee off. Often, that meant we had time to simmer down and either we forgot about it altogether or our once hot-headed post became much tamer. Not so much now. Now we can write a review as it happens, and that level of immediacy means that the full “heat” of our ire is communicated in our posts. If we are eloquent, if we are well connected, or if we simply hit on a hot topic, the chances that our posts will be commented on, reposted, and generally spread are much higher.

However, if your company is involved in social media, you have an opportunity to respond, apologize (if appropriate), correct inaccurate information, and in general, interact with customers and potential customers in a way that you never could before. If for no other reason, the capability to correct misinformation should be why an organization monitors social media for its brand(s), products, services, and company name on a regular basis. Without knowing what is being said, how can an organization possibly respond or correct misinformation? The simple act of correcting misinformation can mean the difference between a customer gained and a customer lost.

Information is not always maliciously incorrect, either. It could be a simple typographical error regarding the opening times of a store. Perhaps a visitor entered that your store closed at six (when, in fact, it closes at 9) simply because he or she pressed the wrong key. Not much of a difference in terms of content, but those three hours in the hours of the store operation could mean a few lost customers. Why lose them when a simple edit can remove the inaccuracy?

This should not be mistaken for content control. Participating in social media doesn’t mean your company can stop the flow of bad comments or have them removed. After those comments are out there, they are out there forever. The inability to maintain custodial control over what is said in social media circles about your brand, product, or service is a common fear. However, in reality, have you ever been able to control what your customers say about your brands, products, or services? Companies have never been able to control the conversations of customers and potential customers. Phone calls, water coolers, airplanes, letters, emails, bars, and hundreds of other media have long enabled the content creator to pass judgment on products, services, and organizations.

The primary difference is that social media means that you are now privy to those conversations. Now you can see exactly what is being said about your company (as can everyone else, including your competitors). Perhaps for many organizations, ignorance was bliss, but social media has removed that ignorance. Brands can no longer claim they were unaware of customer viewpoints, desires, or needs.

Whereas libel laws still apply in the blogosphere, opinion is not covered. So provided a content creator (any kind of online content—blog post, tweet, Facebook comment, Amazon review, and so on) is not posting blatant lies about an organization, he or she is free to share his or her opinion. This is why this part of social media is often handed over to the part of the organization that handles customer service. In reality, however, customer service is a major part of any social media activity, and it should be a constant focus for the social media team. This is especially true with respect to social location sharing tools, such as Foursquare and Gowalla.

The users of these tools are the social media equivalent of secret shoppers, with one valuable (at least for the organization) difference—they don’t remain secret. Although many organizations, especially in retail, still retain the services of secret shopping companies to test out their venues and get feedback on customer experiences, nothing can compare with real customer feedback. This is where social location sharing tool users come in. They are the organization’s real customers. These customers post comments, tips, observations at the point of purchase, comments about the use of the service or product, and more. This “heat”—this immediacy—makes their comments valuable, whether they are good or bad.

Feedback from social location sharing users is unfiltered. SLS users are not trying to reach a quota, they are not editing for appropriateness, and the only axe they have to grind is the desire to share their thoughts with their network and to become perceived as a valuable asset to that network. It is important to understand that last motivation. Being an asset to their networks is an overriding concern to many SLS users. The most common way Foursquare users, for example, increase their networks, and therefore their influence, is by providing good content. Good content is that which provides value to the network of content consumers. So by providing timely, relevant information to their networks, Foursquare users increase their own value and generate social capital.

If your company learns to leverage this motivation, you can both assist the SLS user and work toward meeting your own marketing goals. After all, the content creator needs content. Your company wants information posted about you to be accurate and reflective of your products, services, or brands. This can lead to a synergistic relationship between your company and the content creator.

However, your company should be wary of falling into the trap of buying content. It is all too easy for an organization to view this as an appropriate solution, in the same way that they might contemplate any other form of media buy. Simply paying content creators to generate positive posts about an organization will quickly back-fire. First, the Federal Telecommunications Committee has laid out guidelines for content creators, whether they are bloggers or TV producers. Second, when the “real” customers’ content appears at odds with the paid content, it can become rapidly apparent that the paid content creator has sold out. This wrecks the paid content creators’ reputation and can quickly lead to a loss of audience and influence, rendering them no longer useful to your company. Also, your company, will lose whatever credibility it had by not acknowledging the real content and trying to create content that will at the very least have the impression of being “fake.”

Creating fake content will only harm a company should it actually have to deal with a post that requires addressing tangible issues with its customers. Being transparent, genuine, or “real” is often the advice given to organizations about how to conduct themselves in social media. However, the reasons for doing so are often not outlined. The potential for being remembered as the organization that created fake content at some point should be at the forefront of the reasoning to be genuine.

The very minimum response for customer-created content, whether good or bad, is an appropriate acknowledgement, such as “Thank you” for positive comments and “We’re sorry” for a bad comment. For the positive comment it is, for the majority of cases, the only response that is really needed, provided that the comment doesn’t include recommendations for improvements or contain a question. In those situations, a more detailed response is required.

For the bad comment, the “We’re sorry” response should be considered only a stop-gap response, something that lets the content creator know that your company has seen his or her post and you are following up on it. The follow up defines how the relationship between the content creator and your company will be established or changed. The follow up is best handled by whoever has responsibility within your company for customer service/relationship management. This won’t necessarily be the same person or team that handles social media, but at this point it is appropriate to hand off the situation to ensure that the situation is resolved properly and in line with the your company’s policies. How this handover is completed can be a complex process for some organizations, but to the content creator it should be seamless and invisible.

As previously mentioned, customers do not care about internal organization structures, they care about good service. They don’t want to be handed off to different departments or told that the account that they have reached out to or that has made initial contact with them isn’t going to follow through. So in setting up the process, a good deal of thought and attention should be paid to this particular part of the process. Often the most appropriate method is to maintain a single point of contact who becomes an issue project manager as issues are discovered. The issue project manager is empowered to hand off the issue but not the contact relationship. However, this can often cause frustration internally when the department tasked with handling customer service/relationship management perceives that they are losing ground to the marketing/pr/tech support department because they are the ones charged with handling or managing the social media accounts for the organization. This is where the social media strategy comes into its own. Recognizing these types of issues before they arise is crucial to providing a good social customer service experience. It is also where an organization has the opportunity to provide a level of service that becomes a differentiator in the customer experience realm.

More Than a Twitter or Facebook Page

Social business is more than having a Twitter account. It is more than accumulating hundreds or even thousands of “likes” on your company Facebook page. The reason for becoming a social business should be driven by a desire to achieve and maintain a competitive edge. Given the increasing number of social tools available and the consumers using them, becoming a social business is a commitment that must go beyond simple participation.

The social business utilizes social tools (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, and so on) as means for communication with customers and with each other. This means that the social business democratizes the company and opens the way the company does business for all to see.

For most companies, this is a daunting—if not downright scary—prospect and one that meets with a lot of resistance. However, many companies are already taking the appropriate steps to move their businesses to this model and are reaping the rewards.

By becoming a truly social business rather than just being an organization that has a social media department, an organization can demonstrate that it is truly customer focused. In recent years, shoe and clothing distributor Zappos has made an art of social business. Zappos incorporated the customer perspective into everything from its tag line to its company ethos. It has paid off in more ways than anyone could have imagined and has been central to the company’s success. For Zappos, being social wasn’t something that was confined to one part of the organization. It wasn’t a function of the marketing, PR, or customer service departments, because the entire organization was a customer service department. Building an organization with this perspective is a lot easier than realigning an existing one, and certainly the fact that Zappos started with this perspective cannot be overlooked as a contributing factor in the company’s success.

However, if your company truly wants to embrace social media and social location marketing, becoming a social organization that does social business is and should be the ultimate goal. If your company is founded or aligned on the concept of doing social business, you will find it easier to handle customer complaints regardless of whether they are received through social media. In fact, to a social organization, social media is just how business is done.

So, when deciding whether your business is going to take the social business plunge, you have a couple of things to consider:

• Do you believe your company model is already aligned with or can be aligned with social media and social business?

• Do you believe in the social media/social business concept strongly enough to make the investment to change those areas of your company to allow full alignment with the customer-driven social business reality in which all organizations now find themselves?

A social business will find social media a more natural fit than a nonsocial business will. This statement seems obvious when written out, but it is a constant surprise to me that so many businesses that are not social in any other aspect of their marketing communications expect social media to be a natural fit for them and wonder why they find it so difficult to realize real results from their efforts. If the business normally restricts itself to the type of one-way communication that is more broadcast than communication, then social media is obviously going to be a struggle. Companies that broadcast—that is, send offers and new product information, but aren’t interested in customer interaction—are going to find social media daunting.

These companies have dealt only with outgoing communications and have no method in place for dealing with the inevitable influx of inbound communication that will arrive (prompted or not). Customers and potential customers will start communicating both in response to offers and with complaints, observations, suggestions, recommendations, praise, and so on.

All of this will happen on multiple apps (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, to name a few) and all in a free-form manner, some of which will be directed at your company and some of which will be a part of broader conversations. The first challenge for your company is to find these conversations, posts, comments, and so on. The second challenge is to apply some form of triage and to sort this information into buckets—at the very least positive and negative—so that you can decide which to respond to, who will respond, how you will respond, and which to let go without a response.

For an organization that is used to and perhaps established on the concept that customer communication, at least in the normal run of things, is a one way activity that happens in clearly defined spaces and at predetermined times, social media will seem a daunting prospect and is often typified with Wild West Frontier clichés.

If it wasn’t overwhelming enough already, social location sharers armed with smartphones can post comments, write reviews, and upload photos on-the-fly. This information has the potential (depending on the phone and the app the person is using) to include an exact location and timestamp, called a geotag. This could be bad for your business if someone saw an embarrassing incident at a retail location and uploaded a photo—the photo would contain a geotag forever tying it to your business.

Social Customer Relationship Management Database (sCRM)

The social business doesn’t struggle with leveraging social media apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla because these apps are simply part of everyday business. Just as most businesses have incorporated websites into their communication plans, an increasing number of businesses are incorporating social media apps into their communication plans as well. What does this mean for the way customers will interact with organizations in the future?

Primarily, the shift toward social business will allow for a more integrated marketing communication strategy to succeed. Instead of looking for media buying opportunities, online ad placement positions, Twitter campaigns, or PPC campaigns on Facebook, the organization will have developed a Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM) database that allows all the interactions across all platforms with the customer to be held and reviewed at any point. sCRMs are already available, though most do not yet capture all communications on all apps. As sCRMs become increasingly common, it will be possible to identify a customer’s preferred social media channel, the preferred delivery mechanism—web, mobile, out-of-home, email—and the type of information that they are more likely to react to. Not only will this provide the marketer with the capability to provide a totally tailored experience on a customer-by-customer basis, but it will also appear to the customer to be less intrusive. This means that campaigns of the future will most likely be shorter and more focused but have higher action rates than we currently see.

Is Change Inevitable?

While social business and the ensuing sCRM databases that follow sound like a marketing utopia—at least for marketers—its realization will depend on how integrated social media becomes to businesses today and how quickly they move toward adopting the social business model. Many businesses will resist this transition. Many will resist because they do not believe in the social business evolution, believing that the status quo works and seeing no reason to change. Not until their competitors start to see results will these reluctant businesses make the transition to this new model. This has always been the case and mirrors the way in which individuals adopt new technology. If this were not the case, it would not be possible to still purchase VHS players, even as Blu-Ray and digital media downloads seek to replace DVDs.

This resistance, of course, comes with an opportunity cost that many will not be able to afford. By allowing competitors to gain an early start in the transition to a social business model, an organization risks losing not only time but also market share. The new social customer wants and expects a higher degree of integration and multichannel communication. The customer no longer expects to receive only a money off coupon in the mail, or via email. Instead, customers want to see these coupons incorporated into their Facebook interactions from friends. They expect to see them in a Twitter stream and they expect to find them provided automatically when they share their locations via Foursquare or Gowalla. If your company is not embracing social media on multiple levels, you will find a diminishing number of social media interactions with your customers and potential customers. Those customers will seek out other companies—your competitors—who are embracing the new model of doing business and have recognized how customers are seeking communication.

A clear example of social business marketing is the partnership between 7-Eleven stores in the USA and Zynga (the software company responsible for the Facebook games Farmville, YoVille, and Mafia Wars). Farmville, while annoying to many, has (at the time of writing) 10 million more active users than Twitter. It is primarily played by women who enjoy the collaborative nature of the game. Coincidentally, a large contingent of the 7-Eleven customer base is composed of women. By partnering with this popular game, placing digital objects into the game, and then running traditional OOH campaigns at 7-Eleven stores and gas stations to promote the objects, 7-Eleven has recognized where its customers are and what they are likely to be doing online. This is perhaps the most important step in transitioning to becoming a social business.

Choosing the Right Social Media App

If you don’t know where your customers are spending their time online, it’s extremely hard to define a social marketing strategy. This may seem like basic common sense to most, but it is surprising the number of social media campaigns that are started by businesses that have not done their research first. Many businesses assume that because there is a sufficient amount of “buzz” around a particular app, such as Twitter or Facebook, that is where they should conduct their campaigns. But nothing could be further from the truth.

This is just as true for social location marketing as it is for any other social media channel. No one app fits all customer profiles. No one app fits all company types. And just because there’s buzz about an app, that doesn’t mean it is worth spending your marketing budget on it. Buzz would have told 7-Eleven that Twitter was the social media tool they should use (based on number of users), because Farmville is just a game. 7-Eleven, however, did their homework first and realized that buzz is not a market research metric.

Given the number of social channels available to marketers, it is understandably bewildering to identify where customers and prospective customers might be. Indeed it is likely that some apps will provide some crossover for certain customer profiles. Campaigns that take this crossover into account are more likely to succeed than those that don’t. This is where choosing the right style of social media app becomes important to the social business. The goal here is to choose a social media app that will appeal to the audience your business caters to. So with that in mind, consider the following:

• Facebook is a community focused app.

• Twitter is a short-term communication app.

• Foursquare appeals to the more competitive among the social location sharers.

Which of these styles best suits your company is an important question—one that might be a lot more complex than you might at first imagine. First, is your company trying to communicate an entire company impression? Or is your company trying to communicate a brand awareness? Are you creating a particular product promotion campaign for which this will be one of several vehicles? Social location sharing has to be placed into context, not just of the app itself but of the device (smartphone, iPad and so on) and how it’s being used.

This contextualization is ultimately the defining framework for the content that is to be transmitted. For example, a commercial that will be viewed at an IMAX cinema has the capability—because of the scale of the environment, the type of technology, and the shared nature of the experience—to be used in a way that is not possible or necessarily desirable from within an app such as Gowalla. Apps such as Gowalla are used on smartphones, which at best have palm-sized screens and are used by single users and in a very focused manner. The available screen space is extremely limited. Worse, however, is that the user will also be subject to a multitude of ancillary inputs—whether it is a member of the wait staff in a café taking an order, a group of friends clamoring for attention, or the start of a sporting event.

Therefore, any messaging you create for a social location marketing campaign must take these factors into account. Failure to do so will almost certainly result in—at the very least—a low action rate and at worst, complete failure of the campaign.

This is a real challenge for marketers who are accustomed to being able to repurpose a campaign message to almost any environment. Banner ads can utilize the same taglines as OOH. Even Twitter posts can be constructed, with the right writing style, to form part of a broader cohesive messaging campaign. SLM messaging, however, does not work this way. There are a couple of reasons:

• First, as we have seen, the apps themselves do not allow for much creativity outside of bought space, which is almost identical to any other online ad space.

• Second, what space is available is primarily meant for the users of the app to share information about the experience. So coopting this space has to be done in a way that is seen as beneficial to the users of the app. If it’s seen as intrusive or as an attempt to spam them, your marketing will fail.

Repurposed marketing collateral that is shoe-horned into this space intended for the users of the apps will not be welcomed by that community.

Information that will be considered beneficial will vary from customer to customer and will vary even further based on whether you’re marketing to a casual music shopper or a serious medical supplies purchaser, for instance. Again, this is where knowledge of your customers or potential customers is essential if the nonintrusive goal is to be met. What is certain is that simply adding comments or tips that are out of sync with the pre-existing content will not work. Yelp ran afoul of this and faces a class action lawsuit over its somewhat unscrupulous management of content and reviews.

Equally, offers made through SLS apps that don’t “speak” to the users’ experience will also not be seen favorably. For example, an offer that encouraged customers to vote for their favorite bartender and receive free entry to an event in the near future might be a campaign utilized by a bar; however, if the bar is unpopular or has a reputation for bad service and low selection, then chances are people won’t take part in the campaign. SLS, like any other form of social media, isn’t a way of papering over the cracks of a bad operation. What it will do is enhance an already good environment and take good customer service to the next level by bringing the customer and the organization one step closer together.

Achieving this level of alignment will make campaigns more attractive to users, increase participation—and therefore conversion to action—and provide a level of sustainability for the organization.

However, if you choose the wrong app on which to base your SLM campaign, none of this will happen.

Deciding which apps to partner with is just one of many big decisions you will need to make as you determine how social media in particular and social business in general will be incorporated into your company.

For a larger enterprise, transitioning an entire business model to a social business structure is something that will take a lot of time and energy. At the time of this writing, there are no real examples of large enterprises that have decided to make this transition. However, there are many that have incorporated a social business model into their method of doing business. Dell, Comcast, and IBM are good examples of large enterprises that have built successful social business models within their organizations.

Smaller businesses may find that transitioning to a entirely social business model is an easier path than trying to operate two distinct business operations. However, even the small business shouldn’t underestimate the radical nature of the change.

What I want to explore next is what this social business—the part of the organization that operates in the social world—actually looks like. Who works there? What do they do?

Who Owns Social?

So who should be doing the choosing? Who in the organization decides what the social media campaign looks like and who will actually execute it? This is a difficult decision for most organizations when they first start to explore social media. The most common option is to place it with PR/Marketing and use the existing communications resources that the organization already has.

But is this the right decision? If your company really wants to become a social business, it might not be the right way to approach things. If the marketers in your company are focused on creating one-way communications instead of conversations, or if they haven’t built a social brand before, you are probably going to find the conversion to a social business much more difficult.

Many schools of thought exist on what exactly the profile of a social media person looks like: what their background is, what experiences they have had, and what type of work they have been doing prior to joining the organization.

Let’s look at a few of these profiles. What follows are extracts from real job postings for social media positions at various companies. By examining what the market currently looks for we can examine them for the commonalities and see how they fit into the creation of a social business.

Job Description One:

Job Description Two:

Job Description Three:

Job Description Four:

Job Description Five:

As you can see, these are five different job descriptions, and on the surface, five very different people are being sought out. You would expect this from five companies that all seek to do different things with social media (we’ll address that point in a minute). However, they all have some of the same requirements, so let’s start there and examine what is common to a social media post regardless of level within the organization. Table 9.1 breaks down the job requirements for a social media position.

Table 9.1. Social Media Job Requirements

These requirements, in one form or another, are common to all the social media job descriptions I have seen, not just the ones I have included in this chapter. I have modified some of the language to ensure that the companies who posted the original job requirements remained anonymous; however, the distilled versions retain the requirements that are common:

• Education is focused strongly on communication subjects, with every company agreeing on at least a four-year degree—nothing wholly surprising there.

• Experience is a range, and that reflects the seniority of the position. It is interesting to see job descriptions that require five years of social media execution and then are seeking to put that person into a junior/mid-level role. If you could find someone that has five years of executing real social media programs, trust me you are not going to hire them as a junior. More realistic is the requirement that this person have digital marketing experience. Although this is not necessarily social media, experience here means this person will at least understand the online environment.

• Skills are all focused on ensuring that the person has done this before, which is absolutely a requirement. This is not the time to hire someone who “thinks” they can do this because they have a Facebook profile. While it is an area that should be open to experimentation, those experiments need to be backed with reasoned thought and a process for execution. Some of the other skill requirements will vary from role to role, but certainly the ability to communicate, especially in written form, is extremely important. Peter Shankman, founder of Help a Reporter Out, repeatedly states that he will pay for his employees to take any writing class they want, because communication skills are at the core of social media competency. I couldn’t agree with him more.

• Duties also vary greatly from role to role, but the one that seems to be common to most is the ability to create “cutting edge” communications. I find this amusing for the most part. What one company or organization calls cutting edge, others would run screaming from—or worse, be insulted by. In working with numerous clients over the years, I have found that the term is very subjective and almost meaningless; however, it seems that is the way social media is viewed—as cutting edge. This points more to the emergent nature of its use among those companies recruiting for these positions than it does to the maturity of the medium.

What is missing from these job descriptions? In my opinion, the major thing missing from all but one of them is experience in a customer facing role. The reason it is missing is the same as the reason all the job descriptions focus on communications and marketing experience. What these companies are all seeking is someone who can leverage social media as a marketing communications channel—in other words, someone who can write in 140 characters or less the company tagline and make it go “viral”!

When these organizations say they want experience in executing social media campaigns, what they mean is they want to know the candidate can use social media as a marketing channel, which is certainly an important part of the role, but it also implies that the channel is a one-way stream of information passing out of the organization to customers and potential customers who just can’t wait to receive it and share it with their networks. I think we all know that this is a myth.

So what should a job description look like and what does a good candidate for a social media position actually look like, at least on paper?

• Education—Honestly, I’m not a strong proponent of a formal education. I got all mine as an adult, long after I left high school. It’s a tough subject, especially in the current society where education is a formal business and everyone is now told that without a graduate degree you aren’t worth considering, which is what we were all told three decades ago about an undergraduate degree. Personally, when I make hires, I care less about their formal education and more about what they have achieved in life that fits with the role I am hiring for. I know this is not a popular stance, especially in corporate America, but give me one person who has demonstrated his or her abilities to execute rather than ten people who have a piece of paper from a college that says they might be able to do it if I train them to.

• Experience—Here is where the rubber meets the road. This is what, at least for me, separates those who are worth considering from those who are not. What have they actually done that indicates that they can do the role I am hiring for is the main criteria for most jobs, but for a social media position, that should encompass as many of the aspects as possible of what social media will and can mean for the organization. Not just the ability to push out the corporate message, but handling a crisis, creating community, delivering exceptional customer experience and bringing that to the real world. Look for someone who has experience with customers, that could be working in the service industries, sales, customer service—heck, driving a taxi. This is the front line of your organization. If you are trying to build a more social business and a business that will compete and capture the social customer, you need someone who truly understands the demands of a customer communication role and knows how to build value into the relationships that increase the loyalty of those customers.

So where are these candidates that meet this bill, this laundry list of attributes that people want so badly? First, the wrong place to look for them, in my opinion, is job boards. Places such as Monster, The Ladders, and even LinkedIn are all great for finding a general marketing specialist, a PR person, even a CMO, but not if you want an absolutely amazing social media person/team member who will represent your organization in the best possible way.

Strangely enough, the one place to find these people seems to be the last place that recruiters and hiring managers seem to look: the social web! Look for persons who have clearly demonstrated that they can build something, create awareness, have interactions with people in a positive way, and garner support and a following from a community of users. Obviously there has to be a fit with your product/brand/service, but look for those after you have started to identify someone who will make the best social media representative.

My most recent hire for my company was someone I had followed for over a year on Twitter. I watched this person build a business online, and I had even bought a sponsorship slot with this person’s business for some of the videos it was creating. This person had what my company needed, but more than this, this person knew how the social web worked. This person understood the dynamic and had been there and utilized it to create something.

If I were to give you an example of someone that I have watched lately, and who I believe would be a great candidate for a social media role with a company, it would be Poppy Dinsey of What I Wore Today fame (see Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1. Poppy Dinsey is a self-made social media star.

Poppy is someone I have been watching for about eight months (at the time of writing). She created What I Wore Today (www.wiwt.co.uk) as a way of finding new outfits in her existing wardrobe. In other words, she wanted to save money and “shop her own closet.” She decided to document the process by posting a picture of her outfit every day. Friends told her that she would never keep it up, but since January 1, 2010, she has not missed a single day.

More than this, she has actually generated thousands of page views each week on her blog by simply posting a picture. These pictures are not risqué, they are not salacious in nature, they are simply her outfit, be it a pair of jeans and a shirt or a summer dress or even an old dressing gown (on a day she was sick).

Why do I think this is a person that would be good for a social media role? First, she understands what drives traffic. Second, she interacts with people on Twitter when she gets feedback on her outfits. She engages her audience and reacts to them in a human way. In June, I asked her to post a picture for my birthday and she did. There was no reason for her to do so, other than I made the request. She did this just because I was a follower and I made the request. This shows that she reacts to her “fans” and where appropriate, follows up.

Last, and perhaps most important, her work has gained her attention. She now has a column with MSN. They noticed what she was doing and invited her to write a fashion column for them. She was spotted by Vodaphone using an iPhone in her pictures. When the new iPhone was released, they sent her one to try out as a replacement for her old one. When London Fashion week rolled around, Vodaphone, which was a major sponsor of the show, reached out to her again and asked her to be their blogger for the entire event.

All this from someone who decided to post a picture of their outfit online every day. Oh, and the fact that she kept it up even when she was sick also speaks volumes about the type of commitment she shows to a project.

You can’t find these details in a resume. You don’t find them in educational certificates. This is the real thing. This is what a social media person looks like. Someone who can actually do the job, not someone who thinks they can or has a piece of paper that says they might be able to do it with the right support.

I asked Poppy what advice she has for companies looking to hire a social media person; here is what she replied:

“Really research the work they’ve done in the past and make sure it fits with your company’s brand. I’ve turned down work when people have approached me knowing my style and then a few meetings down the line they say they don’t want me to do X/Y/Z which they *know* is a big part of my personal brand and how I work. Different people have different approaches, so you have to make sure you find the right person. And there are A LOT of charlatans in the world of social media, so as I said before, really research the work they’ve done in the past.”

All sound advice. Note especially her recommendation that you research their work. Recruiting is a costly business. Most of the cost comes from the time involved and yet organizations want to be able to post a job ad and fill it in a matter of weeks, maybe a month. With social media, I say you should start a year before you think you will need someone; draw up a list of likely candidates, put them on a watch list, go to events and meet them, see how they interact over time with people online, and think about how they might fit into your organization.

This sounds like a lot of work. That’s because it is. What you are hiring is not a marketer, not a PR person, not a community manager, not a social media specialist. You are hiring someone who will breed loyalty in the community of social consumers, and loyalty isn’t cheap.

So this is what your point person in the social media function looks like. In anything larger than a small enterprise, you are going to have other roles in the social business function that will be providing social media capabilities to your organization. These include blogger outreach, social media monitoring, and internal liaison. Some of these roles are going to overlap with existing functions within an organization. For example, blogger outreach might well cross into the PR function within the organization and encroach on the territory of a media list owner (I have seen this in Fortune 500 companies), and social media monitoring may well cross into the realm of corporate communications and customer service, depending on what is being monitored and what is found.

It is important to recognize the roles that are created by the adoption of a social business model. Equally important is the recognition that while these roles are mostly tactical, there needs to be strategic leadership for these roles. This hire or appointment, if you are moving someone internally, will provide the direction and ensure that the role achieves both the organizational goals and does so in a way that can be shown to the C-suite to have had bottom-line impact. Ultimately, this is where the criticism of social media and the social business model is aimed. Having someone who has experience at a senior level of creating meaningful metrics and tying those to bottom-line performance will ensure that the organization not only pursues the model actively but continues to do so as campaigns roll out.

It is unlikely that one person is going to embody all these skills (though there are a few out there), so the most likely path for any organization is to establish a social business team within the organization that not only provides the skills the organization needs for the social consumer, but also provides the education needed internally for the organization to adopt social practices in other parts of the business.

The closer an organization gets to having a social business team, and gradually expands that ethos throughout, the closer the organization becomes to being a fully socially orientated business.

But what are the drawbacks? First, the time and investment of restructuring an organization is never a simple or inexpensive undertaking, and for an enterprisesized organization, it is almost certainly something that will not spread throughout the entire organization. What is important is that the social business part of the organization becomes integrated into the strategic decision making that directs the organization and how the organization interacts with the social consumer.

Second, the frequent transitions that senior management, especially in enterprise-level organizations go through. There needs to be an adequate bench within the social business area so that these transitions have a minimal impact on the ethos of operating as a social business.

This bench is especially important if the organization opts to have a “face” of social business. For example, Ford has Scott Monty, who not only leads their social business endeavors but is the recognizable face of those endeavors. If your organization seeks to emulate this model, ensuring that there is a second and third “face” available not only helps spread the load in terms of giving voice to campaigns, but it makes transitions easier and more seamless to the people who matter, the customers.

These “faces” are the loyalty point for the brand. In the past, the logo or other imagery was the loyalty point, but for the social consumer, the person that they associate with the brand has become more important. This is understandable; human beings are sociable by nature. The opportunity to meet the face of the brand is much more compelling than the opportunity to simply hang out in a branded area at a conference.

The social consumer wants to build an affinity with an organization based on human traits: trust, communication, honesty, reciprocity. These are the same traits that they look for to build relationships with other human beings. This seems very “touchy feely” to some organizations, and certainly there is an element of that involved in social commerce, but that should not cloud the organization’s objective, which, unless it is a nonprofit, is to deliver value to the customer and the owners of the organization.

The new model of social business is still evolving. How the communication will evolve is still being experimented with and will continue to be, driven both by the realization of what can be achieved and by the new waves of technology that enable increasingly closer proximity to the customer.