CHAPTER 2
THE EXECUTIVE CHAMPION
Success in social media requires the collective effort of lots of people within an organization. Marketing, communications and PR, customer service, product-line managers, product development people, and business leadership all have roles to play in making a corporation’s program take shape and execute smoothly and successfully. But of all the players and roles, two are most critical to an organization’s success.
The first is the social media evangelist—the person actually tasked with building the strategy and program and representing the brand in social networks. Most of the public focus and attention falls to this person, the social media expert who is the online public face of the company. We’ll discuss that person more in Chapter 4.
To demonstrate the nature and importance of the second person, let’s use an example from one of the most beloved films of the past quarter century. Bull Durham is considered by many baseball fans (including me) to be the best baseball movie ever made. Viewers are treated to a bus ride through the peculiarities and culture of minor-league baseball while following the developing relationship between worldly-wise, grizzled veteran catcher Crash Davis and his high-potential pitcher, Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, who, despite his golden arm, is arrogant, eccentric, and naive. Over the course of the minor-league season, the Davis-LaLoosh relationship becomes one of sports movies’ most recognized and beloved mentor-mentee stories.
But if you know the movie, you know that none of it would have happened without manager Joe Riggins—who brings Davis to the team in the first place to make sure the young pitcher succeeds. While Davis focuses on making the kid as good as he can be, Riggins keeps his attention on the eventual success of the whole team on the field, at the same time being there for Davis when his support is needed. He knows enough to let Davis alone and to do the job he is there to do: make the team successful while empowering Davis to succeed in his role.
When it comes to implementing social media within a large organization, every Crash Davis needs a Joe Riggins—someone in leadership who makes the whole team successful while empowering the social media evangelist to do her specific job of bringing the organization along and maturing its social initiatives. Call this leadership role the executive champion of social media. This can be a different person in different organizations. Frequently the head of communications or PR plays this role, sometimes it’s one of the senior people in marketing, and sometimes it’s even someone forward thinking in business leadership. The executive champion isn’t directly involved in developing strategy or executing social media initiatives or campaigns—but he is just as important as the evangelist in building a winning social program. The executive champion clears the path inside the organization to give social media a chance and a foothold in the first place.
This is the most critical element for social media success at any company. A strong executive champion can help make even a lesser evangelist successful. Absent such leadership (or if the executive champion is weak or only halfheartedly supports social media), even the best social media evangelist will find it difficult to truly drive adoption across the company and get full buy-in for the company’s social media efforts.
David Puner, who, as the architect of Dunkin’ Donuts’ social presence, rose to online prominence as “Dunkin’ Dave,” puts it this way: “Unless you’ve got somebody way up there supporting social—somebody senior taking the leap of faith and saying ‘let’s go for it, let’s do it’—it’s hard to have a program backed with enough resources or support.”1 Zena Weist, who has led H&R Block’s social media program since January 2010, is equally blunt. “You need a leader to make social media a priority within the organization,” she says. “If it’s not a priority, it will not get resources, and without resources, you will not have cachet to get your social media foundation built.”2
Characteristics of the Executive Champion
First and foremost, it’s not necessary to fully understand or “get” social media or be immersed in social networks for an executive champion to be effective in his role. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with two great ones during my corporate career, Jon Iwata at IBM and Steve Harris at General Motors. Neither man is extensively active in social networks, and unless you work in the communications field or at IBM or GM, you may not even know who they are. But neither IBM nor GM would have as extensive or well reputed a social media program without them.
The executive champion isn’t the person at the organization who handles the Twitter conversations, updates the Facebook page, appears at tweetups, or decides which social media events to sponsor or attend. But he does have at least a grasp of the importance of social media and a commitment to it. When Jon asked me to be IBM’s blogger-in-chief in early 2005, he was forthright about what he expected. “There will be a business application for blogs,” he told me, “and we want you to help us find out what that is and make IBM a leader in blogging for business.” (This was well before Twitter, before Facebook opened to noncollegiate audiences, before even MySpace exploded; at that time, “social media” largely consisted of blogs and podcasts.) When I was considering going to GM, Steve Harris won me over during our interview by telling me that what he wanted more than anything else from me was for me to “scare the hell” out of him on a regular basis—to push the company out of its comfort zones and do the innovative, “we’ve never done this before” kinds of things that would announce GM to be a serious player in social media. Neither Iwata nor Harris was a social media expert—that’s what they were hiring someone for—but both instinctively understood the communications and media landscape well enough to know the importance of building a solid social media presence and program, and both were committed to the premise that their brand would be a leader in the space. They didn’t just want their company to be active in the online social realm; they wanted to be out in front.
Your organization may not have the size or breadth of an IBM or a GM, but you’re going to need someone in leadership who shares Iwata’s or Harris’s vision and commitment to social media. An effective executive champion has to be senior enough in the organization to:
• Hire someone into the position of social media lead (even possibly building a team if the organization is big enough). Both Iwata and Harris were senior vice presidents of communications at their respective companies. Depending on the organization, it might be someone in marketing, communications, or customer service, and it may not be an SVP—but wherever he comes from, the organization needs someone with the authority to make this kind of hire or create this kind of position.
• Establish ownership and authority over the social space. If an executive champion claims that his department will staff up for social media or lead in executing social programs but is not high enough or credible enough within the organization to be granted that leadership, the stage is set for internal clashes later. If multiple departments or leaders claim that social belongs to them, disaster will soon follow. The executive champion has to have the gravitas and clout such that when he says, “My department will lead here,” the rest of the organization recognizes that leadership.
• Mediate disputes with authority. With social media having become as big as it has, large organizations often have multiple departments, sub-brands, or teams wanting to execute a social media program or initiative. Ideally these groups are working together and agree on the right course of action. But when differences of opinion or direction cannot be worked out or when disputes aren’t getting solved at the working level, the executive champion needs both the wisdom to mediate and make a decision and the seniority to have his word stand. If the executive champion hears two possible courses of action or is asked to choose between direction A or direction B and says “we’re going to do A,” all parties in the organization need to recognize that executive’s authority and not go off saying, “Well, Smith said go with A, but we don’t have to listen to that.”
Achieving that kind of authority doesn’t just come with a title or position, however. An executive champion who claims leadership in social media without any demonstrated knowledge or reason for that leadership is not going to be credible. The executive champion also will need to be organizationally adept and agile enough to support his claim to social media leadership and responsibility. The executive champion will need to do the following:
• Sell the social media vision to the highest levels of business leadership. At some point, the C level of the organization will need to at the very least be made aware of the team’s social media plans. After all, if an organization is spending money on something and even making a hire or promotion for someone to lead the organization’s efforts in a space, support from those highest levels is going to be critical. The executive champion needs to sell the C-suite on the importance of the social space in general and why resources allocated to it are being wisely spent.
• Credibly take this vision to the rest of the organization. Social media is at this point big enough and is talked about frequently enough that lots of people in the organization are going to see it as important—and if they think that it’s being done poorly or that it doesn’t fit with the rest of the organization’s communications, marketing, or customer service strategy, they’ll revolt. The executive champion needs to not only have credibly established leadership but also routinely convince his peers of the validity and strength of the program’s direction. A strong executive champion will also listen to ideas and concerns from those peers in order to keep them included in the process and discourage parallel programs.
At Dell, Manish Mehta has played the role of executive champion of social media for four years. While Manish is not the face of Dell online to most people (that role falls most prominently to Richard Binhammer or Lionel Menchaca), he’s been in the middle of the program behind the scenes. “Lionel does so much of the blogging, and he’s one of the ones people know,” says Richard, “but he’s not fighting all the internal battles. That’s Manish.”3 While Mehta was the first person ever to write a post for Direct2Dell (Dell’s blog), he’s not the most public member of Dell’s social team. He just keeps things running smoothly behind the scenes. That’s exactly what Richard, Lionel, and the rest of the Dell team need him to do.
Leadership Style and Needs from the Executive Champion
Once ownership of social media has been established and a budget obtained, what kind of leadership should the executive champion display? While it’s true that the executive champion does not have to be directly involved in social networks, it is important that he not be wholly disinterested either. In order to be effective, the executive champion should at least occasionally be included in or briefed on strategic discussions. He should be updated regularly on how the budget is being spent and how much is left. Measurement and metrics should be shared with the executive champion regularly. After all, how can he champion the cause inside the organization if he’s not being given information that solidifies his position or proves that what’s being done is working?
It’s also important for the executive champion to enforce consistency among social media, marketing, and communications strategies. Imagine that a brand’s social media lead directs his team to execute an online-centered campaign around one of the brand’s products. The event seems like a big success from a social media perspective: participation from the targeted bloggers is high, the event goes smoothly, and there are lots of positive posts about the brand. Perhaps the brand or the event being carried out even becomes a trending topic on Twitter, and the brand’s Facebook page and Twitter account pick up several hundred new followers. Sounds like a win, right? But what if the campaign centers around a specific product and targets “tech-savvy twenty-something young professionals,” while the target market for the product is actually “suburban mothers from upscale families”—and there’s about to be a high-visibility advertising and marketing campaign aimed at reaching that audience? While it wouldn’t invalidate the success the social media campaign achieves, that campaign would certainly have been “off message,” wouldn’t have reached the product’s target audience, and wouldn’t have taken any advantage of the advertising to reinforce the message. Wouldn’t that feel like something of a missed opportunity or an incomplete effort? With that in mind, another very important role for an executive champion is ensuring that social efforts sync with larger communications and marketing strategies for the organization. A social media initiative that isn’t in line with larger branding efforts is not just a missed opportunity. At worst, it can be counterproductive, cause inconsistency, and confuse an audience as to a brand’s message or positioning.
No matter how well informed the social media lead is about an organization’s overall communications and marketing strategy, the executive champion is inevitably going to be privy to more information by virtue of his access to senior leadership. It’s the responsibility of both the evangelist and the executive champion to ensure that what’s happening in social media reflects these larger strategies—and it’s the additional responsibility of the executive champion to ensure that social media tactics are part of greater strategic planning from the outset. In the earlier example (the ad campaign targeted at twentysomething professionals), the role of the executive champion would be twofold. First, as the new ad campaign focused on those upscale moms was being developed, the executive champion should have been reminding everyone in marketing and advertising leadership to keep social media in mind as the program took shape and asking them to work with the social media evangelist in building social media into the program rather than adding it as an afterthought. Second, the executive champion should have been briefing the social media evangelist on the upcoming strategy and campaign and telling the evangelist whom to work with in marketing, advertising, or PR to learn more. At that point, it becomes the evangelist’s job to actually build the social program, but the executive champion has to have made the connections and primed the pump for social media to be part of the larger program.
The Most Important Relationship in Brand Social Media
It’s said so often that it’s become cliché: social media is about relationships. I’d argue that within a big organization, the most important social media relationship of them all is the one between the evangelist and the champion. If these two people aren’t working in sync, the social program will inevitably suffer.
Trust is key. Since the executive champion is most often going to be a communications or marketing leader rather than a social media specialist, he’s unlikely to be familiar enough with the social space to know whether an initiative makes sense. The executive champion will have to trust the social media leader and her team. This is not always a natural trust—smart social tactics often make traditionalists uncomfortable—so it must be worked on as a priority. There should be frequent and two-way conversations between them—with the evangelist taking the time to share activities and to explain why each activity or program makes sense socially and the executive champion making sure that broader company strategy is clearly communicated. This would help ensure that the social media evangelist is aware of upcoming marketing or communications efforts that could be relevant to the work the social team is doing or that the social team should be working to take advantage of. Ideally, the two should have regularly scheduled conversations—informally over coffee, formally in the office, whatever works best for them. Not only will doing this keep information flowing freely and build the necessary trust between the two, but it can also guard against overreaching by either party.
Micromanagement by the champion can result in social initiatives that feel too “corporate” or “marketing-y.” On the other hand, a rogue evangelist not fully integrated with the rest of the organization can be disconnected, inconsistent with the brand’s larger strategy, and blind to opportunities to reinforce the brand’s message or take advantage of traditional marketing efforts already in place.
It’s not fair to expect an executive to champion social efforts across the organization that he has not at least been briefed on; it’s also not fair to expect a social media leader to work in line with the organization’s larger efforts if she’s treated as little more than a community manager and is never made aware of other strategic efforts. The champion and evangelist should communicate regularly, and their relationship has to be a priority for both.
Managing Risks and Insulating Against Failures
All the hype about and emphasis on social networks in the past few years might lead people to believe that there’s a definitive right way and wrong way to do it. In reality, the social media space is still emerging, and the playbook for social media is being written and rewritten as the space evolves.
In this environment, an executive champion will have to be comfortable with ambiguity and taking risks. There are going to be times when “I think so” is the best answer the evangelist will have for the question “Will this program work?” There will be times where something the evangelist thought would work instead fell flat or met resistance. There will be efforts made that will in hindsight have been mistakes and monies spent that everybody involved will wish after the fact to have back. As long as lessons are learned each time, and the same mistakes are not made repeatedly, this is part of the social media marketing process.
The executive champion must also be comfortable taking these risky programs to leadership and perhaps even be willing to report back to leadership occasionally on the lessons learned from failed initiatives. Without that kind of managerial courage from the executive champion, the social leader or team can be isolated, left out on a limb to twist when something doesn’t go as planned. Future initiatives might not get the support necessary to empower the social team to take chances and innovate.
Managing Agency-Company Relationships
As social media continues to generate attention and draw the spotlight, most organizations will experience a barrage of marketing, PR, and social media consultants and agencies approaching various parts of the company and offering to run the organization’s social media initiatives. Many of these are going to be good, solid agencies or consultants with lots of good ideas and experience helping clients achieve both business and social media results. In fact, I’m not aware of a single big brand that’s achieved success in social media that hasn’t worked with at least one agency or consultant—outside thinking and perspective is often a critical element to your effectiveness. The executive champion should work with the evangelist to identify strong potential agency or consultant partners and then help make sure necessary funding and resources are available to bring them aboard.
Unfortunately, some agencies will talk fast and drop a lot of jargon into their presentation hoping to fluster, confuse, frighten, or dazzle brands into thinking that they know the online social world better than the brand does. The social media evangelist should know the difference but will occasionally need support from the executive champion to help hold off a particularly enthusiastic marketing or communications manager who’s been on the receiving end of such a presentation and is pushing to sign on with them. (The champion’s moderation may be needed because the evangelist might be seen simply as “protecting her turf” when arguing against such a proposal. Having a leader back the evangelist at times like these can help avoid contracts with agencies that prove to be costly mistakes.)
Money Talks
Finally, the executive champion is going to be in the best position to provide budget for the social media program or be able to credibly and effectively go “tin-cupping” through the rest of the organization to acquire that budget—and the odds are, at least at first, the executive champion will need to do this. Perhaps the biggest myth around social media, at least from an organizational standpoint, is that social media is free. Let’s disabuse everyone of that notion right away: success in social media is not free. Compared with other forms of marketing, it can be incredibly cost-efficient and give you a bigger bang for your buck, but if all you’re ever able to put into social media (as a big organization, anyway) is time and conversation, you’ll find limited return. Social media marketing is still marketing and, as such, requires an investment at least at some level in order to be successful. An executive champion must control a significant-enough budget to allocate resources to social media (this can include product for use in promotion)—or needs to be high enough up in the organization that he can impose upon his peers for contributions to the effort. Without at least some sort of product or financial resources available to a social media program, that program faces a much more uphill climb to social media success.
Ultimately, your executive champion is vital to ensuring open-mindedness to social media within the organization, establishing where authority rests within the organization, enforcing that authority when disputes or challenges arise, ensuring that social leaders have the opportunity to integrate with broader communications and marketing initiatives, securing or providing resources to support social efforts, and maintaining consistency and control across agency efforts. Most executive champions will not be directly involved in the development of social strategy—but they don’t need to be. The right social media evangelist will play that role when the organization brings her on. But absent a champion playing this critical role behind the scenes, no evangelist can be fully successful. The job of an executive champion of social media is not to be externally visible or to be your social media visionary—it’s to be the manager behind the scenes clearing the path for social media inside the organization.