CHAPTER 3
OWNING SOCIAL MEDIA
There’s an age-old trick played by most children with their parents in order to get their way. I’m willing to wager that at one point during your childhood you tried it. (I’ll confess that I did!) Imagine a child wants to do something like go online to play Club Penguin. The child asks one parent—say, Mom—if she can go online. Mom says no. Undeterred, the child approaches Dad with the same question, hoping that he will unwittingly give the desired answer despite Mom’s denial. In the child’s young mind, she’s insured against punishment because she asked Dad, and Dad said yes, so how could she be disobeying?
Almost every parent, or for that matter almost anybody who was once a kid, can relate to this concept of divided authority. In family situations, the best-case scenario is that when Mom and Dad find out about the dual requests, the child in fact doesn’t get what she wants and is disciplined for trying to play the parents off one another. But if parental direction and authority haven’t been established and the parents don’t agree on what the answer should be, the divided authority game can quickly degenerate into tension between the parents or even arguments over which parent has the final say. What started out as simply a child’s desire to play Club Penguin can create unintended consequences, cause internal disputes, and perhaps make different members of the family unhappy with each other!
Not that I want to call working professionals “children,” but organizations run a somewhat similar kind of risk with social media. Social media is in vogue right now, and lots of people see it as an opportunity to make their mark or establish their value to their organization. It’s almost a given that more than one group inside an organization will believe that social media belongs to them. It’s also pretty much a given that multiple groups inside your organization are going to start planning or even executing social media programs or initiatives independently. H&R Block’s Zena Weist has observed at her own company and others that “there’s stepping on toes, typically because one group doesn’t know the other existed.”1
Absent a clear and established authoritative structure that is accepted by all parties and functions, a brand or organization faces disconnected or disjointed social efforts at best. At worst, you can have not only an inconsistent social presence but also campaigns that compete with one another for the same audiences or even present conflicting messaging. You might even have two parts of the company hiring or promoting individuals for the same job function! (You laugh—but I’ve seen organizations in which both marketing and communications have hired a “director of social media” for the company.) Clear lines of authority and agreement on who is going to “own” social media in your organization are perhaps the most critical of all the elements we’ll discuss. Without them, your program will suffer from too much chaos to present a consistent presence and voice in the social media world.
This clarity of authority isn’t always easy to achieve. There are at least three business functions with legitimate claim to leadership in social media within an organization: communications, marketing, and customer service. In many organizations, each group will assume its own supremacy in the social space and resent what seems like an intrusion of others into a capability that rightly belongs to it. It’s important to prevent this kind of territorialism when possible. Clear authority isn’t just about heading off fights and inconsistency. It’s about incorporating the best of what various parts of the business do into the social media program mix. The reality is, each function brings a different strength and a different weakness to social media activity. In an ideal situation, these strengths and functions are brought together as sort of a hybrid function operating together and directing the rest of the business.
Before getting into how to establish an agreed-upon authority and getting the acceptance of everyone in the organization of this authority, let’s explore the claims to social media leadership of various parts of the business and identify what each brings to the table.
Public Relations/Communications
In many of the organizations that have done social media well, public relations or communications hold the reins. That’s not to say that other departments can’t do this well—my friend and competitor at Ford, Scott Monty, famously resides within Ford’s marketing department—but most frequently, you find communications at the helm of successful social media programs.
This isn’t an accident. The social Web is interactive by nature, and a community not only expects two-way dialogue but also frequently controls the subject and tone of the conversations. This situation is ideally matched to the expertise of a PR pro who is used to responding to questions with the right answers to represent the brand and convey the information the organization wants people to know. Public relations people, because of the nature of their job, also are more used to taking into consideration how an audience is going to react to a message or action and then building a strategy around it. Additionally, PR professionals are much more used to skepticism about a brand’s messages than marketing people tend to be—many of us have spent countless hours on the phone trying to sway recalcitrant reporters or fending off critical questions during press events. For this reason, the sometimes intense criticism and negative aspects of conversations that occur online may not faze a PR person as much as someone in marketing (who may be more used to crafting a message and then identifying the best channels through which to distribute that message). The ability to think quickly on one’s feet and to address the concerns of a critic while remaining “on message” is critical to being a solid PR person—and critical to success when representing a brand within social networks and online. There’s something of a natural fit for PR people within social networks.
But it’s not a perfect fit. Even when doing a more traditional media relations job, whom do the PR people get their key messages from? Who decides the core audiences the messages need to go to, so that the PR person can choose his target media outlets accordingly? Who knows the core attributes of the products being promoted by the PR people? In each case, the answer is almost always the same …
Marketing
And that’s the big argument against having PR run your brand’s social media presence: PR doesn’t know the essence of the brand as well and doesn’t have the same information and research at the ready as to target audiences, focus group reactions, or product attributes as marketing has. And while all the talk from social media pundits about “engaging” and “the conversation” and two-way dialogue is nice, ultimately your organization is not online just to talk with people; you’re there to eventually affect marketplace behavior (drive customer loyalty and sales in a for-profit business or generate volunteers, donations, or action in a not-for-profit organization). Isn’t it better to put the social outreach in the hands of the people who know best how the brand should make people feel, who know the kind of audience a social program should be trying to reach?
Maybe. But there are problems inherent in a marketing-led social media program. For starters, many marketers are so used to pushing a message on a particular calendar that they forget that social media audiences expect actual real-time dialogue. (I’ve even seen marketers draw up editorial calendars for Twitter, for heaven’s sake—trying to schedule out even their “casual” conversations by time, frequency, and subject—and ignore audience interaction altogether.) As Facebook surpasses 800 million users and Twitter approaches 200 million, it’s easy to see why marketers get so excited about getting in front of all those “eyeballs.” Often, though, marketers don’t realize that people don’t join social networks to be marketed to, and many people might not want to be marketed to on social networks, at least in the traditional sense. If PR-driven social media can sometimes seem purposeless or like conversation for conversation’s sake, marketing-driven social programs can seem devoid of conversation or interaction—just like the same old marketing tricks and techniques that audiences have been increasingly rejecting over the past few years. Social media isn’t supposed to be about messages, after all—it’s supposed to be about the customer, right? The defining difference between social media and traditional media is that in traditional channels we broadcast messages at an audience that has little to no opportunity to reply to or challenge us, while in social channels, the customer’s voice is equal to that of the brand or organization. In social media, the customer sets the tone, and brands and marketers try to earn their way into a trusted conversation with customers. And that brings us to …
Customer Service
Perhaps overlooked in the rush to market or promote, your customer service department has in some ways the most natural claim to social media leadership in your organization. After all, customers today are less likely than ever to send you a nasty letter if they’re displeased with your product or the service they’ve received from you. Often, they don’t even pick up the phone to let you know they (or you) have a problem—they take to their keyboard and let their networks within Facebook and Twitter know about it. Bad news can travel even farther if a customer maintains a popular blog or creates a social site dedicated to highlighting the negative experience. (Just ask Alaska Airlines, which was famously accused in November 2010 of “hating kids” after declining to hold a flight for a couple who were changing their baby’s diaper.2 Or United Airlines, skewered relentlessly on YouTube by singer David Carroll with his song “United Breaks Guitars” after he had a particularly bad experience with baggage handlers at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.3) Social networks in general represent an amazing opportunity to listen to customers “in their natural habitat” talking about your brand, your products, and the services you provide. Best of all, helping a customer through social networks allows everyone in both the customer’s network and your organization’s to see the interaction—thus enhancing your reputation as a company that cares about its customers.
One of the companies most frequently held up as an example of a brand truly “getting” social media is Zappos. It’s built its social presence centrally on the premise of using social channels to provide uniquely extensive customer service—in fact, every employee, no matter what the role, is considered a customer service specialist and is encouraged to use Twitter and other social networking platforms to reach out to customers and provide exemplary service, making sure not only that problems are solved but also that the customer is feeling cared about and develops a connection with the brand.
If it worked so well for Zappos, why would it not for your brand? If online audiences are ultimately customers and potential customers, who better than customer service to lead the outreach to them? Right?
The problem with customer service leading your social presence is that customer service agents and departments are usually set up to do two things: solve problems for customers who have them and keep happy the customers who don’t have them. That’s great, but what about the members of the audience who aren’t your customers yet? Unless you’re thrilled with your market share and don’t feel the need to grow or increase your revenue from new customers, your organization is going to need to do some sort of promotional outreach. You need to have some mechanism for sharing information about your products and services, and you need to be able to raise awareness of new products and services when you launch them. Customer service professionals and departments are perhaps better suited than anyone else in your organization to handle the sometimes testy or harshly critical conversations that can happen online—they’re often used to hearing from unhappy people and not only know how to solve problems for customers but also are specifically empowered to take the steps to do so (something PR and marketing people often are not). But they’re not usually exceptionally skilled at the kind of promotion and proactive relationship building that is needed for a brand to excel in social media—and having a social presence that centers around solving problems for current customers seems just too big a missed opportunity to reach out to new ones.
Those are three functions of the business with legitimate claims to social media leadership. But I’ve heard arguments that at least two other business functions should be involved in social media programs, so let’s explore them before moving on.
Human Resources
The claim to leadership (or at least inclusion) here usually involves pointing out that whenever you put employees online interacting with the public, there is risk—for both the employee and the company. Well-meant product advice gone bad could be grounds for a lawsuit if it results in a customer’s product breaking or causing damage. Employees could inadvertently reveal confidential or proprietary information if not properly trained. An unhappy employee could in theory use social channels to air dirty laundry or criticize the company. An employee involved in a personal conversation in a social network might say something controversial or perceived as insensitive to a particular group—which could reflect negatively on the company as well as the individual, not to mention potentially making the organization liable for the fallout if the employee was engaging from work. Can you imagine the potential PR headache for your brand if an employee who is associated with your brand decides to engage in a debate in social networks on, say, the Arizona immigration law or gay marriage? (It’s happened, you know. In May 2011, for example, Canadian hockey announcer Damian Goddard was fired by Rogers Sportsnet in Toronto after wading into the gay marriage debate via his Twitter account. Goddard was in fact reacting to comments by New York Rangers tough guy Sean Avery and hockey agent Todd Reynolds on the same subject.4)
And, there’s always the argument that social media is a time-suck, that employees spending time talking with online audiences aren’t doing their work. (To that argument, I say this: when a company reinstitutes the nine-to-five workday with set and strictly adhered-to hours, and when the company promises that the only time an employee will work is when she’s at the office or facility … that will be the day it will be OK to be worried about employees spending moderate amounts of time online at work. But while work hours continue to extend well into what used to be considered personal time, and when the proliferation of devices and wireless access points means that you’re increasingly never out of touch, companies and organizations are going to have to learn to accept a mild amount of social networking or other online activity.)
All these arguments are good reasons for HR to be involved in some aspects of social media programs—especially developing the social media policy and helping get as many employees informed and educated about social media as possible. But HR is not an outward-facing function. Because much of social media involves significant interaction with the external world, HR is not equipped to lead a social media initiative (while I’ve never heard anyone argue that it should lead on its own, I have heard it argued—most often by HR people—that it should have a guiding say in the program’s development). In addition, HR exists in part to protect employees and can have a risk-averse instinct as a result—also not a trait that lends itself well to social media leadership. So while HR has a legitimate role to play in the behind-the-scenes elements of a social program, it’s not the right fit to lead in this space.
Information Technology/Web Development
The tools we’re talking about all involve technology, don’t they? Whether online or mobile, all the networks and conversations we want access to rely on technology for their existence. If we’re going to have a team accessing these tools from the office, it is IT that makes that access happen. Opening Facebook or YouTube to an employee base could theoretically create demand for the IT department to have to manage. Mobile apps and access certainly involve IT—and in some cases, the knowhow to develop new mobile apps for your organization may rest with someone in the IT or Web department. Many of the early adopters of new platforms or technologies are going to be the people who work with, invent, and get geeked about new or emergent technologies. Often the people in your IT department, along with their peers and friends in their community, will discover the next big thing and be flagging it for the attention of the marketing and communications departments before it would ever have shown up on the radars of those groups. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, to have IT leading the charge in social, since these media are at their heart digital and technological?
Well, no. As we’ve discussed, social media is not about technology. Technology is merely the enabler of a bigger dynamic, which is the changing manner in which consumers get information, the changing networks through which they take it in, and the new sources they’ll trust for that information. Social is still largely an outward-facing medium, and in most organizations, IT is still largely an internal-facing support function with little experience with customer service or interacting with the public. In an environment where a slight misstep can be pounced on and spread virally before you even have time to realize someone’s upset with you, do you really want to have a group unused to public interaction in charge of your online presence? I know several organizations where social media is led out of the Web development team, and I’ve been in organizations where the IT department has argued rather strenuously that social media is a matter of technology adoption and incorporation and thus should be led and directed by the technology team. I couldn’t disagree more adamantly. IT has a role to play in supporting implementation of social tools, especially internally, but should not be running your social media presence. The skills needed to build social platforms may reside with your technology team, but the skills needed to use them to great effect externally do not.
Ideal Conditions for Winning
So where does that leave us? Obviously, there are many functions within an organization that at the very least touch social media—and several with legitimate claim to take the lead on social media initiatives. Ideally, you’ll have some sort of consensus within the organization—and a hybrid group assembled of public relations/communications, marketing, and customer service, with some input from HR and IT, making decisions together on social initiatives and operating in a sort of dotted-line reporting structure to each of these functions. But even within this group, someone’s got to have the end responsibility for making final decisions, setting direction, and settling differences of opinion. To draw a baseball analogy, not every pitcher can start for you and be on the mound for Game 7 of the World Series; no matter how good your rotation may be, only one pitcher is your ace and gets the call to start your biggest games. For social media, which function is the “ace”? Who should “own” social?
The two-way interaction demanded by social media audiences is too important to your long-term success—and most marketing departments (at least the ones I’ve been exposed to and heard about from other leaders in the social media space) just don’t “get” how to interact with people without messaging at them. Giving ultimate control of social media to marketing in most cases means your efforts will lack the shift in tactics and mindset necessary to win. Ironically, while the social media industry increasingly refers to what it does as “marketing,” most of the strongest practitioners have communications backgrounds, and most of the most decorated or praised corporate programs are led by communications and PR departments.
The Importance of Collaboration
That’s not to reject the validity of the contributions and perspectives of the other groups—and it’s incumbent on the communications team to develop and maintain social media programs that incorporate the strengths and needs of the other functions, especially marketing. Unilateral action or too much arrogance from communications doesn’t utilize all the resources available to your company for social media—and in many cases, it can lead to unnecessary and unproductive internal battles.
At IBM, when we started planning our social media program, we began by putting a wiki together behind the firewall and having the 25 or so people inside the company with the most active blogs and most extensive knowledge of the space collaborate on the guidelines we would eventually propose. This dynamic set the tone early, and social—while nominally led through communications—was always seen as something of a collaborative process and function. There were fewer “turf wars” as the program evolved, largely as a result of the team-oriented or collective way things were initiated.
Dell experienced similar collective evolution. Richard Bin-hammer says that while the initial team doing online outreach sat with tech support, the company realized quickly a greater opportunity existed than simply doing tech support online. “There were corporate reputation issues to address,” he remembers, “explaining the transformation of our business, clarifying Michael Dell’s role after his return as CEO. There were questions about sustainability and our green program, questions about our evolving business model. This was about more than just tech support.”5 The company brought together members of the technical support team already interacting with customers, members of the communications team, and Binhammer from public affairs to be the new social media team. Richard reports very few “turf wars” as the social media program has evolved over the past four years at Dell—and just like at IBM, he ascribes this to the culture of the company adopting social media as a business tool applicable across the entire organization rather than as a marketing tool, communications tool, or customer service tool.
Unfortunately, “ideally” doesn’t always happen. In many organizations, one group usually takes the lead—either by design or by accident—and moves ahead of the others. Despite the best or well-meant efforts of the people tasked with running the show, turf wars can often develop—especially when the organization begins to see success from its social efforts.
This is especially true if the company is undergoing changes unrelated to social media. At General Motors, we launched our social media program while going through the paroxysms of radical restructuring, bankruptcy, and the pressure of rebuilding the company and our brands. People were losing their jobs, leaving those left in the company scrambling to prove their worth or find something that made them more valuable to keep at the company. Social media was achieving greater prominence and getting a lot of attention in both the mainstream media and the marketing and PR trade press, and in some minds it represented job security, so many people in the organization gravitated to it as something to make their own.
In hindsight, while I was and remain proud to have been hired by the communications department and to have led GM’s social media program from the PR side of the house, I wish I had done a better job of reaching out to and including marketing earlier in the development of the program. We could have been more effective and could have avoided some of the internal squabbles over control that sometimes affected our program even into 2010 and 2011. (In fact, GM’s marketing department hired its own social media agency in late 2010 and began developing its own social programs—first independent of the established program and then superseding it. While there were lots of reasons that this occurred, and it might well have happened no matter what we’d done on the communications side, I can’t help but wonder now if we could have avoided some of the duplication and uncertainty if I’d worked more closely with marketing, perhaps lessening perceptions they might have had that our program wasn’t inclusive of their needs.)
Leading Inclusively
If you’re starting from zero in your organization, how should you go about establishing clarity of purpose and where the lines of authority should run? First and foremost, you should start not with an action but with a mind-set: by seeing social media as tools for the entire business, not just a marketing, PR, or customer service tool. When you begin building a program with the entire organization’s benefit in mind, you have a better chance of being inclusive of the entire organization’s needs and objectives for a social media presence—which will decrease the likelihood of parallel efforts or turf wars later on, because in this scenario, no group should feel left out of the process or that its needs aren’t being met.
Second, no matter which group is hiring the social media lead or department, that group ought to reach out proactively to every other group we’ve discussed in this chapter. (It’s a relatively safe assumption that the executive champion will be leading the hiring or driving the initiative, so he will likely be the one doing the outreach.) Let the rest of the organization know you’re hiring. See if there are any debates or disagreements about that group’s “right” to hire a lead. Whatever turf wars there are to be fought should be fought now by the executive champion and his peers, before the department or program is established and before a lead is hired. (This could be a test of the executive champion’s ability to successfully defend his vision and establish himself in the role of social media champion within the executive ranks.) Without agreement on this most basic start, your organization is setting itself up for internal battles and discord down the road, when your energy will be better expended on external audiences and customers.
In smaller organizations, there may not be turf wars or disagreements over leadership—perhaps only relief that someone else is willing to take it on. Even so, those initiating the program should take care to get buy-in from as much of the rest of the organization as possible. Even if fewer people think they want to take social media on for themselves, it’s still important to include the interests and needs of their role in the program you’re building. At nonprofits, I suspect this is even more important—with resources (both people and money) being scarcer, collaboration and buy-in from all arms of the organization are vital to supporting successful social media program development.
When leadership is on board and in agreement, you can move on to establishing a structure that ensures all parts of the business are represented in the social media program no matter who is leading the way. At General Motors, we established what we called “Social Club”—so named because we felt a more formal name would turn people off, and if folks thought there might be alcohol or fun involved, they’d be more likely to show up. Social Club was a regular weekly meeting among all the brand (Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac) PR and marketing reps who touched social media as part of their responsibilities, with additional representation from legal, customer service, IT, and occasionally some of our partner agencies. Within Social Club, we did everything from share best practices to solicit assistance from one another on upcoming programs or initiatives to make each other aware of emerging platforms, technologies, or opportunities. For example, in late 2008, Phil Colley—then working as our lead social media person for the Chevrolet Volt—came to Social Club to show off a new chat technology he’d learned of and begun to use in Volt social efforts, CoveritLive. We were all impressed with its capabilities, and within weeks, many of us in Social Club were using CoveritLive to conduct live chats between our executives and consumer audiences. During the weeks around the bankruptcy filing, we used this tool to conduct frequent chats featuring senior leadership (including then-CEO Fritz Henderson)—a remarkable openness during an obviously challenging and important time for the company and for American taxpayers, and something we were able to do simply, quickly, and inexpensively. These chats were a cornerstone of our communication strategy during the bankruptcy period, and we found the tool that made them possible through the Social Club structure. This was just one example of something that first surfaced at Social Club and was adopted throughout GM’s social media practice.
It’s important not to overformalize this structure or turn it into yet another interminable organizational meeting. You’ll lose enthusiasm and participation rather quickly—or you’ll find your organization unconsciously structuring the social program and removing the spontaneity that will make you successful. Consider holding the meeting outside of regular conference space (at GM, we held several of our earliest meetings in the bar area of a restaurant then located on the first floor of the Renaissance Center—not for the alcohol, but because the bar featured fantastic views of the Detroit River and the skyline of Windsor, Ontario, that inspired us and added to the “not just another meeting” feel we were aiming for). Keep some semblance of structure—know what you’re going to discuss ahead of each meeting—but also encourage spontaneity, and don’t be afraid of unscheduled brainstorming. Just like in social media in general, there is a delicate balance between discipline and creativity that you have to find.
And don’t give in to usual corporate culture—in this meeting, not everyone has to speak or provide a report. You’re not aiming for a “check the social media box” atmosphere. Just make sure you’re giving everyone in the organization who touches social media a chance to access the same information and new tools, and encourage people to share the programs or initiatives they’re preparing. Lessons learned are also important items to share—including what didn’t work or what not to do. The leader of this meeting has to cultivate an environment in which no one is afraid to report “failure”—because in an emerging space like social media, there are going to be missteps or things you won’t do again. These aren’t failures or underperformances; they’re valuable opportunities to refine what you’re doing—and you have to promote a culture in this group that rewards the sharing of what hasn’t worked as much as what has.
Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is make sure that the entire business is integrating social media into what each function does, that each function’s needs or objectives are being met by social initiatives, and that information is being shared freely among all parts of the organization.
The role of the executive champion continues to be vitally important here. It’s inevitable that disagreements will arise even among your core “social club” group. Most often, they’ll be solvable by consensus or discussion, and in most other cases, the social media lead should be able to make a command decision that is respected and accepted by the rest of the organization. But on a few occasions, there will be a debate that can’t be settled or an answer that a particular part of the business will not be willing to accept. In these cases, the executive champion will need to be prepared to step in to either defend the social media lead’s decision and enforce it if necessary or make a final decision that the rest of the organization must adhere to. Absent that hammer from the executive champion, you’re risking anarchy and a lack of cohesion among the parts of the business involved. This core group should meet regularly and frequently. The social Web changes rapidly, and the group must be able to help the organization adjust when a new platform emerges or Facebook announces yet another change in its service. Frequent meetings also encourage a quick, coordinated response should your organization need it. Given the immediate nature of social networks and audience expectations of almost instantaneous response to situations as they arise, you’re going to be agile and organized should you be faced with a social Web or business crisis. Richard Binhammer recalls that at Dell, as tech support, communications, marketing, and public affairs came together to build the company’s social program in 2006 and 2007, “We realized later that what we achieved in those first days was establishing a coordinated rapid response team. We didn’t know at the time that that’s what we were doing, but that’s exactly what we did.”6 You’re not going to have time in a crisis to try to assemble a group of relevant or interested players unless it already exists; this coordinating body will serve as your rapid response and crisis management team.
By this point (I hope), there’s agreement at the senior leadership level of an organization that social media is a tool for the whole business and that social efforts should be inclusive of all parts of the business. An established and acknowledged executive champion has pushed through his vision as to which part of the business should be leading the others (or what the leadership structure will look like if he’s creating a hybrid body to direct social initiatives) and clarified to the rest of the organization who has final authority on adjudicating disagreements or internal dissension about the direction of a social initiative or program. There are arrangements for a regular body or group to keep each other informed and coordinated under specific leadership—and in doing all this, perhaps fend off turf wars or internal battles before they start. The organization is now ready to take the biggest step: hiring or promoting the person who will be the biggest face and voice of the brand in the social Web and the most visible and vocal champion of social media inside the firewall. The next piece of the puzzle is a social media evangelist.