CHAPTER 9
TEACHING THE ORGANIZATION TO FISH

You know the old philosophical question, if a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? I’d like to offer my own adaptation of that saying: if an organization builds a great social media policy and program but doesn’t involve its employees, is that organization really involved in social media?

Not every organization or company will empower all of its employees to engage in social networks. All the same, it’s a good idea to build a social media education program for all employees anyway. Given the pervasiveness of the social Web, the odds are strong that at least some of your employees are already active in a network or two; maybe they even maintain active blogs. A basic level of instruction or guidance for all of your employees is the minimum you should offer, if for no other reason than to familiarize everyone in the organization with the social media policy you’ve developed.

But what if you want to go further? What if your organization is aiming higher? What if you want to build social media capability into your organization’s DNA—to the point that rather than having just a social media specialist or two, your organization naturally integrates social media into every program, plan, and campaign? How should the company’s education program change in order to achieve that end, and what things should it include?

An organization can do plenty of interesting or even great things in the social space without an employee education initiative, but engineering the culture change often necessary for the full embrace of social media—and by extension making social media an integrated and instinctive part of what an organization does—requires going beyond having a center of expertise, a handful of experts, or even a social media rock star on staff. Organizations have to educate employees across the company broadly and give them the information they’ll need to effectively engage in the social Web.

One Shoe, Many Sizes

The first step in developing a social media education program is recognizing that one size does not fit all. Not everyone in the company will use the information or get involved—and depending on what your policy dictates, everyone may not be allowed to. But some will begin interacting in social networks. Others will touch social media occasionally in the course of their jobs. Still others may have social media as a direct part of their official responsibilities.

Each of these “tiers” has different needs, and a good social media education program will have to be varied enough to accommodate them. Your organization shouldn’t try to develop a mandatory expert-level webinar series or certification exam for every employee. The majority of your employees will not be called upon to use social tools regularly as part of their jobs. Exposing them to more than they’ll ever need to know for their jobs or for how they’ll use social (if at all)—or any other extraneous subject, for that matter—only heightens the risk that they’ll tune out and go back to focusing on subjects more germane to their roles.

People should be experts in the role for which you pay them, but it’s not necessary for someone in finance or engineering to become an expert social marketer—and he has enough to think about without adding another topic to master. You’re giving your employees who don’t use social media professionally enough information so that they don’t make a really bad mistake that reflects on you when they use it in a personal capacity.

Some of your employees, however, will be tasked with regularly using social media in their jobs—and still others will be called on to be your experts and community managers. You can’t offer basic policy familiarity and nothing else to the people who are going to be your faces and ears in the social world. A company has to arm its designated experts with information and training at a level that will help make them experts.

Level One: Undergraduate

The base level for all employees, regardless of whether they’ll ever touch social media for their jobs, should be familiarization with the organization’s social media policy. Even if an employee isn’t blogging or tweeting on behalf of your organization, she may well be active in the social Web on her own—and thus is still subject to your social media policy and guidelines. You need to build a basic instructional module just as you would for expense rules or business conduct guidelines and make sure that every employee takes the course. It doesn’t have to be expansive, but it does have to cover the core of what employees are and are not allowed to do in the social Web.

For example, consider what H&R Block has implemented. Zena Weist explains: “We have over 100,000 employees, and there’s a lot of chatter going on out there [in the social Web]. How do we keep their work talk on brand? In order to respond in one brand voice, we educate our associates on our online communication policy, which is tied to our code of conduct. We include our online communication policy in all our partner and vendor agreements so everyone that is speaking on our brand’s behalf is speaking with our brand promise and the customer’s expectations in mind.”¹

H&R Block’s approach reflects a solid understanding of the environment. It recognizes that employees and associates are going to be active in the social Web and that trying to restrict or control all of their conversations is futile—not to mention limiting their potential effectiveness. To protect its brand and ensure consistency, H&R Block educates everyone at the company on its online communication (social media) policy—to the extent of even including that policy in vendor and partner agreements. It’s a savvy acknowledgment that its associates, partners, and vendors—in order to serve its customers who are also there—will potentially have at least some exposure to the social Web. Its effort to familiarize its policy to as many people as possible with an affiliation with H&R Block not only promises greater consistency in customer interactions but also protects both H&R Block and its associates by making sure that everyone knows the ground rules.

So what should be included in a basic instructional-level education module?

• Review of the organization’s social media policy. Start by making sure employees are aware that the organization has a social media policy and covering its basic tenets. Before a teenager actually gets behind the wheel to learn how to drive, he first spends weeks in the classroom learning the rules of the road—so that when he does actually get out on the road, he has at least a basic idea of what to do. There’s no substitute for experience, but knowing the rules better prepares someone to actually do it. Social media within a corporation is much the same. Teach everyone the company’s rules before getting them out on the road.

• Basic familiarization with some of the most popular platforms in the social media universe. This includes Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and Gowalla, how blogs work, social bookmarking, RSS, Google Alerts, Quora, and others as they emerge. (They’ll keep emerging; Google+ launched in June 2011 and promptly attracted more than 20 million users in its first month, even while still in beta.) You don’t have to get too deep into the weeds; just make sure that people know the ABCs—what the platform is, how it works, how you sign up for an account, and the basics of how to interact on it. Videos are often a great vehicle for getting the basic ideas across. At GM, we licensed several installments of the Common Craft “In Plain English” series by Lee LeFever. The videos are simple, as well as entertaining, and make clear the benefit of the platform or tool being discussed. They’re a very useful set of tools for quick instruction, and I recommend them.

• A beginner’s etiquette or “tips and tricks” guide to the most common platforms used in the social Web. Ideally, employees involved in social media will be familiar with the basic rules of the road for common social networks. They should know to link back to posts, blogs, or sites, for example, or that a first comment on someone’s blog should not include a hard-sell pitch for the brand represented. You’ll want them to know that using hashtags on Twitter will help not only to keep track of conversations but also to draw new viewers to your feed—or that it’s not a good idea to check in “at home” on a location-based network, because then every time you check in someplace else, the entire network will know that you’re not at home, which means you’re potentially risking burglary or break-ins. Your purpose in these deeper dives is to decrease the likelihood that an employee commits an unintentional faux pas or breach of etiquette likely to reflect poorly on the organization—as well as to protect your employees from unwittingly exposing themselves to potential legal or reputational ramifications off-line.

• A resource guide for people looking to learn more. Which sites have particularly useful information and features on the social media industry? Where might employees read or hear about “the next big thing”? Whose blogs should they add to their reader? Who are particularly good or influential people for them to follow on Twitter—either from the “social media” space or within your industry? Try to help employees get as smart as they want to be on social media, and give them as many resources for continued learning as possible. Let’s face it, your training module will be outdated at least to an extent within a few weeks of your rolling it out. These resources will help your employees stay up on what’s emerged or developed after the training was built.

• Points of contact within the organization for further questions about social media. Who will be your employees’ go-to person or people with information and perspective to help them if and when they want to know more, want some clarification on something in the policy, or find themselves in a jam? Who should be advising them on matters that go beyond what’s covered in the training module? The bigger your organization, the less likely that everyone will know each other or recognize who the social media leaders are (the evangelist might have a profile internally, but what about the rest of your team?)—so make sure everyone knows who the points of contact are.

The basic module isn’t a “nice to have” or an optional program that makes you forward-thinking in the realm of social media. This is, in the social media era, a simple and smart “meets minimum” for any company whether it has a social program or not. Everyone in the organization must be aware of what activities are permissible, the basic code of conduct expected should anyone be involved in social, and what things will generate disciplinary action or even termination.

Level Two: Graduate Instruction

The second level or tier of education should be for everyone who works in the functions most likely to brush up against social media in some fashion—communications, marketing, and customer service. Whether or not social is a part of their official description right now, the odds are high that at some point in their career, people in these fields are going to have to do some social media–related tactical planning or be active in a social network as part of a campaign. These employees will need more than the official policy. A survey-level introduction to social media platforms, history, tools, and etiquette is better here.

Responsibilities of Representing a Brand Within Social Media

Just because someone knows how to engage in social networks—and has maybe even built up a following—that doesn’t mean she’s fully aware of all that comes with representing a brand in those networks. The way an individual conducts herself in the social Web isn’t always the right way to conduct herself when she’s associated with a brand.

One of my Detroit automotive counterparts, Chrysler, learned this the hard way in March 2011. One of the young people working for its social media agency—and who had access to the official company Twitter account—was frustrated at a slow morning rush-hour drive in Detroit and tweeted his disapproval: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f——— drive.”

Only the tweet didn’t go out from the young man’s personal account. He accidentally sent it from the @ChryslerAutos account.²

It wasn’t a Chrysler-only situation. That kind of accident could happen to many companies. But the resulting controversy not only cost the young man his job with his agency but also cost the agency its contract with Chrysler.

The problem as I saw it wasn’t really that the accident happened. It was that apparently no one had instructed employees—whether Chrysler’s or the agency’s—that when you represent a brand, there’s a different standard you’re held to, and there are certain things you shouldn’t ever do (like drop f-bombs in your tweets). Even when, as someone associated with a big brand, you’re tweeting from your own account or writing your own blog, you’re still associated with the brand. Yes, people knew that I wasn’t working 24 hours a day when I was at GM, but even when I tweeted from @cbarger or wrote my own stuff, everyone still knew me as “the GM guy.” My using profanity or being crude or deliberately controversial or offering my opinion on controversial subjects would have reflected on General Motors just as surely as if I’d done it while writing on GM’s FastLane blog or tweeted from @GMBlogs. And so I had to behave differently—as does anyone in your organization given the responsibility to man the company’s social accounts. Even if the employee’s name isn’t supposed to be widely known, that responsibility still exists. People will eventually make that connection. So make sure that any employee who’s going to officially engage for your brand knows the following:

• Don’t use profanity in social networks, even when you think you’re on your own account.

• Don’t insert yourself into political or religious discussions that could, in today’s polarized climate, reflect on the brand or end up offending or turning off potential customers based on politics. No one disputes that employees don’t give up their right to free speech when taking on a social media job, but getting into political discussions rarely reflects well on the brand. Let it go and save the political argument for the bar or the gym.

• Don’t join in on sexually charged banter or anything that might offend someone with a different sense of what’s “proper” from yours.

This may sound as if I’m advocating a brand representative sublimate his entire personality when taking on a social media job. Not necessarily—but I am saying that representing a brand calls for a different standard, and if someone is uncomfortable with that standard, he perhaps shouldn’t aspire to represent a brand in social networks. I once had a conversation with a woman employed by a large tech company after I’d spoken on this subject. She angrily informed me that “I’m me, I’m who I am, and I talk the way I talk. If they don’t like who I am, they shouldn’t ask me to do stuff on their behalf.” All I could think was, “So you want the visibility that comes with being a brand rep, and you think it entitles you to additional compensation or advancement (she made that clear), but you don’t want to act responsibly enough to be trusted with the brand’s name?”

Case Study Reviews

Select several case studies, both some that are well known and those that are less so, that are considered examples of companies “getting it right” and of companies committing social media “fails.” Explore them at length. Some will be cases of strong execution of a social media plan, others of poor implementation. Discuss at length what was good or bad about each of them and how the lessons from these case studies might be applied to your organization. (There are several specific examples coming up in Chapter 12 that you may find useful.)

Scenario Planning and “War Games”

Break into small group teams, each moderated by the evangelist or one of your other social media experts, and run through sets of unfolding scenarios in which the team will have to react in “real time” to events occurring at or about the company or brand. Theory and “book learning” is all well and good, but until someone has had to react in social media time and develop something of a “gut” for this kind of work, it’s just not the same. So the purpose of this kind of an exercise is to acclimate a team to the pace and quick changes in the social networking world.

While the purpose of the first tier of training is to provide as many of a brand’s employees as possible a basic understanding of social media and how the company wants to conduct its program, the goal of this second training tier is to begin to develop expertise among a smaller group of professionals within the organization who can easily take on social media responsibilities and even represent the brand in social networks without causing headaches or being too risky.

Level Three: Doctorate Instruction

The top-tier educational program is for those employees whose daily duties or job description include social media responsibilities, especially the ones responsible for running the official corporate or organizationally branded accounts. The people you’re looking at for this level of instruction should have either completed the first two levels of instruction or gained enough experience running social programs or accounts that they won’t need to take them.

For this group, you should consider bringing in outside speakers or authors from the social media world. Yes, I know that I’ve said that the premise of this book is that the outside consultants or social media experts many times do not understand or have a full grasp of the challenges faced when you’re representing a brand rather than yourself online. I stand by that premise (I obviously have to, right?), but fresh, out-of-the-organization thinking can be invigorating, and every industry or business needs to be pushed a little from the outside, particularly when it gets too comfortable or set in its ways. At General Motors, we brought in outside thinkers and authors like Joseph Jaffe, Jason Falls, Chris Brogan, and David Meerman Scott to speak to members of our extended social media team—sometimes in small group sessions, other times in groups of up to 50. Each of these sessions proved extremely beneficial, not just because of the perspective that these individuals brought to us but also because of the bursts of imagination and creativity they sparked in our own people, who began brainstorming and thinking in different directions afterward.

There’s another reason to bring in an outside voice to talk with your team. It is an unfortunate reality of human and organizational nature that we ascribe more credibility to outside voices than organizational ones. A social media evangelist or an extended social media team can lecture or drill until they’re blue in the face, and there may still be people inside the organization who resist the message or remain skeptical. But an outside voice, especially one who’s written a book or achieved an eye-catching following online, can convert skeptics to believers—even if he’s saying the exact same thing you did. It’s wise for the social team to acknowledge this reality, however frustrating, and take advantage of whatever relationships they’ve built with external influencers to reinforce good ideas. Ultimately, it shouldn’t matter whom the organization credits with an idea or whom the team listens to; as long as the wisdom is accepted, the cause is furthered. (Of course, this puts the onus on the social leads to vet their outside sources wisely. Bringing in an outside influence whose perspective veers dramatically from what you want your people to understand is obviously counterproductive!)

One last consideration, hardly unique to social media but worth mentioning just the same: don’t make the mistake of believing that all of your employee education will take place within your walls. Your “level three” employees need to get out and hear what others are doing, see emerging beta technologies, or just interact with professionals who have similar challenges and goals. Relationships are especially important in social media, and face-to-face interaction with influencers and peers is perhaps even more important than in other practices or functions. So it’s worth your organization’s time to identify good conferences and webinars for your most involved employees to attend. Visibility and participation in the social media conference circuit is also very important in getting the social media “echo chamber” to recognize that your organization is active and has a program that may be worth observation.

Making It Happen: Doing the Training

Once an organization has decided what it’s going to teach to each tier of employee, it of course has to actually conduct or distribute this training. I’ve seen it done via Web modules over company intranets—in fact, we had our basic, entry-level training at General Motors done in this way. Obviously you can reach more people through these technologies, and you have a mechanism to track who’s completed the training and signed off on it. (You also have the option of updating the training or doing something like a yearly recertification as the space continues to evolve.)

But for the second group we’ve talked about, you really ought to consider an in-person, dedicated series of sessions to get everyone up to speed. You can help these employees get signed on to Twitter if they’re not already, walk them through how many of the platforms and tools are used, and do some scenario planning and case study assessments. You can go much more in depth with an in-person class session. Yes, it takes more time and resources, and not everyone has the ability or people to lead a training session like this. But if you can make it work, it gives your people far greater knowledge and deeper understanding. A few hours of time invested now can make a big difference down the line.

Another option to consider—though it takes a commitment of time and resources—is to build a mechanism for your employees to train and inform each other. This was one of our most effective tactics back when I was at IBM. As we rolled out our blogging guidelines in early 2005, the company also built an internal blogging platform (creatively enough, we called it “Blog Central”) on which any employee could start up an internal blog viewable by any other employee in the company. The purpose was to enable and empower group learning and information sharing, whether about various parts of IBM’s business or about the emergence of blogging or about sites or platforms different IBMers were discovering. Within just a year, more than 3,000 IBMers maintained blogs on Blog Central. Some were obviously more popular than others—but the good thing was that some new thought leaders surfaced, people whose knowledge was deemed valuable by the employee community and whose personal stock rose as the organization was able to see what they knew and the respect the employee base had for them. The blogs were searchable by keyword, the top five most popular blogs of the day and week were listed for reference, and information was shared freely across the organization and among employees. While it made some of the lessons less “centralized” or “approved,” that wasn’t always a bad thing—the learning was more organic, sometimes had more credibility with our employees because it came from “us” and not “them” in management, and was no longer the sole responsibility of the core social media team. (I did, as “blogger-in-chief,” have the responsibility of looking over the content on Blog Central to make sure that nothing counterproductive or incorrect was being passed around, but that was the extent to which we tried to control it. You’d be amazed at how much your employee community knows and how quickly bad information gets corrected or self-policed.)

Again, not every organization is going to have the IT or financial resources to put up an internal blogging platform (although microblogging tools like Socialcast or Yammer provide similar functionality without the hassle of maintaining a separate internal infrastructure), but it can be a fantastic tool for community self-education and knowledge sharing.

Building a tiered education system can go a long way toward increasing the knowledge base and understanding your PR, marketing, and customer service teams have of social media platforms, networks, tools, and audience expectations. But there is no substitute for actual experience—either for your individual people or for your program as a whole. Only experience can instill a systematic, organization-wide commitment to social media as a business practice. That’s why we developed a philosophy at General Motors designed not just to build winning social media campaigns and earn respect in social media circles but also to build a permanent capability for the company that would truly integrate social media into the way GM does business. In the next section, I’ll argue that all employees should have some exposure to social media. I’ll also discuss ways to build that exposure into your organizational framework.

Immerse and Disperse

A core team of social media experts can definitely make for a winning program—but that program will always be centered on that small core, vulnerable to individual departures and dependent on that team’s internal influence. A program that exposes as many people as possible inside the organization to real-life social media campaigns can extend social media acumen and expertise throughout an organization—and in doing so, hasten the adoption of social media across the entire business.

It can be tempting, when building a social program, to try to either build a social media rock star from within or attract one from the outside to be the face of the program. It’s easy to see the appeal: a social media rock star draws attention, carries name recognition for your brand or organization, and gives audiences a specific face, name, and personality to identify with a brand. If the whole point of interacting in the social Web is to humanize your brand and make you more than just a logo, why not go all out and personify your brand through that individual?

There are a few problems with this approach, the first and most obvious being that an organization is extremely vulnerable to an individual’s departure. If I had built General Motors’ program entirely around my own persona, the company would have had to start its social media position from scratch after I left in March 2011. (Fortunately, the department housed dozens of people, including a significant handful who’d developed solid followings of their own; as a result, my departure did nothing to harm GM’s presence in the social Web.)

Additionally, having social media expertise sitting in the hands of only a core team somewhat diminishes the purpose of having a social media program. When you’re not integrating social practices and tactics into every campaign from its inception, you’re counting on someone in your organization to tap into the core team’s knowledge and expertise—or even be aware of that individual’s or small group’s existence and role—in order to get social into larger strategies. If you want to make social media truly part of what your organization inherently does, you have to distribute the knowledge as broadly as you can.

A more significant problem with the “core team” approach is a simple matter of scale. No matter how prolific I may be, there is no human way for me to carry on conversations with more than a few dozen or a hundred customers or potential customers every day. Even if I’m persuading many of the people I engage with to buy something from the company I represent, I’m sure the impact of my individual efforts would be relatively minimal every month or quarter. No one person can possibly talk to everyone who wants attention or answers from a large global brand. This is the challenge inherent in organizational social media from the outset and the hardest one to overcome: social media effectiveness is crafted from the building of relationships, and that is very difficult to scale.

Worse still, credibility in the social space comes from being able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk within communities of interest. And no matter how much a social media representative studies or how hard she may work, it would be incredibly difficult for her to present herself as an expert who can speak knowledgeably about all the different subjects relevant to her business. Imagine a social media director at a retail chain. Is he going to be an expert on every product its stores carry, and the company’s marketing strategy, and the business performance questions investors may ask, and the organization’s supply chain, and the local activities of individual stores, and the company’s charitable giving and social responsibility efforts? At some point, the image of “jack of all trades, master of none” is going to bleed through, because nobody is able to maintain credible expertise in every subject that touches a big brand or organization.

Wouldn’t it be better to train and empower people within relevant parts of the business to engage with the communities that care about their areas of expertise? Wouldn’t it be better to have not one or two “social media faces” of a company, but six or ten or twelve or twenty or even more? After all, if one person can carry on 50 conversations a day, then five could carry on 250, ten could talk to 500, fifteen could talk to 750, and so on. The way to address scale in the social media world is not just to distribute the knowledge of social media among your employees but also to convey the authority to enter communities and engage in conversations on the company’s behalf. Unless your organization does this, you will always find yourself confronting the challenge of scale.

At General Motors, we tackled this challenge by developing a philosophy I call “immerse and disperse.” This philosophy was the backbone of our program and is the reason that GM’s program grew to the extent that it has. The core concept is simple: rather than have a permanent team of social media experts or rock stars recognized by the outside world, we built a sort of “revolving door” social media team, designed to move people through the system and get them plugged back into other parts of the organization as experts in their own right.

Here’s how immerse and disperse works: once an evangelist or social media lead is in place, make her the only permanent member of the social team. Other employees—sometimes new hires, other times people you already have—are drafted into the team for a short-term assignment. Some organizations might choose six or nine months, while others could opt for eighteen-month stints; at GM, we mandated terms of approximately one year.

For the length of that term, the assigned employees are immersed completely in social media—it is their major or only responsibility. Give them a baptism by fire, as it were. There is no substitute for actual experience, no matter what business specialty someone wants to learn—so the immersion is designed to provide that experience. These employees spend that year becoming an expert by doing the following:

• Manning the brand’s social accounts—updating the brand’s Facebook pages, managing the community on the company blog, or interacting on the company Twitter feed

• Being assigned responsibility to learn about new or emerging social platforms and reporting back to the evangelist or the rest of the team on their potential uses by the brand

• Running specific social campaigns or programs around a product, coordinating the brand’s presence at important social media shows, or targeting a specific online community (moms or environmentalists, for example)

• Attending social media conferences and seminars to not only learn about what other companies are doing and what the “next big thing” might be but also build relationships of their own with other practitioners, with bloggers, and with social media influencers

• When they are ready, speaking at smaller social media conferences representing the brand, raising awareness of the brand’s program and efforts, and building their own profile with external audiences as an expert

At the end of their designated term, move the employees on to other parts of the company—other branches of marketing or communications, working with sub-brands if the organization has any (for example, GM had Chevrolet, Buick, etc.), product development, business planning, or even finance and accounting or HR. As soon as employees are a credible subject-matter expert in social media, disperse them to other parts of the business where they can serve as embedded social media experts, teaching others what they know and spreading social media knowledge—and the practice of social media—across the entire organization.

Immerse and disperse not only helps speed adoption and institutional understanding of social media throughout your company or organization but also addresses that number one challenge of social media effectiveness: scale. It creates and develops more touch points for audiences to interact with a brand—and each of those individuals in turn can then train his colleagues in how to effectively engage in social media. None of them may individually approach the reach or following of some of the rock stars in the space, but collectively they will have not only similar reach but also perhaps more personal, regular, and relevant interactions with various online communities. Perhaps equally important, by distributing the online and social presence of the company to a range of equally qualified individuals, immerse and disperse insures the company against the impact of any individual’s leaving.

Keep Teaching

As is the case with most careers and in life itself, the key to success isn’t just the initial amounts of education one acquires; it’s in the continued and evolving education and learning one is prepared to undertake. Social media as a phenomenon is still in its childhood, with much maturing and development to come. New technologies and platforms break out every few months. No social media education initiative will ever be completely comprehensive or all-inclusive; no individual within your organization will ever know everything that’s current or “right” with social media. So plan on revising and updating your education module at least once a year, if not more often. Here are a few ways to learn or decide what to put in the updated versions:

• Make sure your evangelist and (hopefully) a few others in the organization are attending social media conferences regularly to learn about the newest trends or developments.

• Make sure that whoever is building the training remains active in social networks and isn’t spending most of her time in meetings or focused on internal dynamics. The atmosphere shifts quickly online, and what “worked” or made for good brand interaction six months ago may not work as well today. Constant and regular interaction is the best way to keep current.

• Assign regular reading to your team of various social media and marketing sites (Mashable, Adrants, ReadWriteWeb, Ad Age, and any number of social media blogs). While it’s important to learn to take hype with a grain of salt in social media, these are still good places to get ideas and learn about emerging platforms or technologies. Have your people occasionally send articles around. Better yet, have them analyze the content a little for perspective or potential application inside the organization.

• Attend at least a couple of social media conferences each year—not just for the programmed content but also for the hallway and reception conversations that happen with other attendees, which are often the most valuable parts of a conference.

Have your employees, even the most experienced ones, refresh their training and understanding often. Recognize that the pace of change in social media punishes complacency and that practices that a year ago made you cutting edge are now so commonplace as to be unremarkable. If you want to be a leader in this space, you constantly have to be revamping what you know, what you do, and how you do it. Just like in life, an education in social media never truly ends.

Teaching an organization to fish is the most effective way to scale social media initiatives and make social network interaction part of what the organization as a whole does, not just a specialty that a select few practice. The true goal when building a brand’s social media program is to embed social media expertise and practice deep into the organizational DNA, as much a part of the brand as traditional marketing, advertising, or PR. When an organization’s employee base is trained in the basics, and a cadre of employees has been created to serve as knowledgeable practitioners who will ensure that social strategies and tactics are part of every marketing and communications program or initiative, that’s when the brand truly embraces social media and has a program that stands out among its competitors and in the industry.