Posts Tagged ‘enterprise social media’

Enterprise Social Media Management

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October 18th, 2009

(yes, that is the enterprise from star trek…get it?)

Update: edited to remove company names to avoid any misunderstanding

I’m sitting at the Vegas airport after having donated by money to the Vegas charity foundation (aka the casinos) and was just thinking about some of the interesting conversations I had with folks during the course of the Blog World Expo event. One of the things that struck me as being odd was that there are many global enterprise organizations that are relying on one social media person to handle all of their efforts. I had the opportunity to speak with folks from various enterprise companies to get their feedback on social media and I believe that the guys out there running social media need more support in order to get the job done.

This is a bit bizarre to me. Do multi-billion dollar international companies really think that they can push all of their social media efforts onto one person or even two people? What expectations can a company possibly have by assigning one person to manage and build relationships for the entire world on behalf of a brand, it’s ridiculous. This is a problem because having one person handle social media for a enterprise company is a virtually impossible task. At the end of the day you get out what you put in, so if you have one person doing all the work; you’re going to get the value of one person.

To me this signifies that a company really doesn’t understand the value of social media yet (why, is another discussion). We’re talking about changing how a company builds relationships and communicates with their customers around the world; this business shift cannot be placed onto one person and it’s not going to happen with a few months. Again, this comes back to what the objectives of the company are but we need to get real here. If you’re a large organization looking to develop a full social media strategy with a measurement component then you are going to need a full team working on this and not just one person.

I’m going to have more to say on this later, but I just wanted to point this out and get your feedback and ideas on how you think a large organization should manage it’s social media efforts. Who would you put on your social media team and why?

TAGS: enterprise social media, social media management, social media team

Corporate Social Media, What’s the Problem?

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October 18th, 2008

credit, David Armano

I just wanted to share this great illustration that David created. I think it definitely speaks volumes of how large corporations approach social media (some, not all of them). The problem with a lot of large corporations and social media (and SEO and pretty much anything else you can think of) is that there is not smooth transition and there is no ownership.

In a large corporation if you want to start a blog it needs to get approved by the marketing team, and/or the sales team, and/or the legal team, and/or senior managers, and/or the product guys, etc. Not to mentioned that each team usually has several people that need to approve the project. Basically the corporation kills its own social media strategy and ends up churning out some kind of garbage that fails miserably. Then, the corporation gets upset that the social media strategy didn’t work and therefore dismisses it.

I think that before we begin looking at where the corporation conversations are going on, what technologies corporations should use, and how corporations should engage with their users; we should first examine the barriers and limitations. Before a company jumps into a social media campaign they need to know who is going to take ownership, how many channels the campaign needs to go through, what teams/people need to approve, etc. In fact, if your company has to ask all of these questions then social media is probably not going to work for you.

Corporations need to figure out a simple and easy way to launch and grow their social media campaigns without hindering their own success, otherwise what’s the point?

what’s your take on how corporations view and engage in social media?

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TAGS: company social media, corporate social media, corporate social media strategy, enterprise social media