There are many good posts on the need for brands and organizations to run their own social media activities. Mia Dand at MarketingMystic recently stated this is one of the top three “inconvenient truths” about social media. The Conversation Agent blog suggests that social outsourcing only makes sense when the CEO doesn’t have the time or interest to engage using the social channel. Way back in 2009, Entrepreneur Magazine tackled this knotty topic. But few articles explore, from a business operations perspective, why it is a bad idea. Let me explain.
All (successful) companies have a strategic plan. Successful companies are marked by both their strategic and operational excellence. They execute in the present while defining the strategic direction for future growth and success. Activities such as entering a new marketplace, refining customer care programs to ensure repeat buyers, engaging in R&D efforts to surface current and future products and services all depend on both current operations and forward-looking strategy. A thriving organization sees sales grow year over year because they can meet market demand in the present and anticipate customer needs well into the future.
Well-designed Social Media programs serve the strategic plan as they integrate into and reinforce the core strategy of an organization. Social programs leverage aspects of the firm’s business strategy to impact the bottom line. They are not just another fancy marketing channel. If the firm’s strategy includes reaching a new buying audience or launching a new product or service, social media can support that strategy by — for example — refining the customer data on which audience targeting and product features are based. The future course of an organization can be often tracked through customer account penetration awareness and satisfaction data.
Through social business integration programs, organizations can get an informed look (beyond standard CRM reporting) at customer demand through a number of different mechanisms. From well-worn social media marketing efforts – using basic tools such as Twitter or Facebook – they can reality-test and evangelize a product or service, even before the primary launch and investment of significant resources. At the same time, they can monitor the social channel to identify changing perceptions, waxing or waning demand and the presence of emerging competitors.
Through the use of owned social channels such as online customer feedback systems, discussion forums and blogs, an organization can discuss with their existing customers what they want or need, identify market gaps along with product or service issues, or even defuse dissatisfaction “bombs” before they destroy sales. Social media enables an organization to act more nimbly using these early signals — what risk managers call “leading indicators.” (I covered this topic in 2010). A constant stream of contextual feedback brings unstructured data into the realm of strategic intelligence through the use of social business metrics.
So … consider the complexities of interpreting these critical signals in the context of your organization’s core strategy. Does the notion that an outside agency will be making the key decisions about which data are important to your organization sound like good business sense? Do you really want a recent graduate with little or no knowledge of your core business values and imperatives deciding which comments or ideas are important to share with your marketing team? Does an agency that doesn’t understand your company’s confidential strategy have the institutional knowledge to accurately parse the data and sift the important stuff from the fluff? Do agency staff even know the right people to contact on your sales or R&D teams, let alone have the relationships and business framework to help them understand and leverage data that may define your company’s future? These are just some of the reasons why outsourcing social is not in your organization’s best interests.
Once business leaders get past the misconception that social media marketing is all there is to social media, and start to think about using it as a strategic support tool – then it will be used and valued as the powerful information resource it truly is. Why would you want to outsource this crown jewel of strategic information? Keep those precious jewels inside your company where they belong!
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Hi Vanessa
Thanks for your post: interesting and well thought out as always. And of course I agree with you wholeheartedly about the importance of social media within an organisation’s strategy. However, I don’t think that precludes outsourcing some of the social media functions. Disclosure: I work for eModeration, who offer outsourced moderation and community management services.
I think it’s about recognising which roles CAN be outsourced, and where the benefits are. It’s also about working closely with a trusted partner. Just as you shouldn’t hand over the keys of the Twitter account to an intern, neither would your agency do that: you are buying in expertise in social media, and training your agency on your brand.
As you know, monitoring and responding in social media is a demanding job, and not confined to office hours either. Often, eModeration staff work in tandem with the brand: we take the night shift, the weekends, the holidays, the peaks in traffic. We provide a flexible resource as an alternative to a commitment to FTEs.
We pass information, share resources, give ideas and feedback just as a member of our client’s own department would do. When a new employee joins an organisation, they have to pick up all the information they need quickly. That’s what our staff do, and they know which questions to ask. We provide social media expertise and experience: after all, we work across a wide range of clients and can bring this knowledge to the table. We provide access to other services including consultancy, multiple languages, monitoring and moderation, and can even be used in the short term to help a company understand what’s needed before committing to FTEs in house. Under these circumstances, we’ve even trained up client teams to perform our roles …
We are global, and so provide localised cultural knowledge in markets where there may be no client social media team.
Finally – we can get to work quickly. Creating processes, documentation, guidelines, escalations and all other documents that need to be formulated around your community takes time. An agency has the benefit of having access to both best practise examples and the experience of creating these documents for their clients. Time to launch can be drastically reduced through a Community manager not having to research and compile all this data themselves without any assistance.
We would never advocate that a business outsource their strategic thinking to an agency: but we can work together with our clients to fill in any gaps in their skills or resources.
Sorry for the long comment – it’s a conversation we’ve been having a lot lately!
Tia,
I couldn’t agree with you more! We too have a community managed service offering within Leader Networks and it has proven valuable, as your company has, to many clients.
The point I was trying to make was that organizations can’t just hand over the keys to the car without direct parental supervision. The moderators, be them in house or external, need to serve as an information channel and *decisions* need to be made, and process needs to be put in place to make actionable decisions from the data garnered through the social media efforts. With organizations like your and mine, we work in partnership with the companies and enable them to use the information strategically… and not just check the “social media…done” box never to look back!
Thanks for your comment and I hope I clarified 🙂
You did, thanks Vanessa. Yep, we are full of process diagrams, triage assessments, 24/7 escalation tel. numbers … and sometimes clients just *don’t* believe you need them. Until you do, at 3am on a Sunday morning! 😉
I think that any biz small, medium, or large would want the right person dealing with each situation. So, channeling the issues to the qualified person or persons would seem to be the key. How to accomplish that is the challenge. I see a lot of companies like Adobe, for instance, that have FB pages for each product. If you have a question you get responses from the evangelist(sometimes plural) for that particular product. Then if a situation needs to be elevated past this level it can be. Not too mention, that it creates niche followings.
As mentioned above this may not be ideal for 3 am
emergencies. When launching a social media effort it comes downs to the nuances. I think any brand needs to bring in a Social Media Expert to at least lay the ground floor for each channel. Social Media is a craft just like tile work, and working with layperson just insures your chances of yielding a beautiful result.
How many people do we know who go to court without an attorney? Your attorney can do some of the footwork for you. However, you both need to show up at trial just like any brand’s personnel needs to be involved on some level with wall governance.
Hi Mike,
Love the attorney analogy and you are absolutely spot on! While few go to court without an expert strategy, we certainly don’t outsource our testimonials to the court. Social strategy is not child’s play and an industry can help a company avoid serious missteps and identify best practice for execution. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
cheers
Vanessa