by Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia | LinkedIn
Sadly, I speak from experience.
Every business that desires to become social, to become a friend/trusted adviser/adored brand of its audience will struggle for a host of reasons. Here are my personal TOP 5!
At number 5: Expecting people to ‘get it” and work things out.
Social is easy, right? It must be because my 12-year-old is a ninja at it. So, therefore, as a company full of talented people we will be able to do it easily. We will just set an expectation, such as, “we will tweet 20 times per day” and my social media manager will write everything and tweet perhaps even more than that.
Wrong. They won’t. What will they say, how will they produce the content, who’s checking it, how will you measure response, what language should they use, how will they handle trolls, how will they handle complaints, what if someone is upset, what if you’re tagged in inappropriate content, how will you set objectives, what happens if you don’t meet objectives, what happens when the social manager is off, what happens if the social manager leaves, who do they report to… there are a million different stumbling blocks here.
Yes, each of those sortable even if many challenges only be identified once the journey is underway. If you’ve not done this before it will give a new meaning to the expression “firefighting” as these problems/challenges/issues will come along faster than you can solve them.
At number 4: No clear programme
So you have the objective. Make the social media world love your company so you become the first port of call for whatever it is that you do. Given that social sits in marketing…and brand…and customer service…and customer insights…and sales…and internal comms…and HR and new product development and supply chain and research…and every other area of business, where do you start?
Suppose you start in sales, to pick a department at random. How does this dovetail with other departments? What programs should you be deploying? For how long? When will you see an ROI? How will you measure success (and failure)? How do you mitigate risk? How do you manage the bottom 20%?
Each place social touches needs to be considered as an independent programme and its effect on the other departments it touches needs to be considered as well. Failure to do this properly and in a thoroughly well-planned manner will cause untold problems some of which may be very difficult to fix.
At number 3: Unrealistic expectations of ROI
This may not be the paragraph you’re expecting. You think I’m going to say “ROI will take longer than you think” and whist that is true in part, you may be in for a pleasant surprise too. To socialise a large organisation takes time and money and effort. Perhaps every department needs to be trained, empowered, monitored. And that takes a long time because not everyone is as smart as you! But there will be many quick wins along the way.
Take our Social Selling Programme. One client of ours (a global business) bought-in to our 12-week programme. The pilot for 10 individuals was supposed to prove to them what we already know. We are expensive – but worth it. By week three several people of the 10 were forecasting deals they had got through their social selling efforts. One of them was forecasting £1,500,000 and has already closed £350,000 of that. Even DLA is not that expensive!
Now, even we were surprised just how quickly it happened in this instance, but sometimes the timescales and the ROI may be wildly different to what you think. We can help with this.
At number 2: No agreement of what good looks like
We see this a fair bit. Organisations sometimes haven’t articulated what they’re aiming for and clearly this is bad. Like setting out on a journey without a map. Every organisation needs to manage expectations internally. If the programme is sponsored by the CEO you need to be clear about what they’re getting behind.
Social manager: Sir, we’ve just finished our first social media campaign and we’ve had a 1000:1 ROI and generated nearly £1,000,000 in sales!
CEO: Oh dear…I was expecting so much more!
The truth is that even in 2017 social can be seen as a risk and ensuring that you are agreeing what a successful outcome is BEFORE the project completes is a prerequisite of i) keeping your job, and ii) getting promoted off the back of your success.
And…for the 6th consecutive week…
At number 1: Senior buy-in and alignment
The stakeholders of such an important project absolutely MUST be behind it. We have seen so many programmes fail because the CFO says in passing to someone, “this social stuff is a waste of everyone’s time”, because it builds division, dissent, and an acceptance that you don’t need to change if you don’t want to.
Wrong. This is a journey on which EVERYONE in the organisation must undertake. The best way to achieve this, in fact the only way to achieve it, is if there is senior organisation sponsorship, and they are leading by example.
We are very good at engaging those senior people and helping them to see the potential offered by social media.
So, there we have it. That’s my top 5. If you’ve been through a social media transformation within your organisation you may have other things – so why not add them in the comments.
We are a Social Media Agency. We do three things: Social Media Strategy,Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.
