Who Owns Social Media And Why It Should Not Be You

by Vanessa DiMauro and Ryck Lent

Determining who is in charge of social media can be a daunting task. Even when social leadership is channeled through the executive suite, it does not stop at the executive level. Often the question becomes “who owns social media?” within the organization.

For many new initiatives, he who first touches the new “thing” becomes its ultimate owner. The department which leads the first or most visible social media project establishes the initial beachhead of control over its eventual programmatic development. But does this accident of innovation deliver the best results for the organization?

The battle for control of social media most frequently involves three warring tribes: Marketing vs. IT vs. Legal. In addition, if the executive suite is paying attention, roving bands from HR and Customer Care will also join the melee.

Marketing argues that social media is an extension of their strategic marketing and brand management activities, so social marketing should be part of their other digital efforts such as email campaigns and the website.

Over in IT, the keeper of the tool sets and standardization efforts, the CIO claims ownership over all things social. After all, they will be required to support it.

The Legal department offers this opinion: as the group charged with managing compliance and even investor relations, they will have a sizable stake in compliance, social media policy and monitoring efforts, especially if they need to understand the social buzz to manage any potential liability.

There are some organizations where many departments seek to own the social efforts and secure the budget and staff needed to succeed. In others, no one wants to hold the social “hot potato” due to the uncertainties and risks it introduces. Which department head at BP wants to take ownership of Tony Hayward's infamous Twitter gaffe?

The Social Media Cooperative

Let's consider a new social media “ownership” model. One that creates a new, collaborative approach where no one department or group should be responsible for social media for the organization or company. Call it co-ownership or the social media cooperative.

Hold off on those knee-jerk reactions for a moment. Sure, many of you will argue this is impossible -- every successful innovation needs an owner -- so collaborative ownership is ridiculous and a recipe for disaster. Instead, let's run through the reasons for why co-ownership is a crucial and constructive step.

Speed to market. While developing a social strategy is not an emergency, social is here to stay. Social's unprecedented adoption rates make it a necessary operational element and a critical success factor for today's organizations. They must have an ability to act and react quickly -- there's no time to waste. Battles over ownership consume valuable time, where a co-ownership model, at the very least, puts all the resources and goals in the same room at the same time.

Shared budgets. Single owners mean single budgets, so when one group takes ownership, their budget control can exclude funding for social media initiatives outside the ownership group. We all know about "skunk works" projects that succeeded without access to established budgets. But how many more equally vital and valuable initiatives have disappeared without a trace without budget support? Co-ownership places responsibility for funding on all the interested groups, and not incidentally, broadens the base of support for adequate funding.

A single story with many narrators. Line of business ownership inevitably skews the tone and tenor of the social media conversation. If marketing owns social media, it's about marketing. If IT owns it, the emphasis is tools. If legal sets the agenda, rules and compliance ... rule. Instead, co-ownership enables the creation of a single "story" for the organization, told by many voices. The goal is to have the whole organization enable social media and give groups inside and outside an opportunity to influence the conversation.

Why Co-ownership Works

I worked for a consulting company called Cambridge Technology Partners. Like all new employees, I needed to undergo New Employee Orientation, or NEO. We learned about the company’s mission, messaging, key customers, go-to people and filled out lots of forms.

In the middle of the second day of training, the head of Sales, Chris Greendale, gave a talk about the sales process. At the end, he asked all staff to stand up and put our hands in the air. With some reluctance -- consultants don't like games but do know how to follow instructions -- we did. Then he asked us all to repeat the following mantra: ”I’m in sales. We are all in sales.”

The point? Each one of us would touch a customer or client, and we would directly or indirectly represent Cambridge to that customer or client. This mantra became part of the corporate culture. We each had a personal responsibility to make valuable contributions to company best practice whether we were part of the sales organization, a consultant or in finance. We had co-ownership of the company's goals.

The same need and opportunity exists for social media. While some may have direct responsibility for carrying out social media projects or have an MBO based on social media success, each employee has an opportunity and a responsibility to represent the company well when engaging online. Perhaps there is a need for an “I’m social for my company” battle cry – followed by training and support to understand what that means, in every organization.

Three Models For Online Communities And How To Tell The Difference

Online community is like world peace – everyone thinks it is a good idea but it means something different to each person. Companies frequently encounter a core problem when planning an online community; the key stakeholders each hold different views of what the community will be like and what it will accomplish once it is launched.

Because online community and social media is fairly new to business, we are still in the process of creating a language to communicate.Inherently, in the absence of well formulated definitions and shared experiences, people often draw from their personal experiences to fill in the blanks. So, when business sits around the table to talk about an online community for their company, product or service line, each person hold a different model; that is largely shaped by their relationship with one. A golf expert could evoke a community where many people share information and experiences, facts and figures about their sport. Another stakeholder who may have a medical issue and uses online channels to keep informed may think about a deeply personal exchange of information, and someone else may recall the technical help forum they recently relied upon to solve a networking problem quickly. All of these kinds of experiences are valid and valuable, but they each represent a different model for the online community.

When planning an online community it is so important that all the stakeholders are able to clearly articulate the business goals that the community will serve and understand how the members will be able to benefit from it. When stakeholder expectations are varied, it is likely (regardless of whether the community succeeds or not) that a certain percentage of stakeholders will not be pleased. Mismanaged business expectations gets in the way of community growth and development and can cause a fair degree of confusion at a critical time-period for the online community.

In order to help normalize expectations during the business justification point in an online community strategy, I find it helpful to work through the various forms of b2b communities to help wrap greater clarity around the vision. It is important to focus on the goals of the community in order to identify which model is the best fit for the business. Examples are often helpful along with a framework for thinking about the three different types of online community the company has to choose from: Information Dissemination, Shop-Talk and Professional Collaboration.

Information Dissemination Communities
The first type of online community, Information Dissemination, is where the organizing body creates content, messages, and really shapes the outcome. They’re really controlled or paternalistic environments. One great example that comes to mind is WhiteHouse.gov which offers the public an interactive space: there are feedback forms, polls, videos, and a followship of Twitter, LinkedIn and a number other social tools in order to encourage participation. I think I even saw a blog on there a couple of weeks ago. But they don’t really care what I think in that deep customer care sort of way. The site has some collaborative experience built in, but really the goal and mission is to share and disseminate information outwardly.

Another example is Method Cleaner’s community.  OK, I admit I am a very clean person and have joined this community as I love to learn more about effective cleaning with environmentally sound products.  This site gives me a channel for my cleaning love and serves to educate and inform me. I occasionally get to vote on a product but I am not connecting with the other members in a meaningful way – not do I want to. The community serves it purpose but there is no driving engagement among the participants.  However, the information channel is strong and useful.

Shop Talk Communities
The second type of community is Shop Talk, where discussion groups focus on accomplishing a task, or exchanging transactional information, or getting help, like “How can I do this?” or “Where can I find that?” (Customer support communities would fall into this category.) Technical communities, or even WebMD or Dell, are great examples where a deep community of practice isn’t necessarily being formed. People come on a need basis, and, while they may have an ongoing relationship with these communities, it’s not in a deep, professional, and longstanding way among the majority of participants and members- although there are regular participants. They’re not really trying to deepen their practice, they’re trying to solve a burning problem or issue in the moment and only a small percentage of the visitors or the constituencies actually create a true network or community.

These Shop Talk communities are great for a business to learn about important trends and issues with their product base, gain ideas around future innovations and fixes for prevailing problems and also serve to drastically lower their customer support costs and users tend to do a pretty darn good job of helping each other- thus reducing call center burdens. (For those interested in this topic here is a great article about how to calculate and manage call center costs.)

Professional Collaboration Communities
And, the third type of community is Professional Collaboration. Those are often found in communities of business professionals. A lot of these communities are smaller by nature. They are safe and somewhat private online spaces designed to foster conversation. They tend to be more membership driven or subscription based; they tend to cost money or have sponsors; and they consist of people who meet on a longstanding basis in order to learn about and engage in a certain practice.

An example is Palladium Group’s Execution Premium Community- XPC. Here is a community of strategy professionals who are sharing information and best practice about the art and science of leading strategy.  The goal of this community is to facilitate discussions and offer resources to the profession. I have covered this client’s case study in an earlier blog post. Client retention, brand management, thought leadership and deeper awareness of products and services are at the root of this community.

Another example of a professional community is Martindale-Hubbell Connected.This community of 30K+ legal professionals focuses on connecting people with each other and the LexisNexis products that serve the industry. Professional collaboration communities come in all shapes and sizes, from professional peer groups, to client communities, to those driven by news or information. But they all have a shared vision - to connect people over time to share ideas and experiences.

All three of these types of communities are very important; they all serve important roles. When people talk about online communities, they tend to think of them all rolled up into one single model driven by their personal expectations. But really there are three different types, and they serve three different purposes. And they have three different sets of metrics, goals, outcomes, and revenue models as well. So while that business community idea is still hot on the executive agenda, it is a good time to examine and refine what you really mean by online community so that your outcomes can match the goals – which is the very definition of success.

So You Need To Hire A Community Manager - Now What?

The Community Manager is unlike any other position in the technology and online world. Rather than managing hardware or software, products, services or content, the Community Manager manages behaviors and interactions among the community's members -- readers, clients, prospects, analysts -- whomever your community is designed to engage. It's all about the members, which means it's about managing people. More specifically, successful community management is about guiding those aspects of interpersonal interactions online that lead to greater engagement -- both the quantity of interactions between members (member-to-member) and between the member and the community or company (Company/Community-to-member). There is a lot of demand for community managers of late, and I have been called upon to share my thoughts on what the community manager role really encompasses.

The Community Manager is the CEO of the community -- the Chief Engagement Officer. However, unlike most CEO's, the Community Manager cannot demand that members engage with each other or with the site. Instead, the Community Manager has to achieve the community's engagement goals though indirect means, by focusing the members' attention on areas within the community where they can interact with each other and with features and content on the site. Dawn Foster talk about this, Jeremiah Owyang had a good blog on where community managers come from, and Rachel Happe wrote about what defines a community manager.

The Community Manager may have goals for membership, site traffic and revenue growth. But underlying all of those metrics is the difficult-to-measure member engagement metric -- the quantity and quality of the interactions among members and with site content and features.

Even though most online communities are built on a sophisticated technology platform, the skills and techniques used by the Community Manager to build and sustain user engagement depend more on a keen appreciation of human behavior -- online and off-line -- and a willingness to attract, engage and delight members, than on any highly specialized technical knowledge.

The Community Manager shares some skill sets and activities with a wide range of job roles, including:

• Coach - career, life or even Little League
• Concierge
• Conference or meeting planner
• Customer service manager
• Education & training manager
• Knowledge center manager
• Marketing communications manager
• Matchmaker
• Membership chairman for an organization, club or association
• Newsletter editor/publisher
• Producer/editor for TV, radio, newspaper or magazine
• Product manager
• Professional meeting facilitator
• Referee
• Social psychologist

This long list of jobs should help broaden the ways a Community Manager thinks about their role, and suggest a range of approaches to meet the challenge of managing a professional networking community. The variety of activities included in a Community Manager's job description can help determine the best ways to respond to the needs and issues that arise within the community. For example:

• Does a member need customer service or content to help solve a problem?
• Would more members become involved through a debate or from joining a collaboration project?
• Does meeting a growth target require a marketing approach or a little matchmaking?
• Should an issue within the community be resolved by coaching or a referee?

The various roles also suggest opportunities to build on existing skills and experiences and add new ones to the Community Manager's repertoire.

Community Manager Engagement Strategies

There are three broad categories of member engagement activity:

• Connecting with other members
• Contributing content (user-generated content or UGC)
• Interacting with site content and other features

Within each of these three categories are a number of different actions or features available on the site. The Community Manager has an important role to play by encouraging member participation in each of them. Without going into the specific procedures needed to accomplish each task, here's an outline of some ways the Community Manager can support engagement.

Connecting With Other Members

• Welcome and announce new members to the site
• Encourage new members to share something about themselves with the membership
• Point new members to areas of connection with existing members (alumni, geography,industry)
• Announce new special interest groups within the community
• Invite members to participate in community planning and governance activities
• Find members who attend major offline, face-to-face events and invite them to connect with each other online
• Identify members willing to "mentor" other members on the best ways to use the site and other online tools

Contributing Content

• Solicit information from new members on areas of greatest interest, and then guide them to those areas. If the area is not available, encourage the new member to post a Q&A start a forum topic or launch a special interest group.
• Encourage participation in Q&As by highlighting unanswered questions and calling upon members to help a peer

Interacting With The Site

• Highlight articles, polls, blogs and other content and solicit
• comments or ratings from members on the home page to direct traffic and encourage involvement
• Find points of connection between content on the site and members, and (sparingly!) ask for direct feedback on relevance
• Involve members in planning content, events and other site content activities

These member engagement examples are part of the Community Manager's day-to-day activities. The basis for community management success is creating, encouraging, stimulating, guiding or managing interactions among the members of the community. When people come first, all win!

Social Media is a relentless taskmaster: Why and how to regain control

Social Media is a relentless taskmaster. Once you begin participating in a social media marketing or thought leadership effort, it is hard to stop posting -- even for a moment. It is a cognitive treadmill with no obvious stop button.  At least, that’s what so many have been told.

However, sometimes we must pause to regain control -- to buy time to think, to write with quality and assess the impact of what we have to say -- before we actually say it. There are certainly plenty of examples where someone should have stopped to think before sending. Recently a couple of public figures made serious errors when using social media: BP’s CEO Tony Hayward decrying on twitter that he too is tired of the oil spill problem and wants his life back and Sarah Palin’s Facebook blowout blaming environmentalists’ demands for safe offshore drilling as the root of the oil spill crisis. Perhaps Palin’s comments, while misguided at best, do give us, the reader, a deeper insight into her true point of view. However, each made a significant mistake; damaging stock prices and investor relations and taking serious heat in the media, each with a single keystroke. While they gave us some deeper insights into their points of view, we have to wonder: why did they do it?

It’s not totally their fault. Chances are they stepped onto the social media treadmill and the need and desire to keep pace with participation overshadowed the best practice of thinking before you speak, or tweet, or post something inappropriate on Facebook. Thoughtless? Yes. Harmful? Certainly!  Pressure to engage overriding better judgment? Likely.

While proper discretion is necessary on the social media track, the bar for honesty and authenticity on social media is also set very high. In some small way, I appreciate that they did not outsource their voice to their PR agency of record and, instead, communicated openly.

For the past 6 weeks, I have been a dedicated road warrior with multiple trips to visit multiple cities. Many client engagements, conference talks, book preparations and the like mean I have been, frankly, too engaged with the in-person world to put posting on the priority list. I stepped away from my blog and my twitter stream temporarily. My absence was noted: the blog readership dropped a bit and I missed opportunities to engage online with friends and colleagues.

I began the blackout period with the best of intentions – each day planning to write and translate some of the thoughts and ideas that I was experiencing in the face2face world into the social media world. But as it turned out, I never found the time. So some great ideas and experiences were lost to memory or became book chapters but not tweets or blog entries. I made the active decision not to participate at a period in time when I was too busy to think critically and too tired to contribute well-formed ideas of value. In many ways, I think this is OK. It represents the true nature of the ebb and flow of social media as a collaboration platform.

Aside from dedicated customer care initiatives, which require constant attention, it is important for bloggers to step off the treadmill every so often and place a premium on what they offer online.  Quality ultimately wins over quantity, despite the current thinking that one must produce articles with extreme regularity in order to build a following and make an impact. This current “wisdom” is the driver behind much of the low quality information broadcast on the channel. Silence can sometimes be a more effective communications tool than fluff and empty words, especially when it signifies “I’m listening” or “I’m thinking” rather than simply going dark.

With the benefit of hindsight, I have come up with a strategy for the next time in-person schedules overtake my social media participation. Here are three tips to help avoid “going dark:”

1. Tweet when you can on mobile and string the tweets together into a blog post
2. Sign up a guest blog or two to cover your busy period and show valuable activity
3. Write a blog post that aggregates or rounds up other people’s blog posts and ideas

When I ran a large online community of business professionals, I would tell my moderators that when they noticed a significant drop in online participation, that was precisely the best time to reach out to members with an offer to help in some way. When members get too busy to participate, often it’s because they need help. Travel for work, a business crisis, a professional point-of-pain can often account for participation lapses in online communities. A community’s goal should be to serve its members’ needs when and how they need service. The goal is ultimately to give more than you take. That is the true essence of community – both online and offline.

Keep the three-fold rule in mind: give three times for every single request. While we shouldn’t make too many allowances for poor judgment online – as in the case of BP’s CEO and other potentially damaging social media indiscretions -- at the end of the day it is important to remember that the “humanness” of social media interactions drive the value of this medium. It’s probably best to slow down the communications pace when it becomes unnatural, rather than partake just to achieve the illusion that ubiquity is the most important outcome. Quality always matters most.