Social Media - it's just common sense

Is social media the new dot com scam. I find it curious how a communication medium no older than a couple of years has acclaimed experts promising to solve world hunger, build the Internet and deliver a social media strategy in a day which will transform your organization.

From what I've seen getting social media up and going travels a well worn path of :

• developing a strategy
• removing the roadblocks or deadwood who refute change or evolution
• establishing some guidelines and processes to keep to the company safe and compliant
• recruiting in some motivated staff with a passion for customers service (and social media)
• purchasing a bit of affordable cloud technology to manage your communications

Naturally, you'll need a strategy with contributions from across your key business departments to outline how social media can add some value to your business. What's the challenge or opportunity you are responding to? Servicing, sales, brand development etc. It's not complicated, work through what your objectives are and commence from there in a systematic way.

Now the biggest headache will be your legal and compliance teams who generally speaking would prefer you don't speak to customers at all. Sadly this group of professionals haven't kept up with the times so their advice will be dated. So be prepared to challenge the norm and have hard conversations to inform our resident experts that their advice isn't relevant.

To navigate through the 'no police' get yourself a social media guideline and an accompanying set of process maps to explain how you will communicate responsibly. Also make sure you have some serious air cover from your executive sponsor otherwise the 'no police' will grind you to a slow death or meaningless deliverable.

Getting the right person won't be too hard. Head down to your call centre and find your brightest arts or communications graduate who loves to use social media and has some good sense. The actual process itself of running a social media won't be an unreasonable challenge for a talented individual with a thirst to learn. I'm sure if you look around your business you might know one or two of these people. Also, put in a basic structure with the social media team reporting through to a trusted set of hands and you are away.

From what I've seen social media requires a couple of basic attributes in your people to be successful. In no particular order they are:

• Common sense
• Willingness to be compliant and swim between the flags
• A love of social media and gadgets
• A passion for great customer service
• An ability to write using a down to earth and friendly style
• An ability to deal with the 'no police' and politely cut through the stupidity

The technology to manage your social communications is very mature and cheap. Check out Radian6 as an example to get a feel for how far your dollar can go. In short, these types of applications enable you to manage and monitor your social media.

So to the mystery of communicating. There's no mystery, use simple and honest language, plus own up when you make a blue. Like email don't say anything stupid. Common sense right.

So you've now got your social media team, an agreed scope, a set of processes, a few tools to help with managing your communications and the green light to proceed. From here the first step is to listen to what your customers are saying out there and to commence addressing either issues or alternatively reinforcing customer praise. Once you have this understood you can graduate onto communicating via the common social media channels of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Linkedin etc. Simply grow into your strategy, don't turn the tap on full.

So there you go, it isn't that hard, have a crack, put some controls around your processes and start having some great dialogue with your customers. It's a great opportunity to turnaround or reinforce the value of your business.