Blog
April 27th, 2010
Managing Social Media Time
Over a series of posts, I’ll be looking at some of the most common responses we face regarding concerns, questions and fears from CEOs and Senior Executives about using social media. Covering topics such as ‘Time’, ‘Controlling Conversation’, ‘Security’, ‘Branding’ and ‘The Corporate Image’.
Lets kick off with the big one, time. Clients are always happy to hear that social media is free, but never keen to hear that it will need a lot of time investment. There’s no getting away from the fact that social media is as much about ‘social’ as it is the ‘media’.
2009 figures from EMarketer research informs us that 25% of individuals saw time as their biggest barrier.
So what can you do?
Internal Use
Firstly we recommend using everyone in the company to get social on your behalf. Build it in to their day, set some targets and you’ll soon start to see your brand grow through your web statistics. Every department can help. Introduce it to IT, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Research, and Reception. All involved should be able to search and receive searches based on the specifics of their job descriptions and share the load of creating and monitoring the online conversation.
Staff should be encouraged to comment on company blogs, respond to Twitter messages, and use their online network to help spread good words about your companies activities.
The overall goal should be to develop better visibility online, react and respond to conversations, present your business as a more approachable one to get issues and information out to your clients and customers, and be seen to be a progressive company looking to attract the good employee’s you need.
Share the load
Why should the social elements of digital media only happen to projects and conversations outside a company? Introduce collaborative working opportunities internally as well.
The more projects and activities you can share internally, the more people with knowledge can jump departments and assist. It doesn’t matter where a good idea comes from, the important thing is to create the means and mechanism to communicate quickly across departments, and instill a culture of value and belonging for all the people that want to contribute.
Reduce the length of time a meeting should take by sharing a Google Doc and get everyone’s questions and concerns out in the open before getting in the room. Save the meeting time for action and decisions. Luis Suarez talks more about how Collaboration Is More Important Than Ever on the excellent blog, socialmediatoday.com.
Create social space in your day
Understanding the way that individuals work should also be respected. Some will like dipping in and out of social spaces as and when they feel the need, or as a break from a regular task. Whilst some will prefer stricter operational boundaries, perhaps setting allocated time slots in the morning, lunch and end of the day to check social activity.
John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing has a great breakdown of his ‘system’ for managing social media activity. Some of the sites may differ from you, but the structure may still be applicable, or inspire you to create your own plan.
Test the water by having a Social Media Friday, or telling staff that certain times in the day will be available for social spaces. Or even better—trust your staff. It’s all too easy to introduce more and more restrictions and rules to an employees life and assume that we’re doing good for them and us. However that may not be the case. Letting people manage their own time, free’s up a managers time so they can get a lot more of their work done and not spend half their day having to organise everyone else’s.
Overuse
We also face concerns about overuse. What should be done if people abuse their time online?
How would you respond to staff wasting time in the office offline? Be that reading the paper at their desk or standing in the hallways chatting. You would have a word with them, give a warning and be told to knuckle down. Or even better, find the root cause of their distraction. Is it anything the company can help with?
The reason why people can get away with abusing Internet usage in a company is normally because either company projects aren’t shared digitally, are unmonitored and unaccountable to other members of a project or Internet usage is not allowed, too restrictive, or frowned upon in the first place, forcing employee’s to sneak their usage into the day. Not good. Which one are you? Hopefully, neither.
Even if you give employee’s the freedom to use as much Internet as they wish, they still have their work to do, and are answerable to colleagues, targets and management. Those that abuse usage in any form, naturally face the same disciplinary procedures as any other form of mistrust.
Dealing with distractions
Distractions have a lot to answer for. Those that are well into Social Media usage in their business, they may find that juggling social spaces becomes the distraction itself, if so, Mashable offers up 5 Ways to Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive.
Social Media and Marketing Practitioner Amber Naslund presents a good overview and understanding about social media distractions as well.
Start small
Effective use of time is also about not trying to do too much. Set one objective for the company, with a couple of social tools or spaces that are relevant to your needs and work with those for a while. Perhaps you just need a blog and Twitter account, or a FaceBook Group and monitor some RSS feeds? Whatever you decide to do, make it practical, manageable and review the usage for your operations. If you aren’t getting the results you’re expecting, get professional advice, before throwing in the towel. As it may just be a small change required to get back on the right track.
Balancing a new way of working with existing workloads, is a challenge for any individual, let alone an entire company, which is why change needs to happen gradually and with a long term goal in mind. Those that make the switch and invest enough time, obviously see the rewards, but be warned that you can’t really just dip in and out, this requires full commitment to instil a new way of working. Hover on the fence and fiddle about doing nothing much, and you’ll just be adding to the digital background noise, struggling to be heard along with everyone else.
My next blog post will be about ‘Controlling Conversations’, specifically addressing the professional voice and how to deal with negative reactions online and how to prevent them.
If you have any thoughts or opinions on making social media work for you, please let loose in the comments and we’ll see what we can do.
(Image Credit Metro Centric)
Author: Mark Mapstone
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Mark & DK
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Cool article! I think there’s a couple of other important issues that should be considered in this post, first up, culture. You touch upon it at one point but I think it can’t be under estimated. The culture you develop in your company is vitally important to the success of social media activity and if you’ve previously had a culture of mistrust, you’re not going to change things overnight.
That said, I think that it’s important to make the first step. Too often companies instill a culture of mistrust as standard. Why employ someone if you’re not going to trust them? The first thing to do (to use a terrible American expression) is rip off the bandade! Give your staff access to all these tools for personal use. If they’re not using them as part of their lives, they’re not going to grow an “honest network” and are therefore, in turn, no use to you in terms of social media. That presumes one very important point, that they’re going to be using their personal accounts to promote your business and that brings me onto my second point.
Each person in your business is going to have a different audience. Sure, they’re going to have 10% friends and family following them on Twitter (for example). However, if they’re a Developer and they’re doing interesting stuff, and saying interesting things, which you’d hope they would be – you employed them after all – then other developers are going to follow them. People therefore will build relationships with your brand through many different avenues, perhaps they’re a Developer and are impressed by what you do because they’re impressed by what your staff are doing. Likewise, they could be a CEO and find you because you’re the CEO of your business and grow to be impressed with you and therefore your business. Social media is about people as brands and unless you trust your staff to be those brands and be associated with your brand, you’re doooomed.
And, yes, I’m sure you’re wondering well what if that person leaves (and they will one day) and what if they say something stupid? Well, I refer you to Mark’s point about how would you deal with any other act of misconduct? And, trust people!!! TRUST!!!!
Thanks for the great comment there Kieran. I’ll be talking more on this topic of Employee’s and Trust in the next post about ‘Controlling Conversation’.
If you want to hear more about Kierans thoughts on Social Media in his business, please check out a podcast interview with him on the MediaSnackers website:
http://mediasnackers.com/2010/03/ms-podcast150/
No worries, looking forward to the rest in this series. I think people who dismiss Social Media as “not for them” suffer from a deeper rot in their business that they should be addressing for many reasons beyond trust and social media. I think building a culture is one of the hardest things entrepreneurs have to do when they start a new venture. It’s something I have ahead of me and it’s not something I’m taking lightly. I think it’s possibly the single most important facet of any business and often those who claim to have a culture of trust and openness aren’t really practicing what they preach.
Can’t wait for the next installment – more like this please :)
K
Oh, and for an example of a company who are successfully building the type of culture you need check out SimpleGeo and GitHub. And, check out this blog post by SimpleGeo’s CTO Joe Stump about how to recruit rock stars, this is how you build a team you can trust:
http://stu.mp/2010/03/howto-recruit-rock-stars.html
K