When Collaboration Supplants A Digital Messiah: How To Organize Social Media Around A Team

Having seen reports indicating success in attracting customers, small businesses owners are eager to incorporate social media into their sales strategy. But many SMBs place excessive execution responsibility on one employee.  They should consider how to immerse their business team and collaborate that leads to better outcomes for their customers and their operations.

The reasons why one person in a small business gets selected as the social media messiah is becoming more routine as I meet small business owners of all scales enhancing their online presence.  Limited capital is certainly a factor.  But much of the reasoning comes from a limited understanding how the internet can be used. The end result is to silo analytics as an accounting rather than a starting point for discussion.  Couple this with social media platform and community feature changes that alter strategies seemingly overnight, such as the link between Google search and Google + feature and you have a growing generation of small business owners who want to be remote and hand-off.

There is a transition that projects undergo from needing a strong leader to initiate to running a team to implement details quickly.

Now don’t get me wrong. An initial digital effort should be lean learning process, supported with a reasonable investment to gain some initial understanding. This is particularly true if discussions center on website development.  The internet provides a discovery experience for users, so many of the benefits resulting from code requires a leap of faith to understand how the benefit leads to better business activity offline.

But once under way, steps to enhance a digital presence should be measured, and analytic success calls for a collaborative effort.  Immediate business needs stemming from digital efforts can require aligned efforts that one person may not be able to conduct quickly.  Thus the collaborative nature works especially well as an agent of agility.  It means businesses try to pivot on activities that engages customers, enhance business productivity, and build economic value.  Then monitoring those activities from selecting the right enterprise vendor to deciding how to adjust a dashboard, require a shared understanding from all involved.

So how does a small business organize itself to collaborate effectively?

• Decide which materials – marketing pamphets, images, sales brochures – can be accessed easily.  How can the website content answer questions best? A business should have files available on the cloud so that collaboration does not always rely on a physical meeting.

• Make the company site a working asset through an analytic solution to see how customers discover the digital materials. From event tracking to custom variables, a website is a key support in monitoring how well customers are engaging materials.  Also, should the company manage a social media community for more complex questions?

• Managers should develop some casual familiarity with social media platforms – to gain a collaborative approach and to leverage agility a business should have a working knowledge of the platforms it plans to use.

• Managers should discuss what data trend changes should be monitored. The alerts are meant to keep managers aware of trend changes when they occur.  Moreover, the team should ask what kind of alert is needed - a percentage change or a specific nominal number?  What is the potential response to those alerts? Answering these questions reveals who would be best responsive.

• Progress reports should be included in check up meetings.  Having discussions that keeps everyone informed can also reveal potential ways to work together. Books like Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler’s Empowered reveal examples of companies that merge their marketing and customer support efforts across department.

• To address specific complexities, considered outside help.  An industry expert can tailor new ideas to operational needs and give new ideas that enhance digital presence plans.

Ultimately it is important to have a champion for any new project, particularly one with as potentially a wide scope as digital marketing. While the above ideas are a start, share what you believe can encourage collaboration.  With so many ways to start, any company will realize that starting lean does not entail lean support.