As social media people, we preach the value of organizations getting social with their customers and market. But if you're only using Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus to get social, you're never going to build a great social media team. It's something that took me quite a while to understand.
You're never going to build a great social media team unless your team manifests social. Your team has to ooze social. That means that your team has to use external social media tools to get social with customers, the market, and the public, and that your team must use internal social tools to get social within the company.
How come email and in-person meetings don't work?
With email, you find yourself writing the same emails over and over. That's because email only goes to the person you send it to. With internal social tools, everyone can see your answer to a question so that it only needs to be asked once. Internal social tools build up a body of knowledge that everyone can learn from.
Internal social tools also put your team in the social frame of mind all the time. It's excellent training on communicating effectively, marketing, and building a personal brand. If social isn't part of your DNA, you'll always be chasing fads and other peoples' rather than defining your own unique social media presence.
Using internal social tools is also a great way to educate the rest of your company -- the folks outside of your social media team -- on the value of social. Skeptics will be surprised to find out that social tools communicate them directly with the CEO, just like Twitter can connect you straight to Justin Bieber. A shared knowledge base gets built up, and serendipity occurs around the new channels of communication.
What's Social and What's Private
The maxim "praise in public, criticize in private" is a good guide to follow. Not all internal communications should be social and there's an important place for email and in-person meetings at work. On the other hand, this lesson is a great to learn by using internal social tools at work rather than having to pay the price for a public mistake over external social media.
3 Awesome Internal Social Tools
iDoneThis: Social media marketing queen Laura Roeder says that she can't live without a daily "What I Did Today" communication that's a quick recap of each team member's day. She uses iDoneThis, which is a dead simple way to do a daily status report. At the end of each day, the team gets an email asking, "What'd you get done today?" Just reply. The next morning, the team gets an email with what everyone got done yesterday. It's a launching point for sharing thanks and gratitude and kicks off active engagement with another productive day at work. Rope in the rest of your company, and you have an amazingly simple but powerful way for everyone in the company to track and celebrate the company's accomplishments.
Internal Social Network: If iDoneThis is the social tool to talk about work, your internal social network is the place to talk about everything else. For example, Yammer is Facebook meets Twitter for inside of your company. Post quick status updates, share articles, and chat about them in one place. Yammer has been shown to be a remarkable tool for improving employee retention because of the way it improves employee morale. It's a great social tool to get the company using, because it looks and works exactly like Facebook. If your company already uses Salesforce, get Salesforce Chatter going within the company.
Social Task Management: Breaking down business objectives into tasks and assigning those tasks to employees as to-dos is the bread and butter of any business organization. Tools like Asana make this process dead simple without having to find a time that's convenient for everyone on the team to get in the same room to have a meeting and produce action items. Asana shows off the power of making tasks and objectives public and social rather than private and individual -- it makes the company more transparent and connects people together in a common enterprise working towards the same goals.
Conclusion
Have you ever tried swapping over from email and meetings to internal social tools? I hope there are some interesting ideas in here to make social a natural part of what your social media team does every day. Let me know your thoughts on what helps you get social.