Internal Social Media: Building A Plan

This is the third post in the four part Internal Social Media series. If you’ve enjoyed this series or others you’ve read here, consider subscribing for free!

Building a plan to deploy internal social media has a lot of the same elements and considerations as building an external plan. But there are some nuances, and your discussion and presentation may need to be in smaller, more methodical steps if this is a new idea for your organization.

Goals

This is always the very first place you need to start. When talking about internal social media, bring together the people that have interest in helping shape the plan, as well as the critics and those people that it will directly impact if deployed. Ask yourselves:

• What things can internal social media help us with, either existing business goals or new ones?
• What can it NOT help us do?
• What is the primary need we’re hoping to fill with social media? Information flow? Idea generation and innovation? Networking? Training? Morale?
• How much do we want to weave in personal experiences/interests for employees in their company social media experience?
• What kind of involvement and participation do we want from our employees overall?
• What is success for us? Failure? Over what time period?

There are plenty more questions to ask, but knowing what you want out of internal social media and articulating it alongside definitions for accountability is key to long term success.

Resources

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for any social media adoption is failing to determine who is involved, how much time or money will be spent doing it, and ultimately where accountability for success lies. The team approach is one I favor, mostly because you can bridge several different disciplines in your organization and have collective goals (and group accountability).

You’ll want to consider:

• What your team looks like and which departments/areas are represented. Think communications (marketing, PR, internal comms), HR, finance, IT, sales, customer support, product management, legal, etc. Who has a vested interest?
• How many hours per day/week/month will be required during the development, launch, and maintenance phases of your social media plan. This includes meetings and planning sessions as well as project work. You figure this out by drilling down into the details of execution as best you can, and making educated guesses about time expenditures based on similarly scoped undertakings in the past.
• What software, infrastructure, and other capital expenditures might be necessary to implement the plan
• What the approval channels/information flow looks like
• What other processes and practices might shift, change, or be replaced by what you’re doing with internal social media

When you present the plan to management or the team, having this area addressed with concrete information is really key to getting it considered. Even if your numbers are approximations based on research and related experience, they’ll let folks know that you’ve considered carefully and realistically.

Content and Participation

As you frame out your plan, and depending on the focus of your internal efforts, you’ll want to address what kind of content and information will need to be prepared, or what existing information should be housed and distributed through your social media efforts. Outline:

• Who your key subject matter experts are, and who is capable/willing to help with content creation
• What subject areas you’ll need to focus on, like company news and updates, corporate culture and brand materials, training, product information, knowledge bases for other functions, calendars, etc. Think both by department and by content or media type.
• What formats for content work best for your employees.

As you frame out what your employee participation might look like, you’ll also want to discuss things like:

• How folks get access to your social media efforts
• What mechanisms you’ll give them to respond to and engage with the content you create
• How participants can create and share their own content
• Whether you should draw up guidelines for participation and what issues they should address

Part of planning needs to be envisioning what your social media efforts will look like when they’re in full swing, based on the goals you’ve outlined. Planning for launch is one thing, but discussing the long term nurturing and facilitating of growth, conversation, feedback, and purpose needs to be part of your planning efforts.

Measurement and Results

Your plan really needs to include information on how you plan to measure against the goals you’ve set. And please stop thinking that measurement needs to be complex to be effective. For each concrete goal you have – say, improving the availability of product information across the company – discuss:

• Are we measuring it now? How?
• If we’re not measuring it now, what sorts of indicators would tell us how well we’re doing with that effort? In the above example, perhaps you’d look at surveys of employees reacting to availability of information, downloads/access for existing materials, FAQs asked and answered internally of the product team.
• If we ARE measuring it, what is our goal for improvement, and will the measurements we have help point us to whether or not we’ve achieved that?
• If we don’t have mechanisms in place to measure things properly now, what do we need in order to do that?

Pick no more than two or three things to measure relative to each goal or objective you set. It’s not realistic to track and report on more than that, and clarity is what you’re after, not quantity of statistics. You want indicators that point to progress or lack of it, and ones that can help you understand what to improve, change, or continue in order to stay on track. (Don’t forget to have a conversation about what you’ll do with what you learn).

Illustrate how you’ll report on your results, and where you’ll disseminate that information inside the company.

Presenting the Plan

You know who cares about this in your organization, and you likely know who you need to give you the green light. It might be a combination of the people that hold the purse strings and the people that oversee your day to day activity.

Invite those people into a room for a 30 minute meeting that outlines the goals, resources, participation, and measurement activities you’ve illustrated above. If you’ve done your homework about the hesitations and fears people have about this, be prepared to address them directly in your presentation and discussion.

Be sure that your department/function goals can be rolled up to larger goals for the organization. Talk in business terms, not in social media jargon. Illustrate what social media will help you accomplish inside your organization, and be realistic about the potential downsides or issues that social media won’t solve.

What Else?

There’s plenty more to consider with an internal social media plan, to be sure. I’m giving you some skeleton thoughts in hopes that they’ll help you frame out your own efforts, since there’s no one size fits all solution. What would you include? What considerations do we need to make for particular types of companies or industries? What’s helping you illustrate these efforts inside your organization?

Let’s have a chat about it in the comments.

Tagged as: Business, Management, Organizational culture, Social media