Rightfully, we’re celebrating companies that are doing an outstanding job with social media education, and building internal teams that have the goods on what social media means, and how it’s driving business. Agencies and consultancies are getting smarter and more valuable when they can bring not just the mechanics of social to the fore, but the ability to wire it into other areas of the organization.

These are incredibly valuable things. And having a social media Center of Excellence or the like is definitely something to aspire to.

But don’t forget something critical:

The Center of Excellence can be your resource, but it can easily become the crutch.

And if it becomes the latter, you simply can’t scale it to meet the needs of your business overall.

You may never make a social media professional out of a sales person, or really get the HR folks to love and embrace social media’s potential like your core team would. But the goal needs to be to infuse a basic level of business consideration for those people in their day to day jobs.

We may never love accounting, but we have to learn the value of budgets and fiscal responsibility. We may never be compelling copywriters, but knowing the value of story-based advertising is something that anyone in the company can grasp. They may never know or embrace social at the depth that you do, but they need to be able to integrate it well enough into their own work to function and make some 101-level decisions and actions.

Our jobs as social media professionals is to be the teachers, to set direction, to stay at the leading edge and to do our best to curate and disseminate the knowledge so that others access it and absorb it in a multitude of ways and continually improve what they know. But we are doing our companies a disservice if we stop once we’ve assembled a team of smart social media people and then expect them to shoulder the burden of solving all of the social-media related problems. We’ll create a dependency and a bottleneck that will forever be impossible to get past, which is undoing the very thing we’re hoping to enable: communication and business with less friction.

Learn what pieces of social media are functionally important for people’s roles, pieces that can make their work lives easier, and make it a priority to teach those pieces to everyone. Let your COE be the level up, the core, the innovative, the people that can afford to make social media a focus rather than a component of their work and lead the charge to bring things to another level.

Know that your social media hub is a large node on the company network, but a node nonetheless. Specialists will always have a role, but better and more enthusiastic generalists armed with core social media knowledge from the center will power the businesses that continue to thrive tomorrow.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
When a Social Media Center of Excellence Can Hurt You

The way our organizations are layered and interconnected makes a big difference in how information flows through those systems. For better or for worse, deliberate thought into how those systems are designed is vital to a business’ success.

But let’s take it down to a more individual level, and talk about how we design our personal networks, more specifically using social media tools.

There are a million ways to classify and define the different types of connections you make online. By affinity, interest, geography, level of familiarity, the list goes on. But I think of my connections in terms of depth more than anything else, and I leverage the capabilities and functions of my chosen platforms in order to manage them. I’m sharing this because it might help someone make sense of how they design their own networks, or suggest one or two new lenses through which to view what you’re building. Your mileage, of course, will vary.

Layer 1: Passive

Passive connections are the surface layer, and they’re beautifully suited to open networks like Twitter or Google+, or something like Chatter inside a firewall. The reason is that connections on those networks don’t require reciprocation to be active. Someone can solely be in the role of observer or consumer of information. The connection can be unidirectional.

They still allow for reactionary, directed communication, however. It’s an open dial tone. If I tag someone in Google+ post or send an @user reply to a person or business on Twitter, they’ll still receive it in their stream even if they’ve not connected back to me. Just like I can call you if I have your phone number, but you don’t have to have mine in order to receive the incoming call.

So I can follow people or businesses that interest me, but their following me back doesn’t really matter. If all I want to do it be able to see what they post publicly and have the ability to send them an open message if I choose, a passive connection works just fine.

Layer 2: Reciprocal

In open systems like Twitter or Google+, what a reciprocal connection allows me to do is “get closer” in technical terms. On Twitter, a mutual follow (meaning two users both follow one another) means that we can exchange Direct Messages, or communicate off the public timeline. So, my reciprocating a connection there, I’m giving someone the ability to message me in that capacity (and vice versa).

It’s opening up the communication possibilities just a little bit. It’s also why I follow so many people; it’s a courtesy especially because of my professional role, allowing customers and contacts to reach me quickly and privately. It’s got a downside too, thanks to those that abuse the open doorway. Either way, it’s a choice (and an emotionally charged one, sometimes, for those that equate reciprocal attention with some kind of validation).

On Google+, a reciprocal connection gives someone access to updates and posts that are just shared with connections in circles, rather than the public at large. And of course, on something that demands reciprocity, like Facebook or LinkedIn, it’s the *only* way someone gets behind the wall to share in certain content and updates. It’s much closer to a one-to-one connection and implies some intent to be in touch at a deliberate level.

Layer 3: Focused

Nearly every network these days allows for grouping and filtering of some kind. Twitter lists, Google+ Circles, Facebook groups or friend lists, Chatter groups, LinkedIn groups. It’s the network within the network, and to me, what it allows is focused attention.

This is exactly how I answer one of the questions I’m asked most often: How do you manage tens of thousands of connections across your social networks? Filters, filters, filters.

The large quantity of connections is fine to enable both of the first two layers, and facilitate preliminary ties with a lot of people. But the third one helps me narrow my attention to smaller groups that are easier to manage and actively engage with. The cool thing is that layers 1 and 2 feed this layer; something stops holding my interest and I can replace it with something or someone that I’ve found through the first two layers of connection.

Working Together

The reason connective layers work like this is because they feed each other, and they’re all interconnected. This is how weak ties *become* strong ties eventually, as circumstances bring someone or a business to the fore and move them to a deeper layer of connection and back out again. Listening programs help with this, as does active participation and exposure to networks that are connected to your own via a node or two, but that reach beyond them via the connections of others.

The idea that the state of online networks are permanent, fixed, and only viewable through a single context is what paralyzes us when we’re trying to design either our individual social media systems or the ones we’re building for our business. That’s why it’s not quantity OR quality that matters, but a deliberate interconnection of both. Take that to a macro scale and start talking about organizational design or communication or making an entire business social and…well…perhaps we’ll tackle that in another post. Or several.

Systems are dynamic, and there is no one ring to rule them all anymore. But keeping in mind how connection layers work can help you make more sense of a world that has limitless – and exciting – possibilities.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
3 Layers of Social Media Connections

The good news is that many of them understand the potential for social to have many integration points throughout their organizations, and are starting to consider more than just marketing or PR as applications for what the entire breadth of social – from listening to engagement to measurement – can do for their business.

But inevitably what follows is a complex discussion about just how to get there, from resource to staffing to organizational design and things like social media guidelines or engagement standards and scorecards. All of that is incredibly valuable, and critical.

There’s one pivotal area, however, that tends to get overlooked in many of these discussions. And *this* is the distinctive thing that makes Dell’s social media so powerful and such an incredible case study, aside from just the stuff you see with their community content and engagement.

It’s internal social media education.

Awareness Without Participation

While it’s true that eventually, social media will touch or impact each person’s role in one way or the other and become more of a skill than a job, Mark Schaefer makes an important distinction here that’s right on the money.

While every employee *can* potentially be part of social media, not all of them will in an active, visible way. Nor should they be (and certainly not by force or demand). Just like any of our other pervasive skill sets – a customer service mindset, or some level of technical aptitude with email and websites and the like – some will use it differently than others. But everyone will be at least tangentially impacted by it.

Which means that our education and training programs around social media integration and adoption are really important, and need to be inclusive and comprehensive. They help set the stage of understanding, not just practical application. They help everyone see what social media can do, and what we hope it’ll do for our business, even if they’re not actively engaged in it for professional purposes.

Social media is a unique beast in that it can and will have ripple effects through an organization; what touches customer service directly can then indirectly shift product and service direction or communication practices. So it deserves a central spot in a company’s education and training programs.

One Track Minds

When we talk about social media training and education, most of us first think “teaching people how to use social media”. Which is great, but it’s only one perspective on social that we need to consider.

Our education and immersion programs need to be shaped and designed around many profiles of people, based on what perspective they care about around social media. Consider varying roles in your company, including:

• Leadership, who want to understand the vision and direction for social, where it will impact larger business goals, and how you as an organization intend to apply it strategically (and measure it effectively). The more visionary of the bunch will be interested in large scale applications of social that can drive innovation, efficiency, or customer acquisition and retention.
• Management, who will want to understand how their teams might use it (or how they might be directly involved), how they’ll be accountable for it’s use and adoption in their business area, how to manage the social employee, and where information needs to flow around the company both up and down the chain of command. They’ll be interested in how social can make not just their own role more dynamic, but how it can contribute in a positive way to their department’s or division’s impact in the organization overall (both internally and externally).
• Practitioners, who will want to understand the strategic direction, their roles, the rules of engagement and participation, and what they’ll be accountable and responsible for while they participate in social media. They’ll also be curious about ideas and potential for how they can use it to make their jobs easier, or to make their customer and colleague relationships stronger and more effective.
• Infrastructure, who will want to know how or if social media will impact the overall information structure and security of the company, and what they’ll be expected to support in that regard. They’ll also be interested to learn about efficiencies or more collaborative potential internally, or how social can help tie other pieces of communication structure together more fluidly.
• Observers, who may not fit into any of the categories above but may very well be impacted by the results of social media programs at some point. Whether it’s a new set of information they’ll have access to or simply an understanding of the cultural and informational shift that social may have on the company, even those that aren’t “doing” social media can learn about why social is an important and central factor in business. These could also be external but pivotal people, like partners.

Jeremiah Owyang has some additional ideas here around the stakeholders and what they need to know.

Not everyone needs to learn about social for the same reasons or through the same lens, much like any other application in business like finance, IT, or customer service. Looking at social media education from several points of view can help you design information and programs that are useful for people no matter where they sit on the organizational chart, or what their day to day role entails.

What To Include

Core social media education components can be as diverse as the companies to which they’re applied. But in broad brush strokes, here are the areas that many companies are including in their curriculum and training programs:

• What defines social media, and the business case for getting involved
• Organizational goals for social media
• Cultural perspective on social media in the company
• Social media engagement guidelines and policies (and how and why they were developed as such)
• Social media roles and responsibilities in the organization (who does what)
• Social media applications in the business (where the company is engaged in social media and why)
• Measurement and accountability practices, including data benchmarking and gathering
• Information flow and decision making/escalation chains
• Systems and tools
• Feedback loops and continuous adjustment/improvement practices

There’s undoubtedly more, so please do share your experiences and observations in the comments. The more considerations we all have, the more comprehensive our education programs can be.

Whoa, Nelly.

Is this a big undertaking? You bet it is. Dell has a Social Media and Community University that has it’s own resources and management, leadership level support and investment, and has now trained over 10,000 of their employees as social media professionals (that’s about 10%). Their aim is to keep that up, but train even more people to be simply brand ambassadors through social.

That’s no small task.

Even if your organization isn’t quite at the scale of Dell, putting together a program of this sort is going to require someone to own it, and more people to collaborate on its development and implementation as it grows and scales. But if you’re serious about having an effective social media strategy designed to provide and receive more value from the relationships you have with your customers online, then getting your own colleagues in the game is an important investment.

So what’s your experience? Have you designed programs like this at your company, and what do they look like? What’s worked, and what hasn’t? Please share if you’re willing. We’d love to know more.

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The Most Undervalued (Or Overlooked) Part of Your Social Strategy