6 Must-Have Capabilities for Any Good Enterprise Social Media Management Solution
In late 2011, Ashton Kutcher (the actor and first celebrity to hit 1 million followers on Twitter), walked past a television and saw that the longtime coach of the football team from Penn State University had been fired. As an alumnus of a rival school, and without full background on the story, he immediately tweeted about the firing.
His Tweet drew an onslaught of responses that he couldn’t manage, forcing him to shut down his Twitter account. Ultimately, Kutcher handed his account over to his management company.
Brands understand this challenge, too.
This type of social media crisis isn’t just an isolated Hollywood challenge. It's one that illustrates the very problem facing any brand actively using social channels to communicate with their customers. Earlier in 2011, European airline Jet2 shut down its Twitter account because they couldn’t scale up their efforts.
PepsiCo Manager of Social Strategy and Execution, George Smith, wrote a memo to the company’s CEO stating that integrating social marketing into every corner of a business is crucial and needs simplicity in the face of overwhelming data streams. “That one page document for the CEO is the most important thing I’ve ever created at any job I’ve ever had,” he said.
At some point, social media becomes too much for one person to handle and you need to scale your approach and your team. However, it’s not just about resources. “You can’t just throw more people at the problem, it actually slows things down,” shared Marshall Sponder, author of the book Social Media Analytics, at an industry conference.
So how do you scale?
- First, commit to spread your brand listening and monitoring as deep within the organization as possible. That level of connection bodes well both for serving your customer, and serving your social needs.
- Next, select the right tool designed to handle social at a high level of scalability. Not all tools designed to help manage your social channels were developed to do the same thing.
Selecting the right tool for a scalable social media management solution requires a thorough request for proposal (RFP) process. You must ask good questions upfront to get good answers in return. For the enterprise, your questions should reflect consensus among people in the organization and across business units, and at the same time, be direct about the scalability of a vendor’s solution.
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