The Issue of Scale: Without Human Cloning, Social Managers Need Other Methods

This blog post is most suited for larger organizations where scaling can quickly become an issue. If you’re sitting in your corporate social media group, your center of excellence or whatever you call it, I hear you. You are the only person or have a small team of people guiding and advising the rest of the company. How can you scale your services to meet your social media practitioners’ needs? While this list is not exhaustive, here are a few tips to help ease your concerns:

1) Know Who You Are And Who You Are Not
How far will you go? Where do you need to draw the line? Let’s face it, when you’re in an enablement role, you can’t be executing on everyone’s program. It’s just not possible. Have a clear charter AND communicate your roles and responsibilities, what you will and won’t do to your practitioners. Set clear expectations and be prepared to offer alternative solutions if you are not (avail)able to help. For example, identify and nurture a vendor list and point people to vendors that can help. The key here is not only to have a vendor list but also to share this vendor list and make it easily accessible to all social media practitioners inside the company. Teaching your practitioners about your vendors' capabilities in various online and offline settings can be very powerful.  

2) Extend Your Reach: Tap Into Your Internal Stars
In other words, clone yourself. Well, not exactly. But who says that it always has to be you that has to train or educate others in the company? If you’re a big corporation, chances are different departments are at different stages on their social media journey. Use your internal stars to your advantage. Identify who these people are, invite them to an online forum to share their wisdom with others in the company. Not only will this help you scale but it will also recognize people inside your company that do social media well. Putting them in the limelight and positioning them as experts in a certain area is a way of rewarding a job well done. Or, just connect individuals that have gone through a certain experience with people that are going through it right now.

3) Extend Your Reach: Share Your Knowledge Online
Got a Flip? Over time, you will discover repeat questions and might say “If I only had a tape recorder!”. Why not put together templates, frameworks and how to's for your teams to use and/or record short 2-minute video clips on various social media topics and questions you get on a regular basis? Publish them on your internal web site or community platform and drive people to these resources. In order to help ensure that you’re creating videos, templates and frameworks that are most valuable to your practitioners, think about the:
A) Recurring questions you get
B) Opportunities for improvement and gaps in your company’s social media practice
C) Potential challenges or opportunities you see emerging in social media (this is more of a proactive rather than a reactive approach)

You may come up with four pages of things you could do. Prioritize your ideas based on the impact and effort/resources it takes to make them happen. Ask for feedback if needed.

To learn some more tricks and tips, check out this SlideShare presentation:

Cisco's Social Media Organization and Case Studies

View more presentations from Petra Neiger.