A great post at davefleet.com outlined eight questions to ask Social Media experts.   Josh Peters at shuaism.com gave some great answers.  Almost as common as Social Media experts are Social Media teams in organizations.  I thought this excerpt was very relevant:

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing people sign up for Twitter, follow ten thousand people (many of whom follow back) to build a substantial following, then start spouting advice as though followers equals expertise. Some of them are experts, for sure. Others, however, seem to have little beyond a big mouth to back their words up.

Almost as annoying, but just as dangerous, are the hordes of traditional practitioners that have realized they need to include social media in their pitches nowadays, but have no experience whatsoever using those tools.

Every company is starting a Social Media group/team/initiative, here are 6 questions to ask your organization’s Social Media team:

1 – Will the team have access to any tool, technology, or website they want?

• Watch for any hesitation towards full and complete access
• Probe for the process required to get access from tech admins and compliance teams
• Sounds like a ridiculous question, right?   It’s not, if admins don’t trust their social media teams, chances are that management doesn’t yet trust them either.  You’ll be surprised how many times you hear “well, we just don’t support Firefox.”

2 – What is your “VPV” – Visitor Value Proposition?

• Watch for any answer that could be translated into “Build it, and they will come”
• Probe for specific examples on why this improves upon the current solutions available to potential visitors
• Many otherwise brilliant senior leaders expect the love they have for their organization is common….but unless you are providing visitor-driven, stunning content, no one cares about your company.

3 – How does the organization deal with negative feedback?

• Watch for a sugar-coated answer that is too good to be true
• Probe for examples of leadership acceptance and response to negative feedback
• Social media teams are trained to expect negative feedback but rarely does management understand the true essence of negative comments that customers, partners, and employees post.

4 – What is the biggest regulatory/compliance restraint facing the social media strategy?

• Watch for answers at the extreme, positive or negative
• Probe for the ability for the organization to respond quickly without bureaucratic constraints
• Every organization faces regulatory constraints.  An answer like  “we’re free to do whatever we want” is naive.   However, some industries simply can’t maximize social media’s potential because of their industry regulations.

5 – Who does the social media team report to?

• Watch for organizational layers without a direct reporting structure to top management
• Probe for the strategic objectives of the function that Social Media is most closely aligned
• I’ve heard of social media groups in marketing, strategy, technology, innovation, and even customer service.  Ideally, the social media team will be it’s own function with a a direct report to the CEO to make management buy-in quicker.

6 – What metrics are management using to measure success?

• Watch for a direct answer with narrowly defined metrics or an ambiguous answer with little thought
• Probe for measurements in other functions that tie to social media objectives and for a set of metrics that work together to measure progress
• Social media has multiple ways to impact the bottom line, but the answer here shows strategic thought given to the business model.  The metrics don’t matter as much as the thought process behind them.

What are good answers to these questions?  What else would you include in this list?

Social Media is a hot topic in the corporate world, but many employees are skeptical of the value it can add to their business.  By viewing Social Media in the context of two recent corporate initiatives (Six Sigma and Innovation ), leaders can learn from a historical management perspective of how to implement the radical change taking place around us.

1 – Six Sigma

• Organization Ability to Understand Difficult Concepts – My three favorite Six Sigma companies, GE, Motorola, and Amazon spent tremendous resources, financial and human, to embed Six Sigma capabilities across their organization.  While the low hanging fruit ripe for Six Sigma may be gone, there is no question that the focus on fixing defects that annoy customers will continue to be critical to organizations.  Just like Six Sigma, Social Media isn’t the easiest concept for people to understand (ever try explaining the value of Twitter to someone?)  Not every employee needs to understand regression analysis but Six Sigma forced all employees to look at their work in the context of a business proces….which brings me to my next point.

• Business Process is a Common Language between Management and Employees – Leadership doesn’t have the time to understand the details behind every function in the organization.  But, Six Sigma tied the day-to-day work of front-line employees to metrics and results that leadership understands and wants quantified.  Businesses will always benefit from effiicient processes, but Social Media strategy execution requires rapid iteration and an almost wiki-like approach to the details of the execution.

2 – Innovation

• Solving Unarticulated Customer Needs – Since the dawn of capitalism, economic value has been created by those who can recognize a customer problem and solve it profitably.  It used to be a competitive advantage to have an innovation focused strategy, but it is now a strategic necessity because most companies have adopted a disciplined, consumer-driven approach to developing new products, services, and business models.  Social Media strategies and execution must follow the same process in place at innovative companies:
  • Ability to Surface Unarticulated Customer Needs – No one specifically said to Twitter, “I need a way to share 140 characters of text in as many ways as possible.”  Rather, the founders listened to people who wanted simplicity in communication and openness in idea sharing.  Social Media teams benefit from a member who knows advanced market research techniques (like ethnography) to surface customer data.
  • Skill to Quantify the Breadth and Intensity of Customer Needs – Just because someone says they need something, doesn’t mean you have to solve it.  Social Media teams must spread their customer insights across the organization to solicit feedback and perspective.  It’s not always a hard number that measures the need for a solution.  But through a diversity of opinion, you can separate customer insights into those that are interesting and also relevant to your business model.
  • Generating Ideas that Solve Problems – The IBM commercials made this concept famous.  But, a simple ideation session can yield a high number of ideas, few of which have staying power because they don’t solve a customer problem.  Social Media teams are prone to adopting fancy technology ideas that aren’t necessarily the solution to a customer problem.  However, they can learn from Innovation’s structured ideation sessions that focus creativity on real problems
  • Focus on Execution over Ideation – Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article shows historical examples of simultaneous discovery like calculus and the telephone.  Simply put, ideas aren’t the magic bullet.  A Social Media team needs to understand that tradeoffs between the idea and reality will be required.  Execution is typically a function of hard work, so as long as the Social Media team can immerse itself in the details required to execute their solution to an unarticulated consumer need, success will not be lost along the path to realization.

• Strategic Risk-Taking over the Long Term – Innovation requires “big bets” often without an immediate payback to the organization’s goals.  Leaders are trained not to argue with the “big bet” principle, but true innovative companies are those that adopt risk-taking and measure management on the ability to take smart risks.  Social Media teams should seek to understand management’s commitment to patience and constant re-calibration of goals and objectives based on findings from constant iterative customer feedback.

For Discussion:  What other hot-button  ”management trends” are relevant to Social Media teams?  How can you leverage past organization-wide initiatives to better suceed in your goal for change?