Building a Social Media Team: The Project Manager

As the use and expectations of social media grow in the enterprise, so does the amount of work that’s necessary to realize goals. Somebody has to manage that work or it will quickly spiral into uncoordinated threads that consume time and resources. In our series, Building a Social Media Team, we have looked at the community manager and social strategist. Now we will examine a role that exists to ensure what the community manager and social strategist envision actually happens — on time and on budget.

Getting Things Done

Many businesses that decide to invest in social underestimate the amount of work required for their social programs to be successful. Even modest social efforts focused on marketing often require coordinating several people, departments, external vendors and dates. The increasing use of social media and growing realization that more than a few Facebook posts are necessary to achieve business goals has caused the number of opportunities for social media project managers to increase dramatically in the last few years.
      
Although this role may have different titles across organizations:

• Social media manager
• Social media program manager
• Social media project manager
• Social media program lead
• Social program coordinator

the responsibilities are similar. Social media program managers must understand business goals, be able to run multi-campaign and project programs, measure social media impacts against business objectives, and perhaps most importantly, effectively communicate.

Communication skills are essential for all project management, but it is especially vital for those people that manage social media teams. The very nature of social media is “social.” Project managers that don’t understand the importance of two-way communication and working collaboratively will not be successful.

This doesn't mean the technical aspects of project management are not important. A report by the Altimeter Group found that most companies lack formalized social media processes. A lack of process makes it more difficult to respond in a crisis, manage employee behavior and consistently implement social initiatives. Project managers with an ability to establish formal processes can play an important role in helping create, implement, monitor and measure the performance of social programs.

What organizations want to accomplish when it comes to social media can vary and so can their needs. However, social media project managers should possess several core characteristics:

• A passion for social media — If a candidate believes the term tweet is just a sound birds make, look elsewhere for someone to manage your social media program.
• Friendly, patient and responsive.
• Detail oriented and timely.
• Comfortable working with creative and technical personalities that may be neither detail oriented or timely.
• Not overly confident in his or her social media skills — This can lead to the project manager attempting to control the shape of social media programs instead of managing them.
• Excellent team builder — Listens to team member concerns, resolves conflicts, encourages feedback.

Great social media project managers may possess many additional qualities, but having this core set of attributes provide a solid foundation for success.

The Circle of Success

No matter what type of social program an organization is pursuing, a strong, competent social media program manager is critical.

It is interesting to note that the relationship between social media and project management is not just one-way. Social media can also make it easier to manage projects. Vendors have introduced a new breed of social project management platforms that leverage social mechanisms to improve project communication, information sharing and collaboration. These tools allow team members to interact more naturally and provide more visibility into the actual work that’s occurring in the project. 

Does your organization have a social media project manager? What did you learn filling the role? We would love to hear your feedback.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Optimizing Organizational Effectiveness Through Social Business

Many organizations today are seeking opportunities to be more responsive and effective. Typical goals are to improve sales efficiency, accelerate innovation and increase responsiveness to customers. As companies have leveraged the benefits of external communication using social networking, leading organizations have recognized the potential for similar impact through full transformation into a social business.

Collaboration in Demand 

IBM's 2012 CEO Study identified that collaboration is the number-one trait CEOs are seeking in their employees, with 75 percent of CEOs calling it critical. A new, unprecedented era of internal knowledge sharing, catalyzed by “digital natives” entering the workforce, brings expectations of connectedness and contributing to the overall organization. Becoming a social business drives both the cultural change as well as technology adoption required to meet the expectations of employees as well as customers, partners, and suppliers.

The largest potential for improved collaboration is insertion of social into business processes. Inside the organization, this can lead to measurable improvements in the responsiveness and close rate of salespeople, faster delivery of new products and shorter cycle time in providing customer service. There are efficiency benefits as well, as organizations turn from sending information in private channels such as email to sharing information through social file repositories, wikis, blogs or profiles.

Putting Social to Work at IBM

At IBM, we have proven the value of social business tools in several ways. Here are a few examples:

• Our inside sales organization has increased its successful conversion rate for leads and opportunities, based on utilization of internal social tools. Salespeople now have direct access to product expertise and information, which they can then utilize to address customer requirements and objections more quickly. We have measured a several percentage point improvement in results which can be directly correlated to the use of internal social networking.
• Project teams at IBM increasingly are comprised of talent clouds, where the best subject-matter experts and skilled leaders are assembled for a particular activity. To help identify and leverage expertise, employees create and maintain their own organizational profiles, including much richer data than the typical corporate directory. IBMers document their technical skills, spoken languages, customer affiliations, interests and previous employers, all of which feeds into an expertise location system.
• Unstructured activity tracking has replaced formal project management for group-oriented task management. The activity-centric model provides significant improvements versus email oriented approaches, which tend to focus on individual to-dos and keep most of the knowledge hidden in individual user mailboxes. 
  Shared activities store everything from meeting minutes to presentation material to document templates, all in a outline-oriented shared repository. Activity contributors typically can be added by anyone already involved, ensuring that new contributors are enabled organically.

In my own experience, the motivations for participating in internal collaboration through social business tools are clear. My daily email volume has decreased over the last three years, despite greater responsibilities. The constant inbox assault of requests for current presentations, attempts to locate me or determine the status of current projects or activities has all disappeared.

By providing all of that information through our use of social business tools, those IBMers who I normally interact with or influence can find useful information on their own, by utilizing tags, search tools or notifications. This has resulted in a transformation of email into a social mail experience, where only relevant content arrives in my inbox with a faster path to action.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com