Achieving social media buy-in with senior management and the board can create comms harmony within an organisation, but why is this essential and why is this about more than just marketing and PR?
Social media is a buzzword forced upon us daily, but for many it’s intangible in achieving business goals. However, as with its digital marketing relatives it’s increasingly quantifiable.
This is evident through the perceived value of some of the bigger social networks (Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) is a recent example). These networks, that may be worth more on paper than in the real world, have enormous influence across both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) realms and this shouldn’t be ignored.
A PwC whitepaper late last year highlighted how businesses were failing to manage social media http://www.elementalcomms.co.uk/blog/pwc-reveals-b2b-companies-failing-in-managing-social-media and for the most part, it isn’t surprising. It revealed that although B2B companies were investing between $416,000 (£269,615) and $1.85 (£1.19) million in social media, the infrastructure to manage it was not in place, nor were systems to measure its return on investment (ROI). All businesses obviously behave differently, but certainly share similar incentives needed to stimulate the board and senior management to consider a much-needed change.
The art and science of social media
It’s one thing knowing that measurement is becoming a better art and science, but quite another convincing the powers that be upstairs that investing in the use of social media is to the benefit of the business.
Social media buy-in is important because it’s more than comms and marketing, it should transcend through all facets of an organisation. It’s a channel that should include and feed into customer service, research, sales et al with all departments pulling in the same direction. Education is the major element on the route to buy-in and although it may be thought leadership that is perceived to be coming and managed from the top, this needs be a multi-level affair, where in a sense hierarchy should take more of a back seat to make it more inclusively adopted organisation-wide.
Tim Gibbon
This is a sample chapter taken from the book Insiders Know-How: Public Relations. Pick up your copy from Amazon
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