In his recent report Career Path of the Social Media Strategist Jeremiah Owyang outlinedthe challenges social strategists face with:
- Lack of education about social media across the company
- Providing ROI is difficult beyond the engagement metrics
- Serving the entire company is difficult with limited resources
- Technology and tool space changes all the time
- Success breads jealousy
- Internal and external demands are rapidly compounding
During his keynote at WOMMA Summit though he presented 7 steps social media strategists can use to avoid becoming a helpdesk (these were not mentioned in his report!):
- A proactive mindset is required, you can’t wait for company to catch up to you.
- Quickly switch hats, take off ‘evangelism’ hat and put on ‘program manager hat’, a different skill set will be required. You need to be able to align multiple stakeholders around a number of strategic discussions and deliverables.
- Provide business units requirements for social media strategy elements BEFORE they ask for it, not after.
- Move to hub and spoke or dandelion org model now! (see report for explanation of both) Tip: governance, process, continuous education are key.
- Become an enabler for business units, you can never hire enough community managers to deploy and manage efforts.
- Deploy scalable programs: communities, advocacy, SMMS, invest in SCRM. Dialog doesn’t scale alone – get your advocates to go to work for you.
- Become more than just marketing, extend into support, retail, etc.
Being a part of a Social Media Center of Excellence (a small team of 7; 4 in 2009) I concur with his assessment and recommendations. Enabling other marketers within the company is key to ensuring you don’t become the only expert in the house who is forced to not only outline the strategy but activate it is well. This is just not possible. You also need to be a great project manager and influence as you ensure total alignment among key stakeholders (business units, PR, web, privacy, security, HR, marketing, support, etc).
What do you think?