what the heck is a social media playbook, · what the eck is a social media playbook, and why do i...

Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One?

www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / [email protected] Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [ 1 ]

Community Ebook / September 2012 / www.radian6.com / 1 888 6radian

Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6

What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One?

Author Heather MacLean Manager, Engagement & Influencer Relations, Salesforce Marketing Cloud@Macleanheather

http://www.radian6.com

mailto:community%40radian6.com?subject=

http://www.radian6.com/?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=MonitorPlaybookSept2012


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IntroductionIn today’s business environment, listening to conversations about your brand is critical. Building and developing an engagement strategy for your community is essential. The question that we are asked most often is “where do I start?” The best way to get your company started on your social media journey is to develop a Playbook. This document is a guide to help you create an effective, clear Playbook. Here are a few topics we’ll focus on:

•BusinessObjectives•Roles,ResponsibilitiesandExpectations•Determiningwhattorespondtoandwhatnottorespondto•UsingWorkflowtoYourAdvantage -KnowingtheWho,WhatandWhyofConversations -KnowingtheWho,HowandWhentoRespond•Escalation•Reporting This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is a starting point.

By having a Playbook that addresses these topics, your organization will have a consistent and documented approach to listening and engaging with your community. It will also enable you to develop a workflow that provides reporting, metrics and accountability.

Finally, we all know the importance of C-Suite buy-in. The Playbook provides a framework that demonstrates a well-thought-out approach. It helps contextualize the breadth and depth of social conversations. It also helps the C-Suite to understand their role in terms of escalation and crisis planning.

“The best way to get your company started on your social media journey, is to develop a Playbook.”

Before jumping in, let’s lay some groundwork to get the creative juices flowing:

• This document is based on best practices, and of course our experiences and tools.

• In addition to having your Playbook, ensure that your organization has a clear social media policy. Employees need to know what they can and cannot do or share.

• A Playbook should always be a living-breathing document. It should be revisited at least twice a year and updated consistently based on the ongoing experiences of your organization.

• Not every Playbook will look exactly the same. Your Playbook should reflect your organization’s unique policies and procedures.

• Be sure to keep your company’s goals and objectives in mind while developing your Playbook.

• Use this Playbook Guide for inspiration to get your creative juices flowing.






Begin at the Beginning When you begin planning your Playbook, make sure you understand your corporate objectives.

Once you have determined what is most important to your organization, you can build this into your Playbook. For example, if you are focusing on customer service issues, your hours of operation, messaging and response times should all be geared to meet your corporate goals. Once you know your objectives, it’s time to define roles, responsibilities and expectations

Research and development opportunities

Reputation ManagementLead

generation

Competitive intelligence

Customer service

Crisis management

Why You Need to be an Active Listener:

Because of the speed of social, being an active listener means that you can alert appropriate teams, and management when necessary, to any issues AS they occur. Using a good listening tool will also help you collect sufficient detail to act quickly to determine the appropriate response.

Having this information at your fingertips and being able to share with the appropriate parties can really make a difference when you need to take action to correct an issue or stop a crisis from taking root. For example you can:

•Get a quick snapshot or a detailed report on the volume of mentions and specific nature of the conversation around your brand

• Track posts to measure the impact of your brand engagement or your company’s reputation

•Gain a better understanding of the competitive landscape

What strategic areas are the focus of your business?






Determine Roles, Responsibilities and ExpectationsWith your corporate objectives in place, you’re ready to develop your Community team. Community teams are comprised of people who are most actively listening and engaging on behalf of the brand. This does not mean that other parts of the organization are not actively involved in the conversations. Ideally, your whole organization is social and, therefore, the Playbook holds even greater importance. Playbooks should be shared across the organization to help guide all employees.

When establishing your Community Team, there should be clear roles, responsibilities, job descriptions and expectations for each team member. Some common titles associated with Community Teams include: Community Managers, Community Engagement Specialists, Community Analysts and Social Media Specialists.

General Things to Consider for Your Community Team

Set up a listening schedule for your team. This has to be a schedule that works for your operation and your available resources. From our experience, we’ve found that assigning people chunks of time between two and three hours is most effective. This allows for people to focus on engaging on behalf of the brand while monitoring all mentions around your organization. It also ensures that the non-monitoring time is sufficient for other Community work, including content development, personal engagement and reporting.

“When establishing your Community Team, there should be clear roles, responsibilities, job descriptions and expectations for each team member.”






The following is a typical list of activities for those listening and engaging:

•Monitoryourorganization’sTopicProfileforallmentionsofyourcompanyduringtheregularworkinghours.

•BesuretoleverageyourCRMsystemandaddanycontextaroundtheconversation,customersandleads.

•Assignpoststoappropriateteammembersforresponse,follow-upandresolution.

•Assignsalesleadstothebusinessdevelopmentteamtocapitalizeonpotentialsalesopportunities.

•Emailpoststopartnersandfollowupontheirengagement

•Ensurethatwhenandwhereappropriate,thatsourcetagsandposttagsareusedappropriately.

•Ensurethatyourengagementteamreviewsandclosesallpoststhathavebeenassigned.

Things to consider for your Community

It’s also important to define your responsibilities so that your community knows what to expect. For example, begin by determining what your “regular” hours of operation are and when you will be actively listening and engaging on behalf of your brand. Once you establish those hours and have agreement from your internal stakeholders, be sure to post this information on your various channels. Don’t forget to indicate the time zone for your hours of operation as well.

Next, determine what an appropriate turn-around or response time is for your team. For example:

Why? The expectation in social networks is far different than traditional communications. Conversations in social are real-time and people expect responses in real-time. Establishing response times, and sharing them, demonstrates your commitment to your community. Meeting these expectations will also help to ensure that you solve an issue before it escalates or potentially goes viral. Outside these hours of operations, good listening tools give you options for “Alerts” to be sent directly to the email of a designated person - therefore, enabling your Community to respond in a timely fashion.

Twitter

20 minutes

Facebook

30 minutes

Blogs

1 hour Mainstream News

1 hour

Comments

1 hour






Determining What to Respond to and What Not to Respond to:As a part of the listening process, it is recommended that you determine the types of comments/posts that you will and will not respond to.

Question: If the conversation is really peer-to-peer and there is no ask of you, should you jump in? The general rule of thumb is - no. Let the conversation continue without jumping in. If however, there is a question about your company, product or service, then that could be a good point to introduce yourself.

The following are some conversations that are good opportunities for engagement:

•Mentionsofyourcompanyparticipationinindustryeventsorpresentations

•Complimentsofyourproduct,serviceorpeople•Recommendationsorreferralsofyourproductsand/orservices

•Customerservice/supportissuesorenquiries•Salesleadsorproductenquiries•Productrequests

Why You Should Determine this Up Front:

Have you heard the saying: “Don’t feed the trolls?” This is an important phrase to remember. Knowing when to take the high road and when not to engage is as important as knowing when you should respond. On occasion there will be people who want to engage in a public debate and perhaps embarrass the brand. If you respond to these types of posts, you will be feeding that need. Most people see through the effort of these people and they don’t expect you to feed the trolls - so don’t.






The following are some examples of the types of posts that you may choose to avoid responding to:

•Genericmentionsamongaseaofcompetitors,withoutcommentarythat’spositiveornegative

•Sarcastic,snarkyorpotentiallyinflammatorycomments•Straightretweetsofcompanycontentorcompanynewswithoutanyadditionalcommentary

•Peer-to-peerconversationsthatmentionyourcompanyinpassing,inwhichyourinvolvementcouldbeperceivedasintrusive

•Posts/forumthreadsthatrequiremembershiptorespondto,unlessit’sacustomerserviceissue,negativepostormisinformationyouneedtocorrect

•Rumors

Be clear on what you would like your team to avoid when responding to your community. For example:

unwarranted public apologies

details about future product enhancements

profanity or inappropriate subject matter

reference to partners customers or relationships that are not publicly known

starting rumors






Using Workflow to your AdvantageWorkflow is all about tracking, consistency of recording information, metrics, reporting and ensuring you respond in a timely manner in order to protect the brand. It helps with the who, what and why around conversations.

The following section highlights how our Engagement Console can be used to track information, engage and analyze and report data.

Before responding on behalf of the brand, we need to ask ourselves a few key questions to make sure that we are responding within our corporate guidelines. We will apply this information in our workflow, which can be used for reporting purposes, as well as providing us with a clear snapshot around the context of each person we engage with, for future engagement.

•Whoisposting?•Whataretheytalkingabout?•Isitnegativeortimesensitive?•Whoshouldrespond?•Anyfurthercontexttoadd?•Wheredoesthepoststand?Hasitbeenclosedoff?

Question: Why is it important to know who is posting? It is important since we respond/route posts differently depending on whether a person is a customer, partner, employee, competitor or a general member of our community.

Why Do You Need Workflow:

Workflow can help both the Community Team in their work to listen and engage on behalf of the brand by:

• creating a record of the conversation

• tracking:

- sentiment of conversations. This can be very useful for marketing to adjust plans to better reach customers and/or the community at large

- whether or not a response has been given for a particular question or concern and who responded

• finding your company’s advocates, influencers or detractors

• separating employee conversations from community members so that you can focus your attentions in the right areas

• escalating issues to other departments or to senior management

• creating reports that show Share of Conversation, Share of Voice, sentiment and much, much more

When applied correctly, it can save you and your team a lot of time.






When first viewing a post you should research the person to appropriately apply tags. For example, you may look at:

•Theperson’ssocialprofileavailablethroughtheEngagementConsole

•TheirLinkedInProfile•Checkyourcompany’sCRMtodetermineiftheyareacustomerorprospect

To make listening and monitoring more efficient, we recommend using macros to streamline the process. Here are some of the most common macros that we use:

Question: What is Share of Voice and why is it important? It is the degree to which your brand is mentioned in terms of your competitors in online conversations. It’s important because the higher your Share of Voice (SOV) the more you are being discussed in relation to your competitors.

“...the higher your Share of Conversation (SOC) is the more your brand name is appearing in on-line conversations.”

Who is posting? Macros.






Question: What is Share of Conversation and why is it important? It’s the degree to which a brand is associated with the conversations in the industry. It‘s important because the higher your Share of Conversation (SOC) is the more your brand name is appearing in on-line conversations. Of course, you want your brand to be top of mind when making purchasing decisions.

What are they posting aboutAfter you’ve determined who is posting (and used source tags), you next need to ask yourself what they are posting about in reference to your brand name. This is what will determine your classification and post tags.

Classifications are selected by assignee/traffic coordinator to track the nature of online conversation.

Classifications & Definitions

Product Review: Product feedback/review, including RT’sGen. Product/ Company: Passing mentionIndustry Discussion: Industry conversations, including competitive referencesCompany Events: Conferences & webinarsProduct Review: Product feedback/review, including RT’sGen. Product/ Company: Passing mentionIndustry Discussion: Industry conversations, including competitive referencesCompany Outreach: Mentions by an employee/partnerSupport: Existing customer support inquiryRecommendation/Ref: Positive reference to using your product or serviceSales Lead: Possible/potential leadPartner/Reseller: Mention by a partner/resellers customer

Ensuring that you tag your posts appropriately will help with your reporting when you are looking at SOV and SOC.

“...you want your brand top of mind when making purchasing decisions.”






Setting Engagement ClassificationsThe following are the engagement level options available in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

•New Content Not reviewed–Defaultwhenanontopicpostisfound

•Reviewed, Determining Best Response–Qualifiedpost,assignedtoappropriateemployeeforpossibleresponse

•Recommend Follow up–Tobemanagedbyassignee

•Commented, Awaiting Reply –Tobemanagedbyassignee

•Commented Closed –Tobemanagedbyassignee

•Referred –Tobemanagedbyassignee

•Resolved, no further action required –Tobemanagedbyassignee

•Reviewed, Closed, no response needed – Tobemanagedbyassignee

Identifying Priority

Why? Classifying engagement status enables members of the Community team to keep track of posts that have outstanding issues. With people on different shifts, they are easily able to determine what is outstanding and what needs action. Reporting can also be done showing how many posts were closed out in a given period. This can demonstrate how much work flow is being done by any one person at any given time.






What Types of Posts Should You Assign to Other Departments?Social listening and engagement should not be restricted to just the Community team. Social organizations are just that - social. The entire organization participates. While the Community team will often be the first to encounter a conversation and assign post and source tags, they will often assign posts to other departments. Assigning a post could be required because it should be handled by another department, or, it could be to alert management and the C-Suite of competitor activity, an emerging issue or a mention. Assigning posts helps with the Who, How and When to respond.

The following table represents a variety of topics that could be referred to other departments. This list is by no means exhaustive. Each company will have their own unique items that they wish to classify and address.

What is the tone of the post?

Why? Understanding the volume of posts that are negative, positive or neutral can help guide marketing and communication plans. It provides a pulse of the community. This can be very useful information

Customer Support

Support/Troubleshooting: Technical issue, troubleshooting, etc.

Product Management Team

Product Review: Product Enhancement

Lead Generation Team

Manager or Director of Community

Training Team

ExecutiveTeam

Sales Lead: Interest in a demo or want to buy

Industry Discussion or Company Content: Conversations of concern relating to your brand

Support or Troubleshooting: Requests for training

Industry Discussion: Financial, speculation of sale, high-level business conversations, industry analysis






What to do When You Are Assigned a Post1. Review the post to ensure that you are the right person to address

it. If you are not, reassign the post to the right person.

2. If you are responding publicly ensure that you are following your corporate guidelines.

4. Update the “Engagement Level” in the Engagement Console to reflect the current status of the post after you have taken action. For example, “Reviewed, No Engagement Required”, may be selected.

5. Close out all posts that have been assigned to you, even if they do not require engagement. This will provide more accurate reports.

What about Escalation of Issues?Every Playbook should have an escalation process. This will be unique to your organization. You should determine what categories of posts you want escalated and to whom.

For example:

•Competitormentionsand/orconversations•Libellouscomments•Socialattacks

You should also plan for increased volumes due to company events and/or announcements as well as the worst case scenario of a full out social media attack on your organization. For each, be sure to know who will do what - when, and how you will handle each scenario. Map this process out in your plan, including how to reach people in an emergency and designate exact roles and responsibilities. Be sure to practice this plan at least twice a year.

Every Playbook should have an escalation process. This will be unique to your organization.






ReportingA great way to keep management informed of how your company is doing socially is through the generation of reports.

Ad hoc reports can be prepared to report on specific events.

Weekly reports can give a quick summary of the top issues and where competitors stand in comparison to your organization.

Monthly reports can provide much more detailed information around your overall objectives.

Final ThoughtsPlaybooks are living, breathing plans that take you through the who, what, when and how to listen and respond on behalf of your brand in both every day business operations as well as the unplanned and unexpected.

Start with defining and aligning your:

•BusinessObjectives•Roles,ResponsibilitiesandExpectations•Planstoresopndandnotrespond•UsingworkflowtoYourAdvantage -KnowingtheWho,WhatandWhyofConversations -KnowingtheWho,HowandWhentoRespond•Escalation•Reporting

This will result in processes that guide your entire organization and ensure buy-in with your C-Suite.

By having a Playbook that addresses these topics your organization will have a strong plan of action in place.

Other Resources

For additional information on listening and engaging, please check out the following:

How to Develop Your Social Media Strategy

Social Media Listening, Measuring and Engagement Primer

20 Ways to Succeed at Social Media Engagement

Find us on the web: www.radian6.com

Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/marketingcloud

Read the Blog: www.radian6.com/blog

Editors: Julie Meredith, Jason Boies and Mike Girard Design: Lise Hansen




http://www.radian6.com/resources/library/how-to-develop-a-social-media-strategy/?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=MonitorPlaybookSept2012

http://www.radian6.com/resources/library/how-to-develop-a-social-media-strategy/?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=MonitorPlaybookSept2012

http://www.radian6.com/resources/library/social-media-listening-measuring-and-engagement-primer/?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=MonitorPlaybookSept2012



http://www.radian6.com/resources/library/20-ways-to-succeed-at-social-media-engagement/?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=MonitorPlaybookSept2012

http://www.radian6.com/resources/library/20-ways-to-succeed-at-social-media-engagement/?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=MonitorPlaybookSept2012


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Glossary

ListeningMost people perceive someone who listens as someone who cares. This type of listening has to be visibly demonstrated; it is not passive or unidirectional. It is two-way listening. Message reception is not enough; the listener must respond. This is two-way, conversational listening.

Conversational Listening Builds Relationships: One-way data gathering is a stealth activity. You may be doing it to better listen to your customers and there is tremendous value in analyzing what you hear and acting upon it. Why stop there? Let customers see that you are listening by acknowledging them and strengthen your relationships too!

Conversational Listening Sends a Message: On the surface, listening seems to be about receiving. However, conversational listening sends a message: you are important to us.

Conversational Listening Personalizes Your Brand: A listening brand is an unmasked brand that is more personal and less institutional. As you listen & build trust, you will also increase the quality of the feedback you receive since people will share more openly when they observe true listening behaviour.

The online community’s awareness that you are actively listening will influence the conversation significantly. Your very presence changes the dynamics. Let people know you are listening.

EngagementFirst and foremost, engagement is not a goal; it is a result. Our approach to engagement is the result of building a community by focusing on the people that are in the community. It is about sharing content and information that will benefit our community. It is about expanding our networks and connecting with more people through conversations, likes and shares. Finally it is about being present and being able to have conversations. Being human and being appreciative is important.

PlaybookA playbook lays out the processes in which your organization will listen and engage. It helps provide information to all the players to ensure that they are consistent in engagement and workflow, while also guiding them through what can sometimes be murky waters.

Post TagsProvides a summary of the content in a post or posts. They enable you to categorize posts. For example, company outreach.

Source TagsUsed in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to identify the source of the post. For example, sources could be tagged as an influencer or a competitor.

WorkflowProvides the methods and processes for tracking, measuring and responding to conversations about your brand.




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