What did this week teach me? Don’t get complacent in your thinking
that the rest of your department gets what the social media support
team does. Sure, you probably did a great sales job to senior
management when you initially got your support and funding to get
things off the runway… but people forget, new leadership enters and
people begin wondering exactly what this team is doing.

Make sure your have a line item for “Internal Marketing” on your roadmap
and be be diligent about acting on it. Believe me, other things
always seem to take priority.

Some thoughts about how to keep the team’s amazing work front and
center with your leadership team:

Ensure they understand what a day in the life of a Social Support agent looks like.

• A lot of the work might happen behind the scenes (like over direct or private message) so no one will ever see this work.
• Provide customer service wins at least once a week. “Hey, with our
  listening tool we heard that a customer that ran into issue ‘X’ and we
  proactively reached out to her to solve it. She was delighted and
  tweeted that out to her 65,000 followers. BIG WIN”.
• Get in front of your Senior Leadship at their meetings for 15
  minutes once a month and provide stats you have and show them
  the positive tweets or posts that your satisfied followers are sending
  you.
• Set up a Blog on your internal collaboration platform (ours is
  called #justsayin) and talk about the authentic interactions you’re
  having with your customers. Talk about how customers are feeling about your
  product or service and share some of thier fun user generated content.

Don’t assume that this is happening organically through the grapevine,
you need to ensure that all the other leaders understand what the team
is doing and the value that they are adding to your support
organization.

When I took over the Self Service team about twelve months ago it was probably the most traumatic and painful paradigm shift I’d ever experienced. After 12 years of traditional corporate thinking hammered into my skull, the first order of business was determining how social media was adding value to the support organization. Were we reducing support costs? Were we deflecting calls? Were our customers happy with our service? Everywhere I turned, the same reply, yes, but, the value is difficult to calculate definitively in social media. If I were a senior exec looking in on this business I’d be inclined to close the shop. I began to get very nervous…

Okay, surely there are best practices and industry metrics for this stuff I told myself. I was a social media acolyte, but now out of necessity I had to become a black-belt. I dove into social media like a guy doing a cannonball into the deep-end. Michelle inundated me with books, blogs, industry articles, and suggested I start following Social Media thought leaders like David Armano, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis. I talked to other big companies about how they were measuring success. Everywhere I came up with the same result “well, you can’t really prove it”. I realized I was spinning my wheels on trying to nail down a definitive correlation and decided to start with the basics. Some percentage of those accepted solutions and RTs were mitigating calls, let’s low-ball it and call it a day.
What is interesting  was that as we looked at the data, we could see that as social media usage was increasing - the call volumes were decreasing. Was it a result of what the team was doing? “Well, I can’t definitively prove it” I thought with a crooked smile…
To summarize a few lessons I learned in my first 3 months
·         Don’t lose yourself down the rat-hole of definitive value metrics. Assume some small percentage of what you’re doing is deflecting calls. Ideally, work with a business unit specializing in business analysis/reporting  that the rest of the company trusts to do up your numbers, they’ll have more credibility. Create an unassisted or social media scorecard and have it presented along the assisted scorecard at monthly exec meetings.
·         Harvest the feedback you’re receiving through every social channel you have. Summarize and present this to senior management to help make your assisted or unassisted service offerings better. It can also l help you make the case for more budget/resources. Also, find ways to route other relevant information to the areas of the company that could benefit from it like Product Management or R&D.

Not too long agao I was fortunate enough to spend a few days with the best minds at Lithium. Over dinner I spoke with Michael Wu, Principle Scientist of Analytics about the goal of social media and what companies should be trying to do with the data they’re capturing about their customers. Of course the goals may be different depending on strategy or what part of the organization you work in, but where do you start?

The essence of our conversation was that you need to think of everyone in social web land as falling somewhere between fanatical brand advocate and seething hatred detractor. The ultimate goal, when analyzing the data you are able to collect through social media, is to find ways to move people up the chain towards brand evangelism. It’s a simple but powerful idea. Michael said one good way is to first identify your advocates and empower the heck out of them so that it’s easier for them to do exactly this for you. They already have the integrity and trust of their social network, your job is to provide ways to amplify their promotion of your brand and leverage their reach.

@armano I am not but here’s the best way I can visualize it.