Be smart and use social media to change the way your business works

Strategy and basic business logic suggests that a business should either partner with supporting organisations or outsource operations which are not part of its core business solution, service or offering. Outsourcing is a key business decision— one that requires strategic thought as it affects business growth directly. As a practice, marketing has evolved in the past few years. The evolution has impacted decision-making in business in more ways than one as more and more of them are experimenting with new methods of outreach and engagement. Today, businesses have realised that their audience have to be engaged in a meaningful and engaging communication driven by a proposition. As social media gets more and more recognised as a format of outreach and engagement with clients and customers, and as an object of business value, firms will be seen increasingly adopting the method. Today, a decision before every firm is whether it will outsource their social media management or keep it in-house. There are several schools of thought on this matter. Let us explore this dilemma with some self-assessing, quick-help kits. The first question that a business firm needs to ask is; what stage is its business in? If you are a start-up or a less-than-five member company and assuming that you are not greatly funded, there is no choice but to learn the few relevant tricks yourself. For a small firm, knowing the customer is critical. Honestly, to leverage social media the right way, knowing the audience is crucial. If you are a start-up, ensure that you understand your customer closely. Create a relationship in the real (off-line) world and then keep them engaged online. For businesses that have achieved a certain scale, it is crucial to not go haywire. If your founding team knows the way online, great! Else outsourcing the social media management to a “partner” agency will save the firm frustration. This will allow the firm time to focus on what it is in for. For larger companies, its crucial to map relevant business objectives with what can be achieved on social media and assess risks and rewards. One of the best ways to exercise this is to get a full-time, hands-on business consultant on board, someone who has been in the industry and both on the agency and client ends. Also it would help if the personnel has the experience of working across sectors. Such a person will help a firm establish the right assessments and in training existing in-house teams (e.g.: marketing, human resource) or create a focused team, helping you to reduce wastage. The second question that needs to be raised is regarding business objectives; ent acquisition to reducing time to market. If you have your objectives clearly prioritised, you could always take help from experts in creating a working social media structure for your company, i.e. if you are small. For set-ups that are at a growth stage and for larger firms, hiring a consultant will be the optimum solution. It will help maintain costs and reach an optimum solution easily. The other question that needs to be raised is—do you have your processes mapped right? Most smaller companies miss that. Setting well-defined processes right from the start is a tough task. With large companies though, this is far more structured. To ensure a successful social media implementation, businesses must have their KPIs right. The key process indicators go a long way in establishing the success of any social media campaign. Far too much is said about the media bit. Social media is more ‘social’ than the media bit. The ‘engagement’ aspect of social media should really be initiated, built and scaled up, in-house. You can always choose to outsource the technical and recurring aspects to strategic partners. The optimum solution is to have a co-existing model, wherein the firm strategically keeps the crucial customers engaged, also the messaging and communication bit in-house, while parts of the execution—design, buying media etc.— could be outsourced to a partner agency. however, how do you decide what to outsource and what capabilities to build in-house? Based upon experience and working across industries and several international and domestic clients, personally I believe that the capabilities which a business should focus on building in-house are: integrating a strong social media policy across business processes, analytics and statistics, customer service reputation, management and monitoring content creation, messaging and communication.