The operations side of Social media for small businesses
Justin Kistner, of Webtrends, posted a brilliant article on the operations side of social media, looking at how businesses invest in and support utilizing social media. I left my own comment on small businesses, because his writing was mainly focused on medium or large businesses, which have a marketing budget and can afford to hire a social media person or department to maintain their social media presence. Below is my comment, with some further commentary for small businesses:
Speaking as a person who works with small businesses, who usually only have either themselves or one or two other people to rely upon the total infrastructure of the business, what I usually see is less of an investment of money, and more of an investment of time and exploring automation options with social media while still maintaining a viable presence on social media.
That said your model still applies to those small businesses. They still need to train either themselves or someone else. They still need to have a business process that describes how they will use social media and integrate into the rest of their business, and they also need some infrastructure, though a lot of that can be found in the various methods of automating social media available to them.
Usually the staff for a small business is the business owner or an employee who manages the social media presence part time, while also doing other work related duties. They need to be trained, but also have limited time to use social media, and will tend to want to use automation options to manage their time on social media sites further.
Small businesses do need to define their business and marketing processes for using social media. Going in without a clear understanding of how social media can benefit the business as well as what social media to use can really hamstring a business that wants to connect with people online. A small business will need to devise a strategy and process for responses, publishing of material, measurement, promotion, and even automation (in terms of what is automated and why). Achieving clarity on the business policies for using social media will enhance how small businesses integrate it into their marketing efforts and business infrastructure, but small businesses also need to factor in the time element more than a company such as Intel (which has a social media department) will.
In developing processes around how social media is used in a small business, the infrastructure, i.e. where the automation occurs, also needs to be considered. What tools and applications will a small business use and how will those tools and applications benefit the small business in terms of connection with clients, but also management of social media resources? What social networking sites will a business want to be on and why? As a small business develops their social media infrastructure, they’ll find it gets easier to integrate it into what they do, but answering questions such as what I wrote above is essential for small businesses to create a plan that effectively uses social media.
My experience with businesses suggests that laying out this process ahead of jumping into the technology is essential for making it succeed for that business…and some form of investment, time or money, or both, is needed to make it work.
