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
Good follow up here, Taylor. The needs of a small business are quite different. Rather than a focus on specialization and scaling, small businesses have to focus on jack-of-all-trades types that can drive the program from soup to nuts. If there is budget for more than one person, then dividing responsibilities by heads down and heads up makes sense. One person focusing on monitoring and strategy and another cranking out content.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like