How can my business’s social content become more strategic?

Grant Leboff: You touch on something – I think it’s very important – because you touched just on this idea of; it’s no good getting the work experience person in because they don’t have the business experience, they don’t have the right tone of voice and all these other bits and pieces. And something you’re touching on, which I think a lot of companies are missing. I have your view on this is that, I think too many people are still looking at this stuff as tools and actually it goes to the heart of business strategy. I mean we’ve already talked about the fact that social media really… you need to be a social business to be able to use social media, which again goes into company culture and goes then back into the heart of business strategy. And you made a very good point about having – whether it’s a communications director or someone head of social – but someone sitting on the board because that’s how fundamental it becomes. So how do companies become more strategic at this? You can hire a community manager, you can hire the PR agency and of course feed them some of the things that they should be talking about and you should be able to do that because you’re the expert. You have the expertise in the industry. But how does a company start to look at this? Because for a lot of people, they’re asking questions of themselves they’ve never had to ask before, which I think is why some people struggle. How does a company start to look at their content strategy in this social sense and actually become more strategic about it?

David Taylor: It’s very, very good point. I think the key thing for me is you cannot wing it anymore. A lot of companies would wing their marketing. This is what we’ve done in the past, it’s always worked. We don’t really have to think about it very hard. But now it’s really important they have a strategy. So it may well be… we’ve touched some things like having a social culture for social. Now if there’s no culture for social, then you’ve got no content pipeline. If you’ve got no content pipeline, whoever you’re going to get to to manage your social isn’t going to be able to do the job or that there’s a lot of hostility in your organisation. ‘Oh, we going on Facebook!’ ‘Oh, why are you on Facebook? – We all hate it’. Well, that’s not really going to help then. And it’s about having, again, the culture includes…. If you get the culture right, you then need to create a proper strategy. When I say a strategy, this is a business strategy, it’s not a social strategy, it’s not a marketing strategy, it’s is a strategy for business and it involves what are our social media guidelines for our staff? You made a very good, important point that about all of us being marketers. So if you have an organization with a hundred employees and a marketing department with two people, you don’t have a marketing department with two people, you have a marketing department of a hundred, two of which do it all the time. The other 98, it’s part of their job. So an email signature with a linkedin profile that’s marketing. An email signature with a website or a Twitter account, that’s marketing. Everyone has a role to play in marketing. Therefore, if you’re coming up with a strategy, it’s an entire strategy for the business going forward, and how do we involve everyone, and that does include proper guidelines for staff. What can they do? What can’t they do? How do they protect themselves? How do you protect yourself from them? That is the sort of internal aspect, but then outside it’s like who are our customers? How are customers going to get their information? Is it going to be combination of online and offline? Are they social? Aren’t they social? Maybe they will be social in two years, but they’re not social now. Is there a new social network coming through now, which we’re not really using, but we need to be aware of? All of these things have to be factored in. So you have a strategy which everyone buys into. Now if we’re talking about board level, you’d have the comms director or the head of social and say, okay, this is company x. This is our strategy for the next two years, three years going forward, and this is how we’re going to act as a business. What resources we’re going to be putting into, how does it affect our sales, how’s it affect our recruitment, how’s it affect our employee relations, all of these things. But they can’t just be done. Oh, piecemeal.