HOW TO: Define a Social Media Strategy for Enterprise

The Social Media for Business Leaders Series is supported by The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, an enterprise-grade application for marketers who manage multiple social channels. Learn more here.

Much has been written about social media strategy for small business. It’s a personal medium, and a few employees engaging directly with customers on Twitter() and Facebook() can be a natural extension of a small biz web presence.

But things can get complicated when you extrapolate engagement over the multiple departments, offices, and countries of a large corporation. Do you centralize your social message with a few managed accounts, or do you empower every employee to be a social representative of your brand? How do you manage the hundreds, if not thousands of daily mentions and messages directed at a global company while still keeping it conversational? We spoke with the architects of some leading social media enterprise strategies for their takes on this evolving field.

For many large brands, each product they sell could be considered a “sub-brand” in itself. People don’t seek out General Mills cereal, they just like Cheerios. This kind of fragmentation offers several marketing advantages, according to David Witt, the senior manager of social engagement at General Mills, “but it can be challenging to develop meaningful social capabilities for each [brand], while also providing synergistic platforms for the whole.”

Witt says General Mills provides corporate-wide services like training, guidelines and listening tools, but allows each brand to develop an approach that suits its needs.

While similar segmentation exists for entertainment properties, the overarching brand presence is usually stronger, and the social marketing should be tempered accordingly.

“It’s important to remember that customers still see it as one cohesive brand, even if the reality is a dozen different products managed by different people,” said Matt Gibbs, manager of social media and audience development at Playboy. “Whether it’s Playboy magazine, Playboy.com, Playboy TV, Playboy Radio, Playboy’s Miss Social, or any of our other products, to fans it’s one in the same. Wherever the social media touch point is, Playboy must be consistent.”

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Source: mashable.com
By: Matt Silverman