Strategy
1. What is the organization's strategy and goals for the use of social media?
Social media channels can be used for marketing campaigns, brand awareness, product feedback, investor communications, recruiting employees. The strategy should be based on business objectives with clear measures supported by high impact, low risk initiatives to start out.
Communication
2. What groups does your organization engage with on social media platforms?
Given the exploding levels of social media adoption, chances are any stakeholder group that the organization engages with is using social media channels. Identifying critical stakeholder groups is a first step, messaging for different audiences is next. At any time a customer, investor, shareholder advocate, employee or a regulator could be looking for information or talking about your organization.
Presence
3. How is the organization's reputation social media?
Monitoring tools such as dashboards provide a view of what key messages and sentiments are being expressed about the organization's brand through online conversations. The tools are simple to use and can often save the day by identifying dissatisfaction before it leads to a crisis.
Governance
4. How does the organization manage decisions?
Crisis will happen to the best of organizations and in social media, the magnitude of the issue can be amplified quickly. To be sure that an organization's reputation and brand value doesn't get crushed in times of trouble, it's important to have a well-defined response plan.
Readiness
5. Does the organization have the competencies and tools to deal with social media?
Using social media channels is a long-term commitment to customers and employees alike. It's important to develop a supporting business system of training, policies and guidelines, technology and operational measures to support the use of social media for business purposes.
Risk
6. Does your company have a risk management plan in place?
Creating a social media risk framework helps manage risks in a fluid, dynamic environment that is always on. Any good risk framework identifies the risk, assesses how risk will be managed and responded to.
Transparency
7. What are the company's principles and brand voice on social media channels?
Building trust is a way of life on social media channels. Consumers expect and demand honest responses and authentic discussion rather than canned public relations messages. Every social media spokesperson should be aware of the organization's principles for response as well as being capable of inserting their own personalities.
Employees
8. How do your employees use social media?
Whether you give access to employees during work hours or not, employees can easily use social media on personal mobile devices any time. Having a clear policy is a good start but employees need help in understanding how they should or shouldn't use social media in relation to their business activities. Equipping employees with tools and training will go a long way in keeping them engaged and representing the organization professionally.
Operations
9. How does the organization share social media information?
The organization needs to be clear on the resources that are required to handle the new communication channels. There are new technologies, roles and work processes required to integrate and effectively manage social media into other channels. Consider the risk of customer dissatisfaction if interactions on social media channels are not captured by other parts of the organization.
CEO
10. What is the CEO's reputation on social media?
Some CEO's have their own Twitter accounts; others have PR firms that create YouTube videos for them, the choices for CEO engagement range from passive to very active. Regardless of the level of engagement, many social sites discuss and rank the reputation of your CEO and it's important to manage that reputation.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
