Over the past 18 months I have been working across various groups to encourage more engagement in social media. My experience has led me to conclude that individuals can be placed into one of four different zones of social media engagement and a map which shows them other possibilities certainly helps them become more active. Each zone represents a place on a personal social media journey and no place is worse than not being on the journey at all.

Content Consumer

The first area is the content consumer where there is limited proactive interaction and effort with social media which in turn results in no major social media impact for an organization itself. Nonetheless this is an important place for getting started. The steps I have seen here are:

1. Get individuals to create accounts on common social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc. This will at the very least expose them to the environments. Some individuals may have done this a long time ago but they may be dormant. Avoiding the creation of dormant accounts has to be an aim!
2. The next step is to get individuals using the platforms they are on a little. For most people still in this zone they see little value in social media for them so do not expect too much. It is important to deliver them some initial personal value. The way I have done that is by encouraging them, on the platforms they are on, to follow/connect to thought leaders, influencers, interesting groups or specific hash tags so that they start to use the platforms as a content aggregator such that they can consume it all quickly and from one place.

Value as an information consumer: News and views delievered directly to an individual. Enables a better understanding of the market, their customers, their peers, what their customers/prospects might be reading and provides  a chance to spot holes in their knowledge they might want to fill. It is the modern day RSS feed if you like!

Content Sharer

Once individuals have got comfortable with receiving information the next step is to start to get them engaging on social media. To this end the amount of interaction with social media will go up and people will start to see better results from their efforts. Their number of connections will rise on LinkedIn, the number of followers on Twitter will rise and people might start to put together and post their own tweets which others will respond to. This will create some excitement which will further fuel the fire. In essence a Content Sharer predominently shares things provided to them but may invest a little time in some of their own basic content. The steps I have seen here are:

1. Encourage people to start to like and share posts on LinkedIn/Facebook they like or retweet things they like on Twitter etc. This step gets individuals starting to share what looks interesting to them and initiating proactive engagement with other socially active individuals. In itself this will lead to more followers and connections as well as some interesting conversations.
2. Once people are comfortable just liking, sharing and retweeting the next step is to encourage them to add a little of their own commentary to the things they are passing on. This allows individuals to add their own personality onto things they are sharing. This could be views of agreement but also points of disagreement.
3. As a organization it is possible to start to provide social media content which can be shared through content sharers at your organization. You can send out daily tweet suggestions, point them to LinkedIn/Facebook content they can post etc. In this sense you help them to spread some of the content others are creating but also to become a content “sharing” originator within their network.  In doing this you will see what topics each content sharer is passionate about, help them easily engage into social media and at the same time help promote the organization and brand.
4. Lastly the adventurous individuals might start writing their own Tweets or very short blocks of content for places like LinkedIn/Facebook. Something that does not take more than 10-15 mins of their time seems to be where the line got drawn. This is the first step for many into putting aside some dedicated social media time. In this case it is important to share tools like Twitter Analytics with them so they can see the impact of their tweets and also explain how they can look into their level of interaction on other platforms. This helps them see what they are doing is being seen!

Value as a content sharer: For an individual sharing content brings out their personality. It lets others see what they are interested in. It starts to shape their social media personality which in turn will encourage other like minded individuals to socially connect and interact with them. For the organization it might start to help with branding and awareness efforts as the more people sharing organizational content the broader the reach into different networks generally.

Content Creator

The content creator is a fully fledged content sharer but has realized that to grow their personal social media brand they need to generate more comprehensive personal content. They are willing to invest the time to write, edit, re-write and publish original content. If you like they start to become a content machine the other content sharers at the organization can use as a source but also they become a great organizational representative on social media.

For an organization these people become very important as we shift towards content marketing and social selling. The tide is turning and now people are learning more online before engaging. These content creators can seriously up the game in terms of the amount of material organizations have at their disposal.

Clearly this requires a great deal of effort to create the content itself and this should not be a one-off effort but rather an ongoing continuous social media approach. It is important for organizations to realize the time investment needed and make space for it. The steps I have seen here are:

1. Put together a series of training programs that can help people generate content. In most cases it is important to deal with any fear of posting original content on social media. Groups of people with some early support can bounce ideas of each other and get peer reviews of their content.
2. Put into place a process for the editing, and where required, publishing of content. Many people are happy to write but they want editorial/copy writing support to check and amend their content. This is not a “content review” but rather one to make sure grammar etc is holding up. This is especially true when non-native speakers are involved. It is important that this process is clearly defined and that the voice of the author remains intact.
3. Provide a reward for the content creation effort on a regular basis irrespective of the result. This could be something small like a regular internal recognition of having put out 5 original content pieces or something larger like a dinner.
4. Have a way to announce new content when it is published throughout the organization. Get other organizational content sharers to connect or follow other content creators and share their content. Ensure content consumers in the organization are following the content creators. Monitor the number of readers, retweets, likes, comments etc and then link that to number of leads in sales/marketing, number of downloads of linked collateral etc and share that so people can understand the impact. Success breeds success.
5. Provide a reward for the top 3 people who are having a major impact every 6 months. Make sure the reward reflects those who are driving leads, conversations etc as those materially affect the organization.

Value as a content creator: Besides the fact content creators can have a major organizational impact, in terms of leads or collateral downloads etc, being seen on social media with original content helps establish them as a thought leader. This helps build connections in the physical world and generally helps increase credibility before an individual arrives at a marketing event, a customer site, an analyst briefing etc. In the future the lack of a social media presence might suggest to people that an individual has no point of view. From an organizational standpoint the content creator becomes an important source of material that can be used to grow the social media presence of the organization.

Socially Engaged

In this stage of the journey individuals have built large networks. They are content consumers, content sharers and content creators. They are likely spending at least 1 to 2 hours a week on social media. They have a growing network and understand the value of social media. They are therefore proactively engaging into social media with original content and a lot of interaction which in turn will be generating some tangible results from social media for the organization.

These people are essentially your internal social media ambassadors. They are the people others will turn to for advice and look to as to if they should start the social media journey. You will notice these people get contacted by people looking for conference speakers, looking for work and by customers proactively seeking out solutions. It is important to do a few things for this group:

1. Ensure there is a process to support them which is fast enough to support them. These people will generate content much more quickly than you can imagine and they will be impatient. They will still need copy editing support most likely and they will want their material to go public as quickly as possible.
2. Ask your sales and marketing teams if there are topics you would like to see more of on social media and then ask these individuals to help with that. They will rise to the challenge.
3. Think about having these people be part of a group chat on LinkedIn or a Tweetchat on twitter. Encourage 4 or 5 to participate and get them interacting with each other.
4. Make these people talk to other groups and share their positive experiences. Social media is not just for sales and marketing. It can be done by pre-sales, by HR, by Finance and more.

Value as Socially Engaged: Being socially engaged means an individual is are delivering great value to the organization they are representing. It also means that the person’s personal brand, around the topics they are focused on, is sufficiently high that people look to them for input and advice. As an individual this means they will be sought after for their views and that opportunities for career enhancement might become more prevalent meaning that retaining these people is also an important thing to be cognizant of.

Conclusion

This post has not tried to explain why taking all your staff on a social media journey makes sense. It is my personal belief that the way organizations procure software is changing. Most research is now carried out online via social media before touching a web site or speaking to a sales person. This means that the content being generated and leveraged via social media is the brand of your organization.

By working to ensure that brand is strong, with great relevant material, you ensure companies using social media for the first part of their buying journey buy into the individuals in your organization who cannot be easily copied like software or processes can.  From there they will learn more about the company and eventually the products or solutions they might want. At that stage they are likely ready for the sales call. This is the total opposite to how it used to be. Companies who will do best in this new digital economy will adapt to this and realize they need more than just a marketing and sales team to succeed.

Having said all that taking individuals through this social media journey is a fun and rewarding exercise. It is a journey I myself have been on and found very rewarding as I have got to meet a whole lot of people I would never have interacted with and heard a lot of different views. There is no downside to that!

I would be interested to know if you see other steps on the journey or if you think there are other things that should be done at each stage!