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10 Crucial Roles of a Social Media Director

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What Sort of Expertise Does a Social Media Expert Need?

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Social Media Marketing budgets are on the rise. It’s been said that as many as 86% of Companies are planning a Social Media Marketing Bump this year. And social media job listings aren’t so hard to find anymore.

In 2010, a new job role of Social Media Director became quite the thing. It was given many names and a wide range of job descriptions. Although on a whole we humans have gotten good at being social, those in social media roles need more than expertise with online tools to lead a company’s direction successful on the social web.

Now, years later, we realize that any role on a social media team is about change: changing relationships, changing technology and change management in times of every more rapid change.

10 Crucial Roles of a Social Media Director

Macro and micro businesses get stuck in process models that they’ve outgrown, but keep using. Fear of change, love of past success, bias that interprets history in our favor leads us to repeat and re-imprint bad or outdated behaviors in our organizational brains.

To pull that off, a social media director needs to be role model, leader, learner, teacher, guide, friend, entrepreneur, but even more than that. If you want a company to embrace the social web, champion these ten roles as an action plan …

  1. be a role model … listen first; communicate authentically; don’t control the conversation (and choose wisely those you refer)
  2. become a fan … fall in love with the brand and its customers to protect its heritage and legacy
  3. be a follower … get to know the people who work there to find the champions and learn how the culture moves, learns, and thinks
  4. be about ROI …. study the business to protect it financially
  5. be a connector … work toward open silos so they communicate internally at light speed
  6. be inclusive … enlist marketing and PR to help build a strong, consistently authentic voice between the business and its customers
  7. be strategic … write a strategic plan of goals and measurements based on customers that naturally support growing product offers, strategic relationships, and the customer base
  8. be focused … choose online tools, tests, and tactics after you have the goals
  9. be innovative … integrate social business online and off
  10. be a community builder … make it look easy, fun, and meaningful

If you look inside those ten points you’ll see that the job really calls for about ten roles — strategist, change manager, brand manager, a marketing manager, a community builder, a campaign manager, a cheerleader, a business developer, a corporate trainer, and a social media professional who can use quantifiable social media data, tools, and measurements.

Last night, 1700+ Retweeted a Mashable Post about the 15,740 social media experts on Twitter. I can’t help but wonder whether all 15,740 are up to all ten of them.

Bet you see even more roles and action steps that I’ve left out. I’d love you to add your additions here.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
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Stop Thinking Poor – Start Irresistibly Growing Your Business

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No one does it on purpose. Who would? Why would they? Yet I’ve seen it. I see it now. Something negative happens. People hit a wall with their business. They pull back, retreat to safer ground to protect what they have. They question their commitment, their strategy, their decisions. This sort of risk mitigation can be a good thing

The problem happens when we start thinking poor.

Is Thinking Poor Managing Your Business Down the Drain?

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Whenever an unexpected life event, the economy, or kismet puts a hitch in our giddyup, it’s a natural response to question how we got where we are. Panic or just sheer exhausted frustration can lead us to believe our thinking was wrong from the start, that it’s time to change direction and save what we’ve got before we lose it all.

That’s thinking poor. Thinking poor leads us to throw away the good things without seeing them and to increase our chances of following them down into that hole. Some great examples of poor thinking include:

  • slashing the marketing budget across the board … reaching fewer customers won’t grow the business
  • discounting prices for unlimited periods … customers who value us only for discounts will leave when they’re gone
  • reducing services … just tells customers we don’t value them at the time we need them most
  • raising prices … passing on our pain to our customers doesn’t win their loyalty

We’ve seen plenty of examples of ways businesses think poor. Thinking poor is a reaction based in fear and weakness.

Great businesses work from strength, strategy, and commitment. We evaluate where we are, what got us here, and how we might adapt to keep moving forward. To do that we go back to the original strategy and check every premise to see which are still vibrant and which no longer work in the new environment. Here are some questions to help you do that.

  • Which parts of our old strategy still truly brings us closer to our customers? Which parts no longer work in the current market?
  • Which are our most robust markets? Who are our most reachable customers? How can we celebrate them and make them heroes?
  • What do those customers value about our products? How can we find out what they wish we would leave out of our offer? How can we invite them to help make our business stronger?
  • What small, high-value enticements might we add to our current offer that would get new customers to try us and entice old customers to try us again?
  • How might we repackage what we’ve offered before so that it becomes a new and vibrant offer for a market of customers that has already shown interest in what we are doing?
  • How can we invest more in skills, services, and learning how to get closer to what our customers want?

Each of these questions is centered in becoming more intimate with the people, the customers, who grow our business.

Delivering service, product, and value to customers by listening to those who are nearest to us is the fastest way to grow a thriving, stable business.

And it’s more fun than thinking poor …

What are you going to do today to start growing your business?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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SOB Business Cafe: 10 Posts that Inspired My IZEAFest Talk

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

IZEAFest Edition

This weekend I get the pleasure of speaking at IZEAFest at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. What an awesome experience that was and how cool to be among so many Internet friends. You can out more about the experience and how to be part of it at IZEAFest.com

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My conversation, Navigating and Networking in the Seamless Concrete-Virtual Universe, is about the question How can you leverage relationships to become successful in business? Naturally personal identity, an irresistible offer, conversation, and community online and offline will be important and featured throughout.

The Specials this Week are

Ten posts that inspired my IZEAFest talk.

Internet famous isn’t “Oprah famous” . . . not even close . . . and the Internet forgets quickly.

When I asked Internet Rockstar, Guy Kawasaki, about what bloggers should know about blogging as business, he said. …

I call him up. He answers.
I say, “Hi, Eddie, how am I?”
He replies, “Oh, you’re fine. What do you think of me?”

I heard them talk and laugh. They were talking “cool talk” about how cool they were and how cool I was not.

Barn Raisers avoid the risk by building the community as they build the site. They believe that people will help build a powerful idea. Barn Raisers invite collaboration from the people they’ll be serving and so what they build is often a gathering place for people even before it’s fully finished.

I was in the game, but I wasn’t playing with all that was in me.

I looked around and saw I wasn’t the only one that was holding back.

He was instant community. He was kind of like Tom Sawyer. He could smile around a corner.

Strategy isn’t a plan, a decision, a goal, a destination.
It’s a tool for leveraging who you are, what you know, where you are, the environment, and how people think and respond to each other. Strategy is a system for improving your position.

The Traffic Game, Auditioning Ants, and How Communities Grow

… by the time I came along, the neighborhood wasn’t much more than a huge space that people came to eat and sleep.

The beauty of enlisting a social media community from the start is that communities only have time for ideas that will work.

Because deeply knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive.

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Is It Time to Reassess What You Think?

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In most companies, employees are asked to participate in a yearly performance appraisal. In the good situation, the employees actually take part in evaluating their own as well as hearing what their managers think. It’s a tiring, but important process. It gets us to STOP and look at where we were and where we are now — something we often forget to do unless we make it a priority.

If we don’t stop now and then, we get stuck in thinking things that aren’t necessarily true … about ourselves and about the folks we know.

Resorting and Re-evaluating

Meet Carol. Everyone at the company thought she was a pain. Seriously. If you asked her for a phone number she’d tell you to get a pencil and paper, then spend 7 minutes reciting out 7 digits. Any sane person could have walked 7 miles to talk to the person that the phone number led to. Carol loved details. No else like details of her specific brand.

Then one day I went to work, thinking that everyone had put Carol in a box. No one liked her. People often made her a topic of conversation.

It dawned on me that I’d been going along with the wisdom of the crowd on that….

One day I decide to wipe the slate clean. I pretended I’d never met Carol that I’d never heard a word about her before. What I found was both unsettling and amazing.

I actually liked her a lot and found her affinity for detail valuable to me because I don’t like details at all.

I’d let other folks put Carol in a box and I’d kept her there.

My loss.

One reassessment and now she was a friend and a resource to me. Challenging assumptions is a great strategy.

Is it time to reassess what you think?

I make connections.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to do some strategic thinking?

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Do You Tune Your Goals to Get Maximum Opportunity Attraction?

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You Don’t Need Luck

My blog and my business changed when I wrote my blogging goal. Thing is I should have known that. Setting goals is one of those life lessons that I keep learning over again.

Sometime in college, I figured out that whenever I made a goal that was tuned tightly to who I am and what I do well, it easily became a catalytic action. Goals became my way of saying …

I don’t need luck, if I can make things happen.

What I realized was that goal set As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said …

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

Every successful and outstanding business, every well-conceived campaign or action becomes an opportunity magnet with goals that are

  • clear, concrete, and intentional — What will you accomplish? Why will you be doing that? Who or what will help yo?
  • measurable — How will you know you got there? What will count as a good score?
  • reachable — The strategy can be to get to the stars, but the goal should be the next step. What will you do to get there next?
  • matched to your skill set Great goals make us stretch enough to be challenged an interested. What will will you need to learn or put in action to achieve this?
  • time dependent — Place a time frame on what you’ll be accomplishing. Goals need focus and urgency to keep momentum. What is the end date?

(skills x passion) + problem solving = opportunity magnet

For a goal to be an opportunity magnet, it’s got to have some actionable attraction. Great goals use what’s uniquely our own — the strength of skills, the leverage of our situation, and the momentum of our passion.

Do you tune your goals to get maximum opportunity attraction?

I make connections.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!

Great resources:
Effective Business Process Solutions To Achieve Business Goals
Make good on new goals this year
If I Were Launching a New Small Biz Web Site Today
True goals are SMART.

Could You Be a Chief Executive Social Gardener?

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Enter the Chief Executive Social Gardener

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Recently a friend asked me how we might get big brands to think more like entrepreneurs. I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe we should get the C-suite executives to start a gardening community.

Gardeners follow time-tested strategies and tactics. Gardeners

  • have a goal — whether it’s a garden or community we’re building, we know what we’re setting as the mission.
  • know their field — we need to understand the qualities of the playing ground, the terrain, and the creatures who live there.
  • understand the systems and cycles, rhythms and patterns — we see our own habits, the natural paths of outside factors, the effects of climate, the weather, and unexpected events
  • consider the units (plants or people) that match those circumstances, how they work and compete, and which of those we can manage most easily
  • determine what we know, what we want to know, and watch out for what we need to learn

Gardeners talk to each other about what works and what doesn’t. What you know about anything is what applies to making plants happy and thriving. If you’re good at that, you’re gold.

Gardeners also:

  • watch and listen. We are constantly testing the information we think we know. We talk. We listen. We read everything. Not a gardener with any experience thinks that he or she can outwit the variables that nature can bring together.
  • remove weeds, trolls, and competitive threats, while finding opportunities. When gardens fail, great gardeners look for learning and new solutions, when they thrive we look for the same things.
  • amend what’s failing and care for what works — so that threats can’t take hold. Gardeners know that little problems grow, in the same way as beautiful fields do.
  • know that life cycles peak and know what works to extend them. We’ve been watching our gardens. We get to know when they need boosting and when they don’t.
  • realize what we don’t control and we’re careful about when and how changes and new ideas are introduced.

Every enterprise should have a Chief Executive Gardener to be a true partner in getting the Chief Bean Counter more beans to count.

Could you be a Chief Executive Social Gardener?
What seeds are you planting now?

More about social media gardening tomorrow …

I make connections.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Grow your community with Liz!!

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