The Social Media MBA in Practice: An Essential Collection of Inspirational Case Studies to Influence your Social Media Strategy

Across Departments

6

Macmillan – Social Beyond Marketing

Embedding Social Media Literacy across Macmillan

Your audience decides how it wants to communicate with you and what it wants to talk about. So, to be effective, social media cannot be the exclusive domain of one department. It needs to be a core competency for all staff, especially those who are public facing.

Executive summary

Overview

Embedding social media within an organization means addressing a lot of preconceptions held by staff and working to change how people think about their organization, their responsibilities to their audience and their own professional reputations.

Key findings

Social media needs to be a business-as-usual activity not a campaign-specific one. Your employees know their audiences best, they just need the tools to engage with them.

• Staff needs to know what success should look like but for many employees this is a new medium and their apprehension is a natural response. Therefore demonstrate best practices but also be patient and supportive.
• Be holistic. Staff uses the same social media channels privately as well as professionally and all of your employees' activity can reflect on your organization. So do not confine training to purely work-related issues. Address concerns about the personal/private question and present your social media training as a personal development opportunity as well ...