Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Does your social media strategy suffer from Slide 29?

BL Ochman's blog post resonates well with me so I want to share my 2 cents about the role of social media in a company.

Ochman's point is that some agencies add social media as an afterthought and do not understand that it is not about Twitter and Facebook buzz but a state of mind to be transparent and listen to customers.

I woke up today thinking about this same topic in a different angle. (ya, think about getting from bed thinking about it :))

I work on social media for PayPalX Platform, building out community innovation by using social media. My team offers social campaigns for launches, social media at events as a way to engage and listen to developer ecosystem and offers support via Twitter. My main job is bringing about the innovation with transparency but it is not surprising to hear needs for tactical event templates for social media.

Recently I have been looking into what is the best way for us to provide localization of social media for the same brand for global geos. We have our common brand 'paypalx' we have several geos who are social savvy with people who have created their own handles. Now we need to arrive at optimal guidelines for rest of the regions.

I have created training plans to educate people who are experts in our product and real customer advocates to become social media savvy. We have a bunch of agencies local to each geo offering to do social media for local events. We experimented with one in Singapore recently.

As we scale this globally across 190 countries, the challenge is not creating another slide or template and finding the right time zone for training timings or visits, but education on the role of social media in enhancing our goals by being transparent, embracing customer feedback and building solid process and programs to build on the strength of real passionate people in the company.

Are you facing similar situation in educating your company about the real power of social media, are you making decisions about localization of social media for global markets, do you have a story on what worked or did not work? I'd love to hear from you.

You can add comments or trackbacks or ping me on Twitter @sujamthe.

If I get enough nuggets of wisdom, I'll do a followup post. Stay Tuned!