User and Social Experience Design
What happens when someone who's been the face of your organisation through social media to customers and the world leaves that position and takes that relationship with the community out the door with them?
Social media is about collaboratively-generated media by both an organisation and external participants such as customers, third parties, vendors, service users etc. It’s about conversation. Conversation between customers and conversation between the organisation and their customers.
The ideal implementation of social media for an organisation would be to completely remove the internal/external barrier, the corporate firewall, and allow genuine, open two-way conversation between employees and customers. But that’s not likely to happen.
So we’ll settle for authorised employees. Not the traditional PR team – who will retain their role for a few years to come generating marketing hype and spin until companies can finally let go – but people just doing their job from the CEO down to people on the front line at the coal face.
Up until recently I was employed by an Australian Government Federal Department where I had the opportunity to actually deploy a social media strategy which was principally manifest through a blog plus several other channels that we used to converse and collaborate with projects stakeholders and users – and they loved it; thought it was a great idea.
Unfortunately due to team restructuring and direction realignment I was made redundant, along with (amongst others) the other person in my team who was also quite involved with facilitating our area’s social media strategy and was the primary face and liaison.
So in just a single day the team suddenly lost its engagement capability, and outside stakeholders and users lost their connection into the Department.
In situations like this where only a few people are actively engaging with the outside world, what sort of resourcing plan can you have in place to ensure that the function is maintained? I know this goes for any sort of capability – and social media wasn’t the only one lost when my previous team downsized – but when it is something so public, when it’s about people building relationships with people outside how can you ensure continuity, persistence and redundancy?
When a new person starts in any role in an office generally one of the things done on the first day is to take them around and introduce them to everyone. You don’t send them off on their own; no, you walk around and facilitate those introductions and explain the various relationships, dynamics and hierarchies in the office.
I think that’s an important part of transitioning social media and online community management* roles, as people move on and new people come in to hand-hold them and introduce them to the community that you’ve been working with to not only hand over the technical information about using social networks, brand monitoring etc but also to hand over the relationships. If you’re the one with the reputation amongst the community and you’re the one saying “Hey guys, meet my new colleague who you’ll see around here” then that trust will be in part transferred to that person because you facilitated it.
What are your thoughts on this? It is a HR issue too I realise, but my concern is primarily from the social experience perspective.
* I dislike the term community management.
// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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Well said Nat.
After having to do a hand-over of all my organisation’s social media accounts before going on a few weeks holiday – I can say that it is absolutely key that you make those introductions.
If you don’t, you risk the new person’s tone being rather different than yours – suddenly your well-built credibility would crumble as people realise they’ve had a switch pulled on them – with no warning or explanation.
Introductions need to be made honestly, friendly and obviously in a tone that your community has come to expect. If the new person has a similiar communication style to you, it could make the transition easier for the community as well.
I think also that the new person can get a of a kick out of seeing all the welcome messages from the community, and it can help them settle in the role easier if they feel welcome and accepted. That’s the experience my colleague and I had, others’ mileage may vary.