When your company decides its time dip its toes into the social media waters it is important that you’ve assembled the right team. Depending on the size of your company, an entire team may not be necessary, but if it is, here are some people you should consider including.
1. IT Department: There are many reasons to bring the IT department into the fold. For instance, if you want a blog and want it to link to your current site you’ll need the help of you IT Department. If your company doesn’t have an IT Department then you may want to consult with the company that hosts your website. They can probably help you with this.
2. Legal Council: For most businesses this is probably very unnecessary, but better safe than sorry. You may want someone to at least review any policy you are considering enacting regarding social media.
3. Risk Management: Again, for most businesses you won’t need Risk Management on the team and really many, businesses don’t even have such a department. However, if you do have a Risk Management department you may want to loop them in at some point. They’re job after all is to figure out where you may have problems and to help prevent them.
4. Public Affairs: For many companies, marketing and public affairs are the same, but consider including your public affairs team in the process if they do work separately.
You will need to look at your business specifically to see if there are any other key stakeholders that should be included in the initial planning of a social media strategy. Depending on the size of your business you may not need a whole team to get things going, but do consider who might have a vested interest in your company’s social media efforts and go from there.
Above all you want to have people on your team who are excited about communicating through social media.
