Firms generally fall into one of two camps as it relates to their social business hiring:

1. The firm leverages an existing employee who raised her or his hand to own the social business program and/or has demonstrated a strong interest in and aptitude for social media, or

2. The organization hires a social media leader to drive the social business program.

Social business includes various elements such as strategy, metrics and measurement, community/collaboration platform onboarding, engagement and retention, social advocacy/training, content creation, partner management, product ratings and reviews and personnel and program leadership. Often times, these responsibilities are owned by one individual and lead to additional hiring as metrics demonstrate progress along the organization’s social journey.

For example, additional social hires are often triggered by growth and engagement within the community, increased participation in training and a need for additional content creation. Metrics for these evolutionary tasks assist to assess the health of the program from an activity and reporting standpoint, but do not provide the needed level of understanding related to social adoption by the employees.

Organizations should couple quantitative metrics with qualitative methods to fully understand both activity metrics and more subtle factors leading to employee satisfaction and motivations. Through social listening in community platforms, external social monitoring and communication in 1:1 and team meetings, organizations can glean meaningful insights related to scaling and improving the quality of their social business program.

A core objective in creating socially engaged employees is to evolve to advocacy and influence behaviors that lead to stronger employee brands and, by proxy, amplification of the corporate identity and brand. Over time as employees become more socially engaged, companies will achieve higher employee retention, be able to attract the right types of hires, improve customer experiences and increase revenues.

Insights

• Develop a discipline around social that includes having an appointed leader, defined metrics of success and systems of measurement to inform the scaling of and hiring for your social business program.

• Do not just appoint a social leader - empower them at the executive level to work with a cross-organizational team of advocates to instill a culture of social engagement, content creation and sharing.

• Establish hard and soft social business metrics with at least quarterly milestones in addition to annual goals.

• Include social skills in the hiring process for both the social business program and employees generally.