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What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One?
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Introduction
In todays business environment, listening to conversations about
your brand is critical. Building and developing an engagement
strategy for your community is essential. The question that we
are asked most often is where do I start? The best way to get
your company started on your social media journey, is to develop
a Playbook. This document is a guide to help you create an
effective, clear Playbook. Here are a few topics well focus on:
Business Objectives
Roles, Responsibilities and Expectations
Determining what to respond to and what not to respond to
Using Workflow to Your Advantage
- Knowing the Who, What and Why of Conversations
- Knowing the Who, How and When to Respond
Escalation
Reporting
This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is a starting point.
By having a Playbook that addresses these topics, your
organization will have a consistent and documented approach to
listening and engaging with your community. It will also enable
you to develop a workflow that provides reporting, metrics and
accountability.
Finally, we all know the importance of C-Suite buy-in. The
Playbook provides a framework that demonstrates a wellthought-out approach. It helps contextualize the breadth and
depth of social conversations. It also helps the C-Suite to
understand their role in terms of escalation and crisis planning.
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Reputation
Management
Lead
generation
Crisis
management
Competitive
intelligence
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Determine Roles,
Responsibilities and
Expectations
With your corporate objectives in place, youre ready to develop
your Community team. Community teams are comprised of
people who are most actively listening and engaging on behalf of
the brand. This does not mean that other parts of the organization
are not actively involved in the conversations. Ideally, your whole
organization is social and, therefore, the Playbook holds even
greater importance. Playbooks should be shared across the
organization to help guide all employees.
When establishing your Community Team, there should be clear
roles, responsibilities, job descriptions and expectations for each
team member. Some common titles associated with Community
Teams include: Community Managers, Community Engagement
Specialists, Community Analysts and Social Media Specialists.
When establishing
your Community
Team, there should
be clear roles,
responsibilities,
job descriptions
and expectations
for each team
member.
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[4]
Twitter
20 minutes
Comments
30 minutes
Blogs
1 hour
1 hour
Mainstream News
1 hour
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Determining What to
Respond to and What Not
to Respond to:
As a part of the listening process, it is recommended that you
determine the types of comments/posts that you will and will
not respond to.
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The following are some examples of the types of posts that you may
choose to avoid responding to:
Rumors
profanity or inappropriate
subject matter
starting rumors
reference to partners
customers or relationships
that are not publicly known.
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Using Workflow to
your Advantage
Workflow is all about tracking, consistency of recording
information, metrics, reporting and ensuring you respond in a
timely manner in order to protect the brand. It helps with the who,
what and why around conversations.
The following section highlights how our Engagement Console
can be used to track information, engage and analyze and report
data.
Before responding on behalf of the brand, we need to ask
ourselves a few key questions to make sure that we are
responding within our corporate guidelines. We will apply this
information in our workflow, which can be used for reporting
purposes, as well as providing us with a clear snapshot
around the context of each person we engage with, for future
engagement.
Who is posting?
What are they talking about?
Is it negative or time sensitive?
Who should respond?
Any further context to add?
Where does the post stand? Has it been closed off?
Question: Why is it important to know who is
posting? It is important since we respond/
route posts differently depending on whether
a person is a customer, partner, employee,
competitor or a general member of our
community.
tracking:
- sentiment of conversations.
This can be very useful for
marketing to adjust plans to
better reach customers and/or
the community at large
- whether or not a response has
been given for a particular
question or concern and who
responded
separating employee
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...the higher
your Share of
Conversation (SOC)
is the more your
brand name is
appearing in online conversations.
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Setting Engagement
Classifications
Why? Classifying engagement
To be managed by assignee
Identifying Priority
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Support/Troubleshooting:
Technical issue, troubleshooting, etc.
Customer
Support
Product
Management
Team
Lead
Generation
Team
Manager or
Director of
Community
Training
Team
Executive
Team
Product Review:
Product Enhancement
Sales Lead:
Interest in a demo or want to buy
Support or Troubleshooting:
Requests for training
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Every Playbook
should have
an escalation
process. This will
be unique to your
organization.
You should also plan for increased volumes due to company events
and/or announcements as well as the worst case scenario of a full out
social media attack on your organization. For each, be sure to know
who will do what - when, and how you will handle each scenario. Map
this process out in your plan, including how to reach people in an
emergency and designate exact roles and responsibilities. Be sure to
practice this plan at least twice a year.
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Reporting
A great way to keep management informed of how your company
is doing socially, is through the generation of reports.
Ad hoc reports can be prepared to report on specific events.
Weekly reports can give a quick summary of the top issues and
where competitors stand in comparison to your organization.
Monthly reports can provide much more detailed information
around your overall objectives.
Other Resources
For additional information on
listening and engaging, please
check out the following:
How to Develop Your Social
Media Strategy
Final Thoughts
Playbooks are living breathing plans that take you through the
who, what, when and how to listen and respond on behalf of
your brand in both every day business operations as well as the
unplanned and unexpected.
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Glossary
Listening
Engagement
Playbook
A playbook lays out the processes in which your
organization will listen and engage. It helps provide
information to all the players to ensure that they
are consistent in engagement and workflow, while
also guiding them through what can sometimes be
murky waters.
Post Tags
Provides a summary of the content in a post or
posts. They enable you to categorize posts. For
example, company outreach.
Source Tags
Used in the Engagement Console to identify the
source of the post. For example, sources could be
tagged as an influencer or a competitor.
Workflow
Provides the methods and processes for tracking,
measuring and responding to conversations about
your brand.
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[ 15 ]