Neoco

Talking to a couple of clients recently about how best to help them implement their long-term social strategies has had me thinking about a post we wrote last year which looked into companies that move their Social CRM in-house. Clients fully accept that they now need to be using social platforms and they are keen for their in-house teams to be included. This makes sense from the perspective that these are the people who are the most enthusiastic, best informed and best placed to get stories out quickly and respond to customers. On the other hand though, it’s hard to judge their level of expertise with social media and to actually define their actual skill level.

Having reached this stage, clients often bring us in to help them carry out a skills assessment of their internal resources. Once this has been completed we can use the long-term strategy we developed with the client to see just what training will be required so that we can efficiently work alongside their in-house team during implementation. By working with internal staff from the very beginning and training them ourselves we can then make sure that they have all the skills they need in order to fully exploit their social strategy.

Now I can already guess what you might be thinking… If we train up their internal teams, what role does that leave for us – an external agency?

Well this is the key question isn’t it? Because long-term, you should never intend to use external resources for the day-to-day management of your communication channels. This makes perfect sense in the short term when you’re still learning, but once your channels are up and running you really should be managing these in-house.

Our role should be in helping you to define and set your strategy and in developing ideas, apps and new directions. We should be bringing you the ideas you probably wouldn’t generate internally – not helping you to get through your workload. From our perspective we want you to do this yourselves and we’ll help you get there.

Naturally in all this there’s a question of scale. If you’re a tiny company where the boss twitters and your second in command uploads videos from their mobile in their spare time you’re probably not ready to think about this just yet. If you’ve got a bunch of people referred to as the marketing team though, now might be the time to think about how you can best improve their skills in order to make the most of your high-cost, but high-value external resources.

Tags  clients in-house teams social CRM social crm strategy strategy