Having sole responsibility for Social Media is so 2010!

A blog entry by Alexandra Bylund, Web Manager, Solresor

Who’s responsible for social media at your company? It’s a marketing person, isn’t it? That seems logical enough, but still, it’s kind of silly to give just one person responsibility for a whole channel.

It’s a bit like allowing just one person to answer the phone for the whole company; one person, regardless of subject, dealing with client support issues, sales questions, product queries, marketing requests, etc – all without listening and finding out whom the client actually wants to speak with.

Social media is a channel. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the like are all tools. We can use these tools to become social, discuss with, and listen to our clients. They are communications tools, essentially an extension of the telephone, email, and some of the other older tools. Is it then right to have just one person decide over the whole conversation in a channel? Well, that is exactly what you are allowing to happen if you choose to assign sole responsibility to one person. This one person will answer all questions regardless of what the client is after. Isn’t that a bit narrow-minded? The client doesn’t care what channel they’ve used to contact us, they expect the same professional treatment regardless. And don’t we want to meet their needs in the best possible way?

So, let’s leave this social media hype from last year behind us and let’s evolve instead. Instead of having one person manage all social media, let go of your fears and open up your company! At Solresor, we encourage Sara, destination manager on Gran Canaria, to answer clients on questions about the current weather on the Canary Islands. Why should a “social media manager” sit at home here in Sweden and answer questions like that when the client could easily have direct contact with the destination instead?

We’ve ensured that Madde at client services can take care of an unsatisfied customer directly. We give Håkan the opportunity to answer questions about bus tours in Vietnam, because he knows best.

   
Sara, Madde, and Håkan

Thanks to all those tools that fit under the heading Social Media, the right person in the right place can have an effective and personal dialogue with our clients. A six to eight week response time for complaints are hopefully a thing of the past, now that our customers can communicate with the right person directly and easily. Right?

Solresor isn’t there yet. Not by a long shot. But we’re definitely on our way. We’ve realized that we must open up so that everyone can answer our customer’s questions regardless of the channel they use. Everyone that works at Solresor knows how to communicate, otherwise they wouldn’t have been hired in the first place. Now all they need to do is learn how to use new tools. Our goal is to teach everyone how to communicate with tools such as Facebook and Twitter, as quickly as possible. We want to make sure that our customers not only get a quick answer, but also reach the right person. It’s about authenticity and quality.

Alexandra Bylund, Solresor
Responsible for all communication through social media at Solresor (right, as I said, we’re not there yet, not quite)
facebook.com/solresor
@alexandrabylund
facebook.com/alexandra.bylund

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