The Social Media Management Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business

How do organizations manage social media effectively?

Every organization wants to implement social media, but it is difficult to create processes and mange employees to make this happen. Most social media books focus on strategies for communicating with customers, but they fail to address the internal process that takes place within a business before those strategies can be implemented. This book is geared toward helping you manage every step of the process required to use social media for business.

The Social Media Management Handbook provides a complete toolbox for defining and practicing a coherent social media strategy. It is a comprehensive resource for bringing together such disparate areas as IT, customer service, sales, communications, and more to meet social media goals. Wollan and Smith and their Accenture team explain policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities, metrics, strategies, incentives, and legal issues that may arise. You will learn how to:

• Empower employees and teams to utilize social media effectively throughout the organization
• Measure the ROI of social media investments and ensure appropriate business value is achieved over time
• Make smarter decisions, make them more quickly, and make them stick

Get the most out of your social media investment and fully leverage its benefits at your company with The Social Media Management Handbook.

From the Book: Making Sure Social Media Content Complies with Regulatory Guidelines
Technology is rushing to catch up with the needs of employers, advertisers, and individuals challenged to comply with FTC requirements, so here are a few suggestions.

Employees and Consumers Publishing Social Media
We suggest that individual social media publishers (such as bloggers, consumers, and employees) take these seven actions to ensure their compliance:

1. Say nothing about a product or service unless there is evidence to support that the statements are truthful and substantiated. The individual is liable for unsubstantiated claims if the statements fall within the definition of an endorsement according to the FTC.
2. Think twice about working with companies that do not provide disclosure information.
3. Push back if companies are not providing the information or support needed to comply with FTC guidelines.
4. Read agreements carefully.
5. Correct inaccurate or misleading information.
6. A quote from someone or description of what someone said should fairly reflect the substance of what the person said; quotes and descriptions should not deliberately or inadvertently distort the original meaning.
7. Always tell the truth, and tell it with confidence.

Employers
We suggest that employers take these seven actions to ensure their compliance and that of their employees:

1. Update social media policies to reflect the FTC Guide revisions in order to proactively inform employees of their obligations.
2. Educate employees. All of them.
3. Monitor to ensure compliance with disclosure requirements and accuracy of information. Ensure that social media listening and monitoring capabilities filter for relevant employee statements.
4. Correct inaccurate or misleading information.
5. Define and implement a process for handling employee statements that create liability for the company, once they are identified through listening and monitoring capabilities.
6. Consider implementing one of the emerging technology solutions that aspire to provide scalable, auditable, and compliant disclaimers for companies.
7. Document the company’s policies and the communication of those policies to employees. (A company can’t just say it did it. It has to be able to prove it.)