This blog post is part of my course Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy which I previously blogged about here.

Cross Functional Social Media in Business. Why?

Early in this class it stood clear that Social Media is not about places and spaces, or even tools, but about people and the conversations you have with them. So, to be where the people who talk about you are is paramount, you cannot choose these places yourself. But in addition to that, in order to have meaningfull conversations, you need to have the right people there. Because it is obvious that different people have different needs and if only people from one department of your organization, it is likely they cannot answer all the questions. And if you are very active you set the expectations high and when you do not deliver the fall will be greater.

It’s like telling a painter to only use green (okay, there are some famous blue works).

So are your organization super talented and able to create monochromatic masterpieces or do you think you might have use for all the colours in the palette? Chances are you belong to the latter group and that is why you should implement a cross functional use of  Social Media in your business. Or do you want a marketing resource answering engineering questions on Twitter or an engineer answering sales questions in the LinkedIn group? If you cannot give relevant answers it makes you irrelevant and people will stop listening to you and forget about you.

But it is obviously hard to go all-in and apply good use all over your organization which leads to the following question:

Which implementation order do you think it is most likely to render a success?