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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Community Ebook / September 2012 / www.radian6.com / 1 888 6radian What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Author Heather MacLean Manager, Engagement & Influencer Relations, Salesforce Marketing Cloud @Macleanheatherwww.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [1]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? “The best way to get your company started on your social media journey, is to develop a Playbook.” Introduction In today’s business environment, listening to conversations about Before jumping in, let’s lay your brand is critical. Building and developing an engagement some groundwork to get strategy for your community is essential. The question that we the creative juices flowing: 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 • This document is based on best a Playbook. This document is a guide to help you create an practices, and of course our experiences and tools. effective, clear Playbook. Here are a few topics we’ll focus on: • In addition to having your Playbook, • Business Objectives ensure that your organization has a • Roles, Responsibilities and Expectations clear social media policy. Employees • Determining what to respond to and what not to respond to need to know what they can and • Using Workflow to Your Advantage cannot do or share. - Knowing the Who, What and Why of Conversations • A Playbook should always be a - Knowing the Who, How and When to Respond living-breathing document. It should • Escalation be revisited at least twice a year • Reporting and updated consistently based on the ongoing experiences of your This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is a starting point. organization. By having a Playbook that addresses these topics, your • Not every Playbook will look exactly the same. Your Playbook should organization will have a consistent and documented approach to reflect your organization’s unique listening and engaging with your community. It will also enable policies and procedures. you to develop a workflow that provides reporting, metrics and accountability. • Be sure to keep your company’s goals and objectives in mind while Finally, we all know the importance of C-Suite buy-in. The developing your Playbook. Playbook provides a framework that demonstrates a well- • Use this Playbook Guide for thought-out approach. It helps contextualize the breadth and inspiration to get your creative depth of social conversations. It also helps the C-Suite to juices flowing. understand their role in terms of escalation and crisis planning.www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [2]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Begin at the Beginning When you begin planning your Why You Need to be an Active Listener: Playbook, make sure you understand your corporate objectives. Because of the speed of social, being an active listener means that you can alert appropriate teams, and management when necessary, to any issues AS they occur. Using a good listening tool will What strategic areas are also help you collect sufficient detail to the focus of your business? act quickly to determine the appropriate response. Having this information at your fingertips and being able to share with the appropriate parties can really make a Reputation difference when you need to take action Lead Management to correct an issue or stop a crisis from generation taking root. For example you can: Research and • Get a quick snapshot or a detailed Crisis development report on the volume of mentions and opportunities management specific nature of the conversation around your brand • Track posts to measure the impact Customer of your brand engagement or your Competitive service intelligence company’s reputation • Gain a better understanding of the competitive landscape Once you have determined what is most important to your organization, you can build this into your Playbook. For example, if you are focusing on customer service issues, your hours of operation, messaging and response times should all be geared to meet your corporate goals. Once you know your objectives, it’s time to define roles, responsibilities and expectationswww.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [3]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Determine Roles, Responsibilities and Expectations With your corporate objectives in place, you’re ready to develop “When establishing your Community team. Community teams are comprised of your Community people who are most actively listening and engaging on behalf of the brand. This does not mean that other parts of the organization Team, there should are not actively involved in the conversations. Ideally, your whole be clear roles, organization is social and, therefore, the Playbook holds even greater importance. Playbooks should be shared across the responsibilities, organization to help guide all employees. job descriptions and expectations When establishing your Community Team, there should be clear roles, responsibilities, job descriptions and expectations for each for each team team member. Some common titles associated with Community member.” Teams include: Community Managers, Community Engagement Specialists, Community Analysts and Social Media Specialists. General Things to Consider for Your Community Team Set up a listening schedule for your team. This has to be a schedule that works for your operation and your available resources. From our experience, we’ve found that assigning people chunks of time between two and three hours is most effective. This allows for people to focus on engaging on behalf of the brand while monitoring all mentions around your organization. It also ensures that the non-monitoring time is sufficient for other Community work, including content development, personal engagement and reporting.www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [4]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? The following is a typical list of activities for those listening and engaging: • Monitor your organization’s Topic Profile for all mentions of your company during the regular working hours. • Be sure to leverage your CRM system and add any context around the conversation, customers and leads. • Assign posts to appropriate team members for response, follow-up and resolution. • Assign sales leads to the business development team to capitalize on potential sales opportunities. • Email posts to partners and follow up on their engagement • Ensure that when and where appropriate, that source tags and post tags are used appropriately. • Ensure that your engagement team reviews and closes all posts that have been assigned. Things to consider for your Community It’s also important to define your responsibilities so that your Why? The expectation in social community knows what to expect. For example, begin by networks is far different than traditional determining what your “regular” hours of operation are and communications. Conversations in when you will be actively listening and engaging on behalf social are real-time and people expect of your brand. Once you establish those hours and have responses in real-time. Establishing agreement from your internal stakeholders, be sure to post this response times, and sharing them, information on your various channels. Don’t forget to indicate demonstrates your commitment to your the time zone for your hours of operation as well. community. Meeting these expectations will also help to ensure that you solve an Next, determine what an appropriate turn-around or response issue before it escalates or potentially time is for your team. For example: goes viral. Outside these hours of operations, good listening tools give you options for “Alerts” to be sent directly to the email of a designated person - Twitter Facebook therefore, enabling your Community to respond in a timely fashion. 20 minutes 30 minutes Blogs Comments 1 hour Mainstream News 1 hour 1 hourwww.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [5]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Determining What to Respond to and What Not to Respond to: As a part of the listening process, it is recommended that you Why You Should Determine determine the types of comments/posts that you will and will this Up Front: not respond to. Have you heard the saying: “Don’t feed the trolls?” This is an important phrase Question: If the conversation is really to remember. Knowing when to take peer-to-peer and there is no ask of you, the high road and when not to engage is as important as knowing when you should you jump in? The general rule of should respond. On occasion there thumb is - no. Let the conversation continue will be people who want to engage in a without jumping in. If however, there is a public debate and perhaps embarrass the brand. If you respond to these types question about your company, product or of posts, you will be feeding that need. service, then that could be a good point to Most people see through the effort of introduce yourself. these people and they don’t expect you to feed the trolls - so don’t. The following are some conversations that are good opportunities for engagement: • Mentions of your company participation in industry events or presentations • Compliments of your product, service or people • Recommendations or referrals of your products and/or services • Customer service/support issues or enquiries • Sales leads or product enquiries • Product requests www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [6]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? The following are some examples of the types of posts that you may choose to avoid responding to: • Generic mentions among a sea of competitors, without commentary that’s positive or negative • Sarcastic, snarky or potentially inflammatory comments • Straight retweets of company content or company news without any additional commentary • Peer-to-peer conversations that mention your company in passing, in which your involvement could be perceived as intrusive • Posts/forum threads that require membership to respond to, unless it’s a customer service issue, negative post or misinformation you need to correct • Rumors Be clear on what you would like your team to avoid when responding to profanity or inappropriate your community. For example: subject matter unwarranted public apologies starting rumors details about future product enhancements reference to partners customers or relationships that are not publicly knownwww.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [7]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Using Workflow to your Advantage Workflow is all about tracking, consistency of recording Why Do You Need information, metrics, reporting and ensuring you respond in a Workflow: timely manner in order to protect the brand. It helps with the who, Workflow can help both the what and why around conversations. Community Team in their work to listen and engage on behalf of the The following section highlights how our Engagement Console brand by: can be used to track information, engage and analyze and • creating a record of the report data. conversation • tracking: Before responding on behalf of the brand, we need to ask - sentiment of conversations. ourselves a few key questions to make sure that we are responding This can be very useful for within our corporate guidelines. We will apply this information in marketing to adjust plans to our workflow, which can be used for reporting purposes, as well better reach customers and/or as providing us with a clear snapshot around the context of each the community at large person we engage with, for future engagement. - whether or not a response has been given for a particular • Who is posting? question or concern and who • What are they talking about? responded • Is it negative or time sensitive? • finding your company’s advocates, • Who should respond? influencers or detractors • Any further context to add? • separating employee • Where does the post stand? Has it been closed off? conversations from community members so that you can focus your attentions in the right areas Question: Why is it important to know who is • escalating issues to other posting? It is important since we respond/ departments or to senior management route posts differently depending on whether • creating reports that show Share a person is a customer, partner, employee, of Conversation, Share of Voice, competitor or a general member of our sentiment and much, much more community. When applied correctly, it can save you and your team a lot of time.www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [8]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? When first viewing a post you should research the person to appropriately apply tags. For example, you may look at: • The person’s social profile available through the Engagement Console • Their LinkedIn Profile • Check your company’s CRM to determine if they are a customer or prospect To make listening and monitoring more efficient, we recommend using macros to streamline the process. Here are some of the most common macros that we use: Who is posting? Macros. “...the higher your Share of Conversation (SOC) is the more your brand name is Question: What is Share of Voice and why is it appearing in on- important? It is the degree to which your brand line conversations.” is mentioned in terms of your competitors in online conversations. It’s important because the higher your Share of Voice (SOV) the more you are being discussed in relation to your competitors.www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [9]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Question: What is Share of Conversation and why is it important? It’s the degree to which a brand is “...you want your associated with the conversations in the industry. brand top of mind It‘s important because the higher your Share of Conversation (SOC) is the more your brand name when making is appearing in on-line conversations. Of course, purchasing you want your brand to be top of mind when decisions.” making purchasing decisions. What are they posting about After you’ve determined who is posting (and used source tags), you next need to ask yourself what they are posting about in reference to your brand name. This is what will determine your classification and post tags. Classifications are selected by assignee/traffic coordinator to track the nature of online conversation. Classifications & Definitions Product Review: Product feedback/review, including RT’s Gen. Product/ Company: Passing mention Industry Discussion: Industry conversations, including competitive references Company Events: Conferences & webinars Product Review: Product feedback/review, including RT’s Gen. Product/ Company: Passing mention Industry Discussion: Industry conversations, including competitive references Company Outreach: Mentions by an employee/partner Support: Existing customer support inquiry Recommendation/Ref: Positive reference to using your product or service Sales Lead: Possible/potential lead Partner/Reseller: Mention by a partner/resellers customer Ensuring that you tag your posts appropriately will help with your reporting when you are looking at SOV and SOC.www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [ 10 ]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Setting Engagement Classifications The following are the engagement level options available in the Why? Classifying engagement status enables members of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Community team to keep track of posts that have outstanding issues. • New Content Not reviewed – With people on different shifts, Default when an on topic post is found they are easily able to determine • Reviewed, Determining Best Response – what is outstanding and what Qualified post, assigned to appropriate employee for needs action. Reporting can also possible response be done showing how many posts were closed out in a given period. • Recommend Follow up – To be managed by assignee This can demonstrate how much work flow is being done by any one • Commented, Awaiting Reply – To be managed by assignee person at any given time. • Commented Closed – To be managed by assignee • Referred – To be managed by assignee • Resolved, no further action required – To be managed by assignee • Reviewed, Closed, no response needed – To be managed by assignee Identifying Prioritywww.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [ 11 ]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? What is the tone of the post? Why? Understanding the volume of posts that are negative, positive or neutral can help guide marketing and communication plans. It provides a pulse of the community. This can be very useful information What Types of Posts Should You Assign to Other Departments? Social listening and engagement should not be Customer Support/Troubleshooting: restricted to just the Community team. Social Support Technical issue, troubleshooting, etc. organizations are just that - social. The entire organization participates. While the Community team Product Management Product Review: Product Enhancement will often be the first to encounter a conversation and Team assign post and source tags, they will often assign posts to other departments. Assigning a post could Lead Generation Sales Lead: Interest in a demo or want to buy be required because it should be handled by another Team department, or, it could be to alert management and the C-Suite of competitor activity, an emerging issue or Manager or Director of Industry Discussion or Company Content: Conversations of concern relating to your brand a mention. Assigning posts helps with the Who, How Community and When to respond. Training Support or Troubleshooting: Team Requests for training The following table represents a variety of topics that could be referred to other departments. This list is by Executive Industry Discussion: Financial, speculation of sale, no means exhaustive. Each company will have their Team high-level business conversations, industry analysis own unique items that they wish to classify and address.www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [ 12 ]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? What to do When You Are Assigned a Post 1. Review the post to ensure that you are the right person to address it. If you are not, reassign the post to the right person. 2. If you are responding publicly ensure that you are following your corporate guidelines. 4. Update the “Engagement Level” in the Engagement Console to reflect the current status of the post after you have taken action. For example, “Reviewed, No Engagement Required”, may be selected. 5. Close out all posts that have been assigned to you, even if they do not require engagement. This will provide more accurate reports. What about Escalation of Issues? Every Playbook should have an escalation process. This will be unique to your organization. You should determine what categories of Every Playbook posts you want escalated and to whom. should have For example: an escalation • Competitor mentions and/or conversations process. This will • Libellous comments be unique to your • Social attacks 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.www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [ 13 ]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? 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 Other Resources where competitors stand in comparison to your organization. For additional information on Monthly reports can provide much more detailed information listening and engaging, please around your overall objectives. check out the following: How to Develop Your Social Media Strategy Social Media Listening, Final Thoughts Measuring and Engagement Primer Playbooks are living, breathing plans that take you through the 20 Ways to Succeed at Social who, what, when and how to listen and respond on behalf of Media Engagement your brand in both every day business operations as well as the unplanned and unexpected. Start with defining and aligning your: • Business Objectives • Roles, Responsibilities and Expectations • Plans to resopnd and not respond • Using workflow to Your Advantage Find us on the web: - Knowing the Who, What and Why of Conversations www.radian6.com - Knowing the Who, How and When to Respond Follow us on Twitter: • Escalation www.twitter.com/marketingcloud • Reporting Read the Blog: This will result in processes that guide your entire organization and www.radian6.com/blog ensure buy-in with your C-Suite. Editors: Julie Meredith, By having a Playbook that addresses these topics your Jason Boies and Mike Girard organization will have a strong plan of action in place. Design: Lise Hansenwww.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [ 14 ]

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Community Ebook / September 2012 What the Heck is a Social Media Playbook, and Why do I Need One? Glossary Listening Engagement Most people perceive someone who listens as First and foremost, engagement is not a goal; someone who cares. This type of listening has it is a result. Our approach to engagement is to be visibly demonstrated; it is not passive or the result of building a community by focusing unidirectional. It is two-way listening. Message on the people that are in the community. It is reception is not enough; the listener must respond. about sharing content and information that will This is two-way, conversational listening. benefit our community. It is about expanding our networks and connecting with more people Conversational Listening Builds through conversations, likes and shares. Finally Relationships: One-way data gathering is a it is about being present and being able to have stealth activity. You may be doing it to better listen conversations. Being human and being appreciative to your customers and there is tremendous value is important. in analyzing what you hear and acting upon it. Why stop there? Let customers see that you are listening Playbook by acknowledging them and strengthen your A playbook lays out the processes in which your relationships too! organization will listen and engage. It helps provide information to all the players to ensure that they Conversational Listening Sends a Message: are consistent in engagement and workflow, while On the surface, listening seems to be about also guiding them through what can sometimes be receiving. However, conversational listening sends a murky waters. message: you are important to us. Post Tags Conversational Listening Personalizes Your Brand: A listening brand is an unmasked brand Provides a summary of the content in a post or that is more personal and less institutional. As you posts. They enable you to categorize posts. For listen & build trust, you will also increase the quality example, company outreach. of the feedback you receive since people will share more openly when they observe true listening Source Tags behaviour. Used in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to identify the source of the post. For example, sources could be The online community’s awareness that you are tagged as an influencer or a competitor. actively listening will influence the conversation significantly. Your very presence changes the Workflow dynamics. Let people know you are listening. Provides the methods and processes for tracking, measuring and responding to conversations about your brand.www.radian6.com1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [ 15 ]