Social Media Playbook

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
@Macleanheather

www.radian6.com
1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6
Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [1]


“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.com
1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [2]


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 expectations

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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.

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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 hour

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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

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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 known

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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.

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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.

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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.com
1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672-3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6 [ 10 ]


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 Priority

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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.

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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.

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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 Hansen

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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.

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