Part three of my series on the different solutions organizations have found for their social media marketing. Read Scenario #1: The Overeager Intern and Scenario #2: X-Company is Going Social and Everyone’s Invited!

Scenario #3 The Big Guns

The ideal situation is one where the organization’s founder, president, or CEO is in charge, or heavily involved in the company’s social media. In this case, this person can become the true “face” for their company. Where we are actually seeing the most of this is in small business or start-ups which makes sense. In these cases, it’s often the owner who is driving sales to start off with and actively trying to promote their company and develop a name for them-selves. What better place to start than social media?

Joyce Cajucom owner of Noir Lash Lounge is one example of a business owner who does a great job with social media. Joyce is sending out tweets and Facebook posts all day long, personally interacting with anybody who has anything to say online about her company. I sent a tweet to @NoirLashLounge letting her know I had enjoyed my appointment with her new trainee and almost immediately, Joyce tweeted right back to say how glad she was that things had worked out. You can imagine how powerful this might be with negative comments as well. How often is it that easy to find such a direct line to the owner?

There are still two main issues that can arise with this arrangement:

1. Business owners, especially small business owners, are typically very, very busy people. This doesn’t always lend itself well to making the time to maintain all the different social media channels they have chosen to engage with. As with most things, when social media is done halfway it’s almost not really worth doing at all.

The best way to get around this obstacle is to really make updating and maintaining social media sites an important part of one’s daily routine. For example, spending half an hour in the morning, right after checking email, and again before the end of the day often works well. The other thing is to make sure that whatever aspects of your social media program can be automated are. I’m not going to go into too much detail about that here because I plan to cover social media aggregating and automating in another post.

2. The second issue I have with putting social media into the boss’ hands is what happens when the boss lacks the skills and knowledge to carry out this task properly? If you can’t imagine, here is one example. The quick answer to this is to make sure either to take the time to learn how to use social media properly or, hire a professional to get your company started and then show you how it’s done.

At the end of the day, although the owner is generally my top choice for who to handle the social media rains, there will always be people who just don’t have the interest or time it takes. In this case, it’s most definitely better to give the responsibility to somebody who is going to handle the job with enthusiasm and care.

- Rosa