I’m in the middle of a year long initiative for one of my clients that involves constructing a “social media center for excellence” or a “social media resource center”. Just what the heck does this mean?

Basically, it’s imperative for a large organization to develop a set of umbrella policies and strategies to govern how it approaches a technology, especially when that technology is readily accessible by most, if not all employees. In other words, you (the employer) know that your employees are already using social media. And you have a pretty good idea at how you want to use social media… But, you don’t have the ability to control it, nor do you have guidelines to govern how your business and employees use it. So on and so forth…

So, as you develop your social media strategy which should include:

• what you hope to gain through social media
• who is supposed to do what
• how you will measure what is done and achieved

Strategy aside, you need to arm your company with the right tools. So, we created a resource center accessible to all:

• links to our official communities
• recorded webcasts on how to use the communities, and how your business uses them (available streaming on-demand)
• handbooks for how to use each community for the business
• a policy manual – keep it short and common sense
• a checklist for how to create communities
• POCs for getting started
• POCs for issues/escalation/crises
• 3rd-party resources such as videos, articles, reports, research
• new-hire orientation training plan

To get started, here’s a great article by Jeremiah Owyang on creating a Social Media Center for Excellence.