Depending on the size of your company and your exposure to social media platforms, you may need to build a social media team, rather than just relying on a single individual.

As I have stated before, if your social media team is just one person, you should really focus on ensuring that this individual has a strong marketing and business background, knows how to understand your business objectives (especially as they pertain to social media), has analytic skills, is a good communicator and has strong customer-focused skills.

Notice how I didn’t say “has a strong understand of social media technology”. To me, this is actually the least important, and it’s only important once all those other aspects of the roll have been full met. This is because social technologies are changing each year. Would you hire someone because they have mastered MySpace? Friendster? No! So why would you hire someone who has only mastered Twitter or Facebook? The bottom line is that just because someone is familiar with these technologies, doesn’t make them an expert. These technologies can be learned and mastered by smart people with a good marketing foundation.

Liana Evans for ClickZ, writes an article about assembling a team from across multiple departments – the departments that all have a stake in social media. This is a novel approach to constructing a team, and I can certainly endorse the strategy if you can actually field and support such an investment. If not, I suggest an equally successful strategy: partner with key POCs in each department.

• Connect with a department manager
• Pitch the value of social media to the organization
• Explain how their department will play a role
• Set expectations (turnaround times, hours, resources, etc.)
• Establish well-documented procedures and policies
• Communicate regularly with the department stakeholder
• Provide regular feedback to the department manager