Outsourcing Social Media Professionally Without Selling Your Soul

This post is a reblogging with permission from Lonnie Tapia, of http://lonnietapia.com/ with no edits or additions. Original post is located on notesee.

B2B and B2C tips for working with social media business folk posted by Lonnie Tapia
How to Outsource Social Media without Selling Your Soul

http://twitter.com/search#search?q=%23OSMPW

outsourcingsocialmediaprofessionally.com/contest

#OSMPW
#SXSWB2B

Kate Buck @katebuckjr
Elizabeth Bellanti, @BeBellanti
Eric Schwartzaman @ericschwartzman
Nicole Simon @nicolesimon

Kate:
Don’t alienate people (stay away from some topics)
No drunk tweeting
Know value system
People who want to tweet, should if they can follow the guidelines above

Kate Buck
- to or not to disclose team
- you don’t have to do it yourself

Check out Social media chores by @chrisbrogan
No hard and fast rules,
Vendors are your new housekeepers

You don’t have to do it all yourself!

Content creation, analytics, campaigns, etc:
Create a team

Launch phase before a new project starts – 30-45 days for setup:
content creation
technical setup
not engaging at this time
get FAQs
find important contacts
getting approval on content

Expectations
- clearly define expectations and goals
- ROI is one channel, there are other outcome expectations to accomplish

Ongoing support and partnership
- weekly meeting to exchange content
- what other strategies are they doing outside of what you are doing

Important thing to look for when hiring;
- chemistry
- align expectations

Eric
You can’t outsource your voice.
You can outsource social media literacy.
There is extreme social media illiteracy in the boardroom.
Education needs to be done at the top. Not just in the marketing dept.
The more folks involved in social media companywide, the more digital breadcrumbs lead to your company.

For B2B, outsourcing isn’t an option. You need the engineers or the people who know the details to answer questions.

Questions to ask upfront:
Who’s the one you want to reach?
Is your audience on Twitter?
What’s your persona?

Panelists have a great debate going on outsourcing social media. Seems to be agreed that social media cannot be outsourced completely. Small businesses can teach a team about a product and they can knock it out. B2B needs the technical people on staff. Sweet spot seems to be small businesses though. B2B can outsource areas and training.

Before you approach a social media company know:
who is your audience
what is your conversion rate

what do you

Slideshow – how to hire a social media company

Related posts:

1. Social Confidence Boot Camp