Quick social wins for the enterprise

If you work for an enterprise level company that is fairly new to social media, there's a chance that you or someone in upper management made your first or second order of business the claiming of your company name accounts on Twitter, Facebook, if they haven't already done so themselves. While all well and good (and obviously necessary), usually after that, companies will try and start engaging customers right away, running marketing campaigns and initiatives, forgetting that they may not have addressed some of the basics to internally tie in all of their marketing efforts and channels by simply informing people from the inside out that their company is involved in social media.

Here are some things to think about doing that are very small in effort but can be big in their effectiveness if you can make them happen. The integration of social media into an enterprise level business takes time if you want it to eventually drive key business decisions across functional groups, but there are ways to speed up that process by taking care of the low-hanging foundational fruit first.

Some of this might be common sense to most but you'd be surprised how many strong long-running enterprise company's haven't done any of these types of quick wins to capitalize on their own size and long-established communication channels.

1. Verify that on marketing/PR email blast templates, regardless if it's B2B or B2C, that you've updated the footer to have text links to your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts/pages. Many large companies spend thousands of dollars on bulk email campaigns still whose lists are in the sometimes millions of opt-in customers. Every email that goes out to a customer without your social media info on it is a missed opportunity.

2. Most larger companies have a descent-size onboarding process for new employees including documentation and a one day orientation. New hires are usually given information about the company and it's web properties. Promoting your social media channels within that environment is a great way to quickly get your employees more engaged in what their company is doing so that they can get a more expanded view of what's going on outside of their own more immediate work environment.

3. Include social media links in the templates of company-wide internal communications. While the subject of an internal memo or communication may not be about social media, it helps to remind people internally where to find your company online. Quick links never hurt.

4. Notify the entire company internally when bigger company promotions or milestones are happening so that employees can be leveraged as your extended social media/marketing team to post a link or content to their personal social media accounts. Some people might not be open to it but for the most part, the livelihood and positive buzz surrounding the company they work for only benefits them.

5. Make sure your social links exist on the company's corporate contact or about page.

None of these take a lot of time to implement (or shouldn't) and they help to solidify social media awareness when and wherever your company communicates to further help the integration of social into your company's culture. If you are working for a company that existed pre-social media however, you'd be surprised how many little opportunities like these to connect everyone are missed.