I’d be willing to wager that one of the questions I hear most frequently in regards to social media (aside from the whole ROI conversation) is whether or not a business should manage their social media strategy and implementation in-house or outsource it.

I’ve teamed up again with Ben LaMothe to tackle this very question as the second part of our social media for businesses series.

So without further ado…

BL: This depends greatly on the experience that staffers have working with social media and the web as marketing and PR tools. It’s dangerous to assume that just because you use Facebook or Twitter in your personal life you’re able to utilize the platforms successfully for business. I would recommend outsourcing it, either at a consulting level, or an execution level.

If you’re comfortable with the mediums and just want the ideas and strategy documents, go that route. Bring someone in to write a strategy for your business, and then take over the responsibility of implementation.

Outsourcing the strategy and implementation brings with it the benefit of ensuring the profiles and web presences remain active. Having a team working on your behalf also ensures that ideas flow continuous, and any opportunities for monetization or growth are spotted early.

AP: The needs of every business are as diverse as the individuals that run them. To answer this question, you need to determine how you expect social media to help your business and do an honest evaluation of the talent located in your organization.

It’s often tempting to assign social media roles to interns or Gen Y staff because of the generational stereotype that they’re all social media junkies and tech-savvy. Instead of making that assumption, I’d encourage you to open a dialogue with individuals in your organization to see if you might have someone who’s genuinely interested in adding social media to their list of responsibilities (and seems to have a proven track record in communicating on these platforms). As Ben mentions in his response, there’s a difference between using social media platforms for personal and business practices.

I’m personally a big fan of keeping implementation in-house, but partnering with a consultant to help craft overall strategy and key messages. Partnering with an expert allows you to avail yourself of their experience and gives you an objective participant who can keep an eye on the big picture making sure the social media strategy’s framework takes into account all overarching business strategies and messages.

An expert will help you determine which platforms you should pursue, craft talking points for each of them as well as guide you through the process of developing a following. Transparency is important in the realm of social media and taking responsibility for implementation of strategies in-house lends an authenticity that outsourcing can’t duplicate. A good partnership will help you find your company’s voice on these new platforms.

Given the volume of information on the matter and the too-many-to-name schools of thought on how to harness the tools successfully, I teamed up with Ben LaMothe, a blog and social media strategist at the Glasshouse Partnership in London, to create a series of blog posts that we hope will help shed light on how and why social media is having an impact on the way businesses market themselves.

Why should small businesses have an active social media presence?

Ben:
Small businesses have a big opportunity to leverage social media into an advantage in their area and turn that into income. This is an advantage that bigger businesses don’t have, in part because any plan for social that they draw up has to scale to reach millions. Because of that, it isn’t easily customized or modified once it is deployed.

At a local level, your user targeting is much better defined. You already know the general profile of someone who would be interested in shopping with you, or eating at your restaurant. You’ve seen them come in and out over the years. Each person that comes in becomes his own viral loop. Everyone in their community is part of their viral loop. And then those people have their own loops, and soon on.

But these viral loops won’t reach everyone, even in a smaller area. This is where social comes in. It operates on top of the viral loops that your customers create every time they visit. This reaches the people who aren’t connected to your customers already. It’s another communication platform to reach current and potential customers.

By being involved in social, you’re opening your business up to marketing and promotional opportunities that otherwise would not exist for the businesses. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, and more and more people are using smart phones, net books and other devices, a small businesses’ ability to reach customers goes from 9 am – 5 pm to 24/7.

Aliera:
While small businesses do have some natural advantages in the social media arena as Ben stated above, social media is an opportunity for any business, no matter the size, to engage customers on a personal level. It’s as global or local a conversation as you want it to be and provides your customers with the opportunity to engage personally with your brand. Since Ben has tackled some of the advantages inherent in utilizing this medium in a local effort, I’d like to take a look at some ways in which building an effective social media can help you, no matter the size of your business:

1. Build a personal relationship with consumers. In their simplest form, social media platforms are conversation tools. By investing your efforts in learning how to navigate these tools, you’re given the opportunity to engage your customers on a personal level. And if you’re a good steward of that engagement, you’re given the chance to establish a rapport and build trust.
2. Get more mileage out of investments in traditional advertising. You’ve already invested money on website development, public relations, and media planning and placement, which are all important avenues of promoting your products or services to your target. To make the most of the efforts spent on traditional advertising, you can add a social media component to your strategy to extend the reach of your other marketing efforts, i.e. promoting your public relations efforts via Twitter, branding your social media space with design elements from your website or talking about the effectiveness of certain media placements on your blog.
3. Get to know your audience. With search engines now tracking conversations in real-time and sites compiling conversations that are happening locally, social media can be used to collect information on the things your audience finds important. By tapping into this resource, you can identify what influences your audience and use that information to reach out to them in a more personal manner. By showing them that you understand their concerns and motivators, you strengthen your relationship.
4. Evaluate and track how relationships shift over time. As with traditional marketing initiatives, it’s important that you measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your outreach. While ROI can still be a tricky thing to determine in social media, the tools used to track it are getting better all the time.

Before you test the waters, however, it’s a good idea to develop a strategy for managing your social media objectives in such a way that they support your traditional marketing goals.