Is your company’s social media plan slightly… disorganized? Not sure who’s running what account and when things should be posted? Web 2.0 Expo Speaker Veronica Fielding has the answer for you in her upcoming session Cure the Chaos: How to Coordinate Your Company’s Social Media Efforts.

Veronica recently answered some of our questions about her session and how you can better facilitate this vital marketing and sales channel.

Justin: Your session title describes the current state of social media adoption for many companies as chaos.  With marketing, HR, IT, sales and every other aspect of the business having a stake in the issue, how does a company even start to set a comprehensive social media strategy?

Veronica: By considering the objectives for each area of the business, the company can begin to envision how social media will enable the organization to achieve those objectives.  For example, if an objective is to increase customer satisfaction, thinking through how social media technologies can support that lays the path for the other considerations that need to be made to move from envisioning to implementation.

Justin: So you’ve set your social media strategy and built your presence on the different networks, yet the money isn’t coming in.  Where are the customers?

Veronica: Social media is seldom, at least at this point in time, a “sales” channel.  It facilitates sales by increasing engagement, communication flow—but it isn’t usually meant to be a direct line to an increase in revenue.

Justin: In terms of the customer, how does social media effect their expectations of the organizations that they choose to do business with and how organizations can use new mediums to engage and collaborate with customers and prospects?

Veronica: Being in the social channel definitively starts to communicate to stakeholders that a brand intends to increase its participation with stakeholders via this channel.  It’s critical to continue conversations and not to let them “die on the vine” by not having the resources available to keep the conversations going.  We call pseudo-abandoned social media sites “ghost towns.”  Good planning keeps the populace engaged and the conversation flowing.

Justin: In addition to the benefits on the outward, public facing front, social media provides an opportunity for unprecedented levels of collaboration within an organization.  Should internal social media usage be regulated by the same set of rules as external?

Veronica: It depends on what the public-facing rules are; and it will vary for each organization.

Justin: In both employee and market-facing communities the Community Manager plays a crucial role.  In your opinion, what are the most important day-to-day responsibilities of someone in this position?  Does every company need a Community Manager?

Veronica:  I think it’s too soon to have hard and fast rules in the social channel, but if an organization were to have a community manager, the key role of that individual (or individuals) would be to ensure the flow of communication between “the brand” and the other members of the community.

Justin: On the Digital Brand Expression blog I noticed a survey about whose driving social media adoption within organizations.  Any results that you can share?

Veronica: We will be announcing those at the conference.

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