A couple of weeks ago a client who runs marketing for a mid-sized retailer called for some advice on staffing up her social team. I’ve been helping her to find a social lead but that takes time and she’s been hot on growing out engagement and was having issues finding experienced individuals to bring onboard. Not surprisingly she wanted to know my thoughts on hiring in versus agencies or even more consulting help to get things moving. After chatting for a few minutes I suggested she look at her existing marketing teams for people who may want to move around and if that didn’t pan out, find a few junior hires.

Now given that I’ve worked in social for a number of years and consider myself a professional in the space (“guru” and “expert” I’ll leave to others) this caught her off guard but from my own experience growing social teams, I put attitude over experience every time. 

Obviously charting a path down the social road it’s requires having a good field guide, your “social media strategist” who looks at the big picture, pitches and secures funding for big programs and handles all the management aspects, but that’s just one part of the team and for my client, that was already on the books. Her problem was trying to support it with a team of experts. But you don’t need experts to have the best; you need an army [small or big] of people who really like to connect with people and they become the best.

When I started a social team at my last full time role I wanted excitement in our business, intelligence in life and eagerness in learning something new — that was about it. The resources I found, internal and external, were not particularly seasoned in the social field but they were passionate about the idea of openly communicating with our customers, hungry enough to define their own programs within team goals and driven to keep raising the bar. What we did kept on evolving – not just from me as the “guide” but from them and our numbers were passed time and time again.

Truth is most of the people who work in social, be it in social support, advocate outreach, or community development don’t pick up amazingly complex systems, they adapt to fairly straight forward tools and often times are telling the vendor what feature to build next themselves. When I read about Comcast Cares, Dell or talk to the teams I know myself, what I see every time is former support agents, PR & marketing coordinators, or people with a year or two in social who were hungry enough to take a little latitude and build themselves a place to succeed from.

Finding a team of seasoned people in a field a few years old is hard. Save it for the strategy roles.

Attitude is the barrier to entry. Take your social strategist, empower them to be a true champion, and surround them with people who understand the principles of engagement and the benefits of transparency and a sprinkle in a big dose of belief in what the company does. The details in how to get that out follow easily.