1. Technical Infrastructure Management. Manage the software and accounts that your social media program run on. In our case, it’s administration of the community platform (from Jive), the blogging platform (from Typepad), and then all the external accounts (Twitter, Faceboook, YouTube, SlideShare, etc.). If you’re hosting your own platform (as we do with our community site), you need resources in IT Ops, software development, web development, SEO consulting, program management. For our blogging platform, which is outsourced to Typepad, we still need administration and web design. External sites need icons, background design, administration – even down to where you are keeping the passwords, and tooling (like CoTweet or Ping.fm).

2. Program Channel and Community Management. Somebody’s gotta blog. Although we have some centralized channels, different programs within our company work with different subject matter and audiences. Often these are outside our core social media and community team, in the product or program team themselves. However, for us, our main technical customer/partner community is taken care of by the communities team. I run a blog and a weekly podcast, and each of those need content, and that requires resourcing for editorial, production,  publishing, and promotion. These are of course social media channels, so each of those needs somebody to be present and interact on the channel.

3. Influencer Relations and Advocacy Program. Although you can operate out of your home base, somebody has to venture out and work with the greater community. In some companies, this might be a PR function, but for our company, the main community is filled with techies, and you need a techie to hang out with them. So I run our main “blogger” relations program, trying to keep up with bigger virtualization conversation and make sure I know most of the people there. It would be hard to do with without my postcast & Twitter channels mentioned in Program #2.  Within this category, I also run an advocacy program, where we give awards to our best evangelists, the people who have given back the most to the overall community.

4. Social Business Consulting. I firmly believe that in the future, there will be no social media programs, just social media baked into all other programs. But for now, somebody needs to be working with all parts of the organization and seeing how they can be using social tools and processes. I think I’ve met with just about every part of our organization except finance. The need for social media interactions in the various groups I’ve talked with range from the very simple -  just needing to get their news out to our existing community via existing channels – to being fully engaged managing their own social media presence.

5. Social Media Training. Somebody is training people. This needs to include both an overall stance toward social media (yes, you can talk to somebody outside the company on this website without being a spokesperson) as well as tactical training (strategies for using Twitter).

6. Social Media Policy. If you do it right, this doesn’t have to be revisited that often, but somebody has to do it, and hopefully it’s a collaboration between many somebodies. Our social media guidelines were inspired from public policies published by companies like IBM, Sun, and Intel.  You need to set overall policies for social media participation at the corporate, the program, and the individual level. You can include policies for individual channels (like Twitter), but be sure you are talking core policies and not specific tools and tips, because those evolve very quickly.

7. Monitoring & Response. Somebody’s got to watch out in general, and somebody has to figure out how to respond to situations. In an ideal world, you’d have many eyes watching (which can include your external community and programmatic listening platforms), a single place to report issues, a well-defined routing and escalation procedure, and a set of identified responders, depending on the topic and the venue. We’re not in an ideal world yet, but we have pretty good antennae and reflexes.

7. Analysis & Metrics. We’ll have an argument about both metrics and ROI some other time. In any case, somebody needs to be measuring some baseline metrics just as a health check – things like fans, followers, traffic. If your business goals include it, campaign traffic, conversions, and revenue get measured. Although I’m all about the relationship benefits of our social media programs, we are starting to track some campaign-oriented results – mostly a matter of always attaching our Omniture tracking codes inside the links we share online. In our organization, the existing web analytics team tracks metrics.

8. Central Corporate Channel and Community Management. I’m listing this as separate from #2, although the activities are similar, because for us it’s a different function and worried about by a different set of people. For us, the channels include our corporate blog(s), and some accompanying Facebook and Twitter accounts. A lot of time press releases get little respect in my technical community, but a modern corporation has all sorts of news and announcements streaming out in all directions beyond just their press releases – programs launched, products patched, and events scheduled. Social media channels, done right, enable people to receive just the announcements they want, in just the venues they want to receive them in. And as always, somebody’s got to run that, and then be there for the questions and feedback.

Again, you can slice your overall social media efforts in different ways than we do, and eventually this stuff gets smeared across the enterprise. A fully functional social media program should thinking about all these areas, and just as we quickly moved beyond the solo “webmaster” in 1999 to a full web team of marketing and production specialists, with this kind of breadth we’re quickly moving beyond the solo “social media expert” in 2009.