The salesforce.com social engagement team triages 80,000 brand mentions a year, escalates issues in real time, and engages with our customers beyond our website. It’s pretty incredible to think that this team of 3 was non-existent 18 months ago.

I’ve brought in Senior Community Manager Nathan Freitas to shed light on his own experience building out the team, crafting a tactical playbook, and weaving social throughout the marketing organization at salesforce.com. Nathan was a 6 year sales veteran at salesforce.com when he was tapped to lead the Community Engagement team.

Can you give me a quick walk through of your team’s roles and responsibilities?

My team’s main focus is creating a Salesforce community on the social channels that is fun and vibrant. We're engaging with posts that mention our brand, routing those to the appropriate teams, pointing to helpful resources, addressing concerns, and just having fun.

How did you build a team and create change?

I hired people that were familiar with the space and great personalities. People that could be a force for good and help lead the effort to make a change. Honestly, it wasn’t all me, rather the larger team of folks that I worked with to help make things better. Don’t do it alone – this is my recommendation to anyone reading this. Find someone that you work well with, help them achieve some great things with social and then turn around and announce the good news to others. Sometimes you have to show them the fruit from the tree before they believe the tree can actually produce fruit.

What tools are you using every day?

We primarily us the Marketing Cloud but also find tools like SocialBro, Bitly, Twitter, and Facebook to have great features we need to be successful.

How are you measuring success?

We’re measuring success by tracking the following:

• Volume of conversation on social channels tied to events we’re a part of
• Number of workflowed posts through Marketing Cloud
• Number of community posts we engaged with
• Clicks on shared content
• Number of new engagement opportunities 

What was the biggest challenge in getting the marketing organization to embrace social?

At the end of the day, the traditional goal of Marketing is to position our product(s) in a way that drives interest and in the end, pipeline. Since social media engagement isn't DIRECTLY creating pipeline, it was a bit of a hard sell. Let me add that there are ways to create leads with inbound marketing but that's not solely community engagement.

So how did you overcome this challenge?

I wouldn’t say “I” overcame it, rather the overall team did. It was a mixture of strategy and just getting out there and testing. Once we started seeing things work, we continue to do more of it. My suggestion is to identify your problem, give yourself a month to research strategies and best practices. Then just get out there and test things. See what works for your audience and market.

What worked for us was collaborating with the content marketing and campaigns teams to extend their reach and help bring in more engaged prospects.

What is a great example of a social transformation success story within one of the Marketing Teams? Can you provide a specific example?

I think our events team has done a great job. In the past few years, they've taking huge steps and are generating social media conversation, and of course registrations through social media. We can always improve but they created huge demand for our Dreamforce and Cloudforce events. Definitely inspiring! 

The biggest example of a transformation I can think of is not within our marketing department, it’s been in support. They’ve gone from what was minimal focus on social media, to full time support via social 24/7. They think more social, look for ways to delight our customers and have really transformed the way we provide support.

To hear from the rest of the salesforce.com Social Team, check out our On Demand Webcast “Inside Salesforce.com’s Social Media Strategy” . During this 60-minute webcast, you’ll get insight into how salesforce.com is using social media to grow the business, the group-by-group programs that provide value, how social media efforts are coordinated across departments and regions, and key initiatives salesforce.com is thinking about for the coming year. Click the banner below.