Steve Mann is creating and implementing a social media strategy for B2B software giant SAP. He agreed to talk to me about what he’s doing for SAP and how B2B marketers should approach getting started in social media. With his personal interest in science and sociology, Steve also has some insightful views on the human side of implementing a social media strategy. I’ve summarized Steve’s top-ten ideas below. I first discovered Steve through this excellent interview that Mike Moran did with Steve on Mike’s blog.

To read my full interview with Steve, see my next post.

10 Rules for Getting Started in Social Media from SAP’s Steve Mann

1. Audit your organization to find social media efforts that already exist within your company.
2. Assess your culture: Are you a command-and-control culture? Can you tolerate negative customer feedback? If not, then start small with external social media—or stay away from it altogether.
3. Examine your organizational structure: Highly stovepiped or diversified companies should use social media internally first to build collaboration capability before going external.
4. Don’t strategize in a vacuum. Ask customers what they want to talk about.
5. Build the internal processes and infrastructure necessary to follow-up on social media interactions with customers.
6. Don’t pick a social media technology, pick a business goal and use social media to pursue it.
7. Learn how different generations like to consume online content. Consider hiring an “inter-generational expert.”
8. Talk to your IT department about restrictive social media policies. Millenials and other digital natives will not tolerate being barred from using social media.
9. Examine your leadership style. Social media, as a means to support collaboration among your Millenial workers, requires an implementation that supports coaching and listening, not rules and edicts.
10. Steal tactics from B2C marketers. They have a head start on social media and many of their their tactics are applicable in B2B.

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