I wrote an article for Social Business News recently talking about the importance of senior managers participating on social media after research revealed that very few actually do.  I think that if you want your social media to really work and for your business to become 'social' then there needs to be leadership from the top as social media is a cultural thing.  Indeed I think social is so important to how companies operate now that a Chief Social Officer is required for you to effectively make use of the possibilities available.

Anyway, to help your senior managers get started, here are 5 ways they can help you build your community.

1.    Engage their peers in mass collaboration – They should be engaging fellow directors and senior managers in mass collaboration activities.  There is a fun exercise they can try at the end of this post.
2.    Working with HR – HR can often block attempts at collaboration because it can be seen as taking away power from their domain.  You will need your director to work with them to ensure collaboration is part of everyones job role, that it becomes a KPI that they are judged against.
3.    Make community results important -If you're going to incorporate social philosophies and technologies into how you work you need to get  community results an importance alongside other more traditional metrics.
4.    Make sure IT give you the tools -Technology will play a big part in enabling your mass collaboration efforts, so your director will need to help ensure that you have the tools and platforms from IT to allow mass collaboration in your business.
5.    Ensuring finance understand what you do – Just as you need technological tools to succeed, you also need financial resources.  Your job will be to educate the CFO on the different budgeting and resource allocation needs of a collaborative business.