In our previous posting, Dave Ewart, Director of Marketing at Cleantech Group, and I shared some ideas around creating conversations in social media channels. In this posting, we’ll share our thoughts about who make the best spokespeople in the social media world.

First of all, the best spokesperson is actually a person. While consumer brands are successfully interacting with consumers as a company/brand persona, business buyers are much more likely to engage with an individual than a company.

While job titles and responsibilities will vary from company to company, the best people for the job are product champions, executives who can bring a business or end user perspective, and technology experts. Overall, you should look for spokespeople who understand your buyers’ views, have knowledge that your buyers value, have public profiles in your industry, and can project a personality that fits with your company brand.

Tip: Decide if you have enough contributors to populate multiple accounts. Or, use a tool like Co-Tweet to align your internal and external resources to contribute content to the same channel or account.

In most companies, overall responsibility for social media falls under the Public Relations department. I think that PR teams can fill critical social media roles around standardization and orchestration. For example, they can create policies for what is appropriate or inappropriate to share and when to communicate time-sensitive information such as product launches. They can monitor postings across the company and encourage participation. In addition, they can perform brand monitoring with tools like Radian6 or Scout Labs and make sure that someone in the company responds to important posts. However, in my experience, PR professionals typically don’t have the bandwidth or the depth of product/ solution knowledge to drive an effective social media strategy by themselves. They need the solution experts to drive the content and the message.