Some departments struggle with getting a bit of the big budget pie for their newly initiated social media project. Since if you want to do it well, you most likely need one fte or maybe even some more who take care of your this social media project.
However what if you don’t get a piece of the budget pie and you cannot have an fte for your social media project? Should you then just wait for the next budget round? No you shouldn’t, to be honest you made a mistake upfront by asking for budget.
The only budget you should spend is your cognitive surplus. Start your social media projects small and well designed, however you won’t need a dedicated person to run it. What you need is a few minutes of each of your team members to for example run your Facebook page. Imagine having 30 people in your company spending 10 minutes every day on doing that…
Not only you avoid the ritual dance to get some budget, what you do at the same time is you are initiating a social business transformation. All of the sudden social media is becoming a part of the job (literally). Of course you have to make sure there is a good process and make sure the group of people are aligned. However this approach might be more valuable for you than just creating a new siloed team for social media with which the existing teams don’t have a connection at all.
So don’t go for the budget, go for the cognitive surplus of people and initiate the transformation. If you are successful there will be budget available which you can use wisely in transforming even further.