Picture a mid-sized retail chain in Istanbul — 312 employees, a general manager who approved the Facebook page launch, and a marketing assistant assigned to run it because she ‘knows social media best.’ No brief, no approval flow, no brand voice document. The page grew in its first three weeks. In the fourth week, a hasty reply to a customer complaint became a press story. They shut the account down. This is not a hypothetical — I have seen variations of it play out across Turkish retail, tourism and manufacturing over the past two years. And every case begins with the same misconception: treating social media as a communication channel, when it is, in fact, a business process.Here is the thesis I want to defend, and I expect pushback on it: launching a corporate social media account is not meaningfully different from installing a piece of production equipment. Run a machine without an operating manual and breakdowns are predictable; run a social media account without a brief, an approval structure and a measurement framework and brand damage is equally predictable. The ‘launch first, fix later’ logic fails here because the internet has a longer memory than most managers assume. A significant portion of Turkish business leaders still treat social media as a broadcast channel — post something, reach people, done. But these platforms are real-time customer relationship environments. Recognising that distinction changes everything from agency contracts to executive decision-making.The first critical link in this process is the brief. A brief tells the agency — or whoever is internally responsible — which audience you are talking to, what you will and will not say, in what tone, at what frequency and with what success metric. Without a brief, every piece of content the agency produces is a guess about your brand. When I worked with a mid-sized construction materials firm in Ankara, the agency cycled through six different tonal approaches over six months — because the client had never provided a brief. After six months, the follower count had risen noticeably, but sales readiness was zero: not a single follower had called to request a quote. Large numbers, empty audience. The brief is not a bureaucratic formality; it is the only mechanism that keeps agency output aligned with business intent.The second critical link is the approval process. Social media moves fast, but speed is not the same as absence of control. By early 2010, Facebook and Twitter have reached substantial audiences in Turkey, particularly the 18-to-35 segment. That audience reacts to posts instantly and shares reactions further. The ‘post now, ask later’ approach therefore carries real risk in any consumer-facing sector. A functional approval process looks like this: a weekly content plan reviewed and signed off in advance; pre-prepared response templates for the most predictable customer scenarios; a written definition of what the account manager can decide independently and what must escalate to a senior decision-maker. This does not slow the channel down. It clarifies exactly where agency autonomy ends and where client authority begins — which eliminates the most common source of wasted back-and-forth.The third link is measurement, and this is where the largest gap opens. Most Turkish SMEs measure social media performance by likes and follower counts. These are visibility indicators, not business outcomes. Look at a tourism operator in Izmir with 4,200 followers and an average of 47 likes per post — but no tracking of how many inquiries came through the channel, and no connection to the reservation system. What should be measured instead: the volume of inquiries arriving via social media, the conversion rate from inquiry to booking, and the average response time. Those three data points tell you whether the channel is working. Follower counts do not. As a manager, the right question to ask your agency is simple: ‘What business result is this account generating?’ If the answer comes back in likes and reach figures, your measurement framework needs rebuilding before your next campaign brief does.Design and content production is another relationship that is consistently underestimated. Social media is a visual environment; even the sharpest copy loses to weak design. A recurring pattern in Turkey: a company purchases a ‘social media management package’ from an agency without separating out the design budget, or assumes it is included. When you look at the contract, the agency is delivering five ‘ready-made template’ posts per month. A template is the opposite of brand identity. Brand identity means consistent typography, a controlled colour palette and a visual language that belongs to you and no one else. Building that language is simultaneously a design job and a brand strategy job — and it does not fit inside a monthly retainer of a few hundred lira. This is a difficult argument to make to managers who can point to a competitor ‘doing social media’ for less. Track that competitor’s account for three months: inconsistency, silence periods and unanswered customer comments will almost certainly appear.The difference between a company that builds corporate social media as a business process and one that runs it as ‘someone should post something’ becomes visible within six months. The first has a brief, an approval flow, a measurement framework, and a manageable agency relationship. The second has a manager asking every week either ‘why was nothing posted?’ or ‘why did that go out without approval?’ Before you open an account — or before you decide whether to keep the one you already have open — I would ask three questions. Which specific customer question are we answering through this channel? Who will answer it, through which approval step? And six months from now, what will we look at to say it worked? If those answers are not written down, hold off on launching. A half-maintained brand presence on social media is more damaging than no presence at all. A potential customer who finds your Facebook page and sees the last post was four months ago draws conclusions — and those conclusions cost you without you ever knowing it happened.
This article was originally published in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on February 4, 2010. The English edition has been reviewed and edited by the author.