Here are some key traits which make for an ideal social media team.  With the right team and program, business improve by becoming more innovative, improving quality as well as performance.

Passion
We're definitely passionate about social media.  It takes a constant and consistent communications program, follow up and management.  If you don't enjoy the amount of communication involved through blogging, tweeting and responding, then you'll quickly burn out. 

Natural Evangelism
Not only an affinity to learning what's new in the social media world and being able to determine their uses but not being drawing into the next shiny object necessarily unless that is part of your branding.  Also, a balance between perfectionism and action with a bias towards action.  After all, you need to keep the conversation going consistently to make this work.

Social Media Team
Not only is social media about communicating, of which, listening is typically 50% but then there is action associated with learning and understanding what customers needs, how they would prefer to buy, what they might prefer to buy, how could they buy more easily and what would get them to recommend others to buy - become a brand advocate.  Taking the feedback we do get from social media and implementing it in a meaningful way to your target audience is the true mark of a savvy business.

Committed to Education
Social media like the communication mediums before are to inform, educate or entertain.  If you're selling, selling, and selling, fairly soon you won't have a community.  So, sharing information and educating people reduces buyers' remorse while helping people make smarter purchase decisions with higher customer satisfaction.

Strategic & Tactical
The social media team is both strategic and tactical.  Directing the conversation draws the community together and draws specific types of community individuals as well.  Depending on your customer set or desired prospective audience, your conversation has both strategic as well as tactical implications and can address broad range of company drivers such as innovation, risk management, business process improvement and customer service delivery.

Business Savvy
A lot of self-proclaimed social media experts can talk up a storm but without some business savvy to understand sales, marketing, channel management, P&L, product management, business processes and customer support fundamentals, they may not be able to assist the company fully.

The key goal of a well planned social media program is that it will support the organization at various points of delivery from the sales, product & service delivery to creating brand advocacy for referrals, repeat sales, up sales or cross sales.

It's far reaching effects are being utilized by companies looking to become Best of Breed in their field.  Improving the performance of our businesses is where the right social media team can assist.