Corporate social media presences – structuring your business for success

Most smart brand-savvy companies now have some form of social media presence. As we’ve all seen, in some companies these have sprung up as the pet project of a marketing team member, on the whim of the customer service director, or maybe because because one of the PR guys sees the potential of these new media as additional PR channels. So how do you take things to the next level? How do you transform what may well be a market-leading social media presence in one part of your business into something that is truly representative of your company as a whole, transcending internal organisational boundaries and really becoming your ‘social face’ on the web?

This is a question on the minds of many firms the world over, and whilst I don’t profess to have all the answers, I will give you my thoughts on things to keep in mind if you’re about to undertake this journey. Let’s use an imaginary telecoms company called “Joe’s” for part of this.

1 – You are Joe’s!
To your customers, you are just Joe’s. Not Joe’s Sales Division, Joe’s Customer Service Department or Joe’s Directorate of Marketing and Brand. Just Joe’s. Sounds simple, but as far as I can see, this is something that many companies totally fail to understand. Companies have complex internal organisational structures for very good reasons i.e. they would cease to function if thousands of staff had no distinct organisational responsibilities. But when facing externally, there cannot be disjoined, organisational unit-focussed social media presences. Makes no sense to customers. Seamless outward-facing unity is critical.

2 – I first started it – so that makes me the boss?
At Joe’s just like everywhere there are directors and senior managers presiding over a myriad of different functions, and rightly so. They have done a great job at using Twitter as a PR tool, but are only just toying with social media for marketing and service purposes. So does this mean that Joe’s PR Director “owns” social media as they were there first? In many firms this seems to be the norm. But I don’t think its right. Kudos where its due for those bold enough to have the initiative to get things up and running in the first place, but just because they did a great job for their function doesn’t make them the only candidate to run the show in totality.

3 – So if I’m not the boss, who is?!
A fine question, and one that’s not so straightforward to answer. My own view is that no one function in a business can be expert at everything, and so centralising social media functions into a single “do everything” team who then conceive and manage everything from PR to marketing campaigns to service requests is pretty doomed to failure if the people making up that team have only part of the functional skills required. But then I’ve also said that the organisationally-fragmented model where the original social media innovator runs the show isn’t right. So what am I saying?

4 – Get your experts together, but de-centralise where it makes sense to
As we all know, social media is very much here to stay and is not just some flash-in-the-pan moment of web madness. But we also know that in most companies real, solid expertise of what social media is, how it works, how you can best use it and so on, is relatively speaking quite thin on the ground. This makes for a quite transitionary time for most companies. Until social media becomes a widely held and practiced discipline across the company, it does make sense to partially centralise things. But – critically – centralising with the right mix of skills, and not centralising for the sake of it.

Let’s look at this in more detail. If you’re moving beyond a successful first foray into social media into something that the senior folks want to see you do more of in a big way, you’re going to have a spike in your social media expertise in one part of the business. But irrespective of this, your functional expertise on marketing, customer service, PR and whatever else will form the core of your social media presences exist in their relevant organisational units, and not necessarily with any social media expertise. One approach that some companies are taking is to build a kind of hybrid model. This means creating a role where a named, senior individual holds overall responsibility for everything related to the company’s social media work, located in a central (or functionally-agnostic) part of the business, but with a team built up of subject matter experts from each of the functional areas either physically seconded into the central team, or dedicated to social media but managed virtually. And until social media really proves its worth with the senior folks (which we all know it will, right?), this kind of transitionary hybrid model feels to me to be one of the best ways of building a successful social media unit that cuts across functional areas without ‘he who shouts loudest’ defining the precise colour of your social media offering.

5 – How’s it best to organise things?
Again there are differing views here, but what I think has the best chance of success is where each functional area either physically stumps up the people to go into the centralised social media organisation, or where they provide dedicated, ring-fenced resource that are still operationally managed by the donor unit but are a dedicated virtual part of the central social media team. For example, it may be that you need a small number of PR, marketing, technology and brand people in your social media team to be the absolute social media experts representing each of these disciplines, but you also need a larger number of dedicated customer service people. In this case, it makes sense to have those who’s day job is running volume service operations continuing to do just that, but totally on your behalf, and without the potential to have resource diverted to other things. But in the case of the marketeers, technology, brand and PR folks, bringing a smaller number of these directly into the central social media team and developing them to be the social media gurus for their function makes sense.

6 – What about backup or supporting functions?
You are almost certainly going to need the regular support of specialist parts of your business like legal, regulatory, IT support and so on, for whom you won’t be able to justify 100% of their time to be dedicated to social media, but upon whom you will need to be able to get rapid access to as and when you need it. It’s important that you have agreements in place with these areas that you can get access to expertise on demand, and with an explicit understanding that traditional ‘management by committee’ decision-making simply won’t cut it. If you need legal advice on something, and your company lawyer needs to get other information from a supplier of theirs, then that supplier also has to be bought into a radically different operational model. Business processes need evaluating and where necessary re-writing such that your social media world can operate at the speed that your customers will expect of that medium.

7 – Organisational structure
So the consolidated social media team could end up looking like this:

- Head of Social Media – central, senior position that is overall accountable for everything that the company does in social media. They are the overall lead, and primary liaison at senior level with the various functions that will be involved in social media. They will thoroughly ‘get it’!
- A central team of marketing, PR, brand, technology, content, design and customer service expertise that are both experts in social media and in their own discipline. These people form the key representatives of each of the respective functional areas and continue to work as virtual parts of their donor teams
- A remotely-managed but dedicated customer service operations team
- Named individuals in supporting functions (e.g. legal or press office), with re-designed processes that facilitate rapid response to requests

8 – It won’t work without company-wide governance
This is all well and good, but without agreeing the terms of reference for your social media business there will always be the potential for conflict with parts of your business who want to do things differently or in priority to others. This is where governance is key. Your Head of Social Media is essentially representative of the various constituent parts of the social media team and overall custodian of your company-wide direction in social, and so they should be working in partnership with the directors of service, marketing, communications, technology and so on to make sure that the overall corporate social media presence meets the needs of the various parts of the business. Also, the social media team is initially unlikely to always be big enough to physically undertake every aspect of a social media activity, for example in a large marketing campaign supporting a high-profile product launch the social media marketeers will need dotted-line support from the wider marketing organisation. Again, proper governance with good planning is very important to get this right and have the right size of team (physical and virtual) available on an activity.

Summary
In summary, in this piece I’ve outlined a way in which large companies could move their social media presences from being advanced in one area but behind in others into a much broader, co-ordinated and brand-representing set of presences, and presences that present your company in a single consolidated way to your customers. I’ve talked about building a dedicated, central team who are all highly-skilled in social media, who totally “get it” but critically also are experts in their own disciplines. I’ve discussed how having a hybrid-model of centralised and de-centralised resource could be a good way to structure your social media business unit, and also looked at just how critical good governance is in making sure that all parts of your company are equally and accurately represented via your social media channels. These are my personal views and not necessarily those of my employer, and the approach that I’ve detailed here is just one of many ways that you could approach this problem – there are various ways to do this and each have their merits. Let’s hear how you’re approaching this in your business!

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