Chapter 5
Aligning Resources and Technology
Once the high-level strategy roadmap is in place and governance determined, your social business strategy needs to include details about the resources needed to execute the strategy. This includes defining the people, funding, education, and technology platforms that will be required over the next few years.
Success Factor #6: Secure Staff, Resources, and Funding
Let’s start with the fundamentals: you need people skilled in the ways of social business, not just social media, to execute the strategy. There’s a level of business acumen that’s necessary, combined with the art and science of social to make things perform and work according to expectations. Although you may be able to make do with a few part-time resources at first, eventually you’ll need specialized and dedicated resources to carry out a full-fledged social business strategy. If you can show that the strategy can deliver value over other available options, then you should be able to secure the funding and resources. To help you make the case, what follows are a few approaches as well as benchmarks to use in your justifications.
Staffing
Related to the question of how to organize for social media is the question of how to get the right people onto that core team. In the early part of the strategy evolution, organizations are often still in planning mode or amplifying existing marketing efforts in which internal skills and capabilities may be limited. During such times, it makes sense to outsource to an external agency—to find an agency partner that can provide monitoring and content marketing expertise but is also willing to help you develop this strategic capability in-house. That’s because over time, it’s crucial to develop core skills, especially to lead strategy and create internal alignment.
One key role to fill quickly is that of the social strategist. This critical role primarily develops and executes the social business strategy. The strategist is often internal-facing, with the goal of aligning and rallying the organization around the strategy. The strategist is in turn supported by a cast of supporting players, ranging from community managers who spend most of their time outward-facing and interacting with customers or employees to a social media manager who may be managing content for a specific channel like Facebook or Twitter. Social content creators become an important asset as well. They’re skilled in creating content that is optimized for social media, which requires an approach different from creativity or expert design.
Actual team sizes vary, with key business drivers contributing to the size of the organization and thus social business efforts. The age and maturity of the social initiatives is also a factor, with companies increasing social media–savvy staff as the strategy evolves and matures. Our research found that at companies with developed programs, staffing ranged on average from six full-time equivalents at companies with revenues between $100 and $250 million to nineteen people at companies with over $1 billion in revenue.15 Over and over again, we heard from top performers in social business about the importance of staffing well—many found that a critical attribute was to identify key people in your organization who are best positioned to gather learnings and disseminate them throughout the rest of the organization. It’s important, though, to see as the standard not the size of the staff but rather its caliber. Expertise is key. Julie Bornstein, chief marketing and digital officer for Sephora, advises, “Invest in people and resources to make sure it’s not a one-time hit.”
Education and Best Practice Sharing
Our research found that social media education and training is taking place at multiple levels in the organization, ranging from frontline employees to dedicated social media practitioners and top executives. At the core, there was a sense that to be successful, social media expertise needs to extend beyond the center of excellence.
For example, RadioShack sees education as an important initiative, even though no one is dedicated to it full time. The purpose of social media education at RadioShack is (1) to help employees know the guardrails and prevent negative issues and impacts, and (2) to create content on behalf of RadioShack to drive business. One way RadioShack does this is to build social media education directly into their onboarding training, supplementing it initially with in-person training and now moving into elearning to scale education throughout the organization. Cosmin Ghiurau, director of social media at RadioShack, told us that he justified the education program investment with hard numbers: “We have 34,000 employees, so if only 1 percent participated and became ambassadors to create content, we’d have an extended team of 340 people creating content for us. We built our social strategy around the power of scale and see it as a cost-savings measure for our organization.”
In terms of staffing and funding education, many social strategists told us that they had little budget to dedicate to training. Lauren Vargas, director of community strategy at Aetna, said, “You can run all of this on a shoestring budget or no budget at all. What’s important is that you go through and structure how to communicate all of the policies and processes. You do need to make the human resources and training investment to get the education in front of people.” And most important, the companies with significant social business education programs have measurement in place. At Aetna, Vargas shared, they use measurements that tie social media engagement to training—those people who have been trained lead to an uptick of key marketing metrics such as brand engagement and advocacy, and at the same time reduce the likelihood of a social media crisis. Having these metrics in place helps Aetna measure the education program’s impact, as they expand from the initial community manager team to a broader enterprise audience.
Meanwhile, investments in internal collaboration platforms and enterprise social networks support begin to pay off as people begin to use these tools to share best practices. Pushing social into business units and geographic groups becomes much easier when the people can turn to each other for support through these existing social bonds. The specific technology used to share best practices is less important than leaders’ establishing the objective of actually using these platforms under a common direction and goals. For example, Aetna consolidates its best practices and educational resources into a learning resource center that members of the Social Media Center of Excellence and extended community team can access.
In a separate research study, Altimeter Group found that at this stage enterprise social networks (ESNs) become paramount in knowledge sharing.16 A survey of companies using ESNs found that sharing best practices was the top-ranked goal for having an ESN in the first place. Encouraging sharing not only has the effect of capturing expertise—it also empowers team members to continually participate.
Funding and the Use of Pilot Programs
Budget and resources impact the ability to experiment, learn, and adapt. As one executive commented, “There’s a lot of interest in social at [our company], but it’s still not a primary driver of business, and its budget is much lower than traditional channels.” While there are outliers, the average spend for both external and internal efforts by companies up to $1 billion in revenue is less than $500,000 a year.17 The CMO Survey reported that social media spending represented just 7.4 percent of marketing budgets in 2012.18
In this light, the role of pilots becomes all the more important. Many social strategists we interviewed pointed to pilot programs that provided decision makers with the “digital proof points” that connect social media solutions to solving business problems. These programs helped them prioritize which initiatives would have the greatest impact.
Once you experiment with pilots, it’s also important to keep moving. Don Bulmer, VP of communication strategy at Shell, advises, “Don’t get stuck in a pilot too long. The toe in the water needs to quickly be followed with an all-in jump. If you dabble, it will be a failure. So make sure the strategy reflects the resources available, and feel comfortable with uncertainty.”
This last point is one of the biggest pitfalls organizations encounter when creating the roadmap—falling into analysis paralysis, seeking the holy grail of clear social media ROI before moving into execution. Or worse, frozen by the fear of failure, the organization stays in the planning rut for too long before committing.
Success Factor #7: Invest in Technology Platforms That Map to Strategy
Given the pace of technology innovation and the volume of vendor marketing, it’s tempting to jump immediately into technology selection and implementation. However, doing so without a strategy, roadmap, and alignment is ill-advised—you may get stuck with a listening platform or social media management system that either doesn’t meet your needs or the expanded team’s needs or is one that you will quickly outgrow. Let’s take a look at how decisions should be made in two common technology platforms related to social business: monitoring and social media management systems (SMMS).
Plan to Evolve Your Monitoring Platform
One of the biggest mistakes that companies make early on is to believe listening and monitoring is about measuring social media activities such as fans, likes, retweets, views, shares, etc. . . . But in reality, these metrics matter only when they are tied to a business metric, which in turn is used to measure progress against a specific strategic goal. As such, the selection of a monitoring and analytics platform has everything to do with how you are approaching social business.
For example, let’s assume that one of your key strategic goals is to drive revenues: your social media analytics program will have to be linked to existing web analytics platforms like Omniture, Coremetrics, and Webtrends, lead tracking systems, as well as search analytics to understand the impact of social on search engine optimization (SEO). Social media metrics would be more focused on how social activities drive loyalty within that channel.19
But for a different goal, such as driving innovation, the goal may be to drive contributions or identify customer likes and dislikes and surface those ideas within the organization. Metrics might include “idea resonance,” which entails tracking the acceleration and reach of idea topics over time. That’s radically different from the revenue-generation goal—and it will require a different type of monitoring tool, in addition to a social business strategy.
As such, there is no one easy answer to the question of which monitoring platform to use. You may end up with two or more platforms, given your needs; more important, you will likely have to evolve your platform as your sophistication and needs change. Take, for example, Dell. When they started listening to social conversations in 2005, they used basic web search to find mentions. But with mentions of Dell proliferating, they established a “command center” in late 2010 using multiple monitoring tools to provide high-level monitoring and analytics for the company. But Dell realized that a centralized command center could only address a small fraction of the 28,000 mentions a day. So they also enabled distributed monitoring where they pushed listening deep into the organization. Coupled with a robust training program, Dell has enabled 17,000 of its 90,000 employees to incorporate social media monitoring into their day-to-day work. So while social media command centers are all the rage, a distributed approach may also be required to ensure that activity is aligned with the context of business functions and roles.
For more information about setting up a monitoring and analytics strategy, organization, and tool selection, see the Altimeter Group report A Framework for Social Analytics by Susan Etlinger.20
To Scale, Invest in a Social Media Management System
Things can get complex, very quickly, especially if you have a large base of customers and need to coordinate engagement from multiple people. A social media management system can help greatly in this; the solutions vary from approachable enterprise tools like HootSuite to complex systems such as Expion and Sprinklr that provide governance for potentially thousands of employees managing local Facebook pages.
The key: understand and anticipate the engagement scenarios you will face when selecting your technology partner and platform. The Altimeter Group report A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation lays out five use cases for SMMS.21 These use cases range from social broadcasting, which requires posting a variety of content types and targeting that placement by social media channel, audience profiles, geography, and time, to intense engagement where strong monitoring, workflow routing, and governance controls are used for customer support. That is a different requirement compared to a distributed brand presence, in which a global or national brand has local stores or locations, each with their own social media presences.
For example, General Motors International Operations (GMIO) had uncoordinated social media efforts across different regions. The company decided to create a Shanghai-based social media hub to coordinate efforts with regional hubs at the country and brand levels. Only after they formalized governance, workflow, and learning processes did they introduce a unified SMMS platform, which they then were able to use to coordinate engagement and measure impact. The result: GMIO initially had 10 to 15 people at the end of 2011 working on social media for part of their job. In one year, they had expanded that to over 150 people in forty countries managing over a hundred company-approved assets in social media channels. While using a SMMS tool like Sprinklr enabled this level of scale, it was possible only because GMIO first had the discipline to establish its strategy, roadmap, governance, and learning processes.
Notes
15. Base of 110 respondents with more than 1,000 employees. Source: Altimeter Group Social Business Survey, Q4 2012. More benchmark information is available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/altimetergroup/8532083260/in/set-72157632924046300.
16. Charlene Li, Making the Business Case for Enterprise Social Networks.
17. Base of 110 respondents with more than 1,000 employees.
18. See The CMO Survey, August 2012, page 34. http://cmosurvey.org/files/2012/08/The_CMO_Survey_Highlights_and_Insights_August-2012-Final.pdf.
19. Etlinger, The Social Media ROI Cookbook.
20. Susan Etlinger, A Framework for Social Analytics. Altimeter Group, August 10, 2011. http://www.altimetergroup.com/research/reports/a-framework-for-social-analytics.
21. Jeremiah Owyang and Andrew Jones, A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation. Altimeter Group, January 5, 2012. http://www.altimetergroup.com/research/reports/a-strategy-for-managing-social-media-proliferation.