Chapter 4

Aligning the Organization: Establishing Governance

Success Factor #5: Establish Governance and Guidelines

The allure of social media can spread quickly through an organization, with many different departments—and goals—competing for the attention of the same social customers. Without organization and centralization, this often creates chaos among employees and especially among customers. At companies without a coordinating hub, the resulting silos, blurred vision, undefined infrastructure, and lack of coordination and governance make charting a course in the right direction difficult. It’s vital to make sure that your organization has the right structure and governance for social business—and also that it evolves as your organization matures.

Governance focuses on smoothing the way not only for better coordination but also in anticipation of scaling engagement with greater groups of customers and employees. It’s the perennial question: “Who owns social media?” There are several questions underlying this query:

The answers depend on your starting point and also where you are on your social business journey. There is no perfect organizational model for social business, and it’s likely that the model will evolve as the social business strategy evolves. The key is to have one model and to ensure that everyone across the organization understands how roles, responsibilities, and resources work within that model.

The default location of many social media efforts resides in marketing or corporate communications; many organizations also have at least one other person or resource in another department, such as digital or customer support. Organizationally, most companies we surveyed have some sort of hub or center of excellence (CoE) to help the rest of the organization understand and scale social activities. Key to the success of the CoE is that it be given the authority to set process and policy for social activities throughout the organization; without that executive support, the CoE cannot function as the central hub for social activities. This hub is then charged with coordinating how social strategy, initiatives, technologies, and governance are developed and deployed throughout the rest of the organization—typically thought of as the “spokes.”

If you find yourself in an organization that does not have clear social business governance, then take the following steps, which are laid out in detail in the following sections.

• Define the role of the CoE.
• Identify the key processes and guidelines that need to be developed.
• Map out how the CoE’s role will change over time.

Defining the CoE

It’s not enough just to create the CoE—organizations should also actively define the role and responsibilities of this new entity. While the actual responsibilities of the CoE will vary depending on the organizational model, they typically encompass three crucial roles:

1. Setting the enterprise-wide social strategy: From the outset, the CoE or hub typically sets and maintains the enterprise-level social strategy. On the surface, the CoE usually assumes responsibility for corporate- or brand-related presences in major social networks to ensure integration across different divisions. But more important, the CoE bears the responsibility of setting, coordinating, and supporting the infrastructure and governance that underline the social efforts of functions and business units throughout the organization. This means creating and executing the strategic roadmap that prioritizes what the organization will do over the next few years. It also means building or contributing to the infrastructure to support it, as well.

Strategy formulation isn’t a one-time activity—it must be continually developed, monitored, and optimized. At one organization we interviewed, the CoE was charged with executing social campaigns and initiatives, but strategy formulation was left to each individual business unit. A survey found that the lines of business were struggling with making social a bigger part of their overall strategy and, in particular, integrating it into their current planning and practices. Once the overall social strategy was coordinated by the CoE, the hub could replicate the process over and over again for individual business units, bringing expertise and consistency to the process.

Building the infrastructure becomes the gateway to bridging the gap between social media and topline business strategies because it enables initiatives to begin and be sustained in a coordinated way. For example, the CoE at Aetna became a key player in establishing enterprise-level strategy and cross-functional empowerment. To do this, the CoE worked closely with legal/compliance, HR, and IT to standardize so that other functions and business units could create and own their own social strategies and initiatives.

As the organization evolves, the hub-and-spoke model expands to a multiple hub-and-spoke model in which lines of business (LoBs) and functions are empowered to lead development and execution of business-specific social strategies—granted that they each follow the overall enterprise vision and approach. The cross-functional team often evolves into an official steering committee to tackle organizational challenges and help lead transformation from the inside out.

2. Support social initiatives throughout the organization. One of the challenges facing the CoE is how much the hub leads versus the spokes handling things on their own. The balance of building scale versus independence is a constant source of discussion—and exasperation—on both sides. For example, in the process of scaling WellPoint’s social media hub-and-spoke model, manager of Social Media Jonathan Blank explained, “The number one limitation to the governance model is getting ideas and adequate information from the business units to understand what programs they can adequately support themselves.” In the short term, the CoE may have to bear the burden of doing the work, but if social media is to have any hope of scaling in the future, it’s crucial that there be a long-term strategy in place for the spokes to take on that work. This is where those who lead the CoE efforts should rally support from key functions to form a steering committee that can expand stakeholder engagement and delegate the work to where it is best suited—complementing existing channel strategies that are already managed within each group.

3. Connect social activities to business metrics. The CoE also plays a crucial role in establishing and communicating the metrics that measure the integration of social strategy into the core business. In addition to business impact metrics, the CoE also is looking at how well social business practices are being adopted, such as the number of people trained and the percentage of social media activities integrated into existing channel strategies. For more information, see The Social Media ROI Cookbook.11

Forming a Steering Committee

As discussed earlier, while the CoE manages day-to-day coordination, a group of cross-functional stakeholders should come together to develop and implement strategic social media throughout the organization. Responsibilities range from integrating social business best practices into everyday operations to solving for enterprise and departmental-level challenges and aligning business objectives with social media investments.

Members of the steering committee typically involve CoE leads, as well as important functions throughout the organization, including IT, HR, sales, digital, finance, business unit leads, marketing, communications, and legal/risk. Some businesses report up to executive sponsorship, whereas others place an executive directly in the group. Comcast’s steering committee, for example, also involves the executive team to ensure that what is being done across different departments best supports overall company goals and business drivers.

Another organization we interviewed had a small executive committee composed of the head of website and e-commerce, head of HR, head of marketing, head of communications, senior rep from tech ops group, risk/compliance officer, and someone representing the overall legal community. The group met every other week to specifically deal with larger, enterprise strategy questions that affect the company overall. The key is not the size or complexity of the steering committee, but rather its focus and intentions. Essentially, it reflects the priorities, opportunities, and concerns of key stakeholders who need new processes and direction to make the overall social business strategy successful—while benefiting from its success.

Evolving the CoE into Multiple Hub and Spoke

While a CoE and the hub-and-spoke model remain in place to provide enterprise-level guidance and training, mini “hubs” begin to develop within each business unit that’s focused on supporting social business initiatives specific to that group. Matt Crenshaw, VP of marketing and analytics at Discovery Channel, shared that they are moving social team members out of the hub. “We recently took a different look at social and where it sits in the organization. The value of our social team being closer to network digital teams leads to closer relationships with content, producers, and fan bases—this is more powerful than it could be if we were learning in a centralized social team environment.”

This multiple hub-and-spoke model continues the journey to connect social with business goals by bringing the responsibility for social execution as close to the point of business value creation as possible. Beverly Jackson, director of marketing and social media at the Recording Academy, explained how they evolved: “There used to be a CoE in more of a fixed environment, but now it’s distributed. This allows for greater flexibility. People now have their specialties that tie social in directly into their work.”

Defining Guidelines and Process

Up to this point, our discussion on governance has focused on organizational structure. Governance must also focus on establishing guidelines and processes that smooth the way for enterprise coordination and integration, and also to empower the “spokes” to be active and help scale social business. This takes more than asking people to “use common sense.” We’ve seen how that plays out, and this is why guidelines and process become critical. They support a social business strategy, and as a result they are intentional in design, not generic. Specific guidelines will ensure that everyone is on the same page not only on when to engage but also how, while process specifics define the roles and responsibilities of each person within a certain situation, lay out the workflow, and detail how decisions and communications will work. Realize that these guidelines and processes are not fixed in time; rather, they need to be regularly updated to ensure that they are aligned with the social business strategy as well as the evolving organization.

Our research found that top organizations usually defined the following types of guidelines and processes as part of their social business strategy governance:

• General social media policy/guidelines. In our research, we found that 85 percent of organizations surveyed had a social media policy in place—but that only 18 percent of them felt that their employees had a good or very good understanding of that policy.12 Moreover, more than half of them had experienced an employee’s violating their social media policy within the last twelve months, and 9 percent had seen more than five do so during that time. The lack of visibility and understanding surrounding these policies—which are frequently written by the legal team and are not practicable—means that unprepared organizations are at risk of employee-led mistakes or, worse, a full-blown crisis that are inevitable as a result. This is a good opportunity to revisit existing policies and guidelines to make sure that they are still valid to meet the demands of your social business strategy to encourage worthwhile enterprise-wide participation.
• Specific playbook for social business practitioners. Employees on the front line of social initiatives need to be on the same page in terms of how they use and engage in social channels and what it is they’re working toward individually and collectively. Think of this as a collection of general backgrounders and best practices that can be applied in a variety of scenarios. A social business playbook outlines business scenarios and how to excel in each as it relates to your business. This applies to everyone, from the social strategist in the CoE to the employees in far-flung spokes of the organization where this is only an occasional activity. A playbook provides an in-depth overview of the “how” to implement and execute social initiatives, usually detailed by business objective and social channel. It may also include briefs defining a brand voice and persona style guide that help to unite all forms of social content, presences, and engagement. For example, at Ford, the general counsel worked closely with the marketing department to create playbooks that delineate Ford’s standards for social networks and sharing, so that each global market could apply it to their particular local situations.
• Engagement triage process. It’s crucial to develop a process map that shows how inbound social media mentions are assessed and triaged and, if warranted, engaged across the organization. Organizations such as the U.S. Air Force, ARAMARK, and H&R Block have detailed triage flow maps that lay out how different issues are handled—a sort of decision tree that ensures that everyone throughout the organization is aware of how to deal with different scenarios.13 In contrast, most organizations leave it to the social strategist(s), who themselves operate on an ad hoc basis to address issues that come up. Given the importance of coherent engagement, this leaves far too many things to chance. Having a detailed engagement process and disciplined application of that process reflects an organizational commitment to treat these customer engagements with the same care and attention given to other channels such as call centers and email inboxes.
• Risk management and social media crisis response plan. Managing risk is an inherent part of being a social business, especially when it involves engaging with dynamic customers and employees. This requires a planned approach to identifying and managing social media risk.14 Maria Poveromo of Adobe noted the importance of establishing comfort zones with executives while establishing an infrastructure for social media crises: “Getting your execs and key stakeholders to be more comfortable with risk is important, along with having a risk mitigation strategy in place.”

To mitigate risk, organizations take measures to prepare the company for any potential crisis that can transpire within social networks. This takes the form of a triage plan, scenario rehearsals, development of preapproved content, and a workflow with points of contact assigned. Developing response plans to multiple threat scenarios prepares the organization for crises, both large and small. Figuring out what to do in the midst of a crisis is not the time to develop this process! Hold worst-case scenario planning sessions to anticipate what can go wrong, and then develop a detailed plan to make sure that all parties who are potentially involved—PR, legal, HR, marketing, executives, and so on—understand their roles and responsibilities. During Ford’s outreach campaign for the Ford Fiesta—in which they loaned a car for six months to one hundred top social media influencers—one of the cars went missing. Within minutes, Scott Monty, the social strategist at Ford, activated a plan they had already prepared for just such a situation. Within a few hours, the car had been tracked down and the crisis averted.

• Decision-making processes. This is one of the hardest and touchiest subjects to tackle as part of social business governance—who gets to make decisions such as approving new initiatives, which things get funded, which technology platforms to invest in, and how to resolve conflicts. There is no single right way to tackle each of these decisions, but the best organizations make a list of the ones they are most likely to encounter, then make sure it is clear who will be involved and how the decision will be made. Renee Brown, SVP and director of social media at Wells Fargo, advises, “Start with clear roles and a cross-functional team that shares the responsibility of leading into the future. Everyone has to be able to take off the day-to-day hat and work for the broader good.”

Beware the Center of Excellence Pitfalls

Throughout the interviews, Altimeter Group learned that although many organizations define and build a CoE, the reasons for doing so may create a scaling problem in the long term. One of the biggest pitfalls is that the CoE falls into a rut of being the social media help desk, with the CoE focusing on executing initiatives in social channels on behalf of the spokes and managing tools rather than on business objectives and impact.

One symptom of this pitfall is the lack of integration of social into core functional activities. One interviewee told us, “The challenge is helping people understand how social fits into the organization as more than just a side project. Social is a key pillar of our marketing strategy, yet it isn’t added to a campaign until the end.” Or, even worse, social is thought of as a necessary nuisance. One social strategist noted, “Social is brought in after the entire program is already created and sold into leadership—who then want to improve it with social. The marketing team will nod and smile, listen to us, and then they do what they want anyway.”

The lack of longer-term strategies to truly scale social media into a social business means the CoE can stay in this rut in perpetuity. The CoE can then fall into a downward spiral—because business impact is not being shown, budgets grow slowly, and the hub lacks the resources to truly scale, as they do not own business outcomes, which typically reside back out at the spokes. To guard against this pitfall, the CoE must from the very start be laser-focused on prioritizing business objectives with the spokes and making clear who has ultimate responsibility and the resources for strategy versus execution.

Notes

11. Etlinger, The Social Media ROI Cookbook.

12. Source: Altimeter Group Social Business Survey, Q4 2012. Base of 110 respondents with more than 1,000 employees.

13. U.S. Air Force blog triage map, as referenced in Jeremiah Owyang’s blog: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/12/31/diagram-how-the-air-force-response-to-blogs/.

14. For more information on risk management, see the Altimeter Group report, Guarding the Social Gates: The Imperative for Social Media Risk Management, August 9, 2012. http://www.altimetergroup.com/research/reports/social-media-risk-management.