3. Establishing a Centralized “Editorial” Social Business Center of Excellence

“Tweetable Moment: Every company is a media company whether they accept it or not. Embrace it like @TeslaMotors did.”

—#nextmediaco

Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Public Relations, has also been saying this for quite some time. Most recently in his 6:00 a.m. blog post, titled “Our Time To Lead,” he argues that PR must take the lead in this evolution and that every company “should” be a media company and generate content that can be shared across the online ecosystem. Although every company “should” make this transition, most don’t realize it, resist it, or have no clue on how to make it happen.

So you may be asking yourself, “Why a media company?”

Following are five characteristics of media companies you must adopt for your brand if you expect to make an impact, break through the noise, and reach consumers with game-changing content.

• Storytelling: Media companies tell stories. Conde’ Nast has a diverse narrative told through their media properties from fashion and travel to sports and weddings. Traditional news organizations also tell stories, although their narrative is current or breaking news. Some news outlets have tried to up-level their narrative by using anecdotes like “Fair & Balanced” to differentiate themselves from their competition.

• Content: Media companies are content machines with an “always on” mentality. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is or what the hour; media companies distribute content all the time. For example, the New York Times publishes 1,500+ articles per day (including those from AP, Reuters, and so on) and 200 to 400 blog posts.

• Relevance: Media companies provide relevant content all the time to someone, somewhere. They aren’t in the business of providing content that’s a few days or weeks old, unless they are holding off on a story to get more detailed information. The content is recent and, in many cases, real-time.

• Ubiquity: Media companies are everywhere. They dominate the search engine results and their content is shared daily across social media channels. They produce videos and advertise, and even their journalists have started building their own personal brands, which also feed the content engine day in and day out.

• Agility: Media companies move quickly. They have subject matter experts and contributing writers who are prepared to write about any topic at any time. They also employ creative teams that can produce visual content at a moment’s notice. They aren’t held captive by approvals from a brand team or lawyers. They are content organizations and move quickly. They have workflows that facilitate the entire content supply chain (ideation, creation, approval, distribution, and integration).

There is a content surplus in the marketplace today, and consumers have attention deficit. For you to reach them with a relevant message, you need to build a content organization where you are creating relevant content—at the right time (sometimes in real time), in the right channel, and to the right customer.

Once you begin the transition and leverage the characteristics mentioned above (storytelling, content, relevance, ubiquity, agility), you can not only create proactive, relevant, and real-time content to reach consumers; but you can also respond to criticism quickly and change brand perception.

Tesla, an electric car manufacturing company, certainly has characteristics of a media company and didn’t back down after the New York Times wrote a negative article about their Model S vehicle.

His article documented a trip he took from Washington, D.C. to Connecticut in the Model S, which has an EPA rated range of 265 miles per charge. Tesla had installed two sets of high-speed charging stations, one in Newark, New Jersey, and one in Milford, Connecticut, which are about 200 miles apart, to service all of the commuters who travel between Washington and Boston.

Broder tested this route on a 30-degree day. What’s interesting is that cold temperatures are known to negatively affect the performance of the type of lithium-ion batteries used in the Model S vehicle. Broder wrote in detail how the estimated range dropped faster than the miles being covered, forcing him at one point to “set the cruise control at 54 mph and turn the climate control system to low to conserve energy.” It certainly didn’t help Tesla that Broder also posted a photo of the Model S being hoisted onto the back of tow truck because he didn’t have enough battery life to get him to the next charging station.

An unfavorable article in the New York Times isn’t going to make or break a company, but it sure did have an impact. A few weeks after the article was posted, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, went on record to say that the negative review and bad press may have reduced the company’s value by $100 million. Speaking on Bloomberg TV, Musk said “a few hundred” customers canceled orders for the Model S after Broder’s review. But there is more to this story...

Five days after the New York Times article was published, Musk wrote an article on his company blog titled, “A Most Peculiar Test Drive” and basically dismantled Broder’s review on many different levels, saying at one point that “Model S never had a chance with John Broder.” He also called out the New York Times directly saying:

When the facts didn’t suit his opinion, he simply changed the facts. Our request of the New York Times is simple and fair: please investigate this article and determine the truth. You are a news organization where that principle is of paramount importance and what is at stake for sustainable transport is simply too important to the world to ignore.

Apparently Broder didn’t know that the entire driving experience was being monitored and documented via Tesla’s GPS and computer system. Figure 3.1 illustrates two inaccuracies in the graphic attached to Broder’s article according to Musk.

Fast-forward three days, and the New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan said that she did find problems with reporter John M. Broder’s note-taking and judgment after his negative review of the Model S. So without specifically apologizing to Tesla Motors, she apologized.

What makes this story even more interesting is that Musk wasn’t the only one who challenged the New York Times. A group of six Tesla owners live-tweeted a road trip from Tesla’s super-charging station in Maryland to the other in Connecticut to prove that Broder’s review was completely wrong as illustrated in Figure 3.2.

The moral of this story is simple. Five or ten years ago, this would never have happened. Traditionally media companies like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal have had complete control over the hearts and minds of consumers. They monopolized our attention spans. They dominated the news cycle and could publish anything about any product or service without the worry of a rebuttal on any level. But the evolution, or I should say revolution, in today’s media landscape has changed that, and companies like Tesla Motors are now standing on equal ground with the mainstream media.

Tesla Motors is a media company whether they know it or not—they are agile storytellers that produce relevant content that show up across the entire ecosystem. Today, your brand needs to start thinking, acting, and operating like a media company, too, and it’s so much more than just refuting negative media coverage.

Unfortunately, it’s not like you can turn on the “media company” button and change operations and behavior overnight. It requires a change in attitude, behavior, and thinking, coupled with processes and governance models. You also must have technology in place that can facilitate the transformation. This change starts with building a centralized, editorial team—otherwise known as a Social Business Center of Excellence.

In the context of transforming your brand to a media company, the CoE can be considered more of a content and editorial team. I’m certainly not saying you need to create two separate teams because they are essentially one and the same. It’s just a different way of looking at it.

The goal of the CoE should be more than just driving social media adoption, governance, technology (community applications, social CRM), deployment, and training. To achieve true business results, it has to succeed at changing organizational behavior—the way it thinks, communicates, and markets to customers. In doing so, the members must adapt and change their own behavior at the same time. They must become change agents if they truly want to see the transformation come to fruition.

Jeremiah Owyang, Principal Analyst at the Altimeter Group, defines the CoE more from a social business adoption standpoint, highlighting how companies in general are becoming more social. He states that the CoE is a centralized program that provides resources, training, and strategy to a variety of business units that are deploying social media in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and provide standardization (webstrategist.com). He writes that this team is often managed by the Corporate Social Strategist, who’s the business stakeholder and program champion. Figure 3.3 illustrates a framework needed to deploy a CoE.

In the 2011 research report by the Altimeter Group, titled “How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets,” Owyang shares four different business cases for deploying a CoE:

• Provide Customers with a Consistent Social Experience: Business units can either be coordinated in their efforts or fragmented and decentralized. Without a common program in place, each business unit develops its own programs, resulting in wasted resources and a fragmented experience for customers.

• Obtain Efficiency Throughout the Organization: The cost of social business will only increase as more business units develop social efforts on their own without proper “guardrails.” Second, this increases time-to-market by enabling various business units to communicate with each other.

• Foster Accountability Across Business Units: Corporations are saddled with hundreds of social assets, which they have difficulty tracking, let alone the risk of a single vendor selling multiple instances to various business units. This central group helps to sunset abandoned efforts and increase success of all moving parts in the organization.

• Coordination Among Business Units: Companies need processes and policies to handle negative situations and mitigate potential PR crises in social channels. This centralized group can quickly work with various arms of the company in a coordinated way to reduce risk and increase responses to PR dilemmas.

Although many of these business cases are important for social business adoption and showcasing organization maturity—and may even be relevant to you and your journey—there is an additional business case that should be front and center as you read through the rest of this book. The first step of transforming your brand to a media company requires you to create and/or champion a center of excellence.

There are certainly other cases that exist beyond these for establishing a centralized team. It will depend on your business objectives and/or challenges that are preventing your company from reaching that next level or solving a particular business problem.

A CoE cannot just be a committee that meets once per month or be someone’s part-time job. In most cases, it starts out that way, but eventually it must evolve into something bigger. Otherwise, the team will never get anything done and scaling will be difficult. The CoE must belong to a reporting organization with the autonomy to make specific and calculated business decisions as it relates to marketing communications and brand strategy. Making the successful transformation from a brand to a media company requires the brain power and hard work from a highly specialized team with skill sets ranging from content strategy to technology integration and deployment.

Defining your brand’s content strategy will undoubtedly be the most difficult task yet one of your most important responsibilities. Later in this book, I go into great detail on exactly what you need to do succeed. But on a high level, developing a content strategy requires you to analyze several key conversations and analytical inputs and to formulate a content plan that adds value to your customers and also aligns to your brand’s objectives. This isn’t easy.

Building a content governance plan, which is covered in Chapter 10, “How Content Governance Will Facilitate Media Company Transformation,” is a task that needs to be high on your priority list. It’s about optimizing your content supply chain, which will ensure control and consistency in the content you create and distribute. Real-time analytics, content performance, and general measurement will also be a part of the CoE’s responsibility.

Internal training of employees is also a huge part of the CoE’s responsibility. Employees (and customers) can help you feed the content engine by acting as content contributors and brand journalists. But employees must be trained before they’re unleashed on the public. The training curriculum should include how to use the latest social media tools and platforms, the best practices for engaging with customers, and how they can contribute content and help tell the brand story within their own social media channels.

One of your last major responsibilities is to assess, deploy, and implement various technology solutions in your organization—from content publishing platforms like Kapost or Contently to real-time content optimization platforms like Social Flow or the Dachis Group Real-time Marketing Dashboard.

As you can see in this figure, there are two circles that surround the CoE. The inner circle makes up the core team and involves employees from the social media team (or potentially corporate communications), digital marketing, customer support, analytics, brand/creative, and regional leads. This core team is responsible for

• the content strategy

• how the content strategy is executed across paid, owned, and earned media

• technology deployment and adoption

• best practice sharing

• training of employees and partners

The outer circle represents the supporting roles of the CoE. The core team will tap into their collective knowledge and support for specific initiatives or projects. For example, during the research phase of the content strategy, the segment marketing team may be responsible for sharing any reports or data about current customer segmentation. This is a vital input of the content strategy. Another example is planning for an upcoming event. The events team is crucial to ensure that the CoE is involved in planning and content creation and customer engagement specifically at the event.

The most important element in the outer circle of the CoE are the employees of your company. If you think about how media companies like the Huffington Post generate so much content, it’s because they have several hundred contributors fueling the content engine day in and day out. You can leverage the support of employees in a similar fashion and help them become brand journalists. Of course, you wouldn’t just open the floodgates without getting their buy-in for participation, training them, and having already established workflows that ensure consistent storytelling.

• Can I do my job better and more efficiently if I buy into this vision?

• Will it make my job easier, and will I be happier?

• Is this the right vision for the company to achieve its business goals, and does my role play into that vision?

One crucial factor that plays a key role in determining whether others will buy into your vision is what Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point, describes as “the stickiness factor.” This refers to a unique quality that compels a message to “stick” in the minds of others and influence behavior change. After all, that should be the goal of the CoE—to influence and change behaviors of others, ultimately transforming your brand into a media company. The message must dig much deeper than just collaboration and innovation too. It must correlate back to the needs, wants, and desires of employees and at the same time align with your business and marketing objectives.

Borrowing again from Malcolm Gladwell, your CoE should consist of “connectors, mavens, and salespeople.” Connectors are the employees who know everyone in every department and have the ability to serve as conduits between each group, helping to find connections, relationships, and “cross-fertilization” that otherwise might not be possible.

Mavens are “information specialists” and are the people within your company many rely on to learn about new information. A maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his or her own. According to Gladwell, mavens have the ability to start “word-of-mouth epidemics” due to their knowledge, social skills, and ability to communicate. Even with internal change management initiatives, the ability for a message to spread word-of mouth (from employee to employee) like an epidemic could mean the difference between success and failure. Mavens are information brokers—sharing and trading what they know with whom they know. The goal of transforming your brand to a media company requires an epidemic of change for it to truly spread.

Salesmen are those within your organization who have a natural gift of charisma to be extremely persuasive in inducing others’ behaviors. They usually have powerful negotiation skills and tend to have a unique quality that makes others want to agree with them.

You will need people like this on your team if you truly want change implemented within your company.

Unclear roles can quickly give birth to organizational conflict and unnecessary silo creation between internal teams that may have social media as a part of their job responsibility. This is where the “soft” skills of your CoE team can make a difference because much of their jobs will be to evangelize and educate the rest of the organization about your vision. One way to avoid push back and general conflict is to co-create the roles and responsibilities with your team as well other internal stakeholders.

• Defining the brand content strategy

• Training employees

• Determining a social media measurement framework

• More effective/collaborative team meetings

These are certainly tactical in nature, but having tangible outcomes of your team’s change efforts are important. Consider the following:

• What do you want your team to accomplish this week/month/year?

• What do you want your team to accomplish in two to five years?

To track the progress, it’s important to pay attention to small, identifiable changes in your day-to-day business operations such as:

• New ideas/innovations proposed from internal meetings

• Technology vendors (content publishing, communities, social CRM, online monitoring) selected, contracts signed, and deployment schedules finalized

• Social media training started and completed or certain milestones reached

When these positive changes have been observed, it’s also important to keep the momentum going and celebrate by:

• Publicly recognizing your team’s work

• Giving monetary rewards (bonus, promotion)

• Just saying “thank you” (it goes a long way)

• Gamification (rewarding and incentivizing certain behaviors)

The goal of transforming your brand to a media company requires an epidemic of change.

A few small wins does not mean that the change has been successfully completed. There will surely be roadblocks in the future if they haven’t already surfaced. Using these victories as a stepping-stone to the next achievement will keep your team’s momentum going strong. It’s important to remember that organizational change doesn’t happen overnight, and neither does the transformation from brand to media company.

The top of the figure represents traditional siloed organizations: Product Marketing, Corporate Communications, Customer Support, and Marketing Operations. But this might look completely different for your company and may even include other cross-functional teams such as specific sub-brands, products, or regional teams. Nonetheless, the role of your CoE is to ensure that every team is communicating with each other for a variety of different reasons. Not only is collaboration healthy for your company, it’s imperative when deploying enterprise-wide employee training, social media policies, technology deployment, and defining your brand’s content strategy.

The ability to tell a consistent brand story across the social ecosystem is fundamental to reach customers, as discussed in Chapter 1, “Understanding the Social Customer and the Chaotic World We Live In.” Your CoE is responsible for doing this in several communication channels that include:

• Campaigns and Initiatives

• Paid, Earned, and Owned Media

• General Community Management

• Customer Support

Additionally, the CoE will be responsible for consolidating the collective data points and measurement initiatives from each of these channels and feeding the best practices and learning back into the respective teams so that they can iterate and/or pivot their content strategies if needed. You can almost consider them as facilitators of knowledge sharing.

As you can see, much of the CoE’s responsibility will require them to tear down organizational silos and attempt to communicate and collaborate with others. This is a difficult task given that silos have plagued business progress for years. And unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), email just won’t work in today’s business environment. Jive CEO Tony Zingale reiterated this point in a 2012 interview with the Computer Business Review. He said that the willingness for employees to collaborate and communicate together is something that companies aren’t used to today. The traditional email models are used in a random way, and cultural and behavioral change is necessary to embrace and adopt a new way to communicate and to get work done. The good news is that there are technological solutions that can help facilitate collaboration.

The Jive Social Business Platform is one technology platform that can enable you and your teams to guide collaboration in a more efficient way when deploying your content strategy and driving organizational change across your business.

No one can argue that planning and executing a content strategy is complex, especially if you work in a global company. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, the media landscape is dynamic, and there is a proliferation of delivery channels and devices, multiple partners and players, and an explosion of data—and constantly shifting technologies are coming to the market everyday. The Jive platform gives you the ability to create a virtual war room to monitor all the aspects of your strategy, from planning to execution. It’s essentially a dashboard where all of your internal stakeholders can share content, discuss deployment tactics, and manage the entire content supply chain from beginning to end. Regardless of physical location, your teams can stay aligned with the campaign strategy, launch, content plan, and ongoing community engagement. Figure 3.6 is an example of a team collaborating and planning the launch of a new product.

Jive also gives you the capability to support disparate teams (sales, marketing, countries) by providing the right content at the right time—when they need it. Instead of using email to solicit feedback on content and to consolidate edits, Jive takes the guesswork out of knowing which version is the latest and provides one channel for your team to communicate important updates to your internal stakeholders. By using Jive’s rich text editor, your team can collaborate and edit drafts, solicit feedback, and mark documents as final in one place.

The value of Jive is that it can provide your team with several tools that facilitate internal communication, collaboration, content creation, and sharing. They have built-in activity streams that allow you to see updates from your team members, the projects they are working on, and the content they are uploading and downloading from the platform. You can also create your own custom “Attention Streams” to track particular people, groups, and projects. Their built-in program for Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) allows you to turn these documents into a real-time collaborative platform so you can co-author, comment, and revise content with your team without disjointed email attachments and version control madness. This is extremely helpful as your team is documenting best practices from others in the organization and sharing them across the company.

The built-in game mechanics and rewards capabilities encourage your team to participate and provide incentives to actively engage within the platform. As teams participate, they earn more points and get more rewards. So if you have employees who are responsible for writing, editing, or approving content, this is an excellent way to encourage them to do more of it.

Although Jive is excellent for internal collaboration, it’s worth mentioning that they also power external communities as well. Figure 3.7 is a screenshot of SAP’s Community Network where customers, partners, and SAP employees are engaging in real-time technology and industry discussions.