11. Structuring Your Teams to Become a Content-Driven Organization

“Tweetable Moment: How you align and build your team is one of the most important factors of your content strategy.”

—#nextmediaco

The good news is that company leadership is realizing the importance of social media, even though these silos still do exist. According to a 2013 Altimeter study “The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Media Transformation” by Charlene Li and Brian Solis, 60% of organizations have identified the right roles, responsibilities, and governance for the execution and resourcing of social media efforts (see Figure 11.1).

If you look closely at this data, only 27% of employees are actually trained on how to use social media, both professionally and personally. This number must go up if you are looking to transition your brand to a media company. This type of change cannot happen in a silo and it can’t be forced from the top down either. It must be a collaborative effort.

Additionally, we have to remember that the transformation from brand to media company is much bigger than just social media. All forms of communication need to contribute to the brand story and be distributed like a well-oiled machine—paid, earned, and owned media; customer support; employee and customer advocacy; and so on. This requires even more radical thinking because it will require you to collaborate with your internal teams—not always an easy task.

Unfortunately, it’s not like we can turn on the “media company” button and change operations and behavior overnight. It requires a change in attitude, behavior, and thinking that is coupled with processes, governance models, and technology that can facilitate the transformation. In this chapter, I discuss organizational structure and roles and responsibilities.

Traditional change management initiatives are usually based on a push model. This means that business leaders attempt to change the organization (process, organizational structure, behaviors, culture, values, and so on) and expect the employees to follow their lead.

The push model of change management is often referred to the crisis-oriented approach or burning platform model, where sudden movement (crisis) in the external market requires a quick pivot in business operations or culture. The burning platform model is actually based on a true story of a huge fire on an oil-drilling platform, which killed nearly 200 men. The handful that survived did so by jumping 15 stories from the platform to the ocean—they understood that they had to jump or burn to death. It is a graphic illustration on what pushing change in an organization truly means.

In this model, change is forced, almost with a command and control type of behavior, by trying to convince your internal stakeholders that the pain of doing nothing is greater than the change being proposed. This type of change management is used when people are unwilling to change their behavior or have a “this too will pass” type of attitude. This model is most often used when companies are experiencing difficult times, when change is a matter of survival, whether for internal (executive turnover) or external factors (struggling economy.)

Resistance to this type of change is normal. Your employees will undoubtedly rush to defend the status quo if they feel their security, job status, or function is threatened. Organizational change naturally generates skepticism and resistance by employees and, in some cases, senior management, making it difficult or impossible to move an organization forward.

This pull change management model is based on the concept that this change is viewed as an opportunity. It assumes that your employees are willing to change their behavior and that there is something “in it” for them if they do. This is based on a participatory style of management, where there is a shared vision rather than one dictated and forced by company leadership. The pull method of change management is most often used when times are good (increasing profits and margins and revenues are up.)

This organizational change might focus on repositioning your company in the marketplace, launching a new product or service, or expanding into new markets that would allow you to dominate a new category. But to succeed with this model, your company needs the agility, flexibility, and a culture of continuous content and marketing innovation. It must be responsive enough to pivot when threats happen in the marketplace, which will undoubtedly put the company through difficult times.

Many organizations today that have adopted Enterprise 2.0 technologies (collaboration tools for internal social networks as discussed in Chapter 10, “How Content Governance Will Facilitate Media Company Transformation”) are more likely to embrace a pull approach or at least more of a balance between push and pull change management models. The great news is that these social tools are already becoming a driving force to this change. The challenge arises in certain organizations when employees aren’t using these tools, or even worse, when they are prohibited to use these tools because they are against corporate or IT policy.

Regardless of where your company is financially or what your market share looks like compared to your competitors, it’s imperative that you think about how you can implement change in your organization. What’s in it for your internal stakeholders is the ability to increase your relevance to your customers. The end result is you selling more products, increases in revenue, salary bonuses, and happy employees.

Wikipedia’s loose and somewhat candy-coated definition of organizational silos is the following:

...is a management system incapable of reciprocal operation with other, related management systems. With department specialization came a silo operational culture for many large organizations. The silo effect is characterized by a lack of communication or common goals between departments in an organization.

Many organizations today are not only incapable of communicating with each other, but they are also unwilling and often refuse purposely to share knowledge. It’s a form of job protection, ego, or just ignorance because that’s the way the organization has always operated. Many employees are just afraid of change.

It’s not always the human factor either. Today, there are still isolated systems and processes that keep valuable information, workflows, and transactions from moving freely throughout an organization. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense. Organizations gave birth to silos to accomplish various tasks: sell products, provide customer support, advertise their products, and so on. The problem arises when there is no governance, guidance, or proper organization for how each of these functions can work together to increase efficiency, save money, and more importantly, provide a more positive customer experience.

The first step in driving organizational change is to create and identify roles and responsibilities of your internal/external stakeholders.

• Chief Content Officer: There has been a lot of talk about whether or not there should be a Chief Content Officer. My stance is that every company is different, and if you feel like having this role in your organization will add value, more power to you. So whether it’s a Chief Content Officer or a Vice President of Marketing, you need a strong leader who has a vision and executional experience to actually move the needle.

This role requires a significant amount of leadership experience, obviously. He or she should have a significant amount of expertise in marketing (paid, earned, owned media), journalism, and the content production process. He or she will ultimately be responsible for the content strategy and be the primary interface with the rest of the company, evangelizing the vision of taking the brand and shifting it to a media company. This person could very well be the “lead” of your Social Business Center or Excellence. The Chief Content Officer should also be accountable for the performance of the brand’s content marketing efforts, measuring relevant data points such as links, traffic, leads, and general content performance within social media channels (Likes, comments, shares, tweets, and so on). In smaller companies, the Chief Content Officer might very well be the editor in chief, editor of content operations, or a director of marketing.

• Managing Editor: This person must be a veteran of traditional media and have a proven ability to run an editorial operation. The managing editor is responsible for all content to include content ideation, creation, approval workflows, and distribution and optimization of the content after it’s posted—essentially, the entire content supply chain operation. In a global company, the managing editor might be responsible for ensuring that the content strategy is coordinated across all the brand’s regional content operations. They might also be responsible for recruiting regional (U.S., Canada, Latin America) or channel editors (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) as the organization scales its content operations. Last, the managing editor is responsible for all the content performance metrics and feeding the insights back to contributors and editors.

• Editors: Depending on how the company is structured and as just mentioned, editors could be in charge of regions, specific products/brands, or channels. They also play a pivotal role in editing and approving content that’s submitted by contributors. They also are responsible for finding and training new contributors. Additionally, if a brand has a real-time Creative Newsroom, editors will be the one giving editorial approval to create content based on what’s trending in the news cycle.

• Community Managers: The days of hiring an intern and paying them almost nothing to manage your social media channels is over. Community managers do more than just manage content calendars and tweet all day long. The truth is, many community managers today are already driving fully robust social CRM programs. They are engaging day to day with customers. They are working with technology platforms and sometimes making critical business decisions. They are gathering and reporting analytics. They are creating workflows and feedback loops with other, internal teams (which almost always requires change management initiatives and cross functional/geographic collaboration). And a strategic community manager advocates on behalf of the social customer back to the business and on behalf of employees back to management for internal community initiatives.

The new role of the community manager is changing dramatically. Today’s community managers must have specific experience in content creation and production and must understand the fundamentals of paid media. For smaller brands with the Creative Newsroom model as well as a converged media strategy, the community manager might be the only one spotting the trends, writing the copy, building a piece of creative, and then making the strategic decision to promote it, all by herself.

• Brand Journalists: For your brand’s content marketing to provide the highest level of value, it’s imperative that subject matter experts contribute articles, posts, presentations, and any other thought leadership material that will help add value to customers. As discussed in Chapter 4, “Empowering Employees, Customers, and Partners to Feed the Content Engine,” employees can be your biggest brand advocates. They just need to be trained, empowered, and enabled to do so.

• External Contributors: Successful content marketing operations often use external content contributors, specifically influencers or brand advocates. Also discussed in Chapter 4, your customers can play a significant role in your journey to become a media company. You will just have to operationalize your brand advocate programs and enable them to help you tell the brand story.

• Analysts: For large companies, having a dedicated analyst is a necessity. Not only for reporting and measurement purposes, but also for making real-time decisions on pushing organic content to sponsored or promoted as well. A good analyst has more than superb Excel skills and the ability to make fancy graphs when reporting back numbers. He should also be able to extract insights so that the editorial teams can iterate specific content to improve its performance.

It doesn’t necessarily matter what you call these roles specifically. But the important thing to remember is that someone should be responsible for your content operations. And if you have made a strategic investment in a content marketing platform such as Kapost, Compendium, or a social CRM platform such as Sprinkr or Spredfast, you should also consider outlining and documenting the following user roles and responsibilities as they relate to the platform as well as the controls they have to create, edit, approve, and distribute content:

• Administrators: This person is responsible for creating and deleting accounts within the content management system. They assign user roles and responsibilities within the system as well as assign platform-specific controls (that is, the ability to publish directly to the brand’s Facebook page). The administrator can be a project manager, someone in IT, a community manager, or someone from your supporting agency.

• Editors: In the last chapter, I showcased several examples of content workflows for planned and unplanned content. In this case, editors are the ones responsible for approving content submitted by contributors. It’s likely that they also give feedback and editorial direction to the content contributors. They might also be responsible for adding approved content to the master editorial calendar or submitting approved content to the next level of approvers: brand or legal review.

• Contributors: Anyone in your company can be a content contributor, and hopefully you have a lot of them. You can think of them as brand journalists. The important thing to remember is that as you scale and add additional contributors, you simultaneously have to add additional editors as well. It’s pretty self-explanatory what contributors are responsible for: contributing content. Of course, each contributor should have a different editorial focus, especially if you work for a large brand with multiple products or specific verticals.

• Community Managers: Specific user roles need to be created that allow for this role to monitor specific social media channels and interact directly with customers or escalate specific conversations to customer support teams. And in many cases, community managers might also be editors of specific channels, like Twitter, Facebook, or the company blog.

• Customer Support: Additionally, specific user roles should be created for customer support staff. This role is vital and should have the capability to create tickets as well as respond directly to customers when they have specific issues with the company’s products or services.

Rebecca Lieb, analyst from the Altimeter Group, identified the following enterprise models for governing the orchestration of content within organizations. The model a company selects is determined by several factors, ranging from culture, structure, budget, business goals, and the types of volume of content produced (see Figure 11.2).

Although this specific model is focused solely on content marketing as a specific job function with your company, you can also look at it through the strategic lens as you take your brand to a media company. Here is a quick summary of Altimeter’s models:

• Content Center of Excellence: This is similar to what I described in Chapter 3, “Establishing a Centralized ‘Editorial’ Social Business Center of Excellence,” where I discussed the Social Business Center of Excellence and how you will involve team members from various job functions and expertise to be a part of the centralized team. Topics other than content are also discussed and managed by this team—governance, training, measurement, global expansion, and so on.

• Editorial Board or Content Council: In this model, internal teams meet to align content, editorial calendars, workflow and try to avoid duplication of effort. They examine content performance metrics and use those insights to drive future content. This is a tactical model that essentially “keeps the train running” according to Altimeter.

• Content Lead: This model is where one executive is responsible and oversees the brand’s content initiatives. The content lead is also responsible for putting together strategy documentation—tone, voice, and copy guidelines. In this case, a supporting agency might have the responsibility to execute.

• Executive Steering Committee: This model is a cross-functional group of senior executives responsible for approving general content direction, ensuring it lives to the overall brand voice and personality.

• Cross-functional Content Chief: This model is where one person is responsible for the brand’s content strategy, also referred to as the head of digital strategy. Usually this person has more than just content that she is responsible for. This role would oversee paid media, analytics, channel marketing, and so on.

• Content Department: This model can almost be compared to an internal agency. They are usually responsible for creating high-end and highly produced content—videos and technical whitepapers.

As you think about building and structuring your content organization, there are several approaches you can use. In the following sections, I identify three—structuring by channel, by brand, or by region.

In this model, you see that there are several hundred content contributors, which could be employees (brand journalists), customers, partners in the supply chain, or a combination of all three. At the top, there is a specific editor for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a few blogs. This is probably the most basic model for a company with one Facebook page, one Twitter account, and so on. It can get extremely complicated with companies that have Global Facebook pages or multiple pages for specific events, product launches, or regions. If you recall, Chapter 10 helps you create governance models to ensure that you can manage the proliferation of several accounts and take the appropriate action to prevent the creation of channels if they aren’t needed.

Additionally, if you have a company blog with multiple categories, it’s good practice to have one editor per category that can manage all the content and content contributors.

If you work for a smaller company, it’s likely that a one or two person team is responsible for the entire content and marketing operation. In this case, you may consider identifying customers to contribute content or use platforms such as eByline, Contently, or Skyword to help you feed the content engine from third-party influencers and freelance journalists.

If you work for a company like Google, there are a few ways you can structure your content organization. You can simply take the previous model and replicate it at the product level. This means you would have several content contributors and one editor for each specific channel for that product. So Google’s Facebook page would have its own set of contributors and editor who would differ from Google Chrome’s Facebook page.

There must be one level above the editor to ensure there is a cohesive relationship among the editors of each of the products channels. It could be the Chief Content Officer mentioned previously, a Vice President of Marketing, or simply a managing editor who is responsible for the integration and storytelling initiatives of each of these brands.

In this model, you see that there is an editor who is responsible for all the content in the given regions—North America, Latin America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. Again, there would have to be an additional level of editors who would be responsible for integration with each of the countries.

Because of this, you have to ensure that you are building the right relationships, structures, and workflows internally that bring community managers, marketing managers, paid media specialists, analysts, and designers together to help you achieve earned media at scale. This is even more important if you are implementing a Creative Newsroom.

In the “Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Must Combine Paid, Owned, and Earned Media” report, Jeremiah Owyang and Rebecca Lieb from the Altimeter Group showcase success criteria for successfully launching a converged media strategy in a company (see Figure 11.5).

At the beginning of this model in the strategy section, you will notice that planning for a stable foundation is mentioned. This is about collaborating with internal teams to ensure the right content is being amplified and that it aligns with your company’s business goals.

The next section is about organization and is the foundation of this chapter. As mentioned in Chapter 3, one of the members listed in the inner circle of the Social Business Center of Excellence is the Digital Marketing team. Having this team at the table is imperative to ensure that converged media is a part of your content strategy. Also if you work with several agencies, you should make it crystal clear that each agency works together and collaborates with each other. The last thing you want is for your content strategy to suffer because your agencies aren’t playing nice together.

The last two pieces of this model—production and analysis—not only play a significant role in your converged media strategy, but they are both imperative to your media company transformation.

• Kapost—built in workflows, content planning, and can also publish to Wordpress and other content platforms.

• Compendium—hosted content marketing platform that has built in workflows, research tools, and content performance metrics.

• Cadence9—several products for CMOs, smaller marketing teams, and agencies with workflow and publishing capabilities.

• Relaborate—mainly for small business or agencies with built-in technology that will help you identify trending topics.

• Percolate—built-in workflows, access to licensed stock photography, and also surfaces third-party curated content that you can publish on your channels.

• Skyword—more focused on writing long-form content emphasizing keyword optimization. They also have access to third-party writers who can write content for your brand.

• Contently—also focused on long-form content creation, planning, workflows, and has a network of journalists that can feed into your content engine.

• Ebyline—also focused on long-form content creation, built-in workflows, and has a network of freelance writers that can feed into your content engine. They also have their own “newsroom” service in case you don’t have the internal resources.

• Spredfast

• Sprinklr

• HootSuite Enterpise

• Adobe Social

• Expion

• Falcon Social

• Raven Tools

• Hubspot

• Simply Measured

• Adobe Social

• Radian6

• Sysmos

• Tracx

• Mutual Mind

• HootSuite Command Center

• Tickr

• Brantology

• Brandwatch

• Ubervu

The Skyword Platform has a flexible, automated content production workflow that can be tailored to your specific organizational requirements. Its platform streamlines and tracks every aspect of the content production process, including third-party writer recruitment and management, automated writer payments and tax administration, content assignments and creation, the ability to optimize your long-form content for search, topic recommendations, editorial review, social media distribution, promotion, and measurement.

Skyword has a seven-step process that can you help you achieve your content goals efficiently and effectively. Each step is outlined in the following sections.