7 Responsibilities of the Enterprise Social Media 'Center'

There seems to be a shared experience among big brands as they advance along their use of social media. many are quite sophisticated in terms of the programs they are deploying from social customer care to alternative marcom programs to B2B lead generation. Many start by hiring the one "social media guy/gal" and then evolve to a core group (3-7) that form a "center of excellence" around them. This "center" is actually a federation of of folks from other departments - marketing, communications, HR, customer service, product development and more. 

Often the center of excellence is formed after some experience with social media marketing  - even years worth of marcom programs and basic social web page deployment (e.g. lets get our main Facebook page and Twitter handle up and active). All sorts of challenges arise at this point not the least of which is the CMO's Dilemma. 

To put social media into high gear and realize the true potential of integrated programs, the core social media group (the core of the "Center," if you will)  needs to tackle 7 key responsibilities:

1. Form the Center of Excellence: Since 'social' affects many parts of the enterprise, it's best to set aside all claims to "who owns social media" and form a working group from across all disciplines and departments. Lest this devolve into committee-hell, establish an agenda around some of the other responsibilities.  Our "Center" has 4 main activities:

• share best practice planning frameworks for how to do social media well
• establish measurement models that are reliable and responsible
• collect and share our toolbox of services, software and solutions
• convene a forum for sharing cases and solutions to keep learning and innovation going

2. Establish order on the use of the branded social Web: let's face it, having an 'anything goes' hands-off approach to determining how Facebook is used within the organization doesn't serve the public very well. By this time, most organizations have dozens of rogue Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn groups - all sorts of videos and images and more. A customer or influencer searching for something about your brand has to weed through all that, magically detect the 'official' pages from those set up by an enthusiastic employee in India and then decipher the official pages set up by 6 competing business units. Never mind the customer-created pages. Time to sort that out. 

This group is also the right one to define how best to use different platforms all the way down to some tactical details like should you embed photos in your Facebook page or use Flickr with an app. 

3. Draft policy and governance: How should employees use the social Web?  What is your official stance on FTC Guidelines in the US? What will be your disclosure and behavior policies abound the world? If you deal in healthcare or finance, how will you interpret federal regulations in different markets? Today there are ample risks for brands from employee behavior online like the Dominos case to FTC Guidelines issues like the Ann Taylor case (all resolved). Time to be clear to avoid unnecessary risk and pave the way to productively using social media. 

4. Define common measurement: This is the #1 barrier to the growth of the use of social media within an organization. The Center can be a hard-charger for putting in 'pretty-good' models immediately. Usually this is establishing some shared meaning and respect around some KPI's (e.g. does the organization value social media impressions? How about sentiment in word of mouth? How do we interpret the participation metrics in our Facebook page?) Engaging the research and measurement leaders in the organization to work as part of the Center and throw out workable models early on is key. 

5. Establish a forum to share best practices: We are all innovating here. We need a place where we can share what we have learned and, ideally, it would be a forum that encourages sharing failure too. Many organizations only talk openly about successes. Sometimes they gloss over lessons learned from things that didn't go quite right such that they can spin an experience as a success. Strive for success and celebrate failure. Thats what we learn from. Just be sure to  create a meeting, a wiki - whatever your org uses to share learnings or you may lose all those great lessons. 

6. Write a training curriculum: Many organizations have training specialists. Still, the Center learns from experience and is best suited to codify learnings into teachable lessons. The training group in HR can eventually deliver that training but so much of what works in social media comes through experience, it is tough to get anywhere unless practitioners have a hand in the curriculum. Identifying influencers online is trickier than it seems. Knowing how to accelerate word of mouth via paid media without spoiling the organic interest can be dicey. 

7. Implement a listening post to serve the enterprise: there are hundreds of listening technologies out there. Each has its strengths. Inside the organization, some business owners want a source of marcom insight. Some want monitoring for rapid response for customer service or crisis. Still others need to benchmark cgm for measurement purposes. Sorting through all the use-cases and all the technology claims to find the best match is tedious and can be expensive. If the Center takes this on, they can potentially save the enterprise money and time by evaluating for all needs. The same is true for any shared investment like social content management systems (e.g. Buddy Media, Vitrue, Context Optional, etc...). The Center can play an important role for many of these shared investments. 

There is a hidden 8th responsibility. You might take it for granted - I have on occasion. The Center of/for Excellence and the core group should be a champion of innovation. That is not as easy as it sounds. most of these other responsibilities are about developing the reliability of the use of social media. If you are a fan of Roger Martin like I am then you know "reliability" is at the other end of the spectrum from validity - the domain of innovators. Innovators are not always weighed down by the burden of proving something based on historical data (reliability). They are trying to prove that something new is valid. Somehow, the Center for Excellence, must deliver the evidence that helps optimize the organization's use of social media while actively trying new things with new partners, platforms and technologies.  

Comments

[Robyn Rottinger]

Organisations definately need to ensure they have a system of delivery when putting or releasing their brand within the social media space. Too often, they take it for granted and place the brand inappopriately amongst the onslaught of mindless personal chatter. Perhaps there needs to be a Facebook for business?

[Allen Bonde]

Hi John - great post and real nice summary of some of the key elements of a COE, which can be a very helpful structure when scaling up tech+people driven corp initiatives. Here are a few other pieces/techniques I've used when rolling these out:

For early discovery and helping with the 'order' and consensus building, I like starting with a mission statement for enterprise social.

For measures and KPI, start with a mix of tactical and highly measurable metrics like traffics/clicks and more 'value-add' but harder to measure ones like lifetime customer value.

For aligning the vision and promoting a common language (key to working across different orgs IMO), establish or adapt a maturity model to show 'we are here' and 'we are going HERE' - for an example see http://blog.offerpop.com/?p=23.

Again, really enjoyed the post, and thanks for allowing me to share a few additional ideas - would love your thoughts!

Allen

[Amber Naslund]

John,

Excellent post and guide for those looking for a workable model, and it's one I endorse wholeheartedly. Thank you especially for bringing up consistent measurement practices. While each business area might tweak some specific metrics relative their goals, having some consistency provides the groundwork for tracking progress over time, and getting tangible insights out of that information later on.

Jay Baer and I have a similar model outlined for our upcoming book, and more and more folks at the enterprise level are headed in this direction (Dell, Autodesk, Humana, H&R Block...). Seems your'e onto something.

Cheers and thanks,
Amber Naslund
Radian6

[John Bell]

Amber - thanks for your comment. let me know more about the book - sounds promising.