The Operations Side of Social Media Marketing

October 7th, 2009

Topics: Social

“Most businesses are still sticking their toe in the water of social media and as a result have seriously under invested in the space. Large Fortune 1000 companies are gripping about spending $30K on software and handing it over to super small teams–sometimes a single person. Can you imagine if they tried to answer their phone lines with a 3 person team? Or a single intern?!! How can they expect to evaluate performance when the team is so under water that they can’t even think?”

— Scaling social media

Ok, so if businesses are under investing in social media, what does a proper investment look like? Let’s look at 3 areas: Staffing, Business Processes, and Infrastructure.

Staffing

Staffing is really two pieces: roles and training. Not only do you need the people organized into roles, but you also need to make sure they are trained. Let’s take a look at some of the publicly available numbers for the top brands:
starbucks

Starbucks (source)

6 people

11 channels

dell

Dell (source and source)

22+ people

11 channels

sap

SAP (source)

35 people

10 channels

bestbuy

Best Buy (source and source)

1,400+ people

9+ channels

Above are some examples of what the top brands are doing. These are some of the most significant staffing investments in social media and they will look paltry compared to where social media is heading. Staff is a big investment.

Business Processes

social-media-engagement

A layer below staffing are the business processes that staff are executing. These are the guts of a social media marketing program. Business processes provide governance and structure that enables a team to execute. The following are the list of processes that a multi-channel social media program needs to function:

  • Monitoring
  • Publishing
  • Moderation
  • Response
  • Measurement
  • Promotion
  • Networking
  • Supervising
  • Maintenance

Infrastructure

If business processes are the guts, then the infrastructure are the bones. Technology provides the means to publish, monitor, measure, delegate, supervise and more. When technology is used right, it can improve efficiency allowing your people to maximize their output, especially if that tech is integrated.

Increasing output is the name of the social media marketing game. A recent study from the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint revealed the first financial correlation between social media and financial performance. The bottom line formula for success according to that report was: Channels X Activity = Financial Performance.

There are tons of social media technologies out there. Hundreds of monitoring choices, URL shortners, avatar managers, aggregators, etc. Below is a configuration of core technologies used to manage an Enterprise B2B social media marketing program:

technology

What are your experiences with the operations side of social media?

What have you seen on investments and configurations of staffing, business processes, and infrastructure to power social media programs? How do you think businesses will approach increasing their investments? Do you think they will? What do you see the future landscape looking like?

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  • Justin Kistner

    Until the tools vendors figure out how to capture and manage the infostream, there will be no shortcuts for significant staffing investments. And even then, I doubt there will ever be the social media equivalent of music-on-hold or hold queues. Social media by definition requires 1:1 relationships with customers.

    Well said! To me this really emphasizes the importance of workflow within social media monitoring and measurement software. Delegation, escalation, scripted FAQ responses, and more such features are as important as the aggregation and measurement side of the technology.

  • RBL

    Great post. This line sums it up: “Can you imagine if they tried to answer their phone lines with a 3 person team?” Marketing organizations need to understand that it takes bodies and brains to get their arms around the social media universe, which is growing by leaps and bounds every year. Until the tools vendors figure out how to capture and manage the infostream, there will be no shortcuts for significant staffing investments. And even then, I doubt there will ever be the social media equivalent of music-on-hold or hold queues. Social media by definition requires 1:1 relationships with customers.

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  • Justin Kistner

    Cory, I’m a social media expert. So I know about things like shoes.

  • http://coryhuff.com Cory Huff

    Um…the fact that you even knew about that video tells me that you…just…wow…

    …Justin…

  • Justin Kistner

    Shawn, you mean the Internet is not Candy Mountain!? ;)

  • http://www.twitter.com/shawnbowers Shawn Bowers

    Cory’s point about the abundance of “Social Media Interns” is spot on. As someone who only recently entered the world of professional social networking, I’m shocked by how little people are willing to invest and the amazing returns they think will be achieved in such a short period of time. For some reason, many companies still have this picture in their head of the Internet as a place of magic, and that all it takes is to set up a Facebook page and be done with it. Social networking is not something I would put in the hands of a temporary employee who isn’t even being paid. Go figure.

  • Justin Kistner

    Thank you, Chase. Glad it was helpful :)

  • http://writetomean.com Chase

    Wow, great post, Justin. One of the first i’ve read on the subject that a: isn’t too ethereal to be of any worldly use to those of us who aren’t working with the largest brands in the word, and b: offers good, tactile info.

    merci!

  • Justin Kistner

    Anne, it’s true that this post focuses on social media marketing. Our VP of Global Services, however, is going to do a post that focuses on social media in Customer Service.

    It’s worth clarifying that we see social media as a communication channel that should be used by every part of the organization, similar to email and the phone.

  • Anne B

    Nice post but…. Where is the Customer Service in this picture? Information is being fed into the Marketing Automation but it also needs to go into Customer Service systems. Ideally, Marketing systems and CS systems “talk” to each other.

    Social Media is not just Marketing – it provides great opportunities for the Customer Service side of the house. One of the challenges is to get Marketing and Customer Service to partner together more effectively. Social Media provides the means and customer focused companies (like Dell) recognize this new opportunity and have used it to their advantage.

  • http://coryhuff.com Cory Huff

    @Ethan thanks for the back up! I like it when really smart people are quoted to back me up.

    It’s amazing to me to see how unequal the business world is becoming on the Web. The whole economy is stretching like warm cheese. Really innovative, agile companies with early adopters in their leadership are outpacing other companies rapidly, and unfortunately for the ones who don’t know what’s going on, they have no idea they’re being left behind because they’re not even monitoring the online space.

    I still talk to people who work for major companies who don’t know what Twitter is, don’t allow their franchisees to use social media…*head shake*

  • Ethan Bauley

    To Cory’s point (“difficult to catch”)…

    “Inequality occurs in large and unconstrained social systems for the same reasons stop-and-go traffic occurs on busy roads, not because it is anyone’s goal, but because it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system. The relatively egalitarian distribution of readers in the early years had nothing to do with the nature of weblogs or webloggers. There just weren’t enough blogs to have really unequal distributions. Now there are.”

    “Power laws, weblogs, and inequality”

    http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

  • http://www.imagineyourreality.com/blog Taylor Ellwood

    Speaking as a person who works with small businesses, who usually only have either themselves or one or two other people to rely upon the total infrastructure of the business, what I usually see is less of an investment of money, and more of an investment of time and exploring automation options with social media while still maintaining a viable presence on social media.

    That said your model still applies to those small businesses. They still need to train either themselves or someone else. They still need to have a business process that describes how they will use social media and integrate into the rest of their business, and they also need some infrastructure, though a lot of that can be found in the various methods of automating social media available to them.

    My experience with businesses suggests that laying out this process ahead of jumping into the technology is essential for making it succeed for that business…and some form of investment is needed to make it work. Good post.

  • Ethan Bauley

    Cory’s final point (“first movers get a head start”) is critical and quantifiable (at least from an economic/strategic pov).

    Clay Shirky’s classic post on the effect of the power law on driving influence says it all. I’ll leave to someone else to dredge that up :-)

    My only note is that this dynamic only has returns insofar as publishing and attention is concerned…vis a vis the structural points Justin makes, there aren’t any direct effects except inasmuch as they’re required to capture attention

  • Justin Kistner

    I suspect you’re right about the Starbucks team. I also wonder how much they tap their agencies for help.

    Enterprises have invested millions in technology and have continued to operate. I don’t think a high ticket cost is an issue, but having a proper spend ratio does make sense, like Avinash’s 10 to 1 rule.

    I think you are right about what will make the money start flowing, “Not until some of the more forward thinking companies can demonstrate significant financial returns will the mainstream move forward with investments”. This leaves the market ripe for picking by first movers. It is sooo cheap to become the leader in an industry these days compared to what it will cost in 3-5 years.

  • http://blog.netbiz.com Cory Huff

    Oh, boy.

    There are a LOT of companies severely underinvesting in infrastructure and personnel in social media.

    Infrastructure

    There seems to be a lot of tools in the under $100 per month range that are just *okay* for tracking social media. Trackur is a good one, but it lacks a lot of refined controls. Then there are the enterprise tracking tools that are, as Justin mentioned, $30k. Seems like there’s room for a player in between.

    Personnel

    After dropping that kind of cash, many marketing managers are inclined to skimp on analysts and execution personnel. I would imagine those six people at Starbucks are having the time of their lives doing something new – but I bet they’re also running ragged.

    Scroll through the job boards in social media and you’ll see almost as many posts for “Social Media Interns” as you will for managers or specialists. There are major companies trusting their outward facing Web presence to people who aren’t authorized or trained to make executive level decisions. Most companies are probably not aware of Avinash Kaushik’s 10 to 1 rule on personnel spending vs. technology spending.

    For the next couple of years I foresee businesses digging in their heels to avoid investing in social media infrastructure. They’ll continue to leverage a spoke and wheel organization with a very small center. Not until some of the more forward thinking companies can demonstrate significant financial returns will the mainstream move forward with investments.

    3 – 5 years out, things will be different. Companies like Dell, Zappos, and others will have demonstrated significant financial returns. Companies will rush to spend more on social media. The major PR firm Edelman recently did a huge about face in their approach and started baking in “Trust” as an important aspect of their PR process. I predict other companies will start doing the same. By then those companies early to the game will already have first mover advantage and will be extremely difficult to catch.

    Wow, apparently I have a lot to say.