The Operations Side of Social Media

“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 (source)

6 people

11 channels

Dell (source and source)

22+ people

11 channels

SAP (source)

35 people

10 channels

Best Buy (source and source)

1,400+ people

9+ channels

Business Processes

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:

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?