Agile Teams Are Critical For Social Marketing Success
I often ask marketing leaders how they organize their resources for social, and the responses are rarely the same. I hear everything from: "We have one person in PR who does social part-time" to "We have hundreds of full time social marketing managers across the globe." Despite this disparity, I find that marketers often share the same level of frustration when they try to advance their social marketing initiatives. Whether they have one social marketing manager or hundreds of social marketing managers, marketers claim that their existing resources are stretched.
Quantity does not equate to quality
Marketers tell us that a lack of dedicated employees is a big pain point. And if you dig a bit deeper, you will find that this is a daunting obstacle that prevents many organizations from scaling and optimizing their social marketing efforts. Marketers often feel that the only way to scale and optimize is to hire more social marketing managers. Yes, more dedicated headcount helps, but it is not the panacea. In order to be truly organized for social marketing success, you need a new perspective.
You must have agile teams
Your organization must be collaborative, responsive, and adaptive. This is the formula you will need to scale and optimize for social. Most organizations will never be able to hire enough staff to meet the growing and real-time demands of social reach, depth, and relationship. But savvy brands have determined that a flexible organizational model can help them significantly advance their social initiatives.
The hub-and-spoke model provides flexibility
We identified three proven organizational models that will lead to social marketing success by delivering on these agile organization imperatives. All of these models are based on the "hub and spoke" model that many marketers still know and love today. But the structure of your hub-and-spoke model will depend on where you are in the social maturity stage. New to social? Then you will focus on building out your social marketing "hub." Coordinating social marketing efforts across functions? Then you will have a centralized team that interacts with various groups, i.e., the "spokes," across your organization. Scaling and optimizing for social? Then you will have a distributed hub-and-spoke, where social roles and responsibilities are shared both horizontally and vertically within your organization.
How are you currently organized for social marketing? I would love to hear your thoughts! In the meantime, you can learn more about how to organize for social in my full report, Staff Agile Teams For Social Marketing Success.