Hub and Spoke: Organizing Around Social Media

Hub and Spoke: Organizing Around Social Media:

As social media evolves into a business strategy, rather than just a marketing strategy, companies will need to re-evaluate how they organize around the moving parts. Every department within an organization can potentially be affected by social media, so you will need to prepare for this.

There are several models for disseminating information and transitioning workflow, and I have found that the hub and spoke model works the best. In this article I will explain how a model like this would function.

The Hub

While many people call it the hub, it could also be referred to as the social media committee. Members of this committee or hub would represent each department within the business, and they possess appropriate social media skills, and their main function is gathering information from stakeholders within their respective functions within the business and relay it to the hub. Then they would be responsible for setting goals and measurement criteria for their departments. Finally, they would coordinate responsibilities, timelines, content production, and training for each area of the business.

Activity Flow to the Spokes

As the social media strategy for each department rolls out, 1 or more committee members would be responsible for monitoring and listening for mentions that warrant collection or response. For example, a person on Twitter mentioned that they are looking for a new microwave. The committee member would then route the Tweet to the sales team for follow up. Another example is a customer complaining about a malfunctioning mobile phone on Facebook. The committee member would route the comment to a representative of the customer service department. Maybe someone is asking a question on a job forum if your company is hiring. You would then relay that question to the human resources department for follow up.

Content Production

Each committee member would be responsible for the creation of content, whether they produce it themselves or delegate to another part of the business (most likely marketing). For example, the committee member that is responsible for the customer service department has been monitoring and listening to many conversations about a certain question that relates to pricing. The next step would be to add an item to the FAQ section of the website and/or to hold a training session for the customer service representatives.

Conclusion

As you can see, social media has the potential to complicate things if there is not a workflow in place, so one of the items you should tackle while planning is to think about how information will flow and who will champion the effort in each department.

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