Solving the Puzzle: Social at Scale

Since the quarantine started, I have been spending much of my time on two activities: doing jigsaw puzzles and making a professional transition from a full-time corporate job to a freelance consulting gig.

Even though the two seem totally different, I am beginning to see some real parallels. When I do a jigsaw puzzle, it starts as a giant heap of pieces. Some are right-side up. Some are upside down. Some are edge pieces, some are not. And in the end, they come together to make one cohesive picture. But it takes a fair amount of work and thought to make that happen. The puzzle will sit on your table collecting dust unless you make an active effort to work on it.

Doing social media – especially for a large, international and highly matrixed company – is much the same. For many large companies, social media is currently the equivalent of that big pile of pieces. Why is that? In part, it’s because of the way social media for businesses evolved. Remember that social media did not exist for most companies 10 years ago. When companies took an interest, leaders did not know what to do with it or who should own it. The result was a free-for-all scrum and the fragmentation of social media duties across many teams. It’s common for marketing, communications, advertising, HR, IT, compliance, agency partners and many other groups to be involved in social media at one company. But as you can imagine, this leads to confusion, communication missteps and redundant work.

If that’s you or your company, here are some things to think about related to this conundrum. For clarity and extra credit points, let’s go back to our puzzle analogy…

ASSEMBLE THE FRAME

Most people doing a jigsaw puzzle start by putting the frame together. This gives you a sense of the puzzle. How big is it going to be? What is the scale like? How big are the components that must fit together?

Yet astonishingly, many big companies do not ever sit down and evaluate social media as one total operation because their current structure does not manage it that way. Look at the total universe of social media work across ALL teams. Ask yourself: What is the social media framework? Who does what? How are the teams structured? How does the work get done? And most importantly, WHO should own it?

If you asked me to create a social media structure for a large company from scratch, most of the time, I would propose one large combined team that creates its own social-specific content and manages both organic and paid. This puts everything under one leader so that communication and direction are as clear as possible. It also gives you someone who is ultimately in charge and responsible for everything that goes out on your channels.

Even if you choose to spread social duties across different teams, you need to ensure there is someone acting as the “traffic cop.” This person is vital, looking across all posts and channels, paid and organic, to ensure consistency of content and that the numerous campaigns are coordinated and not colliding. The sad truth is that many large corporations don’t have a traffic cop or a single social media leader. Their framework is faulty from the start – and so their puzzle naturally turns into a half-completed mess. And even though this post is not about crisis management on social, I will just say that this results in absolute chaos if there is a big crisis to manage.

SORT THE PIECES

My next step when doing a puzzle is to sort the pieces. Depending on the puzzle, I might be sorting by color, shape, pattern, etc. But putting all the similar stuff together helps a lot when you dig into the work of actually completing the puzzle.

Likewise, I think clumping similar responsibilities together makes a lot of sense. But at many companies, there are multiple teams touching community management, organic content, paid content, influencer marketing, executives on social, etc. Certainly, you need to have a division of labor. But in my opinion, all of the same type of work probably should be handled by the same core team. Just like putting a puzzle together, this allows you to complete the task faster and more efficiently. It is also clearer for your people – each person will understand their role and where they fit into the whole.

ESTABLISH THE RULES (GOVERNANCE)

If you’ve ever tried to do a puzzle with someone else, you know it can be a bit challenging to have two people working on one puzzle at the same time. Quite often, my husband and I aggravate each other because one of us will start sorting pieces by color and the other will be sorting by shape. We can avoid these issues by agreeing on a system up front.

Similarly, for a large company with hundreds of channels and hundreds of users, it helps immensely to have an agreed upon system. In fact, when you reach a certain scale, it becomes pretty much necessary. This is where the G word comes into play! People out there who know me already know that governance is my favorite topic related to social media. I will leave you to read my other posts if you want a deeper dive on why. But let’s just say that without a structure and clearly defined rules/procedures, a large company has no hope of controlling social or doing it well. Bottom line: if you can’t tell people the rules, you can’t require anyone to follow them.

BUILD THE PUZZLE

Once I’ve sorted the pieces and established my rules, I start trying to fill in the middle of the puzzle. If you’re like me, sometimes you leave the parts that are all one color (like the sky or grass) till the end because they are the hardest. Likewise, when building a social media operation, it’s really easy to focus your attention on the exciting part of what we do. Everyone loves to talk about content, GIFs, memes, influencers, etc. But the truth is that the shiny objects are only half of what it takes to run social media for a big corporation. Just like any other activity like running a plant or operating a retail store, there need to be standard operating procedures, escalation procedures, crisis plans and documented training for new team members. A shocking number of large companies do not have these materials.

Once you reach a certain scale, the number of things needing to be managed and controlled grows exponentially. There’s people, tools, process, legal, compliance, etc. These are the less-sexy parts of social but are incredibly important for big companies, especially with new privacy laws in Europe and California that continually change the rules of what’s OK and carry big-time fines for violations. It may not be fun for everyone, but at some point, you just have to bite the bullet and put the sky together.

STEP BACK AND REEVALUATE

At some point in the process of doing a big puzzle, I inevitably have to stare really hard at a section and ask, “Does that piece really go there?” Or, worse yet, I have to get down on my hands and knees and look for that one missing piece on the floor (and hope my dog didn’t eat it). Like all things, you probably won’t get it exactly right the first time. You have to be willing to pull a piece or a whole section up and find out where it really belongs. That’s OK and expected. But you should never have anything so precious that you’re not willing to evaluate if there are ways you could do it better. For the fast-changing business of social media especially, being stuck in your old ways is a sure path to failure. I find that a lot of companies have broken social infrastructures just because “that’s the way it’s always been.”

FINISH & START AGAIN

Finally! At the end, you get to push that very last piece into place and marvel at the wonder that you have created! It’s a joyful moment that makes all the hard work worth it. You might leave the puzzle out for a day or two so everyone can remark about what a great job you did. But then the sad truth is you have to put the puzzle away and (if you’re me) open a new one and start all over.

Managing social media is a constant game of solving new puzzles. Once you think you have it figured out, Facebook or Twitter makes some ridiculous change that affects your model. Or, you simply encounter something new (Yelp, NextDoor, Glassdoor, Snap, WhatsApp, WeChat, VSCO… you name it!) that forces you to amend your model. The truth is that good companies should always be evaluating and reevaluating how their social media operation is structured and what could be better. In the long run, the companies that are willing to constantly self-reflect and change will have the most success.