Trendspotting: Social media governance jobs are coming

Feb 4

This week, a job posting from Boston Scientific caught my eye.

Title: Brand Safety and Digital Media Strategy Manager.

Responsibilities include:

Partner with Boston Scientific Legal and Regulatory teams, commercial business partners and advertising agencies to create/update and communicate the company’s social media and advertising guidelines for campaign programs.
Serve as the Boston Scientific subject matter expert for brand safety.
Serve as a subject matter expert for customer and patient data privacy and support Legal and Regulatory to ensure that policies remain up to date and adhere to industry best practices.
Manage external relationships and contracts with enterprise vendors or agencies related to brand safety and customer/patient data privacy matters.

In other words – they are hiring a position to be in charge of overall digital brand protection and data governance, including social media. You can’t see it, but I’m grinning from ear to ear.

I’ve long said that large companies will eventually realize they need a head of social media (or digital) governance. It’s honestly a position that is overdue at most large companies doing social media and digital marketing at scale. It’s my prediction that companies may eventually have a couple of FTEs dedicated to social media/digital governance. And while I’m making predictions, I also predict that there will soon be four-year degrees from universities focusing specifically on corporate social media management and governance. It’s just a matter of time.

The reasoning for such roles is actually pretty well spelled out in the Boston Scientific job posting itself (emphasis mine):

“Boston Scientific has significantly accelerated investment in digital marketing communication channels to educate and drive demand for the company’s products among healthcare providers and patients. These channels include all media (including social media), email, virtual events/conferences, sales enablement tools, websites and mobile apps. Additionally, advancements in digital marketing technology and customer/patient data capabilities have rapidly progressed creating both new opportunities for marketing impact but also new risks with respect to ensuring the integrity of the Boston Scientific brand reputation.”

They are not alone. Companies all over the world have invested millions in digital communication over the last decade – a trend that only accelerated with COVID and the work-from-home movement of last year. If you’re still having trouble connecting the dots, here’s why a company really needs such a dedicated resource:

Social media teams don’t have time. Social media governance is a specialized area of expertise. Most social media teams spend their days in the weeds responding to crises, answering consumer complaints, justifying their existence, creating content, managing vendors, fixing technical issues and a million other things. They simply don’t have the time to focus on governance. And many of them have not built good relationships with Legal, Compliance, Cybersecurity and other departments that should be allies in this cause.
Social media teams aren’t that interested. To be frank, social media governance is a dry and boring topic to a lot of people, including many people who manage social media accounts for a living.
The fear factor. Many social media directors have told me flat-out that they know governance is a thing they need to work on, but they simply don’t want to open the can of worms. They don’t want to actively manage it because then they will have to do the work and be on the hook for “owning” it. While I understand that, I also strongly disagree. If you don’t own it, there are two scenarios that can play out: 1) No one owns it, and it’s complete chaos. 2) Someone else steps forward to own it (like IT) and then you’re beholden to rules made by someone who doesn’t know what it takes to run social. If you’re in this camp, I encourage you to get your head out of the sand and bite the bullet.
People who are not on the social media team do not understand how much work it is. Properly managing social media in a safe and secure way involves dozens of tools, thousands of records, policies, procedures, reviews, audits, etc. Most people think social media teams “just post stuff on social media” with no thought about the actual management of it. For instance, let’s say you’re at a global company with 400 social media accounts, and you insist that each of those accounts has at least two owners for redundancy. Already you’re talking about 400 channels and a minimum of 800 people, and that’s before you add in agency partners and the paid side of the house. If you’re doing social at that scale, the math makes it a “thing” that has to be truly managed.

One more quick example. Let’s say Sarah contacts me and says Joe is leaving her team. Joe has access to the team’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube channel. That seems like a pretty simple request, but in reality, that sets off a workflow that involves multiple systems, several records and about 200 clicks. It’s at least two hours of work to fulfill that request. Here are all the things that have to happen:

And then, assuming Joe is being replaced, we have to do all of those things in reverse to add Joe’s replacement to all of our tools, systems and records, not to mention onboarding that person. Rinse and repeat every time there’s a staffing change for any one of those 400 accounts or at one of those agency partners. And that’s for a simple request that assumes you actually have control of all your social media properties (which many companies do not).

People who are not on the social media team do not appreciate the risk. Risk related to social media has never been higher and has never been so complex. To protect your brand, company and team from about 18 kinds of risk, you must take governance seriously. One of the reasons social media governance falls between the cracks at a lot of companies is because the departments that normally handle such things (IT, Law, HR, Compliance) are not even aware that this data set exists or that it needs protecting. And, as mentioned above, social media teams are either unwilling or too crunched for time and resources.

So… kudos to the team at Boston Scientific for realizing the need and taking action. It will position them well in the future because this picture is only getting more and more complex. There are now regulations like GDPR in Europe and the CCPA here at home, plus the FTC is paying more attention to social media platforms and their data practices. Add the fact that consumers are increasingly turning to social media as a primary customer service channel, and suddenly companies also have to worry about protecting the data and personal information of your consumers who are interacting via social.

It’s just my opinion, but I believe that the role of “social media governance director” is a needed and important one for most large companies. I hope to see more companies follow Boston Scientific’s lead and take this portion of social media as seriously as they treat lead gen and conversions.