Social Media Teams

In a previous post titled The “Odd New Thing”: Social Media, we talked about “what not to do”, when managing social media for your organization or brand. In Data: The Composition of a Corporate Social Media Team, Jeremiah Owyang, industry analyst and partner at Altimeter, tells us “how to do” as he analyzes results from Altimeter’s recent survey to 144 global national corporations with over 1000 employees to see how today’s corporate social media teams break down. It turns out, the average size of a corporate social media team is ELEVEN people, excluding agencies, consultants and researchers.

Altimeter’s study discovered a trend of four key groups at corporations:

1. Leadership Team: Focused on the overall program ROI, drive business results
2. Business Unit Facing: Work inside the company to get executives and teams of other business units on board
3. Market Facing: Serve as a go-between to balance the needs of customers and the corporation
4. Program Management: Run programs at the corporate level, reporting and brand monitoring, manage developer teams to get systems to work

Owyang also makes predictions for the future of social media teams:

“In the future, these teams will likely shrink, or evolve into customer experience teams. Know that the corporate social strategist will work themselves out of a job.  Why?  Business units will be able to operate their own programs without excessive oversight, following program guidelines, and using pre-set best practices and sanctioned software systems.  With that said, a core team will always be required, to coordinate the enterprise, but we predict this will evolve into a customer experience team.”