One of the biggest challenges businesses face today regarding social media is understanding how to appropriately staff initiatives. This challenge is compounded by the inability for some businesses to hire new, full-time people to relieve the existing overwhelmed workforce as a result of the current recession. At Dachis Group, we observe that many businesses are missing tremendous opportunities because social media practitioners volunteer their time and no one is truly responsible or held accountable for specific initiatives. A major component of Social Business Design is developing a staffing model to support our clients’ desires to harness opportunities presented by customer participation. A question we have had to address is whether or not any of the new social roles we recommend can be outsourced. My answer to this question is that only specific responsibilities of those functional roles should be outsourced.
So how does a business determine what it should and should not outsource when it comes to social media? I believe Joe Raasch of Target says it well.
Joe’s comment was one of 41 responses to the question “should you outsource social media” posted on LinkedIn by brand strategist Valeria Maltoni this past March. Valeria published a great post featuring these responses on her blog Conversation Agent. Many respondents agreed social media application development, content development, monitoring, and measurement activities could be outsourced. These are activities that are more transactional to Joe’s point. My colleague Peter Fasano puts it another way by saying social media functions that can be clearly defined are possible to outsource. For example, a business can leverage third party services to scan the Web and help filter and flag comments about its brand by defining the inquiries. A business should not rely on a third party to respond to comments before it can carefully define appropriate responses. The exercise of scripting appropriate responses to hypothetical comments is often fruitless just as you cannot script one side of a real-time conversation before it takes place. Some companies develop intricate scripts and then realize the responses do not work in the real world. That means a business must establish clear guidelines on when and how to respond. Guidelines do not prevent the sponsoring organization from being present to manage escalation from third parties. The question remains as to whether or not organizations that choose to outsource due to lack of resources will be able to support and enforce these guidelines externally.
Why outsource?
Businesses consider outsourcing social media functions because they lack the expertise in-house. Outsourcing social media functions could help a business buy the time it needs to develop these core competencies in-house. In this case, outsourcing can be a viable option, especially if the business partners with the agency for education and training. However, if a company can find a way to keep social media functions in-house, I recommend doing so given the potential risks involved.
Potential Risks to Outsourcing Social Media
- social conversations feel less authentic and trustworthy
- business has less direct oversight to be flexible in strategic approach
- agency not equipped to answer customer questions given its limited access to important business intelligence to make decisions
- business process continuity is challenged leading to delayed response times
- agency loses sight of core business values and objectives driving social participation (we see examples of this even within a business)
- customers grow frustrated because they want to talk directly to the business
A business can minimize potential risks by carefully choosing which functions are outsourced. The general rule to is to avoid outsourcing participation and engagement.
What Can Be Outsourced
- recruitment
- social web monitoring
- moderation (filtering for inappropriate comments or curating the best)
- social web analytics
- content development
- application development
What Should Not Be Outsourced
- listening (you need to be listening to know the context for how to respond)
- responding
- driving conversations
- mediating member discussions
- content management
Possible Exceptions
Companies like Communispace and Passenger have created successful models around outsourcing customer insights communities. Customer insight communities are easier to manage because they are private, members are pre-screened and many community activities are defined in advance.
Remaining Problem
My biggest concern with outsourcing social media functions is that it suggests these activities are not core to the business. If a business has not made the case for investing in social initiatives, outsourcing will add new challenges to making this argument. Outsourcing social media functions puts social media at risk for becoming a separate, siloed business activity which prevents the integration of customer participation into all aspects of the business – a critical move to realizing the full value of social business. Our clients that have experienced success in social media treat their communities as business assets.
Social media initiatives require the investment of resources no matter what, so why not make the right investments in-house to maximize the return?
And don’t dare hire someone new and/or junior and make them a “social” voice of the company. There should be a 3 month new hire hiatus before they are turned loose.
I agree Steve. These positions require a solid understanding of organizational values because of the complex nature of social interactions.
Hi Peter,
I generally agree with you. Outsourcing social media is one of those things that is not quite black and white across all cases, except with application development.
Like any business function, there should be a longer-term view on the subject. By this, I mean a decision does not necessarily have to be “can” or “cannot”, but perhaps “somewhere in the middle”.
For example, with listening, you can work with a company to craft your strategy, find and implement a platform, begin to listen, find out how to filter best, and from there start to build-out a plan for disseminating and responding. Outsourcing the strategy and configuration work can speed up a social initiatives and better prepare organizations for taking the long-haul function in-house.
I believe the same holds true for community management, especially in smaller firms. Again, if you have a long-term view of outsourcing, then the heavy lifting in the beginning (setting up each social space, building a reporting and response framework, defining rules, and even responding to benchmark and measure what is working) can make sense. Overtime, bringing this in will make sense as the amount of activity and impact on the organization grows. Getting up to speed I think is half the battle.
My last thought…is that the bigger the company the more flexibility you have in making choices here, but for smaller companies or smaller departments a mixed-model with a longer term view might make sense.
I am not saying the above does not have pitfalls, but it is an alternative view-point on the subject.
Thank you Mark for sharing your thoughts. I admit my post presented a view of the world as it is today. I believe the decision is complicated and dependent on various factors – although I’m not sure size of the company matters as much as the type of company, culture and audience. Success depends on the approach. Having a long-term view is critical. Long-term, I think we agree the act of listening has greater potential to impact the business when brought in-house.
Really nice post, but I think generalisations are a bit self-defeating. “First-line” response mgt and moderation, where the externals react quickly and escalate following predefined guidelines, enable ‘fixed manpower’ organisations to focus limited HR on the most important engagement. It needs to be managed, but it would have to be managed internally anyway.
Thanks Mathew. I agree that moderation – filtering of inappropriate content and promoting good content – is something that can be outsourced because it can be defined. I’m not yet convinced the management required to ensure a third party appropriately responds to customers on behalf of the organization frees up enough time to make outsourcing worth it.
nice pice Caroline. I think you have it down pretty well. One other thing I would add is around the moderating activity. We at Brandwatch (a monitoring company based in the UK) are seeing an increasing need for what can best be described as ‘fitting’ the conversations on the web into the organisation. Or to use a rather ugly word i heard recently Operationalizing the data. The way to do that is to categorise them into different business units. We’ve developed a simple tagging system to do it. But the real art is deciding what tags to use. ie which business unit or person within an organisation needs to know about the mention. The client organisations want clean relevant data, but what we have found is necessary is an upfront period where they get involved in the categorisation, and we learn from them. Armed with that information we can effectively take on and mostly automate the task saving time and money.
I hope that small insight is useful
Best wishes
giles
Hi Giles,
Your comment accentuates even more how important it is to keep the voice in house. As you say: “…the real art is deciding what tags to use.” This “tagger” or moderator is the one responsible for dispersing any online brand conversation into the company and then collecting appropriate responses.
How important is that…incredibly.
I disagree because people outsource their social media to me. Social media is new and what people should or shouldn’t be doing, I think, is still an open question.
What people should be doing is what works and what gets them closer to their goal.
I work with entrepreneurs. Since these are individuals and not huge companies, I can get close to them. It’s essential that I learn about their businesses in detail. Of course, if there get direct questions they need to answer, I make sure I get feedback from them before replying.
Maybe in the case of big enterprise your advice works. However, for my clients, they’re very comfortable with me being the hands-on manager of their outgoing message. I’m a freelancer, but I’m definitely part of their team.
You are spot on Regina. The great part about being a small business is that one insightful person can add a ton of value to the team. This gets more complex at scale, and that’s really what Dachis Group specializes in; working with some of the largest enterprises in the world.
Hi Regina. Thanks for participating in the debate here and sharing your experience. I’ll admit my opinion is formed by my experience working with larger organizations. Your comment is helpful in supporting the argument that the size of the organization does matter in making the decision to outsource social media.
Great post, Caroline. I just got back from an industry conference (I work in property management), and one of the big discussions was whether or not to outsource social media. One speaker suggested almost exactly what you have: that elements of infrastructure/development can be outsourced, but that for authenticity’s sake, the listening and responding “should” happen in-house. I know companies who manage their programs internally, and some companies who outsource the bulk of their efforts – but many property management companies simply haven’t jumped into the fray yet. I’d suppose the same is true of many other industries as well. It will be very interesting to see how things develop over the next 6 – 12 months.
Here’s the thing with outsourcing “transactional” assignments. It must be a 3 tier system to work properly.
Whomever is assigned these DUTIES (Tier One) must have someone to report to that is assigned the ACCOUNTABILITY (Tier Two).
Above that person is the one who has the ULTIMATE AUTHORITY and is fully accepting of the CONSEQUENCES for delegating the RESPONSIBILITY (Tier Three).
All in caps are important and sobering words/concepts, but none are as thought provoking and serious as the RISKS and CONSEQUENCES involved.
If all the above can be taken in and fully digested, the mission can go forward.
Companies often look at social media and liken it to PR, customer service, market research, marketing, etc. And then companies think that they can outsource their social media just as they outsource their PR, customer service, etc.
What makes social media so different is the speed at which it operates. A negative comment on the social web requires a close to immediate response. The only way to really reach this is by keeping the community management responsibilities in house.
I would like to add another point to “What can be outsourced.” and that is campaign creation. Integrated marketing campaigns, must include social media. The development of this can be done by a solid partnership between agency and client.
Thanks Erik. Yes, social media enables communication at speed and scale like no other medium which is what increases the risks and consequences (to Marc’s point above). I agree with your point that campaign creation involving social media can be outsourced to a partnering agency.
Thanks for the great article. We are an outsourcing company that has done what you said: “a business can leverage third party services to scan the Web and help filter and flag comments about its brand by defining the inquiries”. From experience, many businesses have benefited from having us do these type of work, not because it cheaper or they do not want the added work or that they do not have the capabilities to do it in-house. We also serve as an objective participant of sorts, that can challenge deep rooted conceptions of their business, just by showing what people are really saying about their business through social media.