social media | Venture Gal

This morning I read through the Social Business Forecast: 2011 The Year of Integration presentation by Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter. The presentation explains how companies are integrating social media (from staffing to measuring impact). What I found most interesting about it is the breakdown of how companies are organizing and managing social initiatives. The report points out 5 models:

Centralized
Decentralized
Coordinated
Hub & Spoke (and Multiple Hub & Spoke)
Holistic

Each model has its pros and cons, and some are more applicable to certain types of companies. For example, a company like Zappos has a culture that is conducive to a Holistic model, in which each employee is empowered. The Holistic model probably wouldn’t work out so well with a company like Microsoft, so a Multiple Hub & Spoke model makes more sense (one hub/brand sets rules & procedures and business units undertake their own efforts). Altimeter shares that most companies organize into Hub & Spoke or Centralized models. I favor the Hub & Spoke model for a few reasons. It gets more people involved. People pick up & notice things that others may not. And by empowering the business units to manage their own social media activities they are more invested in the success of those activities and stay more closely tied to the company.

I think it would be interesting to look more closely at how companies’ organizational social model changes over time. When a company goes from 3 people to 30 people to 300 people to 3000 people, how does social media management grow with the company?

Altimeter discovered that as companies mature their total budget, team size, and organizational social model matures as well. The evolution they found was from Centralized (with about 3 team members) to Hub & Spoke (with 8 team members), to Hub & Spoke or Multiple Hub & Spoke (with a larger budget and 20 team members).

It seems like Hub & Spoke is a scalable model, since as the organization grows, each new or growing unit can lead its own social initiatives.

The presentation also looks at what’s next…what are companies concerned about in 2011. ROI is important and some of the common measurements companies are using include engagement data (like retweets, comments, fans, likes, etc), overall sentiment from followers and such, website traffic, conversions/leads, and customer satisfaction rates.

The last section of the presentation recommends where to invest in social media programs. The 6 recommendations are:

Hire folks with a track record of early tech adoption in their careers (and train for scale)
Integrate social media on the website, aggregate, & curate
Invest in advertising to leverage social graph & focus on clear metrics
Build an unpaid army of advocates (let your customers do the work for you)
Invest in scalable systems like social CRM and management tools
Learn to measure ROI (Altimeter put together an ROI Pyramid to illustrate ways to measure ROI)

With early stage companies, just like setting a company culture is important, figuring out how social will be integrated early on will save time and headaches down the road when an unorganized, not thought out plan, creates chaos. You could experiment with different models, and remember that the model may need to change as the company grows, since some models are more scalable than others.

Venture on,

MEL aka Venture Gal

Mirror.me creates a reflection of your online self. Full disclosure – RPM Ventures, the VC firm I work with, invested in this company. No one asked me to blog about the company though. I am sharing this because I think what they’re doing is cool and it is a tool I have used to see if my online presence aligns with my interests.

First, a little bit about Mirror.me. The technology was developed by three Computer Science PhD students at the University of Illinois and now has a full team of folks committed to helping people connect and interact with others with shared interests.

Now, for my reflection. The word cloud is based on who you follow, who follows you, and what you say, so it’s not as simple as just pulling words from your tweets. The biggest words on my word cloud (that you can see to the right) are very related to entrepreneurship – “entrepreneur”, “entrepreneurship”, “venture”, “technology”, “startup”, “founder,” etc. which makes sense since I follow people and organizations in this domain and vice versa. My word cloud also captures other major interests of mine like “food”, “travel”, and “people”. These are especially core to me. There are things about me that are not reflected in my word cloud, but those are things that I am not as active with online. For instance, though “food” is in my cloud, you don’t know what kind of food is my favorite, and with “travel”, you may not see where I have traveled to or to where I want to travel.

Other cool information Mirror.me shows me is my “people cloud” (below). This shows me the strength of my Twitter followers and followees. The people in my cloud range from RPM portfolio companies, co-investors, my Second City improv instructor, to friends, and family, and my cloud will display different people each time I click on it.

A final aspect I’ll mention is the metrics piece. I find this information really interesting – basically I get an interest and demographic breakdown of those I am following and those following me.

Bottom line – Mirror.me shows me online, as if I was looking in a mirror. It also shows me who in my community has similar interests. Seeing my word cloud is no excuse to not get to know me in person. There is much more to me that is not reflected in my cloud. I like that. There needs to be some surprises and things about me for people in real life to discover =)

What are you waiting for, go check out your reflection! Let me know what you think!

Mary aka Venture Gal