Businesses are becoming more sophisticated in their social media strategies and investing in powerful platforms to help growing teams to manage multiple channels. Many have built “command centers” to aggregate information from listening, engagement, publishing, analytics, and routing tools. But do social media command centers deliver real isight, or are they just a distracting “shiny object”?
To answer that question, Silicon Valley advisory firm Altimeter researched the state of the social media command centre. Released yesterday, the report presents findings, case studies, and expert recommendations for evaluating, building, and fine-tuning a command center deployment—and planning for the future.
Drawing on the strategies employed by three Fortune 500 enterprises—eBay, MasterCard, and Wells Fargo—Altimeter authors Susan Etlinger, Andrew Jones, and Charlene Li discovered that the social media command center is only as valuable as the strategy it supports. eBay gets over 80,000 social media brand mentions per day, a volume that requires a serious social media strategy. Their social media command center, which uses HootSuite for its publishing functionality, provides three main benefits: insight, consistency, and “customer first.”
In terms of insight, eBay uses the command center to learn everything from what product enhancements their customers want, to how effective their marketing efforts have been. For consistency, to command center provides “a single source of truth among data sources.” In other words, the data it collects is shared across the enterprise, helping them to keep consistent in their customer service efforts and beyond. Finally, “customer first” refers to eBay’s use of the command center as a conduit “for context and insight for the business, facilitating the ability to think and act from a customer-centric point of view across multiple dimensions.”
What’s the takeaway recommendation? “Build the command center to serve the business and to deliver insights—not just data or metrics.” In addition, the authors offered a list of six best practices. Number six encapsulates the approach of those businesses that use social media command centers most effectively: “Think big and move fast.”
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[Report] Shiny Object or Digital Intelligence Hub? Evolution of the Enterprise Social Media Command Center, by Susan Etlinger from Altimeter Group Network on SlideShare