My most recent thinking on the matter came after a Boot Camp I ran for the entire senior C-suite team of a large insurance broker. Sitting in the room all day was the CEO, COO, CFO, CMO/CSO, SVP HR, CIO, CLO, and several business unit heads. As I listened to the wrap-up comments at the end of the day, and then thought about them further, a thought crystallized:

– The CFO, as an example, is very much a shared service. Finance touches ALL aspects of the enterprise – certainly HR and payroll budgets, product ROI, sales and marketing funding and accountability, etc. And the CFO is quite accepted as a C-Level entity even though the direct-report team is small relative to the others. In this particular case, a similar characterization can be made about HR, Legal & Compliance, and Sales.

So in the context of this discussion, as I look into the future, I see Social Tech being a shared service as well, with its impact touching all aspects of the organization. For example, HR spoke of the need for a LinkedIn training deep-dive. Marketing of course has obvious applications. But Finance also needs Social for Rivers of Information, Crowdsourcing, Reputation Management, and Voice. Legal needs help with Rivers as well as record retention and compliance. Certainly Customer Service needs to integrate Social in a Huge way. And IT can leverage Social in powerful ways as well – e.g. Crowdsourcing low-priority coding projects.

And we’re just scratching the surface. As Social Tech matures in the years ahead, the applications to business goals will also mature.

So my conclusion? Putting Social inside the Marketing and Sales function would be of great benefit to that function, but would likely short the others by extension. This would seem to be sub-optimal for the long-term health of the enterprise.

Curious what other might say. Thanks again.

In terms of priority, I think the first order of a CSO (or the organizational social team) must be governance, policies and planning. The enterprise has to be allowed to thrive with social throughout and not just done in a vertical. I also tend to think technology/tools, compliance, content, customer service and employee engagement & training would also need to be priorities. Can’t forget reputation management/crisis response, of course!

In the end, I also think a true Social Business leader would have to focus on how social technologies and behaviors impact products. The age of collective consumption is upon us, and just as with the web, this will bring changes that most companies are not prepared for.

Great insights. And reading between the lines reveals even more powerful pearls of wisdom. Thanks so much.

FYI, I still talk about you and the Erin Esurance stories from ’05-’09 in my Social Tech Boot Camps for Insurance Executives. You Crowdsourced commercials on YouTube before anyone even knew what crowdsourcing was!

For social, or quite frankly, any media to work in an age where consumers get to control conversations about your brand (whether you like that or not) staff need to be immersed in all the things customers do, understand their needs, and create the company organisation from there. One of the most effective ways I’ve ever structured a team was when I had individuals who were skilled up across both traditional and online media, focused on running a campaign from start to finish across those channels. They were also trained in PR and social, and this focus on end goals and know-how across media helped us achieve a lot in a constrained budget environment. 

Organizing a company around “buzz machines” who are well versed in multimedia requires a willingness to challenge the orthodoxy of silos and a commitment to training and education to keep that breadth of skills sharp– easier for some organizations than others, but an investment in the long-term future.