The Matter of Scale

Social media does scale. Chris, I’ve watched you grow your network so successfully. I’ve been transitioning to the new levels & learning to deal with it.

But your question is in terms of the enterprise. This is a question that I’ve been exploring with Dell & Techsmith. How to scale community management? Lucretia & others have the answer, you just grow the team. A strong leader is important along with communication & organization. As the number of advocates grows I think it’s important to scale wisely to ensure their needs are met (not referring to financial either as these are mostly unpaid). Even at the small company of ACD I had built to having 26 under me. Sean McDonald of Dell has an interesting perspective that the future is that the culture should shift so that all employees are spokespersons (comm mgrs). This is a great idea but it can’t happen until the company can trust everyone with their brand (Some depts hold that pretty tightly). It also requires transparency.

Next week I will have the opportunity to meet people from Intel, Yahoo & companies that have multiple comm mgrs so I look forward to continuing the discussion.

Hi Chris,

Great point on how to scale a perosnal relationship. I agree with Dan thorton on expand your team. We have done that at m I am amazed at how you manage to stay personal with so many channels and messages that must be coming at you. What’s the mantra?

Are you going to be at Pubcon next month?

Regards,

Shashi

Is it less “genuine” to have a team behind your brand? I don’t think so, but am curious to know what you think. Do you divulge it, or do you keep it quiet?

In my case, I’m taking my first intern on and that will change things.

You divulge it, of course. And how is it less genuine? The result and the quality of service that comes from a SM outreach is what matters. While I agree that putting a human face on CS w/ social media is important, I think that when the operation becomes large enough to warrant a team the “face” should be one of responsiveness, transparency and aggressive outreach to customers when trying to solve problems. That goes beyond one person. In fact, if your SM outreach effort is so reliant on one person that a well-trained team can’t follow that person’s example and provide the same level of satisfaction on a more granular level, the idea of corporate SM in your operation is a total failure.

Changing the culture in customer service with SM means it should become the norm, not the exception. It’s ok to have lots of small faces, but they should be positive enough to give the business a friendly face and keep the customers well-served.

I think it’s all about the team approach in order to scale.

Podcamp succeeds because someone from the epicenter need not attend a Podcamp elsewhere to make it a great Podcamp. It’s great because it focuses on the local tribe and expands the idea and “trust circle”.

For example, in a classic company, a secretary handles a bunch of communication for the boss. People know to respect him/her, and take the messages and correspondence as if it comes from the buy guy, or gal, directly. At home, I am CFO, so I manage all of our finances and interactions with businesses, because my husband doesn’t have the time to do so.

We all need surrogates, if just for time management purposes! And people in the real world so understand that your surrogates are just as good, because you trust them and have vouched for them, as you are sometimes- that’s where the trust agents come in. Scale by using surrogates, referrals, and the like, and you’ll win.

The tribal analogy is such a rich one for what is unfolding through these tools. Anybody can talk to the chief, but the question is, do you have anything to talk to the chief about? What at least one of the above posts seems not to recognize about the value of “centralization” to use the twinfluence jargon, is that one can observe and follow the direction of the “power” conversations within these platforms. In that way, centralization gives one access, regardless of your level of engagement. I offer a further analogy: a gathering of world leaders at a UN General Assembly. Initially a platform like Twitter is a general assembly. The question is who do you connect, engage, and move the relationships into your business(and here I mean the general as well as the specific -our business is what we DO)goals.

After a certainly number of contacts, as Ben mentioned above, the ability to devote time and attention interferes with your ability to get things done.

There are probably a lot of things you can do to expand that number though: automatic reminders to drop someone a note if you have not heard from them in a while; become a more practiced writer so you can communicate more quickly and effectively; set expectations that you can’t respond to every tweet; etc.

As for enlisting a team to help, I have seen it done in a genuine fashion. A couple of years ago, I attended an Edward Tufte presentation, and while that was all his personal brand, he had a number of people helping him.

What things should we be doing personally, and what things can we safely hand off to someone else?

It’s hard to scale and keep track of. Expand and pull the Britney technique on Twitter and have a team respond, or selectively big random comments to stay in the game. As long as your presence is seen somehow, it can be scalable.

Craig
http://www.budgetpulse.com

As Richard Reeve covers (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-matter-of-scale/#comment-141901), the tribal analogy converts to the General Assembly analogy. Our problem is a lack of models for this.

Consider: the General Assembly is a top-down organization. There is a parliamentary order which can stifle origination from the floor.

People can/do belong to several long-tail tribes.

Scobelizer points out they scale for broadcasts.

But others point out that blogs are essentially broadcast – however Chris, you use yours for interaction and spiking community involvement.

Perhaps Amazon is another model – people can get any book they want and leave reviews, contact the author or her publisher, etc. They can read the book any amount of times. And everyone can be told when another installment from that author is coming out (even though books are so few and far between…)

Certainly, while blogs and social media are technology-new, the tribal basis stored in our genes is using these new outlets for expression.

Social media both scales and doesn’t – as Scobelizer says, it depends if you want to drink beer or talk about it.

I almost wonder if there is a way to avoid scaling, no matter how large your “broadcast” becomes. Can a large blogger still concentrate their efforts in the same fashion as a smaller blogger? Perhaps you will be unable to respond to each comment individually at some point, but I don’t believe that scaling has to accompany growth where social media is concerned.

You asked: “Is it less “genuine” to have a team behind your brand? I don’t think so, but am curious to know what you think. Do you divulge it, or do you keep it quiet?”

It isn’t less genuine at all – they are called evangelists, advocates, etc. You have us – your readership is your team. And if they’re paid like your intern, then staff. If your intern is promoting the ‘Chris Brogan’ brand then why not make it public? You are a company of one that is growing :) (otherwise your intern will confuse people if it’s a secret). And if the intern is for Crosstech = then that’s easier.

Social media scales well for you (Chris Brogan) because you have mastered the art of making the consumer feel like the specific recipient.

The trick, I guess, is to make sure each person who is reading/listening/following feels like the “one”. You do it marvelously.

Furthermore, there is a certain continuity in your different pieces, something deeper than the words that ties them together. Those folks who say it won’t scale haven’t figured this part out yet.

Using these tools for the “enterprise” (that word always transports me to the bridge in front of Cpt. Kirk) raises a whole different set of issues. First let me say that for me, the social media tools are kind of a “so what?” Don’t get me wrong, I love that I can publish wide varieties of content at will, but really, they’re just communication tools. They will change things for the enterprise slowly, the same way the telephone changed things. The phone was unique when it came out because it connected people by voice who were miles apart geographically. Eventually, though, a telephone just became one more reality of modern life, for better or worse. I assume (and hope) that in your role as a true thought leader, that you would use SM the way a field general uses his communication technologies – to assemble your troops and lead them to the battle front. And not the way a telemarketer uses the phone, that’s just a silly waste of time.

Chris,

I think you pose some really interesting questions and ones that I’m sure you and other A-list bloggers face often. However, the one thing that I love about this space is that many of the top bloggers, you include, take the time out to develop friendships with as many people as possible and you’re truly genuine about it.

Does that mean that it scales? I think it scales but is harder and harder to maintain at that level. It makes it hard to respond to every single question, email, request, etc that you might receive. It involves having to start saying “no” when you were always used to saying “yes”. It also means having to start looking at forming a team to help you manage your other responsibilities. I think the thing that you have to always be careful of though is not to let go of the very things that got you to the level you’re at. For instance, Gary Vaynerchuk has a whole team that now helps him manage his skyrocketing career, however he still stays involved with his community on a daily basis.

I think you are doing an excellent job Chris though I’m sure it’s difficult to manage with the number of contacts and opportunities you receive daily. Keep up the great work!

Good stuff Chris… as usual. Your readers make some interesting points. I tend to agree with a lot of what Andrew Feinberg says in this thread. Having lived corporate social media for Dell for well over 2 years, I can definitely confirm that being “out there” in as many social sites/ commenting on blog posts/ message boards, etc. is the way to build your own personal credibility as well as your company’s.

That said, any single person can only scale so much.

So, back to the question at hand… yes, I believe social media does scale, but it’s not easy. Building a team is the only way to do it. We’re still trying to build processes and tools to support our customers within our own sites and outside of them. That means we need teams of people in place all working toward a common goal. In my experience, customers don’t really care if they hear from me directly or someone else from our team—all they care about is connecting with someone at Dell who can answer their questions/ solve their issue.

In my experience, being a corporate blogger means being a customer advocate, a writer/ editor and a social media evangelist who is both internally and externally focused. Not easy, but it sure is fun.

How could I leave this part out? Building a team also means building a community of customers on our Dell properties. Dell fans who are not Dell employees are the most effective kind of advocate we could ask for.

We have to give customers a reason to be Dell advocates. Getting that point across to colleagues in the business is not always an easy task.

I think you have to consider a LARGE audience each time you post, but share material that is (or seems to be) on the one-to-one (personal) level. If you post in a personal manner that seems to speak to each individual reader…then you are both, touching the individual aspect, but for a larger, broad audience. I think even when you post to a group of 1000+ readers…you can maintain the personal (one-to-one) feel by commenting back to each reader who responds and addressing them each…. You will NEVER be able to attend to each reader when you begin to gain a greater reader base….but you can at least give the impression that you are willing to communicate with each reader as it applies… and that I believe is honest enough to keep readers coming back…

It’s a hard thing to do. I know…this year I went from 20 readers per week to 50+ readers per day…not LARGE scale compared to sites like yours but a definite change in communication and approach from a personal blogging perspective.

~Bobby Ozuna
Drawing Stories…With Words

And let’s not forget the drab consequences of the FEAR of not scaling: not trying. I think companies will find their equilibrium over time but I’ve seen many team simply not make the effort because they don’t want to fail along the way by not being able to attend to the inquiries and needs of the community.

I think the answer is that to scale community you need to bring more people up to the conversational level. A blog is very much a broadcast medium, One speaking to and interacting with Many. Find a way to move your conversation to a realm where members can converse with each other and more voices are heard. As it is with so much of social media, the best way to scale is to engage your members as part of the solution.

A little late to the party here, but still think it’s worth commenting…Kami Huyse of Communication Overtones and I, along with Susan Getgood, were having this very discussion back in August. I consider scalability social media’s weakest point, ( http://is.gd/1U1L ). It’s going to be interesting to see how communicators and PR pros approach the high-touch need of social media with reduced budgets, fewer staffers, etc. that are (or will be) a product of the economic downturn.

Jen

Great! Thank you for sharing!

How could I leave this part out? Building a team also means building a community of customers on our Dell properties. Dell fans who are not Dell employees are the most effective kind of advocate we could ask for.

We have to give customers a reason to be Dell advocates. Getting that point across to colleagues in the business is not always an easy task.