After co-creating live with @briansolis last week I’ve been thinking through organisational structure – with a specific focus on the marketing arm of course.
With an SME, managing CRM, Digital Marketing, Customer Service,The Brand and budgets is relatively easy as you’ve got all those specialist, usually within arms reach. Spread that across an organisation in 5 continents with thousands of employees, and it’s a different story.
In today’s economy, with the emergence of New Media and the expectations our clients are setting, large corporations need the agility to react, just to stay in play.
Its time to arm the organisation!
Training Hub
A central team, formulates the Brand Strategy and scalable tactics for engaging with clients. This hub has the power to teach and spread skills, discovering regional experts. Best practice and guidelines are spread, and adapt with Agile velocity.
Together with training, the central hub helps with: “listening” tools and setting up internal communication streams. It sets paths and priorities for connections with HR, Accounts, Sales, PR and internal experts. The central team ensures New Media and engagement are a priority for these teams.
Regional Spokes
Spokes lead to these trained, or digital natives, empowered throughout the organisation. They are charged with evangelising the brand and marketing best practices, highlighting failures as well. Local nuance, tactical site choices, regional preferences are made, yet central learnings and “tone of voice” (set by the Brand definition) remain intact. Country level or service/product level hubs develop.
Feedback Loop
With the entire marketing organisation engaging with clients, actionable insights and leads need to be spread. Connected marketing analysis is recorded via a global campaign management system, or engagement “logging” mechanism of sorts. A weighted best practice library will develop, honing organisational learnings and adapting the training manual. Leveraging the engagement log as validation.
Hub nodes, with their local or specialism insights, feed back to the central team. The training manual adapts, budgets expand, and revenues rise. With hubs, nodes and spokes in place, the model will expand beyond marketing. Silos, knowledge, thick hierarchies and power hoarding will recede. Replaced by a customer and community centric, learning, agile organisation.
Armed with insights, outstanding levels of sales response, customer service, and in contact with their brand evangelists, the company can attack 2011!
Nick Allen - Marketing, Growth & Running 