One of the most common social media questions we hear is “How do I build global capabilities?” The challenge is that each market has a unique manifestation of social media (different platforms, levels of uptake, user habits), while each marketing team has different strengths and weaknesses. With such varied needs and opportunities, attempting to standardize capabilities globally simply doesn’t work.
The best companies embrace heterogeneity instead of aiming for global consistency. They assess each region’s individual needs in order to tailor capability goals and training accordingly.
To determine needs, companies rate local teams’ social media maturity against local consumers’ maturity and size the gap to close. Self-assessment surveys are the quickest way to determine maturity. Ideally, questions on marketing maturity should cover agency capabilities as well as internal expertise, while questions on consumer maturity should cover how much data is available on consumers’ media preferences/habits. Surveys are usually administered once or twice a year and should evolve as the company’s knowledge of social media grows. MLC’s Social Media Maturity Diagnostic is a good example of the kinds of questions to ask. Members can administer this survey in multiple regions at no cost.
By ranking each region’s internal (marketing) vs. external (consumer) sophistication on a simple 3-point scale (low, medium, high), companies can quickly identify leading and lagging countries. This enables central marketing to:
a) Prioritize groups with the greatest need for improvement by identifying those in which marketers’ use of social lags farthest behind consumers’,
b) Customize training and resources to each team’s individual needs by creating a menu of training modules,
c) Bucket countries with similar needs/opportunities together for joint training,
d) Identify teams pioneering particular capabilities and task them with teaching the broader organization (e.g., South Africa may be leading the way in mobile marketing, while South Korea may be advanced at online community management)
e) Set locally relevant performance targets (rather than unrealistic standard targets) and track progress.
MLC members, for more information on global capability building, please see our webinar on Microsoft’s digital Center of Excellence.
Related posts:
- 10 Habits of Highly Effective Social Media Marketers
- How To Take Advantage of Social Media in Highly Regulated Environments
- Nothing to Lose But Your Chains: Touchpoint Planning in the Social (Media) Revolution
- Drowning in Data? Swap Your Life Preserver for a Surfboard
- Social Media: The Dangers of Discovery
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