Social Media Modularity in Large Organizations: Part I

A challenge faces businesses of any size but afflicts those of large size much more: the problem of siloed information. This doesn’t just mean vertical integration of messages, but rather the vertical stagnation of communicative workflows. It means not utilizing distributed resources to make online content more relevant, cover more ground, and provide a better educational context for readers and users.

Larger organizations, especially local, state, and federal organizations and their affiliates, frequently suffer from message stagnation for any number of reasons. Often, modular clusters of affiliates design their own internal and external communications, only for those pieces to be run through a centralized bottleneck that restricts, censors, edits, and holds up the flow of needed resources. Things are simply lost to time and organization.

For example, many state and federal organizations have their own social media presences, ranging from Facebook to LinkedIn and frequently Instagram and Twitter. Many also utilize YouTube and Google Business; some even use TikTok and Snap to further spread a message. Social media is more than a frivolity for most large organizations—it’s an inexpensive, reliable way to reach potentially millions of people with beneficial, even lifesaving information. It can change elections, sway the public, announce vaccination clinics and urgent events.

Social media isn’t only a one-way vertical posting distribution—it’s now a heterarchical conversation with the public. Sharing, tagging, remixing, and commenting are ways the public interact with and build on shared messages and media from large organizations. They comment, like, share, or engage with material from affiliated agencies who have engaged as well (as show in figure 1).

(Figure 1)

But a challenge arises in controlling messages while also letting them flow properly in the natural social media environment. For a large organization, structuring communication with the online public is a distinct challenge. There are many different methods, but the one covered here is on a central communications unit with a modular architecture of affiliates.

For example, a large state organization might have a central communications division that handles public-facing content. This centralizes a message and ensures filtration before publishing. For a state organization that is politically answerable, this makes sense. Public material that hasn’t been vetted or contradicts a previous message, interferes with workflows for reporters and press, or is factually incorrect (a real problem these days) can be pruned here before release. This central communications unit (CCU) might also have technologies, tools, assets, and talent that ensure much higher quality content production than the affiliated modules might have on their own.

(Figure 2)

In the graphic above, each module represents a different part of the same overall organization. In the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, for example, we have OCOMs (Office of Communications) that handles all public informational material, including social media. Another module might be divisions, such as Behavioral Health, Children and Family Services, etc. Raw messages or initiatives (not yet finalized into social media postings) are generated in a decentralized way, i.e. from the team members of the module or the division director, and then those messages are sent to the centralized communications unit (CCU), where the messages are turned into tangible social media and/or publicizable assets, both digital and print.

In the centralized communications paradigm, the workflow might look like this:

(Figure 3)

The CCU (the “design affiliate” in this diagram) might also receive bits of material, especially online resources, graphics requests, or invites to take photos or create more material in conjunction with the unit. Sometimes the design affiliate is a third-party or contracted agency, which will be discussed in more detail in a later article. Similarly, modules are often units outside the organization that want to generate and publicize messages as well. For a state organization, related affiliates can generate quality messages or highlight causes and events that the centralized communications unit does not have time to generate on its own.

(Figure 4)

For example, DHHS wanted to highlight the new 988 number for suicide prevention through July and August. There are many facets and nuances to this theme. While OCOMs could certainly generate a central message about 988, affiliated stories and facets could be efficiently generated from other state and local organizations to highlight areas that might appeal to more people. Similarly, these agencies can be tagged in posts and shared in their networks, leading to more shares by users who might not follow DHHS content on its own.

(Figure 5)

In the above diagram, A-E are semantically and thematically related facets of an overall message. A might be the new 988 number; AC is how that 988 number relates to the prior number; BC is how people can use the number, and ABC is how people can use the new number compared to the old one. D might be mental health in general, DE might be specific facets of mental health, such as depression, etc. A, E, B, etc., represent posts, webpages, blogs, or online material posted from the CCU about that topic. Frequently, such agencies generate their own content and post it while tagging the CCU, which can lead to distributed exposure (and potential headaches—more on that in a later article).

For a large organization utilizing distributed content from affiliate organizations, each of those overlapping colored areas could represent shared online messages from those affiliates and specific tags for each one. AC might be a federal agency explaining the implementation details; A might be the original suicide prevention number itself. One can see each color and the corresponding overlaps as the segmented message space in an online environment, platform-specific or the entire digital environment lumped together (i.e. B could represent all possible messages about a given topic facet that can be explored online). Messaging overlap can help fill in gaps in education or generate more holistic overall content strategy to reach more people via tagging, shares, etc.

These broad messages are turned into posts, blogs, any online or distributed content, approved by the module, and posted by the CCU to all relevant platforms. Feedback, or user engagement, metrics, conversions, etc., are sent from the CCU/design affiliate back to the message originating module for their data analysis. A constant refinement cycle!

This part of the process is very important in the realm of hiring. For example, Talent Acquisition at the NE DHHS is always trying to hire for hundreds of job positions at a time—standing out and recruiting talent is a genuine task. Posts on social media are a free (or paid, as in the example below) way to reach potential new hires. Considering DHHS has around 50,000 followers on Facebook, there’s a lot of potential for hopping into hiring networks.

A lot (a lot) of money is wasted on paid social media posts that don’t have the proper KPIs, don’t have realistic, attainable, or useful goals and metrics, do not have a reliable or actionable data collection ability, and cannot properly measure referral sources or see how a conversion happened, if it even did. A central communications unit needs to ensure that data is shared with the module, in this case the hiring module, to measure genuine gain from a relative spend.

In this DHHS example, say HR wants to spend $1,000 over a week to highlight a career fair in a given area. Many third-party and marketing agencies are quick to promise paid ads but much slower to set genuine conversion metrics. For example, views, clicks, and engagements are often highlighted, but the real conversion prize is how many new team members a $1,000 ad spend brings in for the organization. If you want to be more granular and have a longer window, a great metric is how much increased productive capacity/output or organizational benefits are generated from a new employee over a one-to-five-year period based on that $1,000 ad spend. Cybernetic feedback loops can also help implement new messages based on data, further honing themes and optimizing ad spend in the future.

Continuing this example, HR sends a job post and information related to it to the CCU. The CCU uses its tools to create an ad for a social platform, such as Facebook. The HR module approves the design, approves the budget, and the CCU runs the ad for the desired amount of time. Data based on the ad from the social channel is sent back to the HR module, where it can be analyzed and used for future hiring ads.

In a large organization, especially a state or federal one, problems abound not only in message and content generation, but in curation of tagged content, relations with affiliate agencies, contractual payments and obligations for deliverables, third-party porous boundaries and dark networks sharing non-tailored messages related to the original. This article serves as an introduction to this line of thinking, and in the next related articles I’ll cover:

·????????Boundary and third-party agencies and message tailoring

·????????Feedback loops

·????????The contractual value of social media and design

·????????Economic measures of social media modular output in large organizations

·????????Misinformation

·????????Parallel and multithreaded posting

·????????Channels, communication layers, and distributed posting architecture?

Charts created by Sam Sullivan. Much thanks to draw.io for the templates.