Trends: Corporate Adoption of Social Media: Tire, Tower, and the Wheel

Spending time with large corporations and getting to understand how they adopt social media is fascinating, recently, I’ve noticed a trend, not on public use, but on internal organization.

Unlikes Advertising (which is often controlled by a single group) Social Media is being adopted by many business groups across the enterprise, from marketing, product teams, sales, to support. While not uncommon, social media tends to be a grassroots movement that comes from the edges (where customers are) of the company, where individual users, vertical marketers, and client facing teams exist.

At least three models of social media orginization within a large corporation, which loosely resemble a tire, a tower, or a spoke model.

The Tire
Common to grassroots movements within corporations, adoption happens at the lowest levels at the company, rather than from a centralized group. You’ll see individual business units define their own strategy, pick their own tools, engage their own vendors, and communicate with the market on their own terms.

Common to companies that haven’t put a strategy in place, depending on culture, this could be detrimental as resources are not used efficiently, data is spread on multiple systems, and the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

The Tower
Common in organizations where power is centralized, we may see a central team formed to organize social media. This team defines the policy, best practices, vendors, and tools. This team which will commonly found in corporate communications and supported by PR will often dictate the direction of social media. Expect a dedicated role or sub-group to appear either experiential marketing, new media, or interactive media to eventually be born out of the group, where social media is centralized.

Social media is a grassroots movement, so common dangers can be gagging the natural voice of conversations of product experts with customers using these tools, so a centralized team needs to be more of a support organization to the enterprise, not a controller.

The Wheel
This coordinated model has a central organizational unit that provides best practices, sets policy, supports infrastructure but encourages conversations at the edges of the company. More about empowering business groups to partake in natural social media discussions without hindering, this group will be more of a coordinator, and less of a controller. Expect to see this model to occur as social media infiltrates every nook and cranny of a business, and at a certain point, a company as an enterprise can’t ignore the raging groundswell.

Cautions to this model, as overly coordinated programs will be difficult to achieve, and may be ineffective to different unique markets that a large company may have. Like the tower, having a centralized group at a large enterprise is always going to slow down natural conversations so focus on empowerment, rather than control.

What styles of adoption are you noticing from large companies?

Silicon Valley Sightings (Special Edition): New York’s Tech Scene

(Above: The Flat Iron Building [map], in New York’s Silicon Alley)

I usually reserve this tag for the interesting places I see in Silicon Valley, but am traipsing around New York for a few days.

I’m camping at the office of Bricabox, as a guest of CEO Nate Westheimer in a small thin incubator building with quite a few startups. We’re across the street from Madison Square Park, where there’s several social media, interactive firms in the area. Before lunch I had a briefing from James Gross of Federated Media, learning about a recent social network marketing campaign I’ll share with you later.

Now I’m told that the original Silicon Alley was actually in Soho, but there’s quite a few folks popping up in this general area, VCs included. I twittered I was having lunch at Shake Shack in the park, and a total of 7 of us joined up, great discussions yet in the cold (by my Californian standards). I met Ryan Anderson from Fuel Industries (he’s a Forrester client) and Matt Zarzecki from CafeMom a social network for mothers.

Silicon Valley is very insular, we don’t know much of what happens outside of 408 650 415 and it’s really fascinating to see different communities of the tech industry.

Here’s a list of NY Tech events, Allen Stern has a list of events this week, and Bricabox (I unique content system) has this list of NY Tech Organizations.

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(Silicon Valley Sightings is an ongoing PhotoBlog that captures the intersection of Tech Culture in the San Francisco Silicon Valley Bay Area, check out the archives (which now showcase some tech areas in Asia). All photos by Jeremiah Owyang)

Analysis of the Zuckerberg Lacy Interview

Key Hinkley the CEO of Somewhere does a technical analysis on the Mark Zuckerberg and Sarah Lacy interview, he brings forth frequency charts by keyword, new users sign ups, and provides some analysis and predictions.

What’s interesting isn’t so much the interview itself but how social media has spread among the crowd, it’s a cross between sociology , technology adoption, and psychology.

I know the drama of the discussion has already been talked about by many bloggers, so I’ll leave my opinions off the table, I’m more interested in the impact this has to future conferences. At least two conference organizers have come to me asking for guidance, there is some concern over social media revolts.

A few days ago, I reported the keynote wasn’t the only session where the audience asserted control.