Social Silos Series: How does San Antonio Water System do it?
Posted: October 21st, 2010 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Marketing, Tips, Tricks, How-To's & Top 10's | Tags: business, funnel, in-house, inspiration, San Antonio Water system, silo, social media manager | 6 Comments »Adding social media to the communication mix of any organization larger than a hot dog cart is going to present some inter-departmental challenges.
We call departments ‘silos’ in the business world, like grain silos: freestanding, vertical, self-contained, windowless. As you can imagine, having a job where you’re supposed to have x-ray vision into the other silos represents a real—gotta say that word again—challenge.
It’s hard—group hug—as a new social media manager, to create connections the people you work with aren’t used to. They don’t appreciate how interesting the minutiae of their day is to your newfound audience, nor are they necessarily paid to talk to you about it at the speed you now require. This study shows almost a third of orgs call siloing “the biggest barrier” to going digital.
So what’s a social media evangelist to do? How do you create a funnel for tasty tidbits, success stories & rockin’ special events to filter over to your desk & out into the Twitto/Blogo/Facebookoverse?
I asked some in-house social media folks, & the responses were so good we’ll do a little series, here.
Q: HOW (process, tactics) are you getting enough info from all corners of your org (breaking down silos) to feed your social media streams?
A: Michael Graef, Manager, Creative Services
San Antonio Water System
Employees: 1600
Trick: 10 years of internal relationship building & organizational knowledge
“I’m the the in-house creative services manager for San Antonio’s city-owned water and wastewater utility. We are a 1600 employee quasi-governmental organization.
Basically I am the self-appointed “community manager” because I was the one with the vision and who kept pushing to make it happen.
It took me almost a year to navigate all of the HR, legal and IT concerns to even get permission to begin. We current have a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo. We also monitor influential local blogs and news sites and comment as warranted. In addition, we also publish several opt-in email newsletters.
Most of the in-house support has been grown organically rather than through a formal process. After 10 years of writing and producing various media for the organization, I’m pretty adept at ferreting out information through existing internal relationships. And while I’m not on the team that handles traditional PR and media relations, I work closely enough with them that I am usually up-to-date on the “hot” and “taboo” issues of the moment. Over time, many of those internal contacts have started to proactively feed me information. Some is useful and some is not. But either way, the barriers have begun to come down on their own without having to be torn down.
The hardest part has been conveying the sense of urgency that social channels demand. Fellow employees are pretty well used to 24 hour turnaround on email inquiries. But customers who use social channels —especially Twitter—are looking for a quick reply. So “I’ll get that to you tomorrow” is no longer soon enough. The pace is more like crisis PR than traditional customer relationship management.
We’ve already reached a point where having a single person handle social media responsibilities is insufficient. I suspect it won’t be long before we will need to explore some division of labor and “on call” scheduling among PR, customer service, and even emergency operations staffs. However, my goal is to establish social engagement as a “normal” part of our business first. Once that is done, I believe it will be much easier to pitch a more formal, cross-functional structure.”
