The Impact of Organizational Silos on Social Media

Perhaps this is a non issue. Some may argue that since organizations need to give up control to the consumer anyway, there is no real need to collaborate internally about messaging and/or outbound marketing communications or programs. On the other hand, a rebuttal might be that organizations need to collaborate for many reasons to include:

• Leverage best practices among the different marketing organizations and business groups (what has worked, what hasn’t worked)
• Learn, share and communicate (sometime it’s good to just hear what others are doing in the org)
• Identify opportunities to partner on various projects
• Leverage agencies and consolidate the work flow, contracts, etc (might me a money saver)

And, let’s consider the 53rd thesis from the Cluetrain Manifesto which states, “There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.” This tells me that having one voice, one conversation and internal alignment is important to help drive a social media strategy that works.

Whatever your opinion is about this matter, there is a huge issue within organizations. Take this excerpt from the article, “The Prison of Marketing” and it may shed some light on this (thank you @annierodkins for sending this to me):

As one would probably expect, silos often exist between marketing and other functions, such as finance, human resources, sales, and operations. Yet what surprises many is that within marketing itself silos often exist as well—between research and communications creative, or between corporate and business communications groups, or among regional marketing teams.

This quote nails it right on the head. While at HP, I worked in IPG (Image & Printing Group) in the North America region. I was in charge of driving search and social media strategy in the US & Canada. There was little to no collaboration between our regional marketing team and corporate marketing. And often times, we learned about their marketing plans after execution; and vice versa. It was extremely difficult to connect the dots and identify opportunities to integrate each other’s plans after the fact. Basically, they did what they wanted to do and we did what we wanted to do. A sad but true story.

At Yahoo, it was even worse. I worked in the Communities & Communications Group which included products such as (Yahoo Mail, Messenger, 360, Groups and Bix). Communication and collaboration across these products were alive and thriving since they all fell within the same organizational structure, but outside of this silo, I had NO IDEA what was going on at Yahoo!

At Intel, it’s the same story.

The article referenced above goes on to say:

The results are generally easy to see—as the organization proclaims different messages, based on different strategies, from its various groups and functions. Public relations, advertising, executive speechwriters, sales, and investor relations each tend to create messages that address their respective audiences, but they generally fail to take the extra step and marry them with common themes that best reflect the value and essence of the business in its totality.

The result is that companies rarely speak with one coherent voice. And the consistency of the brand—one of the key drivers of value—is undermined.

And marketing, charged with developing and executing coherent positioning and communications, ends up spending an enormous amount of time struggling against the cacophony of voices within its own company, often begging and pleading with others to get into line.

I firmly believe that organizational silos are detrimental to the health of an organization from an employee morale perspective; and it can also have a severe impact on the relationship with our consumers.

I am sure that we all can agree that social media has opened the door of online conversations; but organizations haven’t lost full control because they can now participate; not doing so is like being on trial for a crime without representation from a defense lawyer. Taking a look at the Cluetrain again, thesis 19 and 25 state the following:

• Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.
• Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

However, before we go off and start participating, I believe that we need to be having “that conversation” internally first and organizational silos prevent us from doing that effectively.

So, as it relates to social media (not brand or direct marketing) and the fact that organizations have lost some (not all) control of the message, what is the real impact of organizational silos? And, does it have any “real” impact on the value of the brand?

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