Social Media Marketer as Community Organizer

While much of American political organizing caters to particular group
interests and identities, the IAF works to create bridging social capital by
bringing leaders from different faith communities together in what it calls
broad-based organizations. Warren, 32

The reading I did for this week made me think of how communities are organized and how communities function based up that organization. Now, this blog post is going to bridge back to community informatics a little bit, but I think Warren's chapters apply to this post.

Both Starbucks and Toyota are limited in their social media teams; Starbucks has six people on their team, and Toyota has three people on theirs. In addition, I doubt anyone on the Starbucks team can make a Frappuccino or anyone on the Toyota team can explain how the sticking accelerator is being fixed. But each company has employees that are experts in these areas.

So, when Starbucks created MyStarbucksidea.com, the social media team wasn't creating content and responding to ideas posted by customers. Instead, "Starbucks set out to ensure the departments impacted by the site (which includes practically every department) had a representative who was responsible for being the liaison" (from Engagement Database Report found on the website). The Mini-Starbucks Card was actually a customer idea that made its way to Chuck Davidson, an employee at Starbucks. He traced the comments, wrote a proposal, and put it into action.

Toyota has as similar breakdown in roles:

"Take a look at the Twitter account and you’ll see that in addition to DeYager, three public relations specialists from sales, environment/safety, and public affairs/community outreach contribute posts. The Toyota Twitter team uses monitoring software to identify tweets mentioning Toyota, then responds from a respective area of expertise using technology from CoTweet to manage multiple authors on the single Twitter account. This same mode is utilized on Toyota’s Facebook pages — response requests are sent out and come back from around the company, depending on the topic" (from Engagement Database Report found on the website).

What is interesting about social media is that that Warren's dynamic, as explained by Walter, Kretzmann, and McNknight on page 68 of their text, fits into effective organization social media strategies.

Warren i1 963, ix) identities two dimensions of community involving either, relations of units (whether individuals, groups, or organizations). The horizontal dimension involves "the relation of local units to one another"; this is what we think of as the community. The vertical dimension involves "the relation of local units to extracommunity systems" in the larger society and culture. (68)

We can think of employees and internal communications as being on the horizontal axis and consumers and external communications (PR and brand affinity) as being on the vertical axis.