The case study above was presented at SocialMedia.org's Member Meeting 37 in Chicago on October 28, 2015.
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To download the slide presentation in this video, visit wom.us/1IQdrqn.
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In their SocialMedia.org Member Meeting case study presentation, McDonald's Global Social Director, Matthew Tennant, and Global Social Operations Manager of Global Digital, Lizzie Roscoe, explain how they're globalizing social media at scale.
They go into detail about their single global Hub and Spoke model, the four Global Social Support Service Areas, and the structure of their community management teams.
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Below is live coverage of this session:
— Matthew: We’re going to walk you through our journey to globalizing social media at scale. We want to talk about how we speak to the heart of the customer. The digital organization is fairly new to McDonald’s.
— Lizzie describes the social landscape at McDonald’s: We currently have a large, global organizational structure, with inconsistent use of social channels, software tools, and social media accounts. We are in 119 countries, have 17+ channels, 28,000+ accounts, and use 26+ social software tools.
— Lizzie: The combination of our global social presence and our inconsistent use of social software tools has led to an exponentially complex ecosystem…
— Lizzie: The Global Social Team conducted an assessment (April-July) to determine the current state of McDonald’s social media activities around the globe and found five key findings:
1. Customer engagement levels vary significantly in each market: How can we have a more consistent experience for customers across all channels?
2. Social channels and accounts duplicative: Are these accounts actually serving the customer? We wanted to make sure it was clear where our customers could come talk to or find us in social media.
3. Social process and software tools were inconsistent: The tools we were using weren’t talking to each other and was creating more work for our teams.
4. Social collaboration across markets low: How do we work together as one, collaborative digital team?
5. Internal Alignment Required: Social media is borderless — our teams needed to start talking to each other more and create a more centralized approach.
— Matthew: We decided on using one Hub and Spoke model globally. A hub by our definition: Physical global locations that are geographically positioned around the world to support market level spokes for real time data analysis, predictive, alerting systems, and services. The Spoke: Market level physical locations that are mirrors of hub locations in specific markets globally.
— Essentially what we have in our Hub, spoke, and service model is three Geographically Aligned Locations with connections to 119 countries. We also have four Global Support Service Areas. How do we do more with less?
— In late March, we launched a global brand hub in Chicago. We also have a hub in Singapore, and one opening in London soon. Matthew shares some more about the purpose of each of McDonald’s Global Social Services Areas:
• Data intelligence: Always-on, global pulse of our brand and customers.
• Engagement advocacy: Part of the conversation, reinforcing our customer and brand promise (we get a message every single second).
• Content studio: Creative newsroom for real-time, relevant, and planned content. We have an in-house team to produce all this content.
• Social learning center: Since social media is new to the organization, this acts as the resource of Social at McDonald’s (e.g. guidelines, training videos, etc.).
— Lizzie: Our engagement was not consistent across markets: We weren’t responding as quickly as we wanted to. The first layer we looked at was our technology and tools. Did we have the right tools necessary to see all of our channels and conversations that were happening around the world??
— Lizzie: Then, we looked at how to automate certain processes, while also deciding which messages required manual activity to filter the right social conversations to our community managers. Finally, we looked at the categorization of social posts so that each message has the appropriate action.