Who owns social media within the enterprise?

Marty Collins from the Windows team at Microsoft has a nice post discussing which teams within your organization should be driving social media – marketing? Support? PR? Others? In it, she focuses on what I agree is the critical question – just what are your goals, and who is (beyond social media) responsible for achieving them?

When I started the community/social media plan it was driven by a few precise business goals, increase brand favorability and likelihood to refer and lower customer churn for Windows Live. I knew if I exposed Hotmail users to what can be done on Messenger I had a better shot at increasing customer attach rate to our services, thereby lowering customer churn. My business objectives are rooted in marketing performance indicators so it makes sense I’m running this program from the marketing team.

I think that’s spot on, and is what both enterprises and pitching agencies should be asking themselves in the process of developing new social media projects. Follow the accountabilities back to the owning teams, and you’ll often find the budget even if it’s not quite *yet* allocated to social media.

Going beyond that, what’s interesting to me is Microsoft itself is an example of just how diffused ownership, accountability, and execution of social media really can be within large organizations. Provided you think of social media as a toolset within the broader context of “community marketing“, which is my preferred perspective. Beyond Zune/XBOX PR and Windows marketing, Microsoft engages in social media in dozens if not hundreds of other ways.

• Developer teams (not just marketing/PR, but the dev and evangelist team especially – think the DPE org, Channel 9, and so on) reaching out and building community, buzz, and loyalty among developers.
• Subsidiary “audience” marketing teams driving their own initiatives and agencies, often tied very directly back to supporting sub lead generation and product adoption goals.
• Support (forums, MVP, etc) cultivating influencers and helping the community members help each other, all to drive down support costs, i.e. you call in less.
• Other corporate, advertising, and product group marketing teams driving their own social media initiatives everywhere from the home to the college campus to the enterprise IT shops.
• Development and program management groups naturally doing what they’ve been doing for years – blogging, supporting user groups, engaging in forums, posting videos and podcasts, etc. It’s social media, even if some of lacks the sex appeal of UG video, Twitter, and the like.

Very often the question of “where does social media live” is posed in the context of where the project budget sits to engage with outside consultants and agencies. But with an organization that has embraced community marketing as deeply as Microsoft has, the practical understanding of the who really owns or drives social media projects is much more complex.