A lot of people are trying to figure  out where social media fits within their company. Forrester has just published a report looking at how companies should organise to deal with social media.

Forrester has established  three distinct models:

1 The Tire (Distributed): Where each business unit or group may create its own social media programs without a centralized approach. We call this approach the “tire,” as it originates at the edges of the company.

2 The Tower (Centralized): We refer to this centralization as the “tower” – a standalone group within a company that’s responsible for social media programs, often within corporate marketing or corporate communiations.

3 The Hub and Spoke (Cross Functional): Like the hub on a bicycle wheel, a cross-functional group that represents multiple stakeholders across the company assembles in the middle of the organization. The hub facilitates resource sharing and cross-functional communications (via the “spokes” in the wheel) to those at the edge of the organization (or the “tire”).

They recommend the hub and spoke approach. ItsOpen has experience of working with all three different models.

The hub and spoke model makes sense but it can be difficult to put into practice. It can take a long time to build consensus.

The tire is good  to an extent, because we think  it gives a specific unit the opportunity to experiment and this model enables you to move fast.

The Tower has its value, but often it becomes clear that the tower can be most valuable by distributing knowledge across the organisation and by concentrating on itself and how it can embrace social media for the good of its role and the business as a whole.

The executive summary from Forrester says:

‘The biggest challenge brands often have to overcome isn’t technology but managing cultural change within the enterprise. With an ever-increasing number of brands engaging in social media marketing in recent years, companies need to not only be properly budgeted but also well organized. Once brands experiment with social activities, they must then organize from the inside out – or risk not properly staffing or responding to customers. Brands need to integrate social into their companies by developing a safe place for employees to experiment, creating a process to manage and measure these programs, and integrating social into other marketing and enterprise systems. Above all, brands must organize their companies in the hub-and-spoke model [a cross functional team], which allows business units to be  flexible with their social programs – but provides a grounded center that enables the company to act efficiently.’

Fully agree with the Forrester points  about the need for experimentation. That is essential. I take the point about the culture of the organisation. But the fact of the matter is that those companies who don’t change will quickly lose their ability to communicate effectively. A fact which is beginning to dawn on smart CEOs who wonder why their results announcements did not reflect what was written on the carefully-crafted press release by their very expensive advisors.

News being gathered through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and news sharing sites is fundamentally altering how we are receiving information to guide decisions we make in our lives.

The protests in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson are just two recent examples of how the internet’s latest social technologies helped to break and share these developments.

Jeff Jarvis who blogs at Buzzmachine is again at the forefront of discussions on this subject. Arguably one of the world’s foremost web thinkers, Jarvis has put forward the fascinating notion that news is no longer a product but it is in fact now a process.

To support his view, he highlights the emergence of sites like Globalvoices which has developed an infrastructure which curates constant streams of news and information from around the web. So people can be kept up-to-date.

So what implications do these developments have for business media in the social age? Clearly the days of just putting together a polished press release; getting it signed off; and sending it out are over. Of course you still have to do that, but chances are the story will have moved on rapidly as soon as you have issued it or people will be commenting on it, changing it in effect, so it becomes redundant in seconds.

Business media professionals need to develop fresh methods for distributing content in real-time and responding to responses about their content in real-time.

And this all needs to be curated and presented for their interested audiences to be able to read.

Conversations which went on with journalists on the phone are now taking place online and business media communications professionals need to be participating online in order to listen, manage and protect – as far as is possible – how the organisations they represent are being reported.

This requires new skills. But I am sure leading corporate communications teams will get the hang of it pretty quickly. After all, who wants to spend most of their working time chasing after a blog story which could have been nipped in the virtual bud early on in the cycle?

Robin Goad, research director of Hitwise, has come up with some fascinating insights into the rise of Twitter.

Namely, that in May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other web sites in the UK, accounting for one in every 350 visits to a typical website.

Technophobes may grumble about the amount of attention that Twitter is gaining. But for all the enlightened communications professionals out there, this is yet more evidence that social media can really help you gain attention and influence.

Robin’s smart analysis is well worth a read.

At Its Open, we’re happy to shout the praises of social media as a way of getting close to customers and partners.

But social media only works well if it’s used properly. Rushing in to set up a site on Facebook or Twitter without first developing a strategy for how you plan to use it can spell disaster.

As an article in The Vancouver Sun points out, Facebook and Twitter are both designed as networks for socialising, not selling. Adapting them for business purposes takes a little ingenuity and imaginaton.

Fortunately, Facebook now allows members to have a company page, which is slightly different from a personal page. People can become a “fan” of your company rather than a “friend”. But as the article’s author, Jonathan Weber, notes:

“Most people do not think of themselves as “fans” of particular businesses, even businesses they like. (Fan after all is short for fanatic, and it’s a pretty rare firm that inspires fanaticism.) So it’s not that easy to accumulate fans.”

It’s a tricky dilemma. Weber says there is no “magic bullet” but he does have some suggestions, including the rather controversial one of asking your employees to promote the company via their Facebook page. His main piece of advice, however, is simple:

“Making good use of social networks requires you to act human and to stay sensitive to the evolving ethos of the community. And that requires time and attention-two commodities that are always in short supply at small companies.”