Is your marketing calendar chaotic? Take this one question test.

Wrestling social media to the ground

Every social media manager I talk to tells me one of two things.  One, they are relying on technology to get their mission accomplished.  Or Two, their collaborative process involves spreadsheets, word documents, emails and contentious moments deciding who on the team is going to react to a rogue social post mention.

Well kudos to those with technology, I just want to point out the advantages social relationship management software brings to the table.

Marketing Calendars Have Many Cooks

Think about your organization.  

Here’s the one test question:  Is your agency assembling content, putting it into a spreadsheet or word doc and then sending it off for approval? 

Then does the process involve approvals from:

• legal,
• the brand managers,
• the community managers,
• Corporate Communications,
• Public Relations,
• Marketing,
• (I don’t know…anyone else?  HR?)?

I suggest you do two things if this is true.  One calculate the amount of expensive labor expended.  And Two, think about how much important information can be lost in that shuffle.

Synergy Not Chaos

The alternative of course is to have a single view into the content so as to support a true team collaborative process.  Think about what life would be like if the team could log into the same dashboard, (each with their own security limitations of course). 

1. The agency can upload the content. 
2. The content can be routed via workflows to each approver automatically; alerting each of them it’s their turn. 
3. This single view of content can be scheduled, pushed, published and then monitored. 
4. Rinse Repeat

Chaos Squared

For those organizations with global reach, or many departments, stores, etc. you probably have many Facebook pages, Twitter handles, Instagram accounts.  Think about how the process to distribute approved content could be streamlined, curated with confidence and pushed out there if, again, your teammates were alerted by email to look into that single view dashboard.

The platform will also improve productivity by enabling your team to push out communications across multiple pages, multiple social networks at the same time.  Again, count the hours and do the math.

With a social relationship management system, the team at the hub can have confidence those folks on the tips of the spokes will be publishing What you want and in a Timely Basis.

Plus you’ll have confidence that all of your messaging will have a consistent Voice.  Even if those messages are in multiple languages. 

Measuring Performance

For those responsible for monitoring the content’s performance consider merely logging in to view the metrics, to eyeball what’s working instantly. This versus the monthly reports gathered by perusing multiple metric sources.  We all want to know “what’s working” and waiting is never easy.  With the technology monitoring your content’s performance you can specify time periods, social voices, channels, accounts in varied slicing and dicing fashion.

Wrap Up

So if you’re assigning tasks to others and want to monitor their workflow,

Technology shouldn’t rule the roost, but it can be the backbone that supports the creative energy of the smart people on your team.  If team collaboration excellence is your goal, then using a social relationship management set of technologies to manage your marketing calendar is absolutely the best practice.

Ron Shulkin blogs researches and writes about enterprise technology focused on innovation and social media. You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at this Facebook group.  You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.  

Ron Shulkin is the Chicago area Director for Spredfast. Spredfast provides a social relationship platform that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs at scale. Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ YouTube and popular blogging platforms. You can learn more about Spredfast here.