Tamara Littleton, CEO, and Blaise Grimes-Viort, VP of Social Media Services, at Emoderation explain how to successfully launch, manage and run global social media campaigns for multinational brands. Head of Languages, Richard Simcott, explains the difference between translation and localisation, while Wendy Christie, Chief Production Officer, advises on quality assurance processes for major social media projects.

1. Managing
social media
at scale
An Emoderation white paper
How do companies successfully manage multiple brands on several
social media channels across global territories in different languages, 24/7?
Emoderation’s social media experts explain how.
August 2014
Authors: Tamara Littleton, Blaise Grimes-Viort, Wendy Christie, Richard Simcott

2. 2
Table of contents
Running a global project 3
Global versus local 8
Localising the creative themes and tackling implementation 9
Content optimisation and standardisation 10
Communications and management tools to support large scale campaigns 11
Resourcing a large scale social media programme or campaign 12
Get the right tools in place 13
Set goals, and invest in training 13
Set aside enough time and resource for quality checks 13
Work out the right escalation processes 14
Think in languages, not countries 15
The importance of cultural fluency 16
Summary 17
Emoderation’s experts 18

3. 3
Running a global project
Tamara Littleton, CEO, Emoderation, explains how
global brands, teams and agencies can work effectively
together to deliver successful social media campaigns.
Social media is now a vital part of the marketing and communications
mix for consumer-facing brands: critical to reputation management;
a game-changer for customer service; and one of the most effective
ways of marketing a product to a wide audience.
But for it to be effective, the way a brand manages its social media
presences must fit with wider branding and value guidelines, and be
consistent across countries, languages and sub-brands.
For multinational corporations with millions of customers, fans and
followers on social media, that’s a huge task. The challenge is: how
do you personalise your responses on social media across hundreds
of territories, in multiple languages, to millions of fans, and still main-
tain the values, style, quality and tone of voice of the brand?
I believe that management of social media should be a partnership
between a brand, its agencies and its social media team. Effective so-
cial media takes a global approach for consistency and governance,
but has enough flexibility to allow localised content and personalised
responses in each country or geographical region.
Running a global project

4. 4
How do we start?
Establishing the partnership between
the global brand team, its agencies
and Emoderation is the first step to
successfully managing your social
media campaign on a global scale.
In this white paper, some of Emoderation’s experts give their advice
on how to structure a social media campaign and presence across
multiple territories; how to allocate resource and ensure top quality
results; and how to ensure consistency across multiple languages.

5. 5
Blaise Grimes-Viort, Emoderation’s VP of Social Media
Services, looks at how to structure a social media campaign
on a global scale. This is done using the hub and spoke model.
Client Global Team
Client Local Team
Local implementation
of global strategy
Localise strategy
Local content creation
Report to global team via
Project Manager
Set overall objectives
Create strategy
Define brand guidelines
Client Local Team
Ensure objectives being met
Ensure local content
adheres to brand guidelines
Point of contact between global
and local teams
Emoderation Local Team
Emoderation Project Manager
Emoderation Project Manager
Emoderation Local Team
Emoderation Local Team
Client Local Team

6. 6
The hub (central) team
The hub is the centralised management of your
social media programme.
This is where your strategy is set (and managed), and where the basis
of an implementation programme is created. Overall ownership will
sit with the brand but external agencies may also consult on strategy,
creative ideas and the principles
of implementation.
Within the centralised hub should sit:
Overall strategy and objectives. What is the big picture
approach to social media? What are you using social media
to achieve? What are the desired goals (and are they
measurable)? Is it reputation management, marketing,
customer service, customer loyalty, sales – or a combination
of these?
Creative themes. What are the creative concepts and assets
that you will use to support your strategy? Is your social media
part of an integrated media campaign? Are you launching a
new product or unveiling a seasonal promotion?
Brand guidelines for social media. These will include:
use of the brand name and logo; vision and mission statement
(and how this translates to social media); brand personality;
tone of voice; use of imagery; and copywriting style. These will
often be produced by the client in partnership with a creative
or strategic agency.
Standardised reporting. Templates for effective reporting
for all the countries. This will help you evaluate and compare
data from each of your local markets.
Management. The central team should be available to
support and guide the local team to deliver best practice
where required.

7. 7
The spokes (local) team
The spokes are the local teams in each region,
responsible for implementing the strategy
created by the hub.
Within the spokes will sit:
Localisation of the creative themes that you set centrally.
This includes creation of local content or translation of central
content that is then checked against the central brand
guidelines for that product or service.
Implementation of the social media strategy, including levels
of moderation and frequency of engagement.
Quality assurance checks and processes.
Escalation processes and guidance on types of escalation.
Measurement of performance against the centrally
agreed objectives and goals.

8. 8
Global versus local
While you can set strategy, approach, tone and
best practice centrally, localisation ensures you deliver
the best results for your target audience in that market.
Legislation will also vary from country to country. This is particularly
true for heavily regulated industries such as financial services, pharma
or alcohol brands, and if you are marketing to children or teenagers.
To successfully localise your social media, you need local community
management teams, who are both linguistically and culturally fluent in
the local language (more on that from Richard Simcott later in this
paper). Your teams also need to be trained on relevant local legisla-
tion or escalation processes. Those teams will work more efficiently if
they’re working with a local business team which handles sales and
marketing for that territory.
So, the principles of engagement, guidelines and direction of the
social media campaign should be given from the hub, and local
territories allowed the autonomy to implement the central structure,
to make it relevant with local insight and information.
Structuring a team for a global-scale project
Each local team needs a project leader, who is the point of contact
between both the global team and the local team (see hub and spoke
diagram on page 5).
The project leader will look at whether the campaign is achieving the
overall objective of the campaign and make key decisions on what
needs tweaking or what training is needed, for example.
Localisation is more than translation.
There will be local cultural issues or nuances – humour doesn’t
always travel well, for example – and relevance to a specific market
that must be taken into account.

9. 9
Localising creative themes
and tackling implementation
While most of the creative strategy and themes are set by the brand
itself or its relevant agencies, those themes will also need local
content creation, which in turn needs checking against the global
guidelines. Each spoke team should be responsible for advising on
whether the central creative approach will work for local markets.
They can work with the central team to devise a new territory-specific
campaign where appropriate.
Emoderation takes the creative themes developed by the agency,
and we create content pillars, exploring the thematic avenues to
define topics and ideas for engagement. Then, we create an editorial
calendar that specifies how frequently to post, what channels to post
on and so on, and we create content against that narrative journey.
Four key activities that inform feedback
from the local market to the standardised central model:
1. Content Is there content that works across
all markets?
2. Engagement Is there a standard answer to
reduce escalations
3. Moderation Is the standard moderation time
right across all markets
4. Social Listening Are there any similar issues across all
markets that need adressing in the
standardised model? Is there an action
against a policy point that’s aggravating
people, and if so, should policy be changed?

10. 10
Content optimisation and
standardisation
This model of optimisation can be set centrally, but the variations
have to be relevant locally.
Once the programme is underway, you need to look at content that
can be standardised based on data from your local ‘spoke’ teams. If
you analyse data from local engagement, you start to identify com-
mon themes which can then be rolled out to new regions.
Answering the following questions will help you
define elements that can be standardised:
Are there pain points common to all regions?
Do particular types of content work really well across
all regions?
Are there common questions in all territories that could be
more efficiently answered with a standard response?
Is there an adverse reaction against a central policy –
for example, product or service charges or a change to
popular branding – that aggravates the community and
needs to be changed?
Answers to these questions should be fed back into the central
hub so the overall strategy can be updated.
Next, we look at content optimisation. For example:
what are the best times to post for your community,
within your region and to fit your brand objectives?

11. 11
Communications
and management tools
Performance management: a project which takes in 20 or 30
territories and which has 80+ community managers working on
it is like running a large department. You’ll need internal technical
solutions and support for that project just as you would for a large,
geographically dispersed team which needs to collaborate and
communicate with each other.
You’ll need somewhere central where you can store all your project
insights – cultural knowledge, content ideas, milestones and resourc-
ing schedules – in one place. You can use this information alongside
your campaign metrics to help measure the success of your project
against your objectives, and compare the performance of different
countries. There are numerous tools available to help you manage
projects internally. What these tool providers offer is changing all the
time, so you need to keep a close eye on what’s out there. Wendy
Christie explains how Emoderation uses social collaboration tools to
help keep teams on track later in this white paper.
Social listening: Social listening tools are used to monitor both the
social web and your owned communities, allowing you to extract
information about what people are saying about your brand, analyse
it, and make changes where necessary.
The listening tool you choose should be able to differentiate
between direct abuse (“I hate you, BRAND”) and indirect abuse
(“I hate BRAND”), as well as accurately determining sentiment,
emotion and intent (“I really want to have a pair of XX jeans” or “I’m
going to buy a pair of XX jeans”). Again, there are numerous tools
on the market. For help, see our handy checklist for choosing the
right tool. Choose your tool carefully to ensure it delivers the data
and analysis you want.
Data on its own can be overwhelming: you should have a process in
place to sort the important information from the background noise, so
you know what information you should be acting on (not just listening
to). For more information see our blog post on how we manage
social listening.
The challenge of creating social media campaigns at scale
The single biggest challenge of engaging customers and potential
customers at scale is how you respond at scale to what you learn
through that engagement. If you’re going to create an engagement
strategy that has genuine value, you have to be prepared to act on
the response you get from your audiences.
In order to support large scale campaigns, there are a few
processes and tools which are crucial to success.

12. 12
Resourcing a large scale
social media campaign
Quality assurance, resourcing, getting the standards right at
the start, and knowing how and where to escalate an issue, are
all critical to the success of managing social media at scale,
says Wendy Christie, Emoderation’s Chief Production Officer.
Resourcing the management of social media at scale is all about
finding the right balance between the number of people with the
relevant languages, the amount of time you need on each social
channel and the goals and standards you want to achieve. This
allows you to comfortably meet the demands of your peak traffic
and engage with your audience in a timely manner.
We have to ensure that there is someone available 24/7 in case
there’s an emergency or an issue that needs solving immediately,
so Emoderation has a team to cover all time zones.
There are a few questions to answer when deciding
on resourcing:
What are the expected traffic peaks for a new project?
And once a project is underway, what does the data tell
you about those traffic patterns?
How often will you be posting content on social channels
and how often do you want to get back to your customers
or engage with your audience?
What’s the timescale and level of urgency for moderation?
Where a human decision has to be made about content,
how quickly do you need that decision to be made? Does it
have to happen immediately, within an hour, or the same day?
What languages do you need? As Richard Simcott says in
this white paper, you may need fewer than you think.
How many hours do you estimate you’ll need to spend
on the project?
Once you’ve answered these questions you can then decide on the
size of the team. Remember that no-one can work at full capacity for
an eight-hour day, and you need to cover for sickness and holidays,
as well as having a second pair of eyes to review quality.

13. 13
Get the right tools in place
Getting the nuts and bolts right is very important. Make sure the tool
you’re using does what you need it to, and don’t assume all tools are
the same (they’re not). If you’re managing a moderation or community
management project at scale, you need a social media management
tool that lets you identify exactly what action was taken by whom, on
what channel, and at what time. This lets you check for quality and
consistency. A good tool will also measure productivity, so you can
benchmark performance across the team.
If you’re covering social media channels in multiple time zones and
languages, your team will be distributed across the world. So you
need to use the right technology to communicate with each other. We
mainly use Skype and Google Hangouts, but we also have a system
to message the entire team across a project, and we use Basecamp
to do this.
And don’t forget internal comms. We use a chat room system,
Campfire, so that the team can talk to each other when they work.
Set goals, and invest
in training
Get all your team involved in your project from the start. People need
to know exactly what is expected, in terms of both quality and quan-
tity of actions. Invest in training, and give the team the tools they need
to achieve their goals. If you’re scaling up quickly, you might consider
using tried and tested learning and self-assessment tools as part of
your project rollout.
Set aside enough time and
resource for quality checks
You should run quality checks daily, to ensure the content meets the
tone of voice guidelines and that escalations are being dealt with
promptly. You should also do random spot checks. If you have a new
person on the team, you may need to check their work and give feed-
back more regularly than that of someone with a proven track record.
The team leader should check activity against the brand guidelines,
social strategy and agreed schedule.
Think about how you’re going to review the quality of translation and
content on multilingual projects. You need more than one person to
be a native speaker in each language so you can check that content
is accurate and on brand. Richard Simcott explains this in more detail
later.
Our experience is that you should overestimate the amount of time
you need at the beginning of a campaign to carry out quality checks.
Later, as the team becomes more embedded in your community, you
can decrease the amount of review time.

14. 14
Work out the right
escalation processes
Having the right escalation process in place is important
for a healthy and safe online community and to protect the
reputation of the brand or organisation.
The right processes will depend on the kind of community you have,
its target audience and the type of content it contains.
Some types of community will have more escalations than others.
Sites that are used by children or teenagers, for example, will have a
lot of content that needs escalating.
Sometimes our moderators are exposed to some very challenging
content, so you also need a system in place both to deal with that
content (report it to the police, for example, in extreme cases), but
also to support the team member who’s seen it.
If there’s a problem at 2am, who will you call? There needs to be
someone on duty who can take a decision, and quickly escalate an
issue. That person needs to speak the appropriate language (or work
with someone who can translate accurately) so they can make the
right decision.
All our teams are fluent in English (the language we use across the
business for communication), to overcome that issue.

15. 15
One of the most common mistakes brands make is to over-estimate
the number of languages they need for a multi-national campaign.
Our advice is always to be conservative at the start: you can always
scale up once you have a true sense of where your campaigns are
going to work best for you. Get a strong skeleton framework in place
first, then look at what you need to expand the campaign.
Think in languages,
not countries
The next thing we advise is to think in languages, rather than just in
countries. It would be very neat to be able to say: ‘We’re in 50 coun-
tries, therefore we need 50 languages’, but the reality is different. For
example, if you’re creating content in Ireland, you probably don’t need
to run Facebook in Gaelic. However, you might need Welsh for Wales.
But if Belgium or Switzerland are important markets, you need
multiple languages for each. If you’re in Israel, are you going to cover
Arabic and Hebrew? In Spain, are you including Catalan? So our first
advice is think about how many languages you need, not just how
many countries you’re in.
Then, consider:
How local do you need the campaign to be? For example,
would it be ok to use a Dutch person to cover Flemish in
Belgium, or do you need a native Flemish speaker?
Are you fine with having a US English speaker covering
the UK, or is the campaign a local UK one (in which case
you should have a UK English speaker. There are cultural
differences and language nuances that can lead to real
confusion). If you say ‘I want to work in German’, which
German do you mean? German spoken in Germany, Austria
or Switzerland? French for France or Canada? Each has
different variations, words and cultural references that can
make them quite distinct from each other.
Do you have the resource to deliver these languages?
We estimate that you need three people for each language
to cover holidays, sickness and different working patterns.
It’s also important for quality checks (one of those three
should be quality checking the others’ work).
How many hours do you need in each language?
This decision should be based on your objectives and
projected traffic for each territory. It might change your
thinking on which languages you need: if you only want
moderation for an hour a day, how do you split that hour
between two or three people?
The social media strategy approach outlined earlier by
Blaise Grimes-Viort will predict how much time is needed for
community management and social listening and this will
dictate the resource required.
Emoderation’s Head of Languages and resident
hyper-polyglot, Richard Simcott, explains how to approach
the use of language in a global social media campaign.

16. 16
The importance
of cultural fluency
Having an understanding of a language’s cultural context,
as well as technical proficiency, is incredibly important in
moderation and community management.
When recruiting for a campaign, we run detailed tests to see not just
how well someone can speak a language, but how aware they are of
the language they’re speaking. Do they notice nuances, for example
why we ‘catch’ a train in English, as opposed to getting a train?
One of the best tests of language skills is talking to children. When I
was in Germany, learning German, the first question I was asked by
a group of children was ‘can you do the splits?’! I didn’t know how to
respond in any language and no amount of study will prepare you for
a random question on your acrobatic skills! You know you’re fluent
when you can talk to children in their language.
You lose your fluency in a culture if you’re not exposed to it every day.
If you’re Hungarian, but left Hungary 20 years ago to live in the US, for
example, your cultural references – and even your language – will be
closer to that of a US citizen than to your native Hungary. You adopt
the culture of the country in which you live.
English is different, as it’s spoken everywhere and we’re exposed to it
through TV and film. It’s also the main language of global businesses.
If you speak English and live in the UK, US culture will be familiar. But
can you write convincingly as a US citizen if you’re British? Possibly
not. You need to know the history, culture and politics of the place.
Even simple things such as food references are different.
A word that needs moderating in UK English might be completely
harmless in the US. Or if you’ve learnt French in France, you might
know that you can reverse the syllables of words (known as Verlan,
from l’envers). But they don’t do this in Canadian French.
Even the nuances of swearing are different between cultures: In
France, swear words are based around sexual terms (much as they
are in English). But in Canada, they’re much more focused on reli-
gious words. In Sweden, one of the worst things you can call some-
one is a devil.
In the Netherlands, telling someone you hope they get typhoid or
consumption is really bad. But saying ‘I hope you get hiccups’ is the
clean version – like telling someone to ‘buzz off’. So a blacklist of
terms for moderation based just on UK and US swearwords, might
not make much sense to someone from another country.
Lastly, when localising content for social media, for example Face-
book status updates, it’s crucial that you don’t just translate. Humour
and puns written in English will rarely translate so the central team
should avoid making the content too parochial or ensure that local
markets are given autonomy to create content from scratch.

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Summary
Managing social media successfully on an international or
even a global scale takes planning, resource and commitment.
You need a resource that matches your global business model which can
cope with working across multiple languages, time zones and continents.
We have developed our hub and spoke model to meet the needs of individ-
ual brands and their agencies in a global market.
If you’re thinking of scaling your social media activities
across multiple locations and languages, the following
checklist might help:
Agree your objectives and strategy. Wh at do you want to achieve
from a global approach?
Define the markets in which you are active on social media.
Think about how local you need the approach to be, and what
languages you need to deliver on your social media strategy.
Put in place a process for localising content and assess how
many people you need in each language (remember: you need
two to three fluent speakers for each language to allow for quality
checking). And remember cultural fluency is essential too.
Agree the principles of the project. Assess market variables, such
as legislation, local needs, and market tiers. This will define how
your structure your teams. What is the central ‘hub’ responsible for,
and what are the local teams – your ‘spokes’ – responsible for?
Get the right team in place, and invest in training them. Work out
how much resource you need, and what capacity they’ll work at.
Get the right tools in place. Consider tools for social listening,
performance management, and campaign/social media
management. Don’t forget collaboration tools, too, so members
of your team feel part of the bigger picture and communication
flows well.
Set standards, for performance, quality and content; and ensure
that both global and local teams know exactly what is expected of
them. Agree reporting structures.
Agree the creative themes for the project, and check them against
brand guidelines. These themes will determine the content you
produce centrally and locally.
Set clear escalation processes between local and central teams
and collaborate with other agencies. If the reputation of the brand
or organisation is at stake you need to work with all stakeholders
to minimise or manage a crisis.
Obsess about the data. What content can you standardise,
and how can you optimise content across markets?
How are different markets performing against each other?
To find out more about
how we can support
your global social media
management, visit
www.emoderation.com
or email us.

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Emoderation’s experts
Tamara founded the company in 2002 with the vision of applying the best social media management practices to branded online channels. Emoderation now provides
social media management to some of the biggest brands in the world. Almost all her 350-strong team work remotely and with flexible hours, which allows her to offer
social media management in any time zone and in more than 50 languages. This structure has allowed her to scale both Emoderation and its clients’ campaigns. As well
as running Emoderation, Tamara is also the CEO of Polpeo, a social media crisis simulation company that helps brands rehearsetheir response to a crisis breaking on
social media. She has extensive experience in community management, child safety, social media consultancy, and crisis communications.
Wendy Christie has worked in the field of online community for more than ten years. As the Head of AOL UK’s Social Media and Community team, she managed
moderation, community editorial and product integration between 1998 and 2007. Wendy oversees the recruitment, training and management of our moderators,
and works to ensure that the services we provide are the best of class. She helps to develop Emoderation’s child safety policies and is a CEOP Ambassador.
Blaise is Emoderation’s VP of Social Media Services. He started his career in community management in 2001 and since then has worked with global brands, start-ups
and charities in fields such as publishing, FMCG, fashion, gaming, social networking, pharmaceutical, broadcasting, and telecoms. Blaise was Head of Communities and
Social Media for publisher Hearst UK before coming to Emoderation, where he oversees our community management, social media consultancy and training services.
Richard is our resident hyper-polyglot. He previously worked in the diplomatic corps for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and is fluent in many languages, including
all major European languages. Richard manages our multilingual moderators, and provides advice and training on multilingual community management projects. He was
recently named ‘Ambassador of Multilingualism’ by The Goethe Institute.
© Emoderation Limited 2014
This document is the intellectual property of Emoderation Limited and may not be duplicated or disclosed to any third party without the written permission of an authorised officer of the company.
Tamara Littleton, CEO
Wendy Christie
Blaise Grimes-Viort
Richard Simcott