In his BlogWell Los Angeles presentation, General Mills' Social Media Engagement Manager, Aaron Miller, shares how they are building and empowering a new team of community managers to act as the voice of their brands. He covers how to make the case, the responsibilities involved, the team structure, and sourcing talent for creating a centralized social media team. Watch the video of this presentation here: https://vimeo.com/57437152

1. SocialMedia.org
Video Case Studies
SocialMedia.org
This video is from
Case Studies
BlogWell
San Francisco
June 20, 2011
This presentation is from
socialmedia.org/blogwell
BlogWell Aaron Miller
Los Angeles
December 5, 2012 Building a Team of Connected
socialmedia.org/blogwell Community Managers

2. Building a Team of
Connected
Community Managers
Aaron Miller
Brand social media engagement
Aaron.Miller@genmills.com
Flickr: brookewill

3. What we’ll cover

4. What we won’t cover

5. One year ago at
• 110 U.S. social
media channels
– 20 Twitter feeds
– 40 Facebook
pages, 9 million
fans
• Growing weekly
All managed by
agencies + three
contractors.
Flickr: stopthegears

6. Challenges
Awareness of importance of social media in
building brands, but with current structure:
– Isolated and fragmented brands
– Disconnected from our consumers
– Paying to build agency skills and knowledge, not
our own
– Lack of ownership and accountability
Flickr: KateMonkey

7. Goal
Build a team of social community
managers, supplemented with
contractors and agencies
Flickr: NaturesDawn

8. Making the Case in
Dollars and Sense
Flickr: 68751915@N05 Flickr: hawkexpress

9. Dollars*
Agency
• $100 per hour
• 40 hours per week
• 50 weeks per year
• $200,000 per year per brand
Employee
• Much less than $200k per year
• Multiplied out across brands,
the savings opportunities are
significant
*Not actual GMI figures Flickr: 59937401@N07

10. Sense
• Connected to their brand
• High level of ownership
• Connected to each other
• Employees, so we’re building our own
institutional knowledge
Flickr: Francois

11. Other ways of making the case
Flickr: streetfly_jz

12. This year
• Building a team of 10
community managers, each
Cheerios dedicated to a specific brand
• Supplementing with
contractors and agencies

13. Their mission
The General Mills community management team
creates and fosters always-on streams of content and
conversations in online channels that build bridges
between General Mills and our stakeholders.
Through that content and conversation, we increase
awareness, influence attitudes, and create preference
for our company and our brands.
We help protect our company's and brands' reputations
and build actionable intuition about the behaviors,
lifestyles and opinions of our target audiences.

14. Responsibilities
• Social strategy
• Editorial planning
• Content execution
• Base-level analytics

15. A social brand team structure
Aggregate issues and communicate
for improvement/insight.
Full brand team
Community Creates broader
Integrates Marketing marketing
Listen for feedback,
issues into campaigns that
insights and intuition
service queue integrate social
and resolves Creates
with Content valuable,
consumers. creative teams shareable
Consumer Service Listens and Agencies
content
engages in Provide creative Consumer Insights +
team member dialogue. and strategic
Gathers and
support
Analytics shares insights
Directs product or
consumers issues to
Service for resolution. Works together to build
integrated strategies.
Plan social content
Community and conversations. Digital strategist
Escalates high-risk
engagement
Social Media issues to SMHT, specialist
which delivers Aggregate and share Brand social strategy leads,
Hotline Team recommendation. results

16. The Social Center of Excellence
(aka me) plays a role in building
team dynamics and scaled
learning across brands and
divisions
Flickr: gadgetgirl

17. Sourcing talent
• There aren’t many people with “community
manager” on their resume
• Looking for qualities, not job experience
• Hires have backgrounds in agencies, non-
profits, psychology, poetry
• Trying to match talent to brand
• Most important quality: Strategic creativity
• Biggest watch-out: Social strategists

18. What’s next?
• Team culture
• Tools
• Agile content development
• International cohesion
Flickr: jonnygoldstein

19. Thank you
Aaron Miller
@helloaaron
Aaron.Miller@genmills.com

20. SocialMedia.org
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BlogWell
San Francisco
June 20, 2011
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Los Angeles
December 5, 2012
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