If you’ve ever considered the impact social media might have on your marketing team’s organisation, or indeed the setup you will need to accommodate a successful social media strategy in the first place, then Forrester’s Marketing blog has suggested a few options.

Designed to cover questions such as “which roles do we need?” and “which department should be in charge of it?”, Forrester has developed a three-pronged model as follows (with Forrester favouring the hub and spoke method as the most sopisticated of the three):

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 communicaitons.
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”)

As per my previous post on Barack Obama’s marketing campaign chief’s approach, message and strategy should always get the lion’s share of attention over channel and tehnology. Thus the people you hire for these positions and the structure of the team delivering social media marketing should be right at the top of the agenda of any social media programme. For insight into the planning of social media campaigns, download our popular B2B web 2.0 marketing campaign planner.

Insight into Asos’s approach (in this earlier blog post “A Tale of Two Retailers” also gives insight into how Asos is driving their strategy from the top.)