Centralised vs. decentralised: How should you manage social data analytics in your company?

Social data provides valuable insights to inform different aspects of the business – from marketing and sales to customer support and product development. Some companies have a single, centralised team handling social data analytics for the entire organisation. Other companies have decentralised their social data analysis function.

So which of these approaches is the best? Let’s take a closer look at the benefits and challenges each of these approaches present.

Centralised

With this approach, there’s a single core team that runs social data analysis for the entire organisation.

Benefits

-With a centralised team, you can create a single source of truth which allows you to streamline your social data analysis efforts. You can ensure the use of consistent metrics across the board, allowing for comparable measures of success for the business as a whole. Plus, there’s less duplication of efforts as different departments can go to a single team to conduct the analysis.

-A centralised approach also provides better visibility of the wider business challenges. It helps put the data into context for the organisation as a whole. This makes room for more targeted insights to inform overall business decisions.

-Centralisation puts the data in the hands of a core team of data scientists and analysts. Since only engaged stakeholders with a certain level of data literacy are involved, it reduces the chances of errors when extracting insights.

Challenges

-The biggest challenge is the risk of a bottleneck when the whole business’s needs are filtering down to one team. This tends to slow down the entire process and may cause delays in getting the right insights at the right time. Companies like Walmart even experimented with the approach but found that it was too much of a funnel, with people waiting for information from the insights and analytics team.

-There’s also the fact that since other departments are not actively working with the data, it could discourage them from thinking in a data-driven way. They might never come to realise how the data fits into their function or how to make use of it in a way that drives growth.

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Centralisation puts the data in the hands of a core team of data scientists and analysts.

Decentralised

With this approach, each department or business unit conducts its own social data analysis to serve their respective teams.

Benefits

-A decentralised approach enables data democratisation as it allows more people to work with the data.

-Due to data democratisation, a decentralised approach also removes data silos within companies. It enables more teams to access data and extract insights for their own needs, minimising the risks of bottleneck. As subject matter experts derive the insights they need, they can identify how to best use them for the benefit of their respective functions – whether it’s marketing, sales, customer support, or product development.

-Different departments know the information they need better than anyone. So they’ll be better at finding the insights relevant to their function. This takes away the time-consuming process of sifting through a generalised analytics report to find the info they need.

Challenges

-One of the biggest issues with a decentralised approach is that other business units may not be as data literate as people who were actually trained to analyse data. This can lead to inaccurate insights.

-With each team having access to the data they need for their specific job functions, there’s a lesser need to communicate with other teams. As a result, they could miss shared challenges that affect the organisation as a whole. In addition, with teams only looking at a specific data set, there’s a chance they could miss insights relevant for other teams.

How are companies setting up their teams?

Different organisations are seeing the benefits of both a decentralised and a centralised approach. But, it can take some experimentation to find out what works best for a particular company setup.

After experiencing issues with a centralised approach, Walmart now has a decentralised network of people that are working together and are staying aligned. The organisation is trying to democratise their tools and methodology to subject matter experts because social media intelligence is applicable to all areas of business.

Food and beverage giant, Mondelez also takes a similar approach. They have insights and analytics people in their business units around the world. City Football Group, however, uses a centralised market research team that works closely with other departments.

The ideal approach may be a hybrid between the two – decentralising analytics across different business units with dedicated insights specialists, and having one central hub to connect all of those units.