Nobody puts Digital in the corner

Apologies for the Dirty Dancing themed blog title, but behind this tongue-in-cheek title is a issue that perplexes a large number of business globally – where should Digital sit within a business? And how do you avoid it becoming a silo?

Small business solutions

For a small business, they often take the digital one man band approach where a single person writes the web copy, edits the HTML and even sets up the hosting, etc. Within a small business that can work well, it allows the online presence to be quickly changed and appear, dynamic and fast paced. There are obvious risks involved in this, such as what do we do when Bob (or Sally) is away on holiday or even worse when they leave the business? But for most businesses this is simply how they have to operate, due to their size and budget.

Enterprise expansion

In a global enterprise the digital skillset is broken down into the individual disciplines with diverse roles such as digital brand marketing manager, ecommerce marketing manager, social media marketing manager, affiliate marketing manager, email marketing manager, etc all present within the same business or regional team. This is perceived as the ultimate setup with each digital channel having a champion to drive innovation, analysis and performance as hard as they possibly can.

What about the middle ground?

But the biggest question (which is the reason behind this blog post) is what happens (or what should happen) in-between these two scenarios? Where should digital sit? Is it part of Marketing, Sales, IT or a completely separate Digital department?

New Media Age (RIP the print edition) used to regularly feature digital team structures and every single one had a different form and function within the organisation. This indicates one of two things to me. Firstly, the constant change and innovation in digital as a whole, impacts internal organisation structures directly. As a result team structures and members are in a state of constant flux. Digital managers sometimes look in envy at the established structures that sales, marketing, human resources and other teams have at times. The second observation is that maybe, just maybe there isn’t a fundamental structure that a digital team should have – as each businesses approach is somewhat unique, then maybe the team structure has to reflect this internally?

So where does this leave the digital team?

I think it really is a case of assessing your businesses needs, fully understanding the resources required and then creating a structure that works for you. If you already have a team in place, spend time talking to them and fully understanding the roles and responsibilities , before introducing wholesale changes or crazy new team structures.

Thankfully there is some help out there to get you started, Dave Chaffey & Econsultancy have a must read guide to Managing Digital Channels that is a great place to begin your digital team journey.

I’d love to hear If you think you’ve created the ideal structure or worked in a team that was so complex it made your head hurt! Send me a tweet @simonlilly or add a Comment below…