When I look at the common elements of large companies doing well in search marketing, I almost always encounter some Center of Excellence (CoE). While they may not always be called a CoE, some call them Search Council; nonetheless, they are some centralized information repository or governance on how search is deployed around the world in the organization.
The CoE should focus on improving content creation workflow practices, compliance levels, policies, support, awareness, and measurement across the program. It is also highly focused on building a culture of Search Marketing excellence that will have a measurable impact on the bottom line.
Center of Excellence Defined
Essentially, a Center of Excellence brings together varied people and skills to promote collaboration and use best practices around a specific focus area to drive incremental business results.
Search Center of Excellence Role & Function
The COE needs to be an aggregation of multiple disciplines and levels of the organization to provide insight into the various stakeholders’ roles and how they should collaborate with each other to be more effective.
In addition to role representation, the COE needs to provide a broad base of information and guidance and should provide the following:
Shared Learning – first and foremost a proper CoE will prevent, or minimize the reinvention of the wheel for most business units with a base from which to start their understanding of a process or technique. These formalized and uniform roles and processes enable shared learning:
- Aggregation and evangelizing of best practices
- Training and certifications
- Skill assessments & team building
Measurements & Metrics—CoEs should be able to demonstrate through output metrics that they are delivering the valued results that justified their creation.
- Uniform Metrics
- Uniform tools and collection methods
- Aggregation and evangelization of the results
Support — For the specific area of focus, CoE’s should offer support and mentoring to the business lines. The level of support will vary based on ability and resources and organization.
- Sourcing and procurement of shares tools and resources
- Share subject matter experts
- Air cover and support with executive management
- Develop process and opportunity for scale in the service offering
- Where possible, financial and resource support
Governance – Not be confused with the dictatorship or gatekeeper of a process or strategy but an enabler, arbitrator, and motivator and in some cases the decider of what is the better of two practices.
- Creation and arbitration of common standards, policies and methodologies
- Enforcement of a consistent architecture and uniform approach across the organization
- A common method and set of techniques for managing information
- Developing and enabling well-defined Roles and Responsibilities for team members
Search Center of Excellence Benefits
The most effective Centers of Excellence are ones that offers a variety of benefits that can be gained from centralizing a set of essential functions to support global search and social media marketing programs. Some of the benefits include:
- Better reuse of capabilities across programs
- Reduced speed of delivery
- Cost reduction or elimination through shared infrastructure and tools
- Cost savings through shared skill sets and elimination of redundant or inefficient processes or approaches
- Reduction in frustration and disorganization for those just adopting search marketing or another marketing function that have no previous experience or basis to form their approach or deployment of the new activity
In summary, a Center of Excellence brings together varied best practices in program development, deployment, and measurement to achieve better speed to market, consistency, and reduced complexity. The quicker the organization adopts this centralized process for information sharing, the quicker it will see a more widespread adoption of these practices and a reduction in barriers to improving performance in its specific discipline.
Note: I think companies that are struggling with social media adoption in their organizations can adopt the same principles for their social media strategy as the Search Center of Excellence.
