Top-down management structures first proliferated in the United States during the railway era, as barons struggled to maintain control of their sprawling new empires. The easiest way to govern hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad, they discovered, was to erect a chain of command, which extended from the central offices in New York and Chicago to the field offices of the new frontier JoAnne Yates explains in The Rise of System in American Management in Control Through Communication.
This strategy also proved to be remarkably effective for the heads of large banks, telephone companies and eventually, computer manufacturers and multinational data-processing firms. The chain of command is often thought to reduce conflict, help with role differentiation, and increase coordination. In other words, employees are thought to need managers because managers define, either implicitly or explicitly, who people are as workers.
Today, Systematic Management’s ideas of upward communication, downward communication and lateral communication are increasingly important for organizations. The social media platform, Hootsuite is a tool that allows organizations to amplify their social media campaigns across multiple channels from one place, is a tool that encourages such methods of communication listed above. Its key features are engagement, listening, analytics, and collaboration.
Hootsuite encourages lateral communication, because it allows communication between individuals and departments on the same organizational level. This is achieved through the collaboration function, which allows companies to assign messages, manage internal workflow and communication between collaborators and clients permits communication directly without going through several layers of bureaucracy, which often only serve to stagnant the communication process. Given this sort of flexibility, employees have an easier time problem solving, information sharing across different work groups or even different geographical locals. The collaborator function, has essentially replaced the office memo.
Social media platform such as Hootsuite create lateral communication between the public and the organization. Before social media became the main channel of communication between businesses and customers, often times the process of communicating with either party was laborious involving phone calls that were transferred from switchboards to frontline staff, to maybe even upper level management depending. With the advent of social media, customers can communicate with either a community manager or more senior employees, as their messages are broadcasted across the Web. Lateral communication between organizations and the public, differs from the upward communication that the public experienced, before the advent of social media.
In terms of managing social media campaigns, Hootsuite allows organizations to schedule messages, measure the ‘true reach’ of their campaign by providing analytics for the number of clicks, new followers, and the campaigns ‘virality.’ Social Media platforms are thus integral to the successful workflow of modern day companies as the systemic management of the early railway system. Of course, trains won’t collide if Tweets aren’t sent on time, but on the information superhighways of the Web, timing and strategy are everything, if you want your message to be heard and to do you need a system of management that works and reflects the attitude of the contemporary worker that enjoys flatten hierarchy over a rigid top-down management style. Social media isn’t hierarchical, so why should the systems that management it be?
Work Cited:
Yates, JoAnne. Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Print.
“Social Media Management.” Hootsuite. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.
Media & Technology 