Why Brands are Building NASA-style Mission Control Rooms For Social Media

From the Super Bowl to Gatorade, Intel and the Red Cross, growing numbers of global organizations are building comprehensive social media command centers. Think of them as NASA mission control for the Facebook generation: Rooms decked out with wall-mounted screens and sophisticated analytical software, monitoring and reacting to the flood of social comments on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere.

But why are enterprises spending millions on building mission control centers to oversee their social media operations?

For the ability to visualize, at a glance, streaming data and analytics that would otherwise require hours to sort through. For executives obsessed with key performance indicators, command centers can make a compelling case for the bottom-line value of social media.

Take Super Bowl’s case in point: In the buildup to this year’s big game, organizers of the popular event built a space-age social media ground control center in downtown Indianapolis, outfitted with 150 square feet of networked screens and a mile of ethernet cable. For two full weeks, 50 social media experts logged 15 hour days inside, monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other channels. All told, Super Bowl ground control sorted through 64 million social mentions, responding to most within just three minutes.  

Behind the impressive technology was an equally impressive payoff: the equivalent of $3.2 million in positive press, plus a 12.5-percent boost in consumer sentiment.

Having a concerted social media strategy, and the tools to instantly track results, has become a new priority—even among managers and CEOs initially skeptical about the social revolution. More than 80 percent of executives now believe their brands can get more sales and bigger market share by using social media, according to a 2012 report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Three-quarters of all Fortune 500 companies have active Twitter accounts, while a recent McKinsey report pegged the untapped value of social technologies at $1.3 trillion.

Monitoring software and applications to track business performance are nothing new, of course. Command centers and mission controls, however, bring all of this technology into a single unified platform, where results across departments can be visualized at a glance by entire teams.

We've responded to the revolution with the launch of HootSuite’s Command Center, that brings together the latest generation of social media mission control technology. Multiple large-panel screens can be customized with a wide range of leading applications to listen, engage and analyze social media. It's a central hub for visually tracking not just social media but a growing number of corporate vital signs—all in one place, in real time. Command Center has its own desktop and mobile apps. A whole room’s worth of reporting screens can be compressed onto laptops, tablets and smartphones, enabling teams to monitor performance indicators from anywhere.

One small step for social media may be one giant leap for enterprises looking to harness new social technologies to boost the bottom line.

Image: Mike Renlund