Product Feature Spotlight: Enterprise Account Management
User-generated content (UGC) is growing in importance for consumer brand marketers and so too is the ability to source, manage and distribute this content across large and sometimes complex organizations.
Stackla has always been built for enterprise consumer brands, in particular ensuring that Stackla technology can be easily integrated into existing workflows via our developer platform.
In addition, our enterprise account management features help enterprise brands achieve a Stackla setup that mirrors their organizational and teams structures.
There are three key components that underpin this:
Multi-stack management
A “Stack” is the name we give to a distinct Stackla environment. You might think of it as a Stackla “account” or “license”.
A single Stack includes all the functionality available in Stackla, including the ability to aggregate content, request content rights, curate content and push to marketing touchpoints.
Often, organizations will have multiple teams or business units that require their own Stack — a distinct environment where different brand or regional teams will make their own choices about the content they aggregate, curate and publish.
Take, for example, a state tourism authority. This organization would be responsible at the highest level for all tourism promotions and campaigns in their state.
Underneath them, you may have regional, city or destination-based marketing organizations that are responsible for the promotion of their particular geographic region within the state.
While operating their own distinct Stacks, there would be times when the state authority would need to push relevant content down to their regional or destination marketing organizations.
The reverse may also be true, where regional bodies might want to contribute content up to the broader state campaigns.
Similarly, horizontal coordination (ie. cross-promotion) may require the sharing of relevant content between regional organizations.
So you can see pretty quickly how siloed environments just won’t do. The ability to reflect the way each organization works together in your Stack setup is crucial to ensuring an efficient use of user-generated content across the greater organization.
Our enterprise Stack management facilitates this type of relationship between Stackla environments through two key tools:
Group Stack Management
Group Stack Management allows an overall group manager to control the distribution of entitlements across Stacks.
This could be the distribution of content storage capacity, aggregation limits, user seats or any other finite entitlement.
A group Stack manager uses a central management interface to ensure the most efficient use of entitlements across all the Stacks under their purview.
Content Flow Controls
In a similar way to which entitlements can be managed across Stacks, so too can the flow of content.
Returning to our tourism example, you may allow for content to be pushed down from a state-level Stack to a regional Stack but not the reverse.
Alternatively you may allow horizontal sharing of content between regions, but no vertical sharing between state and regional organizations.
Or you may configure various combinations of the above between some but not all Stacks.
Your content flow rules can be configured to reflect your organizational structure and relationships.
User access control (UAC) groups
Each individual Stack comes with a handful of default UAC Groups, aka user roles.
Administrator, moderator and developer roles will be familiar and you can probably guess from the names the level of authority and capabilities each provides.
There are of course times when you want to create custom user roles that don’t fit in to any of the default offerings. UAC Groups facilitate this.
Every single major component of Stackla — for example discovery, curation, rights management and publishing — can be switched on and off when configuring a custom role.
Fine-grained control can be achieved with page and even component-level access controls. Every Stackla page and even each button, tab and option can be added or removed from access when configuring a role.
So for example, our hypothetical tourism organization may want to allow:
- Ad agency access restricting all aggregation, curation and display functionality but allowing access to configure integrations with ad platforms via our plugins directory
- Creative agency access to only the Stackla Asset Manager and fine-grained control set to only allow downloading assets but not editing or deleting assets
- Junior marketer access allowing for the aggregation of content, but restricting the ability to auto-publish that content, ensuring it enters a moderation queue for a more senior moderator to review before publishing
- State manager access allowing the pushing of content to regional Stacks and the ability to push content from regional Stacks back up to the state-level Stack
It goes without saying, the potential combinations are many and allow you to operate with total confidence knowing your users have the level of access and authority they require.
Single sign-on (SSO)
Enterprise organizations often have well configured and managed authentication and authorization systems such as LDAP and Active Directory.
Configuring and managing a parallel login system is not an ideal situation, can be insecure and requires a duplication of effort.
Single sign-on technologies allow you to:
- Enforce your own password standards
- Grant and revoke access to Stackla at any time from within your own management system
- Support and control password resets independently
- Prevent users from sharing their accounts to enforce accountability
Stackla integrates with the most popular SSO solutions including Active Directory and LDAP, as well as online SAML services, such as Okta, Google and Salesforce to help you achieve the benefits listed above.
Wrapping up
For enterprise consumer brands it is important to consider how any new technology you introduce into your arsenal will best serve your organization.
The ability to efficiently manage and configure a technology like Stackla in a way that reflects your organizational structure and relationships has a significant impact on the value you will derive from it.
Stackla has always had a focus on building the capabilities to support this and we’re pleased to see a growing number of organizations leveraging our enterprise account management features to build the perfect Stackla configuration for them.
If you would like to find out how enterprise account management can work for you, give your customer success account manager a call or drop us a line, we’re always happy to chat.
