What Is a Social Business?

A social business is one built upon a foundation of learning, growing and a strategy that starts by asking, “What people and environment must we have to achieve our objectives?” and “What processes must we excel at to deliver value to our customers and meet our business and financial objectives?” It also asks (as you did at length in the Insight Layer), “What do our customers value?” and “What do our shareholders expect?”

If you are looking for another great resource to help you map your social business strategy (Figure 7.3), you can check out the team at LeaderNetworks.com for some great ideas on how to build your social business value chain from development to social selling to delivery.²

Lastly, a great must-read article by Christopher Rollyson goes in-depth on the most common “Social Business Strategy Use Cases.”³ And it will help you quickly assess where in the Social Business Life Cycle of transformation your company is currently residing and what steps are most relevant to take for continued evolution. The most immediately relevant value from this piece will be for chief data officers (CDOs), chief marketing officers (CMOs), chief compliance officers (CCOs), and CEOs, to reflect on which choices they are facing today to either improve ROI or simply remain relevant in volatile markets moving forward.

Begin with the End in Mind

Designing the most practical elements of your social business strategy, as it relates to your customer experience and marketing efforts, begins with the end in mind. You will need to look at your business objectives and figure out what you stand for and where your company is headed. You really need to envision all of the ways that social media can help your business. Social media is not just for marketers. Your customer service should be socially activated. Your sales team should be activated with social to help them build relationships with your prospects. Your HR team should be activated with social, to help bring in the top talent that isn't actively looking for a job. Your operations team and any other team that is customer facing should be looking for ways to integrate social within their department, channel, or product.

Our friends at Altimeter Group produce some amazing thought leadership and research around the current and future state of social business, and you should subscribe to their newsletter and webinars if you are newer to (or in the middle of) the process of social business transformation and looking for best practices and benchmarking tools.⁴ Their infographic (Figure 7.4) on social business is about as good as it gets.⁵

• Clear Business Objectives: without them, you don't know what you're shooting for.
• Clear Vision: without it, you don't know where you're going
• Buy-in from the C-Suite: without it, you can't get started.
• Strategic Road Map: without it, your organization's social business initiatives won't align with your organization's business goals.
• Establish Guidelines and Processes: without them, your social media team may tell someone to “cc get a clue.”
• Build and Train Your Team: without doing that, you'll get the wrong people on the bus.
• Invest in the Right Technologies: without doing this, you'll end up buying the newest fandangled technology, which doesn't serve any real business goal.

Once you figure out your objectives, use your data and analytics for insights. Use those insights to help you map your content strategy and your audience intelligence strategy. Almost every fiber of your day-to-day activity will be influenced or impaired by the presence or lack of these two things, your content strategy and your targeted audiences.

It is important to distinguish content strategy from content marketing. The easiest way to think about this is content strategy is like the blueprint to a new custom-built house, and content marketing is like the tools you will use to build it. Each of these serves important but completely different purposes.

Similarly, audience intelligence strategy is focused primarily on the activity of defining the processes by which you will collect, measure, and make sense of the “small data” that you value. Audience intelligence does not imply the buzzword of big data strategy where you collect and measure every data point imaginable just because you can.

In his book Small Data, Martin Lindstrom talks about the tiny clues that uncover huge trends and emphasizes numerous use cases, from Lego to McDonalds and Euro-Disney, that illustrate the power of blending hard analytics data with direct ethnographic research. This allows you to laser in on the metrics that most impact your results within each customer persona.

In 2016 the average shopper required 28 brand interactions before making a purchase decision, according to aggregated client data gathered from interviews with the founders of GeniusMonkey.com, a programmatic platform technology provider.⁶ Also, the average shopper spends only 5 percent of their time online searching and 95 percent of their time engaging with content. You can understand then, why success at the level of execution requires that a sound content and audience intelligence strategy (blueprint) of how you will build and deploy your messaging. You also must measure its impact across the customer journey, and across every department in your company, with documented and clear processes for governance in place.

Measuring what matters is the key at this layer. The integration of the orbiting Operational-Learn, Plan, Do Loop (Figure 7.5) as a rapid way to optimize reliability, and the Innovation-Discover, Design, Deploy Loop to operationalize new insights ensures that you will hone in on the most relevant data to make the most impactful iterations as you execute on the current and future strategies. Below, we will take a deeper look at how you can customize and utilize these interlocking loops, as you execute on a day-in and day-out basis.

Loops, Love, and ROI

As an organizational leader and marketer, your job is often reduced to the qualitative metric of making customers L-O-V-E your brand, while being judged by the quantitative metrics of sales, profits, and ROI. The challenge of innovating and simultaneously providing a positive state of reliability in the customer experience has many of our clients tripping over each other or in a codependent relationship between the marketing, IT, and operations silos, which ultimately causes breakdowns in achieving the desired results while internal frustrations mount. This effect will be compounded further in the coming years as platform fragmentation and disintermediation continue to increase at unprecedented rates of speed. The layers and loops model (Figures 7.5 and 7.6) with the EMF are an attempt to solve this problem.

These two loops interlocked in orbit (on horizontal and vertical planes), ensure that there is no need for a matched cadence between your cycles of innovation and day-to-day execution. In this architecture, a renewable and prioritized dynamic to operationalize future innovations within your existing customer experience is possible while you continue to deliver your existing processes to your customer.

The Operational Loop will be applied to each discipline area for which you are executing and seeking to create a greater contribution impact to the overall customer experience. You will have dozens of these across the enterprise, each with their own data measures and KPIs, which ultimately roll up into the overall domain-level strategies and department-level KPIs. Within this horizontal plane, there may be several micronodes that management implements as milestone checkpoints between the primary nodes of Learn, Plan, Do to further illustrate the process by which your team will ultimately deliver increased reliability over time within each discipline.

As we mentioned earlier, you will, without doubt, discover opportunities for innovation from insights gained while executing. Depending on the maturity of your business and industry, you will be able to invest in these insights in varying degree and with varying priority. However, the key thing is that you have a model by which you understand and can communicate to all the stakeholders. You will set out to create predictable cycles of innovation, and operationalize those innovations into the same execution layer, that you have set up to manage the customer experience consistently.

In Figure 7.7, you notice the Innovation Loop overlay with its major nodes of Discover, Design, and Deploy and its micronode milestones that can be customized in number to fit within whichever innovation methodology and process you subscribe. For example, if you were using a lean startup methodology for innovation, you would likely consider the micronode number one as “ideation,” number two as “early validation,” number three as “front end prototyping,” and so on.

It is both an offensive and defensive strategy to build the internal model and infrastructure to listen to the voice of the internal customer (your employee base), as it relates to insights and ideas for new market opportunities. Using the EMF to plug in your lean methodology and agile design processes will give you a powerful yet flexible model by which you can create more frequent cycles of innovation.

A great example from recent years of a company that has done this brilliantly is Mercer. When Julio Portalatin took over as CEO in 2012, the company was turning 37 years old. Mercer is a nearly $4.5 billion/year, wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies (NYSE: MMC) and operates in 140 countries as a leading global consultancy that helps firms maximize the health, wealth, and careers of their most precious asset, their people.

With more than 20,000 employees, this company was not in any way what you would consider to be a nimble startup, yet under Julio's leadership, it has been able to innovate brilliantly and continue to disrupt itself. They have achieved this by putting processes and business units in place, like the Mercer Innovation Hub and its internal Global Innovation Challenge launched in 2014 under the leadership of Partner, Jo-Anne Bloch.

The Mercer Innovation Hub received more than 200 ideas from people across the enterprise in its inaugural challenge. A small number of these ideas were selected through a rigorous vetting process using lean methodology. A diverse innovation team was formed to take these ideas forward to commercialization.

Along the way some ideas progressed, others were dropped, and new ideas emerged. Some have become services that have migrated from ideation and validation through to incubation and soft launch. They are in the market and available to clients, today as Mercer Match™ and Mercer Candidate Care™.

Mercer continues to maintain a pipeline of new innovation, through this challenge annually. Mercer has even invested in a dedicated CMO for the Innovation Hub as of 2016. She works directly with the innovation teams and reports into the C-Suite of Mercer. The role is to help complete the full commercialization potential of its new offerings and to ensure these can flow seamlessly into the overall Mercer customer experience. Mercer executives and managers continue to draw inspiration and insights by looking at external forces such as VC capital flows and customer needs.

Mercer Candidate Care was developed based on industry research that identified for every open job requisition, roughly 219 people applied. Since inherently only a handful of people will be contacted to interview, and only one person will end up with the actual employment, they noticed significant statistical data that brand dilution and loss of equity was occurring in many companies due to a lack of communication and “care” to the candidates that did not make the cut.

Think about the problem they discovered this way. Brand XYZ has raving fan customers and has built a tremendous amount of brand equity over the years through investment into all the right channels of customer communication and experience. Bob Smith is a loyal brand advocate and notices that XYZ is expanding or opening up a job in his market for which he is qualified in his mind. He begins to feel the excitement as he mentally envisions what it would be like to finally work for XYZ after being such a raving fan for all of these years. He completes the online application process and hits submit. Days, weeks, and months go by and he hears nothing. There are no personal portals or people following up with him to allow him to know where he stands in the process. All he has to go on is the autoresponder (DO NOT REPLY) e-mail he received acknowledging his resume and cover letter submittal at step one.

This common occurrence was happening hundreds of times per job listing and causing companies from telecom to consumer electronics to inadvertently turn raving fan customers into lost souls who felt shunned by their beloved brand, and nobody had built a solution to solve it. Now when a company leverages Mercer Candidate Care in its hiring process the other 219 people that applied for each job not only received personalized communication throughout the processes but also were made aware of resources such as Mercer Match™ so that Mercer can help its client companies find other placements for those candidates outside of the organization as a valued added service.

Mercer's innovative efforts have taken months off of the average hiring cycle for candidates out of work and the benefits have been accretive to their clients' brand equity versus dilutive. Mercer Match (download the app free at MercerMatch.com) was launched as an Android and iOS application that utilizes gamification to identify key persona traits, skills, and strengths and uses algorithms to match specific talent efficiently to jobs and cultures where they will best thrive. Through the blend of the internal culture of keeping the customer central in the decision-making process and the investment made to commercialize the best ideas through the Innovation Hub, Mercer has been able to open up new markets for their methodology while keeping ahead of the disruptive forces and capital formations that are impacting the future of HR, recruiting, and personnel management.

The EMF with its layers and loops works as a flexible and malleable resource. It will allow you to make decisions based upon your overall assessments, knowledge, and plans derived from the Insights and Vision Layers. Depending on how mature your business is within your industry and life cycle, you will put a different weight on how much emphasis and depth you leverage the operational loop and innovation loops. EMF is also flexible to constraints like budgets, bandwidth, and human capital to invest in light or deep research and development and commercialization efforts. EMF also ensures that you have a common picture and model for your teams to work with, when explaining where in the process new innovations are, what receives prioritization as it relates to resources, and which domains of the business will be impacted once execution is deployed.

Optimizing the Operational Loop

In business, as in life, there is no way to stop or slow things down so that you can get to work on something new. In fact, our goal is that you will begin to see your business in these layers and loops more clearly, so that you can calm down and speed up.

The easiest node for anyone to enter this framework is actually within the Success Layer and specifically, under the node of Learn. This is primarily because, regardless of your current internal organizational alignment around customer experience, you are currently executing a marketing and sales strategy today. This gives you an automatic list of areas where insights can and will be generated and where learning can occur.

By beginning with your current operation, you can run a series of simple, but important, audits that will uncover areas and gaps that can begin to be iterated. The audits serve as a catalyst of mini data points and proof points of concern, as you make the case for a deeper annual planning cycle to dive deeper into the Insight and Vision Layers.

Humanizing your tactics starts with a series of audits across your current digital universe. We will cover some of the high level areas to consider tackling below, that historically have shown to be great fodder for further discovery and organization commitment. We have also provided some resources or quick exercises you can use to run these audits.

Audit 1: ROT Content Audit

One of the most common issues we find with brands today, as it relates to their digital presence, is that they have invested heavily in content creation and digital asset creation over the past few years under the idea that “more is better.” Thus, in many companies, this has resulted in an unnecessary amount of digital and financial waste.

Even some of the largest and most popular brands—from Starbucks to Disney—have found that their digital presence is filled with tons of ROT. ROT is an acronym for Redundant, Out of date, and Trivial content. ROT is content that lives in the universe of your digital experience, but serves little to no relevant value to the customer you are seeking to engage.

Think about your social media feeds filled with pictures of people's food and selfies and completely useless drivel or clickbait. How many times have you considered deleting your Facebook account only to continue to persist with it? We (all humans) crave better content, not more content.

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) surveys show that only 37 percent of companies in 2015 had a documented content strategy while only 10 percent of companies could tell whether the content was effective at driving increased performance.⁷ All of this activity leads to piles and piles of nonperforming content and over the past few years companies have responded by creating more, using the proverbial “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach. This resulted in an estimated $1 billion in wasted investment related to content creation in 2015 according to CMI.

The following exercise was developed by Anna Hrach at Ethology and is a powerful but simple exercise you can perform immediately to rid your digital presence and website of ROT.⁸

1. R=Redundant (overly wordy and duplicate content)
2. O=Outdated (expired offers, broken links, out-of-date content and materials)
3. T=Trival (not relevant to your brand or customers, doesn't speak in the brand voice or tone, doesn't reflect your brand values or adhere to brand guidelines)

Redundant content examples are most common across channels where they are not made to feel native to the interface. For example: A blog post around a certain topic should not be copied and pasted into your Facebook feed, and a piece of creative around a promotion on Instagram should not be reused without thoughtful creative on LinkedIn, Snapchat, Facebook, or Twitter. Coordinated campaigns across channels requires coordinated creative that ties everything together but does not lack a relevant and native feel to the user experience expectation of each channel. A great visual using beer to explain (Figure 7.8) context before content helps illustrate this to help improve your digital sense around what would make content feel native and not redundant across popular channels.⁹

For a great manual on how to create engaging and native content that is not redundant across channels, we highly recommend Gary Vaynerchuk's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.¹⁰

Outdated content is extremely common in large brands and small brands alike. It is primarily a result of a lack of proper governance. Out-of-date content is harder to spot than redundant or trivial content. It can be an old phone number or extension that no longer works. It is a reference and bio/headshot of a staff member who is no longer part of the organization. It is the events that are over and never got removed from your event calendar. It is the products mentioned on other pages or blog posts that have been discontinued. This is the content you will find deep within pages or subsections of your site.

One approach is to archive content such as news and events after an agreed amount of time in automated way at the time of publication. This removes the content from site search and navigation but allows it to stay available for those that need access to it for other internal reasons.

What about content with a less obvious end date? The best approach is to establish a policy to enforce content review on a frequent basis be it quarterly or semiannually depending on the volume you are producing. This will make sure content producers check their content to ensure it is not out of date. Another way to automate this internal auditing is to use the last modified date in your CMS to trigger an e-mail telling the person who created the page to check it. You should cc the department distribution list and admin as well so that it is dependent on the system, not an individual, if that original author has left the company and nobody else is supporting the content. In either case your content needs flagging.

Since content that produces little traffic is also less valuable, you could automate a notification based upon traffic flows to notify the producers when it has failed to reach a minimum traffic baseline or dwell time. Be careful with this, however, since the traffic and dwell time are soft metrics and not great indicators for all types of content as it relates to their value.

Trivial content is the hardest to deal with typically because there can be disparate opinions within the team as to what is trivial. This is where having a clear and up-to-date document on brand guidelines that includes voice and tone parameters is valuable. The other three most common criteria by which you should assess trivial content are below:

• Analytics (traffic, dwell time, etc.)
• Users' top tasks (that you want them to complete)
• Business objectives (How it maps to achieving your top three)

You can start by looking at how much traffic the content is getting. Remember however, that this is not the greatest indicator because we have seen a frozen enchilada product company think that homemade Mexican food recipes were a great piece of content on their site because it drove tons of traffic. However, none of that traffic wanted to buy frozen Mexican meals, so conversions were next to nothing. This is why the assessment of how that content is doing related to the top tasks you want them to take because of that content and which business objectives it is mapping to are equally important markers. It is trivial if it doesn't have all three and if it has high traffic but not the other two is potentially decreasing the findability of more relevant content.

Some content that is trivial must be there for compliance reasons, so not all of it needs to be removed. You just want to always ensure that ROT content is not decreasing the ranking or findability of your most relevant and engaging stuff. Flagging these for review and instituting governance around how content is published and reviewed gives you a good systemized approach to managing the content monster and ROT.

Audit 2: Brand Guidelines Audit

A deep dive into how to develop your brand guidelines is outside of the scope of this book, but KISSMetrics offers a great article on why you should do a brand audit and a simple way to start.¹²

Audit 3: Heuristic Audit

A heuristic audit will help you uncover what is working and not working on your site as it relates to overall usability for your intended audience. It will identify the short and longer term fixes and areas of concern as you prioritize the touch points you will invest in to drive the most impact.

Good Governance Guidelines

What rules and governance do you need for your content strategy? The ideal content continuum will look something like Figure 7.9 below:

The most basic and powerful rules for good governance around your content strategy and publishing efforts are to establish the following and document them for clear awareness, training, and reinforcement within your teams.

• When are the scheduled cycles for planning and updates?
• When, how, and to what metrics do we assess how content is performing?
• When do we audit our workflows and processes?
• When and how often do we update our process?
• When (and by what criteria) does content get prioritized for creation, promotion, and featured publication?

As we conclude this chapter, we want to encourage all of you to think of yourselves as designers—practical, creative problem solvers. The reality of what great designers do is they solve problems using a variety of tactics and tools through a process of discovery, planning, creativity, and execution.

Design thinking is human-centered and integrates the needs of the customer, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. Figure 7.10 shows the sweet spot where innovation in any process occurs and design thinkers never lose sight of this and use the EMF to help define the problem and opportunities more effectively so that they can focus their energy and resources on finding the solution in the center.

As you move on to the remaining sections of this book and begin to build your ultimate technology stack and arsenal of tactics, we will sunset this chapter and section with a simple summary of how you can “DO” design thinking, even if you have never considered yourself to be a design thinker.

The EMF will support each and every one of these functions as a framework, so you will be well on your way to hacking your way to more efficient optimizations around your day-to-day efforts and overall customer experience.

Design thinking operates in three spaces: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. The EMF mirrors this with its Insights Layer, Vision Layer, and Success Layer. The design thinker approach to the Insight Layer (Inspiration) would be to gather insights, empathize with the customer, define the core problem, and reframe it. At the Vision Layer (Ideation) the design thinker would then brainstorm to generate ideas around how to achieve the stated goal, uncover unexpected areas for exploration, prototype a solution, and gather feedback to validate and iterate design requirements. Lastly, the design thinker would begin to implement at the Success Layer by making the solution real, make it rain, test more ways to make it rain, and iterate.

There is a saying that you can approach the center of town from any angle and it remains the center of town. You have now been armed with the framework and mental models for how to design your organization and enroll all stakeholders around the notion that a great customer experience is the one metric that matters for continued growth and sustainability.

You know how to keep the Zombies at bay, and now it is time to show you how to build the customized data and analytics platforms and tactical plans to go obliterate your competition!

Takeaways from the Success Layer

1. What: At this layer you have implemented a process to optimize reliability around your customer experience, and implemented repeatable measurements of value and a culture of iteration based upon the Kaizen philosophy of never-ending incremental daily improvement.
2. Who: Discipline leads, executive sponsor, agency partners, front line teams, analytics department, and customer success team members.
3. How: Audience intelligence/analytics systems, voice of customer (VOC) programs, performance media tactics, NPS/eNPS, detractor pipeline, and financial support
4. Why: The purpose of this layer is to meet your stated business objectives on time and at/or under budget while creating a fluid feedback and feedforward loop for future planning and funds for continued innovation.