Introduction
This is not a book about social media marketing. Within these pages, you’ll find no hidden formula that will teach a business how to increase friends, fans, and followers. It’s not a book about viral marketing, and it doesn’t condone using social media to broadcast one-way messages to the masses. This book is different.
Many organizations today spend a lot of time, resources, and money trying to understand the social landscape and engaging externally with their customers and prospects. They’re on a quest to become a social brand. They’re investing in Facebook applications, branded communities, and blogs; many also are using online monitoring solutions to listen and see what people are saying about the brand. From this perspective, many companies today are doing a decent job.
Friends, fans, and followers are important, yes. And brands increase their social equity by engaging in two-way dialogue with their constituency, yes. And transparency is key to these external engagements, yes. But while many organizations are trying desperately to humanize their brand, they are failing to understand that they need to humanize their business first.
Therein lies the business challenge. As social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter gained popularity and social customers became more influential, companies of all sizes and from all industries began to join the conversation. Customers learned to expect companies to be part of the social web. And social influencers started criticizing brands for every action—or inaction—they took online.
Companies listened. Organizations are now aggressively hiring community managers and social strategists, allocating budgets to social media, hiring agencies, and creating engagement strategies. They are doing everything a “good” social brand should be doing.
But this book is not about social brands. It’s about an organization’s natural (sometimes forced) evolution into a social business. A social business deals with the internal transformation of an organization and addresses key factors such as organizational models, culture, internal communications, collaboration, governance, training, employee activation, global and technology expansion, team dynamics, and measurement philosophy.
To do this effectively, companies have to get smarter; acquire new technologies, intelligence, and talent; and become more open and transparent. They have to establish business processes, governance models and rules of engaging on the social web that protect the organization yet empower their employees. They have to change the way they do business—and that starts with the people of the organization.
An organization that uses social media to engage externally with customers is a social brand but not necessarily a social business. There’s a huge difference between the two.
From the outside looking in, most people wouldn’t recognize or understand the challenges that social media has created in an enterprise. The anarchy, conflict, confusion, lack of communication and collaboration, and organizational silos that exist behind the firewall are not visible. These challenges make the process of becoming an effective social brand much more difficult and less effective. For some organizations, this quest to become a social brand and a social business is done simultaneously.
The premise of this book is that organizations cannot and will not have effective external conversations with consumers unless they can have effective internal conversations first. This involves much more than internal conversations, conference calls, and a collaboration forum. For this evolution to take place, organizations need to adopt social behaviors in every aspect of their business.
Figure I.1 illustrates the evolution of social business. It started with the growing influence of the social customer. The immediate response to the social customer was that companies began to adopt behaviors of a social brand—brands/companies and organizations started engaging with the social customer on the social web. Today, this is causing a multitude of challenges internally, such as no governance and policies, employees running wild in social media, social media ownership issues, and more for many organizations. Now organizations are trying to operationalize social media internally to become a collaborative social business.
Figure I.1 The evolution of social business
This is the key takeaway of this book.
This book aims to equip business leaders, marketers, and communications professionals with the knowledge necessary to transform their business. It provides actionable insights for them to take back to their teams and organizations to begin facilitating change. The social business evolution will not happen overnight. It may take years. But it has to happen and it will happen. This book helps make that happen.
Chapters at a Glance
Chapter 1, “Human Capital, Evolved,” deals with the organization’s most valuable asset: its people. It addresses the need to facilitate organizational change in an effort to break down organizational silos and communicate more effectively. Much of that communication should involve organizational failures in the social space so that teams can learn what not to do and avoid making the same mistake more than once. The chapter also discusses the importance of gaining executive support from either the CEO or someone close to him or her who can champion the evolution internally. A big part of this chapter discusses the need to empower employees to engage in the social web; it offers examples of how to manage teams and employees across different business units and geographies. The chapter concludes with an overview of three common organizational models related to social media: centralized, decentralized, and a fully collaborative and integrated social model.
Chapter 2, “Surveying The Technology Supermarket,” discusses technology and the importance of choosing the right social software. It’s not a comprehensive overview of every technology vendor in the market; rather, it covers a subset of vendors—some old, some new—that are driving innovation on the social web. The chapter discusses collaboration/internal community software, social listening, and social relationship management vendors. It also discusses the importance of internal scalability and the need to have IT involved when sourcing vendors. The chapter concludes by making a few predictions on the social landscape for Facebook and Twitter.
Chapter 3, “Establishing a Governance Model,” discusses the need for organizations to establish governance models that address employees’ use of social media, disclosure, and moderation policies (on and off domain). Several real-life (and very public) examples illustrate what happens when organizations do not have policies in place to guide employee behavior. The chapter also discusses the need for organizations to become more intelligent through ongoing training opportunities and through noncompetitive collaboration with other companies to share enterprise best practices. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the need to create social media executive councils that will help shape governance, training, and deployment internally.
Chapter 4, “Embracing the Social Consumer,” discusses the evolution of social customers and their growing influence on the social web. It also covers their business counterpart: the social media practitioner, the employee responsible for establishing, fostering, and guiding a conversational exchange with the social customer. The chapter also discusses the difference between corporate social profiles and personal profiles as this relates to social media practitioners. Much of this chapter also illustrates the importance of integrating customer support into social media, as well as using the channels to solicit feedback from the community.
Chapter 5, “In Response to the Social Customer: Social CRM,” is all about social CRM. It defines the process of managing and responding to the social customer via social CRM channels. The chapter goes in depth about various applications and use case models of social CRM and categorizes different types of customers that organizations must pay attention to. Roles and responsibilities are also discussed. The chapter concludes by highlighting three vendors that are taking social CRM to the next level.
Chapter 6, “Establishing a Measurement Philosophy,” discusses the importance for organizations to agree on a measurement philosophy that works for everyone. The chapter also discusses financial impact and nonfinancial impact-measurement philosophies, including ROI-driven metrics, purchase funnel metrics, owned-earned-paid media values, community health, and share of voice metrics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how to measure influence, the value of a Facebook fan, and challenges that organizations will face when determining a measurement philosophy.
Chapter 7, “How to Choose the Right Vendors, Agencies, and Technology Partners,” outlines a step-by-step process for choosing the right technology vendors and spotlights issues to consider before making any purchase decisions. Additionally, the chapter highlights three agency perspectives and three perspectives from Fortune 500 companies (Intel, Cisco, and Adobe) and shares valuable advice on what to consider when selecting a social agency. It concludes with a quick case study showcasing Cisco and its process for choosing technology vendors.
Chapter 8, “Marketing Investments on the Rise for Social Business Initiatives,” discusses the recent trend of organizations allocating marketing dollars to social business budgets, both internally and externally. The chapter cites several research studies from eMarketer, MarketingSherpa, Econsultancy, ExactTarget, Meltwater, StrongMail, Zoomerang, and Alterian as it relates to 2011 predictions and insights into social media budgets within the organization. The chapter also highlights data from the Altimeter Group as to which job functions and social media initiatives the budget dollars are getting allocated to. The chapter concludes with a framework that organizations can use to determine budgets internally and to develop buy-in and support from senior management.
Chapter 9, “Creating a Comprehensive Social Media Strategic Plan,” helps business leaders and marketers define and create a comprehensive social media strategy, taking into consideration the difference in an organization’s mission, goals and objectives, strategy, and tactical plans. The chapter goes in depth to explain the value of audience segmentation and gives global snapshots of social media usage, behaviors, and adoption in Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Finally, it discusses the importance of integrating social media with paid media.
Chapter 10, “The Rise of Customer Advocacy,” examines the difference between influencers and advocates. The chapter details how to create a robust customer advocacy program and highlights a well-known vendor’s program. The chapter concludes with a case study about marketing automation SaaS company Eloqua.
Chapter 11, “Ethical Bribe: Relevant Content Matters,” is about content. It discusses how strategic, relevant content can add business value to the online conversation. The chapter gives specific recommendations for companies on adding value to the conversation, becoming a trusted advisor, being authentic and believable, building trust, and listening. Relevant content can increase the reach of branded messages and increase the organic search results for certain terms.
Chapter 12, “Social Businesses in the Real World: EMC and Intel,” highlights two case studies of companies that exemplify the characteristics of a social business and are succeeding in the social space, EMC and Intel. EMC first gained focus internally and created a fully collaborative, social organization before unleashing its employees externally to engage with customers. Intel, on the other hand, began its journey as a grassroots effort more than 10 years ago when technology experts and IT managers were engaging in forums and chat rooms, talking shop with other IT managers. This natural groundswell effect from employees, coupled with management’s vision to socialize the organization, drove Intel to become a leading brand in social media.
Based on Actual Events
The views, theories, strategies, and recommendations presented in this book are the culmination of my 12 years of experience working in the enterprise; I’ve held positions in top technology firms such as Sony Electronics, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, and Intel Corporation and have specialized in building social media programs that focus on building long-term relationships with customers. In short, I consider myself not an academic, but rather a practitioner with practical in-the-trenches experience and real-world perspectives.
That said, it’s important to make a distinction between this book and many others written on the topic of social media. Most of them are written specifically from the theoretical perspective, which makes sense because of the relative newness of social media, especially within business. Here, however, I’ve focused on practical strategies, tactics, and lessons learned, which can effectively evolve internal culture into something that is much more appropriate and effective for today’s social business.
Hopefully you’ll find such an approach a refreshing change that allows you to quickly and easily apply the ideas presented to your business.