Chapter 12

Building a Social Organization

If you're wondering if social media adds a new layer of complexity to corporate policy, wonder no more. Just like everything else in its wake, social media impacts corporate governance. Even if a corporation has corporate governance guidelines in place now, it still needs to revise them to include social media guidance.

If your corporate leaders forbid employees from using social media as part of their sales and marketing strategy, they're missing out on a powerful tool. Just like every other iteration of Internet tools — for instance, websites and e-mail — social media techniques must become part of the fabric of a brand's strategy.

For your social strategy to succeed, your business needs to foster a collaborative environment among employees. That is ultimately the resounding message of this book. Collaboration is absolutely essential when you're building a successful social CRM model. In order to fully utilize all forms of information, it's important that your internal units work in a collaborative way.

In this chapter, we explain how to build consensus among the leadership within your company. We also highlight some of the key ideas surrounding effective communication between business units using internal social networks.

Defining the New Internal Ecosystem

Ecosystem collaboration can be defined as the “new business reality.” Edelman Digital explains the new internal ecosystem as the new business reality and identifies the following three truths that explain this reality:

Ultimately, this business environment is about empowering every aspect of your business to work more efficiently. Isn't that what collaboration is all about? In practice, this new reality also means that requirements are changing drastically for companies all over the world. This change will be easier for some employees than for others. Some people and organizations are naturally more prone to collaboration. You may know the team players, as well as the ones who seem to struggle with collaboration or managing change. To show employees your effort to foster collaboration is sincere, be sure to lay the groundwork for what we call true collaboration.

True collaboration goes well beyond meetings, training, and committees — although those activities can certainly jumpstart collaboration. True collaboration takes place when your business has the following:

Meeting the Needs of a Social Organization

Today's corporate leaders are faced with changes coming from all sides of the enterprise. To understand the needs of the changing social organization, you'll find it helpful to look at the factors that are creating that change:

Changes in data management and technology dramatically affect how the social enterprise functions.

Most leaders agree that technological changes are the most difficult to tackle because they produce the most rapid changes. The following list shows some of the most important and most rapidly evolving technical issues that play a role in enabling social business and social CRM:

So, now that you understand the challenges and benefits of today's rapidly changing technology, you're ready to consider how you can help the key players in your social CRM strategy leap over the obstacles and head toward the benefits.

Getting the CEO on board

The capabilities of the CEO make a huge difference in the corporation's ability to adapt to technological and other changes. At no time in history has the ability of CEOs to understand these changes been this front and center. Your CEO needs to possess a good understanding about how technology affects every part of the organization. If a technologically savvy CEO leads your business, the leadership he or she can provide is a wonderful asset to implementing social CRM.

Unfortunately, current leaders may not have the training and experience to make effective use of these technologies. Indeed, given the speed with which technology is implemented, it's unlikely that most C-level executives have this training and experience.

Kristin Zhivago, of Zhivago Management Partners, offers some ideas on how to handle this situation. At the 2012 Optimization Summit (as reported by Daniel Burstein on the Marketing Sherpa blog), Zhivago introduced seven CEO personas that help you get buy-in from your CEO. Each CEO persona characterizes the one area in which a CEO is typically most comfortable. The seven personas are as follows:

Zhivago says that once you identify your CEO's style, you can determine what information you can provide to help that executive champion the technical changes that drive social CRM. Consider where your CEO falls along each of these continuums:

Challenging chief marketing officers to support the social enterprise

Moving on from our discussion of CEOs, we next tell you about chief marketing officers (CMOs) and their preparedness for social media and changing technology.

Social media has really thrown CMOs a curveball. Previously, they were the ones who owned the marketing campaigns. They could dictate what was needed from other departments and decide when campaigns would start and stop. That's not possible today.

For one thing, many social media campaigns don't have ending dates. They evolve from one type of outreach to another. For example, a social media campaign might start out as a promotion offering a discounted product and end up managing an ongoing user community.

In addition, salespeople might have their own campaigns running on a specific channel — perhaps LinkedIn — that don't directly involve the marketing department. To add to the complexity, data streams in from other departments that bear on the decisions that the CMO needs to make. The current CMO role is fraught with confusion. Many aren't sure where to place their emphasis.

In IBM's 2011 study, Today's CMO: Innovating or Following?, CMOs were asked, “Do you plan to increase or decrease the use of the following tools and technologies over the next three to five years? You can see the results of the survey in Table 12-1.

Table 12-1 Change in Tool and Technology Budgets

What's really surprising about the statistics in Table 12-1 is the percentage of CMOs who plan to decrease spending in areas like social media and CRM. These two areas are critical to the organization's future growth.

The CMOs inability to see the potential in those areas doesn't bode well for their organization as a whole. Most analysts agree that spending should increase to accommodate rapid changes in technology (discussed earlier in this section) and employee needs (which we discuss in upcoming sections). The CMOs who don't see that will be caught short.

Supporting business units

The leadership of the company is just the first stop in convincing the company to integrate a social CRM strategy. Other management positions need to be developed into social CRM rock stars! Each business unit will have its own goals for engaging socially across multiple channels.

Integrating a socially charged ecosystem within the company has many benefits associated for each department, as highlighted in Table 12-2. The system incorporates the idea that every policy, every system, and everything your business does will impact the outcome of the company. It's important to understand the benefits for each department when implementing a social CRM ecosystem within the company.

Table 12-2 Social CRM Benefits to Each Department

Table 12-2 is by no means a full view of how social CRM reaches each department, but this information can help get the social business wheels spinning.

Make sure that every department understands the importance of implementing an internal social strategy. It's hard to change, and the leaders within your organization must be prepared to implement the solution — because with the benefits also come the challenges of integrating software within your company.

Realizing the social challenges

All the benefits sound great, right? If integration were easy and without challenges, we'd all have embraced it fully by now. Full integration is the perfect ideal, the goal. You need to strive for it, and with hard work you'll reach your goals. But if you make a step toward integrating your internal systems with the customer at the forefront of your strategies, you're sure to realize many payoffs.

Challenges are made to be met and overcome. With some awareness of and preparation for the challenges ahead, you'll be better equipped to rise above the obstacles. Here are some of the challenges that you can expect when you're building a collaborative environment:

The challenges discourage many enterprises from taking the plunge. It's true that embarking on a truly collaborative ecosystem will take time, energy, and resources, and the payoff may not be realized for years to come.

Establishing an Internal Social Network

To boost the collaboration process, many businesses have looked to internal social networks. Instead of using the power of social networking only to brand and market the business, businesses have uncovered the value of idea sharing within a secured internal network.

For instance, Facebook offers closed and private groups that require an invitation to join. It's a free way to connect employees on a platform that fosters idea sharing, collaboration, and communication. It doesn't require an appointment invitation, weekly meeting, or knock on the door to get brainstorming activities started.

Also, IBM Connections offers a software solution for businesses to establish their own internal social network, unaffiliated with an outside site. This gives the enterprise more control over how to configure the site. Aside from engaging employees, businesses using an internal social networking site can also invite partner and vendors to the site for collaboration activities and file sharing. Members of an internal network can upload and share files within the network.

Social networks, when used with true ingenuity in mind, offer a powerful tool for idea sharing and collaboration. Here's a list of some of the things that your organization can do with these tools:

Shall we go on? Here's a challenge: add at least five more collaborative opportunities to this list.