Chapter 2

Laying Foundations: Goals, Vision, and Executive Support

Success Factor #1: Define the Overall Business Goals

It seems so simple or even commonsensical: base your social strategy on your overall business goals. But businesses instead place greater value on case studies or industry best practices, without consideration of whether or not the examples accurately reflect parallel business outcomes. Time after time, we have found organizations confusing a series of social media tactics with strategy, with the focus on simply having a presence across all platforms rather than understanding how these activities lead to real positive business impact. Without building the tacit frameworks for how the social strategy connects to and aligns with strategic goals, you have a series of tactical projects—and you risk unsustainable trajectories. David Fenech—vice president, Interactive Marketing & Creative Services, for Kelly Services—addressed this well, advising, “Always go back to the objectives you’re after. If you lose sight of that, you’ll be wasting time and resources quickly.” Starting off on the right foot means defining, up front, which business goals take priority. The key point here is that the answers will be different for every business.

The focus on business goals is intentional. As we’ll see later in this chapter, ensuring the support of key executives is crucial—and you won’t be able to do this unless your social business strategy is aligned with the small number of objectives at the top of their agenda. Social media initiatives gain greater visibility as they begin to have real business impact. As this happens, social media shifts from a bottom-up, curiosity-driven groundswell to top-down focused initiatives that have real business significance and thus strategic impact. This captures the attention of C-level executives and transforms social media into social business—in which the objectives, metrics, and activities truly focus on driving impact to the bottom line. We’ve learned that in the process, the social media team learns to speak the language of the C-suite. Instead of talking tweets, likes, pins, shares, check-ins, and the like, strategists tie social KPIs to business KPIs. Strategists must make the leap from social media reporting to earn a bona fide line item on executive dashboards and scorecards that evaluate and measure the bottom line.

Identifying Which Goals Matter

Organizational goals and objectives exist throughout the organization, as it is the reflex system that validates progress and performance. Goals are determined at the enterprise level, within business units, and also inside departments and teams, and each will affect social media strategies differently. Again, starting off on the right foot means defining goals up front—and ensuring that stakeholders at different levels and across departments or geographies are aligned toward those goals.

In one recent client engagement, the project kicked off with the team prepared to give us a detailed briefing on all of their social activities. But instead, we asked them to start at the beginning and review their three-year strategic plan for the organization. Without that context, we could not begin to offer relevant advice nor craft a coherent strategy.

At Adobe, Maria Poveromo, senior director of PR, AR, & Social Media, adheres to this approach, saying, “Our mantra at Adobe is starting with business objectives when thinking of the development of social business strategy wherever it may live in the organization. The social objectives should be a natural extension of business objectives.”

To get started with your social business strategy, dig out a copy of your corporate vision and mission statement, your current strategic plan, and long-term goals (if those goals are unclear, see the following exercise). Make a copy of these and stick it next to your computer screen or paste a copy on the front of your notebook. The goal: always keep your organization’s objectives front and center as you craft your social business strategy. You get extra credit for reviewing existing data that conveys customer expectations, areas where current efforts fall short, and insights into where new opportunities are present. These are the building blocks of your social business work.

Now, think through how social initiatives can help you achieve these goals at a high level. We’ll go into more detail in Chapter Three on how to do this, but you should be able to identify a few ways that organizational and social goals can be linked. For example, one goal may be to improve customer satisfaction, raising it from a 60 percent to a 70 percent satisfaction rate. You can see how activities in social channels could influence that number; for example, how social customer support can help mitigate issues before they spread.

Exercise: Connect Social Goals to Organizational Goals

Let’s apply this right away. Take a few minutes to write down your organization’s top strategic goals for the year—list up to five of them (see Figure 2.1). Here’s a template to get you started:

Figure 2.1 Aligning Business and Social Goals Worksheet

• Write down your top five strategic goals.
• Identify how you would measure progress or attainment of these business goals now.
• Brainstorm a few social business initiatives that could potentially support that business goal (treat this as an exercise for now; you’re not developing a full-fledged program at the moment).
• Identify metrics that connect social business metrics to the business goal metrics.
• Identify gaps that will need to be addressed in the social business strategy.

Tying Social Strategy to Business Goals: The Metric Holy Grail

“We tend to overvalue the things that we can measure, and undervalue the things we cannot.”

— John Hayes, CMO of American Express

Measuring and demonstrating the business impact of social media isn’t easy. Our Altimeter colleague, Susan Etlinger, researches how organizations can go beyond so-called “vanity” metrics—such as likes, comments, retweets, reach, views, and the like—and maps these and other key metrics to tangible business outcomes such as revenue generation, brand reputation, or cost savings.3 Because of the focus on driving business outcomes, more traditional metrics are now making their way into social media measurement frameworks. Referring traffic, click-throughs, conversions, leads, sales, and net promoter score (NPS), among many others, can extend across functional areas and business units, allowing you to compare the impact of social on business versus (or in conjunction with) other activities.

For example, the social media team at Adobe piloted an integrated campaign for a new product for six months. The team found that social could be undervalued by as much as 94 percent because of the inability to attribute the sale back to social efforts. Initially, search was given all the credit for the sale, but they are now in the early stages of being able to attribute value to social media relative to conversions. The marketing department went beyond simply tracking mentions and sentiments; instead, they connected how an increase in mentions or a change in sentiment corresponds with business impact. Ann Lewnes, CMO at Adobe, stressed the importance of acquiring meaningful metrics early on: “Get measurement under control. This starts with setting clear goals and deciding, from the outset, what you’re looking for. Otherwise, you’ll drown in a sea of data. Hand-in-hand with this is examining the metrics that really matter—the ones most closely tied to bottom-line results.”

This isn’t impossible. It just starts with taking what you know and aligning it with what’s new. In the end, social media are just new channels to help you achieve your goals. They simply require a much more transparent and thoughtful approach, brought to life with a human touch. To this end, our research found that 84 percent of respondents were able to tie social media to customer and community insights, another 51 percent saw improvement in decision making, and a third connected social media to investments and financial impact.4

So the key to developing the right metrics is to stay away from the general (and ultimately not very useful) question, “What is the ROI of social media?” Be much more pragmatic and specific by seeking out metrics that will help you answer the following questions:

• Given these objectives, how do we measure progress or attainment against that objective?
• What role can social media play in helping us in this effort?
• How did social media contribute to that objective?
• How did people respond?
• Why did social media contribute (or not contribute)?
• What did we learn? And how should we approach this differently next time?

What Happens When Business Goals Aren’t Clear?

We understand that not all organizations have goals and priorities clearly communicated across the organization. This makes creating a social strategy infinitely more difficult. In one such case, a national financial organization wanted to extend their robust social media efforts from the corporate marketing department to each physical branch. The goal was to scale social media as a way to better serve customers at a local, personal level.

But there was a fundamental problem: the firm was undergoing a major strategic review of their overall physical location strategy. Because the underlying business strategy and goals were in flux, the social team couldn’t earn internal support for a social strategy. The result: the organization put local social initiatives on hold until it was clear what the local business objectives would be. In the absence of business goals, it’s sometimes better to hold off until they are defined and consensus is earned. It comes back to learning the language of those executives who are not yet convinced of the business value of social media. Plus, it’s a good exercise for any social media strategist, as the process expands their horizons and perspective.

So unless you are clear, at least directionally, which overall strategic goals matter, it will be difficult for you to design a social business strategy. There’s little value in going around in circles with no goal in mind or trying to justify something that you know is the right thing to do but just can’t articulate why. So do yourself and your leadership a favor and insist that you are all aligned on goals and outcomes—or delay your social business strategy planning until you have this first fundamental step done.

Success Factor #2: Establish the Long-Term Vision

When’s the last time you read your company’s vision statement? Does it inspire you? Could it guide your direction in social media?

It’s not enough just to have goals in place; you also need to have a long-term vision that communicates to all stakeholders why this journey is taking place and the value it returns. The vision articulates the future customer, employee, and stakeholder relationships and experiences that will come about as a result of the social strategy. Properly done, the vision statement for the social business strategy becomes both the reason and the rallying cry for change. We often refer to it as the North Star, as it guides you in direction and purpose. It becomes the very statement that articulates aspirations and sets the stage for alignment. Transformation champions use the vision statement to lead businesses toward transformation by communicating direction, goals, business priorities, and the value proposition for customers, employees, and the organization as a whole. Vision also helps to reset culture and minimize politics—but it requires careful thought to ensure that the statement builds trust rather than engenders fear and skepticism.

Ford’s first social strategist, Scott Monty, formulated the following vision statement shortly after his arrival in 2009: “To humanize the company by connecting constituents with Ford employees and with each other when possible, providing value in the process.” Note that there is no time bound on this—it’s aspirational and communicates a future state. We recommend that you craft your vision as a future state, usually three years out. That’s long enough to really envision a significant change, yet short enough that you can create a roadmap to make that vision a reality. In our experience, too many organizations get caught up in the now and in every new trend that comes along. Without a long-term vision, you’re forever caught in a game of catch-up.

Just like a good message, your strategy has to be memorable. To that end, craft a vision statement that tells a good story about why you are embarking on this social business journey, the end goal, and the road that you will take to get there. Create something that your colleagues, shareholders, and customers can stand behind. Your goal is to create a vision story that is so compelling and inspirational that it bears retelling over and over again throughout your organization. Each person will tell the story slightly differently, usually through the lens of their participation and perspective. The words matter less than the conveyance of an end state or the journey on which everyone can agree.

Creating a Vision Statement

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind as you craft your social strategy vision statement:

• Focus on relationships with customers, employees, and/or partners in the future. Don’t let today’s constraints limit what can happen.
• Define the experience you wish people to have, feel, and share.
• Think of it as a story that you could tell about that relationship. As humans, we are much more attuned to remember stories than individual words.
• Write a statement that will stand the test of time—and of technology.
• Do it quickly—your gut reaction is usually right. Resist the urge to wordsmith on your first draft.
• Keep it short and memorable.
• Back it up with a longer narrative that explains how you got there and why it’s justified—this is your Jerry McGuire moment!

Following are vision statements that were developed by participants at Altimeter’s social strategy workshops—note that these were developed during a twenty-minute working session and that most have been adopted, with few revisions, at their respective companies. On the surface, these seem like oversimplified and general statements. But in the context of their businesses and, in particular, in light of their business objectives, these vision statements resonate. The secret to this: Don’t. Over. Think. It.

“Inspire customers to create unforgettable experiences through our passion and people.” (Agency for anonymous client)

“To harness a peer perspective that connects actionable insights and solutions to common challenges.” (Research and consulting firm)

“Unite people who share a passion for creating a ‘world free of medical errors.’” (Health care database provider)

Exercise: Writing a Vision Statement

Writing a vision statement shouldn’t be an arduous, wordsmithing-focused task. But we will say this: you are trying to capture the zeitgeist or the spirit of how social media can make your company more social and approachable while improving its efforts in achieving important business outcomes. Here’s how to create a quick-and-dirty social business vision statement in just a few takes. Remember: the goal isn’t to create a perfect statement—rather, the goal is to create a directionally correct statement that will serve as a forcing function to earn buy-in and get people started on the journey together.

1. Take your organization’s vision, mission statements, and brand promise. Read through them and note: do they indicate how your organization wants people engaging with it to feel about doing business with you? If it doesn’t, this is the time to think about how that might evolve based on modern market expectations.

2. Also note how your customers feel about doing business with you. You can do this by capturing a sample of shared experiences. Do they align with your company’s vision and mission statements? Note your organization’s biggest strengths and also its greatest opportunities to improve using social.

3. Brainstorm keywords that describe your organization’s customer relationship aspirations and desired experiences over the next three years, which is a point far enough away in the future to imagine a very different state, but not so far that it feels infeasible to plan around. We suggest putting the words on sticky notes so that they are easy to rearrange as needed.

4. Review the words and phrases and cluster similar ideas.

5. Write a one-sentence three-year social business vision for your organization. Keep it short, memorable, and actionable.

6. Flesh it out into a story, then go back and revise your sentence, once. Don’t lose the narrative; it will come in handy and eventually serve as the sheet music that helps everyone sing the same song.

7. Then, most important, stop.

8. Pick a small group of stakeholders to help you gain broader perspective. Again, don’t wordsmith on this first round, but do make sure it represents different points of view.

This last part is essential. Rather than spending your energy revising and refining the words of the vision statement, make sure that it is a story that others can understand and retell themselves. An unshared vision is a vision unheard, so it needs to resonate, and it needs to be memorable.

Success Factor #3: Ensure Executive Support

Executives become an important stakeholder in social business strategy development and are instrumental in granting additional budget and resources to scale strategic social media. Yet as we shared earlier, our research found that only 52 percent of companies surveyed agreed with the statement, “Top executives are informed, engaged, and aligned with our social strategy.” That’s a problem—and you are the problem solver.

Executives become an important stakeholder in social business strategy development as they review goals and objectives and ensure that social strategies are aligned. Additionally, executives are instrumental in granting additional budget and resources to scale strategic social media. One strategist explained why top executive support is so essential: “Having a C-level sponsor who is ready to take on risk is crucial to success. The lack of having this person on board will eventually create paralysis and stall social strategy progress.” And at Comcast, SVP of Customer Experience Tom Karinshak noted that the company’s social strategy is reviewed regularly by CEO Neil Smit. Karinshak said, “In terms of overall strategy, social’s tie-in to other channels gets briefed all the way up to Neil Smit, CEO of Comcast Cable. Social is part of our overall strategy to transform the customer experience. This is really a cross-company effort up to senior levels.”

Depending on the scale and scope of your strategy, the level of executive engagement in the early stages may be minimal, likely even just a passing awareness that social efforts are being explored. Danna Vetter, VP of consumer strategies for ARAMARK, shared this best practice: “Get all stakeholders involved from the beginning, and make them as knowledgeable as possible. Let them take ownership. . . . Remember: it’s a change management challenge as much as anything else.”

Garnering Executive Engagement

One social strategist told us, “Many of our board members and executive leaders aren’t even on Facebook, so social media is foreign to them.” We found that in organizations whose executives do not use social technologies, social media as a business tool is often limited in reach and understanding within the organization unless a business case is made.

To get through to these executives, go back to the business goals that you identified earlier in this chapter. Take the time to embellish them. Bring forward the plans—or even better, the results from pilots—that demonstrate how social can meet at least one of their strategic goals. No pilots yet? Then use this opportunity to make the case for one. Everything comes down to putting social business into the frame of the executives’ business focus, rather than trying to get them to understand social business. So if launching a key product into a new market is a top priority, demonstrate how social can influence the path to purchase for that customer group. Kate Quinn, former senior vice president and CMO for Wellpoint, explained how they did this and offered this advice: “Help [leaders] understand the importance of social media to customers. Make it come to life for them.”

Then there are executives who appear to be supportive of a social business strategy but are seen as simply “waving the flag” of social business and not investing their attention and social capital into the social strategy. We had the opportunity recently to work with a leadership team that wanted to know how to increase employee engagement both in their internal collaboration platforms as well as externally with customers. But when asked which of them had engaged in social channels with either employees or customers, not a single hand went up. Embarrassingly, they realized that the problem lay at the top of the company—they couldn’t credibly call for employees to engage if they weren’t setting the example themselves.

Best Practices: Getting Executives Onboard

Here are a few of the best practices that we have seen implemented by organizations to get their executives engaged:

• Emphasize relationships and outcomes, not social media channels. When we work with executives, we rarely talk about specific social media channels. Instead, we focus on the types of relationships, experiences, and outcomes that are most important to these executives and on the information that they could share to improve those key relationships. In one case, we took an executive’s iPhone and asked him to make a video on the spot about a recent customer visit. Once recorded, we posted it on the company’s internal social network to the sales team. Seeing the reaction and impact encouraged the executive to do more of this. And a focus on speaking rather than writing seems to work better—we have yet to meet any executives who didn’t like to talk about their objectives!

At GE, CMO Beth Comstock provides the leadership and also the vision for how social will transform their B2B relationships with customers. On Comstock’s approach to social business, Andy Markowitz, director of global digital strategy at GE, said, “Beth has forged a vision that not only sees that this is a way to connect with customers, but also more about a way of doing business.” And she also leads by example, with an active Twitter account: @bethcomstock.

• Use reverse mentoring to increase their practical knowledge of social media. Pair the executive with an up-and-coming social media subject matter expert (SME) who understands the connection between social business and business goals. Schedule regular mentoring sessions between the executive and the SME to review specific examples of how social media advances business goals. Do not use these sessions to give general introductions to social media channels—be sure to always walk into the mentoring sessions with a specific learning objective that connects social to business goals.
• Press for credibility. There is nothing worse than an executive team exhorting employees to use social media when they themselves have little idea what they are asking the organization to do. To be clear, we are not calling for executives to start their own blogs or Twitter accounts! But executive leaders need to be able to credibly say that they understand what it means to be a social business. Until these executives have walked in the shoes of customers and employees and experienced, at a core and visceral level, what it means to be engaged via social media, they lack the credibility to lead a social business. And executives hate to lose credibility in the eyes of customers, employees, and partners.
• Connect the dots. Social media is a new channel, albeit much more powerful and democratized than other traditional platforms, in your overall channel strategy. Executives need to hear that you’ve done the due diligence to show how social media can play a part in the overall program and where it might outperform older or less productive programs. The big thing here is to communicate the complementary and discrete opportunities that social offers for all stakeholders, as they may be concerned that you’re trying to compete with them rather than complement their current initiatives. This is about delivering an integrated or dedicated experience to your connected customers.
• Leverage social media as an enabler. Executives in our research share a common response in their take on social media. They believe that social media is not a means to an end but rather an enabler of business objectives. All they ask is that you take the time to help make the case. In many ways, you become an attorney of sorts. Gather evidence, plot a story and the role of the players, and of course offer the final argument that shows how social media impacts the bottom line or helps the organization achieve or accelerate business priorities.
• Create a sense of urgency. Sometimes the best way to win over executive support is to leave them with no other choice. There are several ways to do this, of course. One way, unfortunately, is in the time of crisis. Many negative stories or experiences that go viral in social media are linked to drops in share value, loss in revenue, and hits to overall reputation. Even the most stubborn executives will want to know how social media will help in these scenarios or learn from others’ crises. Making the case doesn’t just need a negative series of events to gain an executive audience. Sometimes a sense of urgency can be related to true market status. Are competitors showing significant momentum? Is there a disconnect in customer experiences?

Now that we have laid the foundation for the social business strategy, it’s time to think about the actual strategy roadmap itself.

Notes

3. Susan Etlinger, The Social Media ROI Cookbook, July 24, 2012. http://www.altimetergroup.com/research/reports/the-social-media-roi-cookbook.

4. Etlinger, The Social Media ROI Cookbook.