Chapter 3

Setting the Strategy Roadmap: Identify and Prioritize Initiatives

Success Factor #4: Define the Strategy Roadmap

Once you have a long-term goal expressed in the vision and centered with business goals, it’s time to put together the plan for how to get there. The roadmap development process lays out all of the potential ideas and then weighs them against the organization’s readiness and ability to execute. The prioritization of social initiatives—what you will do, when, and just as important, what you won’t do—lies at the heart of the roadmap.

All too often, we find social business teams drowning in a sea of bright, shiny objects, with more and more appearing all the time. They think their job is to stay on top of the latest technologies and options, but in reality, their job is to provide focus amidst all of this chaos. In fact, less than half of the organizations we surveyed at the end of 2012 said that they had a detailed roadmap in place that extended for longer than a year. Some of the companies in our research have run social media programs dating back to 2004. All these years later, you can see that even among the best of them, there are still cases where the organization’s social media effort continues to flounder. A strategy roadmap is the answer.

In an examination of social media plans, Altimeter found that most consisted of a series of initiatives organized by channel (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and so on), usually laid out for the next six to twelve months, supported by listening, editorial calendars, and creative campaigns. Missing were: (1) how these initiatives created business value; (2) long-term planning on what needed to be developed and invested in today to enable strategic activities in the future; and (3) an iterative process to reevaluate whether the initiatives need to be revised to address changing business objectives or marketing conditions.

A clearly articulated roadmap adds discipline and clarity in an area where it’s very easy to move in too many directions at once. The rest of this chapter discusses how to pull together that long-term roadmap for your social business strategy. It consists of three steps:

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have an initial roadmap for your social business strategy. Let’s get started!

Identify Initiatives

Altimeter’s framework can be used to identify social business initiatives (see Figure 3.1). This is not an exhaustive list, but we have found that when working with clients on their roadmaps, it’s a good starting point from which we can start to generate ideas that are closely tied to business goals.

Figure 3.1 Social Business Initiatives Framework

• Learn: What we can learn from customers and community
• Dialog: The nature of our interactions with them
• Advocate: How we build advocacy among customers and community
• Support: How we support them via social channels
• Innovate: Using customer and community to drive innovation

For each category (Learn, Dialog, Advocate, Support, Innovate), we provide a brief explanation of the type of initiative and then provide a few examples. At the end of each section, pause to reflect and identify a few initiatives in that category that will help you achieve your business goals. We suggest that you write those ideas on individual pieces of paper or index cards, as you’ll be ordering them in the next step.

Here are a few examples to get you started:

Let’s get started with a quick look at each of the initiative categories, starting with Learn.

Learn: Glean insights from social engagement

At the most fundamental level, social technologies allow the organization to really listen to and discover what customers, employees, and partners are already saying. In many ways, it’s an opportunity to really get to know people on their terms and to honor their needs. This is different from listening to keyword mentions and merely tracking sentiment. The result: actionable insights that can be used to make decisions.

For example, many business units at GE begin their social business journey with a “voice of the customer” or insight study, conducted through a combination of digital market research, online surveys, and focus groups. Andy Markowitz, director of global digital strategy at GE, recommended, “The first and most principled thing to do is a voice of the customer or insight study. How can you decide what to do in social if you don’t understand what your customers do with it?” This can be done through digital market research and direct customer engagement such as online surveys or focus groups. Additionally, social data offers insights into customer behavior and preferences. Data mining companies can provide deep contextual analysis of conversations and people within important social networks.

Some specific ways to Learn include:

• New insights. What can we learn that we’re not getting from other sources? For example, you can track reputation, learn who are key influencers of your customers, and also learn from the complaints of customers themselves. For example, ratings and reviews sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor capture what customers liked—and didn’t like—about my local or travel-related business, respectively. And Levi’s integrates Facebook likes into its product pages so that it can learn more about each customer.
• Decision support. How should social data influence our plans? For example, you can understand product requirements, fine-tune media investments based on what is resonating, or support real-time customer needs, especially in the midst of a crisis. An example of crisis support is the American Red Cross, which tracks Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to find emergency victims and forwards that information to first responders to help get aid to them. They also use that data to position community relations teams. Lastly, during disasters, they also monitor traffic from people eager to help through donations—which also gives the Red Cross insight they can use to direct people to the best ways to donate.
• Performance improvement. How can we do better next time? Social channels can act as an ongoing focus group that can inform how a content strategy or customer experience can be improved. Besides simply monitoring for consumer comments, you can also proactively reach out to specific audiences for input. Nescafé in the Philippines tapped their Facebook fans as a survey group, encouraging participation by giving people points to interact with the pages’ different apps. The points could be redeemed for products and promotional items—so if you complete a survey, you get fifty points. As a bonus, Nescafé found that the more the fans engaged, the more they liked the brand and also ended up purchasing more product.

For many companies, listening to and learning about what is being said in social channels is a must—especially as customers increasingly expect organizations to be listening and responding. Bridget Dolan, VP of digital marketing at Sephora, advises, “Infuse the client’s voice into everything you do. Giving them a place to communicate with you and be heard is paramount right now. It’s not cutting edge anymore—it’s just table stakes.”

Best Practices: Learn Initiatives

• Search your brand and products or services on sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Get Satisfaction to get a full picture of what people are saying about you. Or use social media listening tools, such as Radian6, NetBase, and Crimson Hexagon, to facilitate deeper listening capabilities.
• Learn and understand the data and begin to establish benchmarks.
• Incorporate what you learn into your strategies.
• Be realistic about and plan for the organizational impact.
• Be brave. Stand up for the hard truths about the data. You will find that there are examples of customers sharing experiences that are not at all close to how you market the company. This is important to capture.
• Research: Listening is just the beginning. Conduct competitive research, identify trends, and most important, make sense of everything and present your findings in the language of the C-Suite.
• Repeat these steps over and over at fixed intervals that work for your business.

Dialog: Deepen relationships with conversations

When organizations engage in Dialog, they make a commitment that social media is no longer just a “nice to have” but instead is seen as a critical element in relationship building. Most organizations do not enter into this lightly—quite the opposite. Some fear being overwhelmed with negative comments. Others worry about encountering a deafening silence of nonengagement. Those businesses that do well with engagement realize that social is not just about “the funnel” or a direct path to purchase. Nor is social relegated to simple engagement metrics. Social media is already affecting the entire customer lifecycle, and it’s time for you to get in front of it.

Some specific ways to have a Dialog include:

• Asking simple but meaningful questions. In response to people posting that they just left a store, Kohl’s asks them directly, “What did you get?” The response is immediate, and is usually an itemized list that amplifies their satisfaction with the experience. This is a relationship not just between Kohl’s and its customers, but also between customers—they frequently exchange ideas, sales in stores, and buying tips with each other. This is relationship building at multiple levels.
• Scaling and localizing the conversation. Companies ranging from Applebee’s to Whole Foods enable restaurant and store managers to update their specific locations’ Twitter and Facebook pages. To date, Whole Foods has a robust presence for every one of its more than 340 grocery stores. With the widespread enabling of conversation, these organizations have a fighting chance of engaging at a more personalized, relevant level than if dialog were all done from a small cadre of people at corporate.

And don’t forget about one of the most important relationships to develop—the one with your own employees. Companies are increasingly looking to enterprise social networks (ESNs) and social collaboration to engage employees internally (see the Altimeter Group Report Making the Business Case for Enterprise Social Networks, February 2012).5 At Kelly Services, CEO Carl Camden is a key supporter of the company’s ESN, explaining, “We are trying to build an inside culture that encourages more speed and innovation at the front lines. It’s critical to enable people to communicate without going through a chain of command.” Organizations also see ESNs as a formative part of creating a culture of sharing that further prepares the company for engagement with customers externally.

Best Practices: Dialog Initiatives

• First listen, then add value. Go where the conversations are happening already and look for ways to expand, extend, and add value in ways appropriate to your goals and the community’s. Use brand monitoring to define your “conversation calendar.”
• Be clear about your conversation horizon. Is this a short-term, focused conversation or long-term dialog?
• Create a “conversation calendar” as opposed to a content calendar. Write a series of conversation-starter tweets, Facebook posts, or title-and-opening-sentence starters for blog posts that would help achieve that goal through social business.
• Make and keep dialog commitments. Tell people what they can expect and deliver on it; that is, if you say it’s a regular blog, then blog regularly.
• Ensure that your dialog voice is consistent with your brand. Don’t try to be what the brand isn’t. Balance the individual voice, brand, and what’s appropriate to the platform.
• Be human. Just as in real life, the same rules of conversation etiquette apply—be a good listener, considerate, kind, and thoughtful.
• Establish a path for internal decision making. Sometimes conversations introduce challenges that require attention and input from distinct stakeholders. Develop a decision tree and assign roles and responsibilities for a variety of likely scenarios (including a crisis).

Support: Assist people and create a great experience in the process

Support through social technologies is an obvious option, and it happens in two ways—either by directly interacting with the organization or through facilitated peer-to-peer support. And keep in mind that employees and ecosystem partners, as well as customers and prospects, deserve Support initiatives as well.

Some potential Support initiatives include:

• Providing support through direct engagement. A natural extension of providing customer support is to do so directly through social channels—and to do it in near real time. Online eyeglass seller Warby Parker notices when people post a picture or tweet after they receive their new glasses—and frequently replies back with a personally recorded video message welcoming them to the Warby Parker experience.6 Similarly, Metro Madrid responds personally to almost every inquiry or issue, especially about train or route delays.7
• Facilitating peer-to-peer support. The UK-based mobile network giffgaff uses forums to provide all customer support online. The customer community uses incentives to encourage participation, ranging from badges to receiving “payback” points that can be redeemed for prepaid phone credit or donated to a charity of their choice. The result: half of all customer service issues are handled by the community, and the average response time is under three minutes.
• Integrating direct and peer-to-peer support with the support backend. When Autodesk set up their new support community, they saw it as a continuum from customer self-service to peer-to-peer support, and then finally a tech support agent speaking with the customer. But when the service was launched, Autodesk’s team overzealously reached out to customers in the discussion forums, leaving few opportunities for “super fans” to participate. After discussion, Autodesk established a service level agreement (SLA) whereby if a post went unanswered for more than twenty-four hours, a support case would be automatically opened up in their customer support system. This gave a chance for customer peers to chime in while also not jeopardizing overall customer satisfaction. The result: within the first six months, half of the issues were resolved within the forum, calls were down 25 percent, and the Net Promoter Score improved by 10 percent.8

Best Practices: Support Initiatives

• Shift your mindset. Think of customers’ complaints not as threats, but as opportunities to develop loyal customers, and build support systems accordingly.
• Be nimble. Watch where the conversations are happening, and take your support to where your customers need it.
• Beware of unintentionally rewarding public complaining. As companies accelerate social support efforts, responding to customers in social channels can reinforce public complaining. Know when to shift the conversation to private channels. On the flip side, introduce programs that encourage and reward positive feedback.
• Integrate with traditional support structures. Plan for long-term integration of social support into call centers, CRM, and the like.
• Fix the root cause. Watch for patterns in support needs, and use data to fix root cause issues with products and services.

Advocate: Enable the best fans to speak on behalf of the organization

Advocate initiatives involve turning your customers and employees into enthusiastic fans, empowered to speak on your behalf. This means that they engage actively in social channels, ranging from simply posting reviews on third-party sites to participating in full-blown advocacy programs created by companies. We divide advocate initiatives into two general categories:

• Informal. This is where you as an organization enable advocacy by encouraging and enabling your fans and employees to share your message. Some examples of this include providing a link to Yelp to write a review, encouraging someone to like a page, or giving a prompt on the dining table to check in on Foursquare.
• Formal. These programs are exactly what they sound like—a formalized and orderly way for companies to create advocates. Creating a formal program provides scale and execution, as well as increased reputation and improved feedback, while also decreasing support issues. For example, the Discovery Channel created Discovery Educator Network (DEN) to encourage and support the use of Discovery programming by educators. People in the network can apply to be designated STAR Discovery Educators who in turn receive their own DEN blog as well as get to attend special events and the DEN summer institute. That official recognition—and reward—is a major motivator for would-be advocates.9

Best Practices: Advocate Initiatives

• Cultivate loyalty. Don’t think of advocacy only in terms of short-term campaigns. Cultivate ongoing relationships with enthusiastic customers to build loyalty.
• Be clear about commitments. Clarity about expectations and commitments is critical. A well-thought-out program can benefit both advocates and the company; a haphazard one can do more harm than good.
• Leverage advocates’ networks. Take advantage of customers’ social graphs through advocacy apps or promotions. See how Zuberance, Appinions, and Involver help brands.
• Recognize participation. Put advocates front and center—find out what motivates them to advocate and build recognition that speaks to those motivations. Make them feel part of the company.

Innovate: Tap the energy and ideas of others

Innovation is seen as the future lifeblood of the organization—and there is tremendous opportunity for organizations to use social technologies to source ideas to innovate on products and services. Innovation through social usually takes one of the following forms:

• Crowdsourcing. It’s one thing to have a suggestion box into which someone can slide an idea. But it’s another when you actively solicit new ideas from people and then make them visible for comment, voting, and even ideas on the ideas! The U.S. General Service Administration (GSA) created challenge.gov to encourage organizations, people, and even government employees to bring forward ideas that address pressing problems facing the GSA. The idea behind crowdsourcing is that the combination of prizes and/or psychic income will entice people to share their ideas in these innovation hubs.
• Community-based innovation. Traditionally, organizations use focus groups to test ideas for new products and services. But what if you could run an ongoing, community-based focus group for months instead of just a two-hour session one evening? Organizations like to use small communities run by firms like Communispace to glean insights, either directly from pointed questions or from their own natural discussions and conversations. Although they are an offshoot of listening and learning initiatives, a primary purpose of these communities is to actively collaborate on new ideas.

Best Practices: Innovate Initiatives

• Be intentional about the commitment. Engaging for innovation requires that you be prepared for anything. You’ll need internal processes to take in feedback and external policies to set customer expectations. This needs to be a well-orchestrated process.
• Communicate constantly. Provide frequent status updates on ideas in the works, whether rejected or implemented.
• Be prepared to disappoint. Stand firm on the criteria for ideas that get implemented. Don’t be swayed by the masses—it’s OK to decline popular ideas, but be transparent about why.
• Recognize contributors. Recognize those who have successful ideas and those who don’t. Let people know their voices matter.

Prioritize Initiatives Against Capabilities and Value

Now that you have all of your social business initiatives assembled, you’ll need to prioritize them against two criteria:

1. Capabilities. Does your organization have the skills and capabilities to execute the initiative today? Do your partners? How much effort would it take to acquire those skills and capabilities? How long would it take to develop those skills and capabilities?

Several companies we interviewed conducted audits during planning to understand existing capabilities, as well as to understand how competitors are and are not using social media. And many run internal readiness audits to identify gaps and opportunities in how to support social media and what training and education are needed to build early understanding and support (see Altimeter Group’s Report Social Business Readiness, August 21, 2011).10

One of the benefits of conducting these audits is to build the case for taking action—but care must be taken that the actual initiatives are accretive to business goals rather than a reaction to competitive actions. For example, executives at Ford wanted to do an internal audit to make sure that the social team knew what everyone was doing around the company and would uncover as much as possible. A total of eighty interviews took place, with the social team providing a snapshot of where Ford was in terms of social activities, as well as significant gaps.

2. Value. How much value does each initiative bring to the organization, in terms of achieving strategic goals? How much investment is needed to create that value? It’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of measurement success when you have a mountain of engagement data at your fingertips. But you must look beyond the number of interactions or percentage of messages with replies or shares and understand how engagement creates business impact. This isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either.

For the purposes of creating your roadmap, create a shorthand way to understand the capability and the value for each initiative. You could simply denote them as low versus high in each area, or create a five-point scoring system. The key is to create differentiation between them so that you can begin prioritizing.

One of the ways to do this is to map your initiatives out against a two-by-two grid of capabilities and values (see Figure 3.2). Place each of your initiatives in one of the four areas of the grid. Those where you have high capability and also see high value should be on your short list of initiatives to pursue. Those that are high in value but low in capability become areas of investment. Those that are low in value but high in capability require closer examination—you may be able to increase the value to the organization over time. And finally, those that are low in capability and low in value—well, those are nice-to-haves that should stay on the back burner for the time being.

Figure 3.2 Prioritize Social Initiatives by Capability and Value

The purpose of this exercise is to help explain to program sponsors why their favorite initiative is not being pursued today, given the overall priorities of the strategy. If they want the priorities to change, then they need to either invest in the capabilities of the organization or restructure the initiative so that it creates more value.

Now that you have your initiatives prioritized, it’s on to the final step: creating your roadmap.

Create a Long-Term Roadmap

With your prioritized initiatives, you can now create a three-year strategic roadmap. We’ll be doing this for each group of prioritized initiatives at a time.

First, take the initiatives that are immediate opportunities (high capability and high value) and plot them out over Year 1. Make your life easier by dividing it into the next six months and then the following six months (see Figure 3.3). If there are any dependencies between initiatives, be sure you address them. For example, Learn initiatives—such as putting in place robust monitoring of customer comments—tend to be a prerequisite, so place those first on your roadmap. Work quickly and don’t labor over the exact order of the initiatives—you’ll have a chance to come back later.

Figure 3.3 Prioritize Social Initiatives over Three Years

Second, take the next group of initiatives that are high in value but low in capabilities. These will require some investments, often in either skilled people or technology platforms. Be sure to identify those requirements, perhaps even making them initiatives in themselves. Understand the dependencies, and again plot them out on the timeline. You may be extending some of the initiatives into Year 2 at this point. There are some, however, that may need to be expedited because the value to the organization is great.

Third, take the last two categories of initiatives and spread them out over the timeline. Don’t dismiss these outright, because the landscape may change to the point that the value of an initiative increases—or you increase your capability in an area where it will then make sense to deploy. Note that you may be extending out into Year 3, especially for some of the initiatives that are low capability and low value.

Lastly, take a look at the overall timeline and move initiatives around as needed to align dependencies and prerequisites. Also take into account any initiatives that are strategic, because they support key organizational goals—move those initiatives up on the timeline and flag them, especially if they will require immediate investment because capabilities are low.

Step back and take a look at your timeline—it’s now your initial social business strategy roadmap, laid out over a year-by-year timeline. You may want to capture this in a more formal Gantt chart that groups the initiatives by strategic goal, so that you can see how it all lays out together (see Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4 Example: Social Business Initiatives Organized by Goals into a Three-Year Roadmap

With a roadmap in hand, it’s time to think about the organization, resources, and technologies you will need to execute on that strategy. That’s our focus in the next chapter.

Notes

5. Charlene Li, Making the Business Case for Enterprise Social Networks. Altimeter Group, February 22, 2012. http://www.altimetergroup.com/research/reports/making-the-business-case-for-enterprise-social-networks.

6. See Warby Parker’s Twitter feed at https://twitter.com/warbyparker.

7. See Metro Madrid’s Twitter presence at https://twitter.com/metro_madrid.

8. More information about the Autodesk case study is available at http://www.lithium.com/customer-stories/autodesk.

9. More information about the Discovery Educator Network is available at http://community.discoveryeducation.com/.

10. Jeremiah Owyang, Social Business Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally. Altimeter Group, August 31, 2011. http://www.altimetergroup.com/research/reports/social-business-readiness.