2. Defining Social Business Strategy and Planning

“Tweetable Moment: A social business strategy delivers better content, smarter marketing, and more effective customer relationships.”

—#nextmediaco

The transformation from brand to a media company does not happen overnight. In fact, the foundation of this transformation revolves around the behaviors of your organization. Being able to identify the opportunity, scope out a plan, influence change, and ultimately achieve support from the executives in your company is a process that can take anywhere between 24 to 36 months in some cases. A social business strategy helps deliver this change systemically and with precision. But before I jump into dissecting social business strategy, let’s first discuss how the business world got here in the first place.

Figure 2.1 illustrates a timeline of how social business is becoming top-of-mind today. Back in 1995 when Al Gore supposedly invented the Internet, customers have been gaining influence. With the rise of user-generated content, technology innovation, and the ability for anyone with Internet access and/or a mobile phone to publish forms of media, it’s no wonder companies jumped into social media headfirst. These dates can certainly be argued, but in 2003, companies began to create social media channels to engage with these influential customers. Finally in 2008, companies realized and experienced all of the challenges that social media had created, both internally and externally—hence the rise of social business (see Figure 2.1).

As I mentioned many times before, consumers are tired of being marketed to. They are fed up with the millions and millions of marketing messages that are thrown in their faces and computer monitors everyday. And even when these messages are coming from a third party (Cnet, Techrunch, NY Times), there is still no guarantee as to the authenticity of the messages.

And as I continue to repeat myself again and again, consumers are talking. They are having conversations online and offline about brands. They are sharing their experiences with each other; and they are either praising your brand or tearing it apart like a pit bull. And it’s almost a guarantee that if it’s the latter, they are telling more than one person about it. This is the kind of viral marketing that you don’t really want to be viral.

Additionally, there were and still are social media so-called experts who like to play “Monday morning quarterback” and call out large brands and media companies for the mistakes they make in social media. Unfortunately, many of these gurus have never worked for a brand and don’t understand the complexities of working for a large organization. In most cases, it’s not like these companies are devising a master plan to deceive the world; they just mess up every now and then.

As the hype of social media continued to gain traction, the majority of brands gave in and finally joined the conversation. Some did it well, and others not so well, but it had to happen. They were pressured into it by the external market, bloggers, influencers, their customers, agencies, and even internal marketing teams who wanted to seize the opportunity and jump head first into social media. Understandably, then, they made mistakes, and the subtle conversation suddenly went from, “Brands need to join the conversation,” to, “Brands need to be more open and authentic,” almost overnight.

In the early days, British Airways got slammed on the Internet for being on Twitter for a few months and only updating their account seven or so times. As did Toyota when they had a product recall but failed to inform their Twitter followers about it. But more recently, the criticism has become a lot more complex for a good reason.

In 2012, Kenneth Cole, a well-known apparel manufacturer and retailer in New York, tried to take advantage of the trending hashtag and tweeted the following during a crisis in Egypt where many people had lost their lives:

Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC

What makes this story even more disheartening is that the tweet came directly from Kenneth Cole himself, the CEO and founder of the brand. Fortunately, it took him only a day or two to write an apology on their Facebook page after deleting the tweet.

Another well-known brand, KitchenAid made a similar mistake when an employee used the @KitchenAidUSA account and tweeted something inappropriate about President Barack Obama’s recently deceased grandmother during the 2012 presidential debate:

Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’ Wow! —#nbcpolitics

KitchenAid recanted the statement quickly, with head of the marketing issuing a sincere apology on the company’s Facebook page, but the damage was already done.

These are just two examples of well-known brands that made mistakes using social media. The visibility of these mistakes was external, but the root cause had to do with lack of internal planning and content governance. And, unfortunately, situations like this still happen today, and it’s because companies fail to think strategically about the potential implications of jumping head first into social media without plans, processes, and controls that can prevent predicaments like these. In addition to these challenges they face externally, social media has caused a multitude of internal challenges as well.

• Employees’ inappropriate use of social media

• Internal confusion about roles and responsibilities

• Inconsistent social media measurement practices

• Outdated crisis communication models

• Expanding social media programs globally without proper planning

• Disjointed content and community management practices

• The daunting task of technology selection and adoption

• Nonexistent content governance models

If you Google “fired for using Facebook” or “fired for using Twitter,” you will find several examples of employees who were fired for the things they said or did in social media. In some cases, inappropriate photos were posted on Instagram or Facebook. In other cases it was questionable or offensive tweets, status updates, comments on others’ wall posts, or blog posts. And it’s not always an intern or junior employee who didn’t know better.

Adam Smith, former CFO of the medical supplies manufacturer Vante, recorded a video of himself bullying a Chick-fil-A drive-thru employee in Tucson and posted it on YouTube. This was in response to Chick-fil-A’s CEO Dan Cathy making anti-gay comments on a national syndicated radio show, which also spurred hundreds of protests in cities where Chick-fil-A conducts business. He was fired.

Francesca’s, a women’s clothing retailer based in Houston announced that it was firing CFO Gene Morphis for tweeting inappropriately about confidential business matters. The official announcement said that he had “improperly communicated company information through social media.”

Having a social business strategy in place ensures that there are social media policies and guidelines for your company and that employees are trained on how to use social media professionally even when using their personal platforms.

If I were to ask you the same question, how would you answer? I am sure it would depend on where you report into today. The truth is, you are not alone. Many companies today aren’t sure how to organize their teams or how to identify and assign roles and responsibilities around social media. This is causing distress among teams and hurting employee morale. It’s also causing teams who want to own social media to go out and create their own communities and social media initiatives without integrating with other, internal teams. This results in disjointed content and inconsistent storytelling.

A social business strategy helps you identify roles and responsibilities so that all stakeholders collaborate and integrate their marketing strategies. In some cases, it also helps you or your leadership design new teams and reporting functions.

A social business strategy not only helps you determine what to measure, but it also helps you ensure that all of your stakeholders have a seat at the table when creating your measurement framework.

A social business strategy can be used to create a proactive crisis communication plan, complete with process and escalation workflows, so that corporate communication’s team and employees can be prepared for any crisis that might plague your business.

A social business strategy can help you build governance models so controls are in place that prevent disparate teams from going rogue and creating new social media channels without proper planning.

The mere fact that all these channels exist is concerning to me for a few reasons. Content is finite. With 178 channels, it’s almost impossible to keep content alive, fresh and engaging, not to mention that 95% of these channels were probably created from internal silos and have dying communities. This is because they were probably created for short-term campaigns or product launches. Second, you will learn in Chapter 6, “Understanding the Challenges of Content Marketing,” that it’s not easy to create compelling content so even if the community was still somewhat alive, most likely the content is mediocre at best.

Not only can a social business strategy prevent situations like this, but it can also help drive a content strategy that’s consistent, tells a good story, and is integrated across every media channel—paid, earned, and owned media.

A social business strategy helps you match your brand’s technology requirements with vendors that have the right technical capabilities. It also helps drive adoption through specific collaborative and creative engagement models.

• Social media policies

• Processes that help determine whether to create a new social media channel or use an existing channel

• Password management for branded social media channels

• Processes for approving content before it goes live

HMV is a British retail chain and is the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom and Canada. In February 2012, it faced mutiny as disgruntled employees took over the the Twitter account to express their anger and frustration for being fired. These employees essentially “live tweeted” their own termination and shared the experience with HMV’s 61,000+ followers. Having a governance policy in place could have prevented this from happening.

With all these challenges happening both internally and externally, you need to implement a social business strategy to help minimize risk and streamline internal communication, kickstarting the transformation into a media company.

A social business strategy is a documented plan of action that helps evolve and transform the thinking of an organization bridging internal and external social initiatives resulting in collaborative connections, a more social organization, and shared value for all stakeholders (customers, partners, and employees).

At the core of this business transformation are the people of the organization (leadership, executives, change agents, and so on) as illustrated in Figure 2.3. For true change to happen in your organization, all stakeholders must embrace this change first. Your behaviors, the way you work and the way you communicate and influence others all play a crucial role in this transformation process.

Change is imitated, and it’s based on actions. It’s like a manager who preaches work/life balance and yet sends emails at 1:00 a.m. and expects responses by 8:00 a.m. A balanced lifestyle will never happen unless the manager changes his or her own behavior first. Once that happens, others will “imitate” and follow suit. Taking it back to this context, if you want to drive social business adoption within your organization, you must, in turn, become social and begin to build social behaviors into your everyday workflow and job routine.

In addition to behavior change, this pillar also involves team dynamics and organizational structure. The easiest way to explain it is that you need to build your teams in a way that allows you to scale your content operations internally. This might mean that you create a centralized editorial team to manage all social media initiatives or a decentralized team that has more autonomy and freedom to try new things and innovate. It also involves an employee strategy that empowers, trains, and enables your employees and colleagues to engage with customers externally.

The second pillar is process or workflow. Most internal processes will vary and be different based on the organizational challenges you must solve and the general company culture. The constant, which will be similar in most companies, is the establishment of social media policies that will help shape employee behavior on the social Web. Other processes to consider are controls for other teams that want to expand social media into new markets or channels; processes that will determine how/when new branded social media channels will be created as well as the “content supply chain.” This process will be the most critical as you think about transitioning your brand to a media company. The content supply chain is a set of processes that govern content ideation, creation, approval, distribution, and optimization of content.

The last pillar is platform or technology. After behavior change has manifested and you have documented the processes and controls, the last thing to think about is technology. Certainly, you might already have technology solutions in use, and that’s fine. In this case you have to work backwards and attempt to fill in the gaps. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, the social media vendor space is extremely crowded. There are social CRM vendors (SalesForce, Nimble, InsideView, SpredFast, Sprinklr), content publishing vendors (Kapost, Compendium, Relaborate, Cadence9, Contently, Skyword), online monitoring vendors (Radian6, Adobe Social, Sysomos, PeopleBrowsr, Tracx, Netbase), brand advocate platforms (Dynamic Signal, Zuberance, Fancorps, Influitive, Extole, Napkin Labs) and finally, community platforms for internal/external collaboration (Jive, Lithium, Yammer, Social Cast, Igloo, and IBM Connections). Yikes! And, this is just a small sample of vendors to choose from.

The list can potentially continue forever, but as you can see, there are several software vendors to consider, so it’s important that you plan accordingly and collaborate with IT to build a scalable road map for technology implementation and user adoption.

Now that you understand the different pillars of social business, let’s take a look at the social business value creation model.

• Increase in revenue

• Decrease in calls in the call center (cost savings)

• Increase in employee morale

• Employee retention and hiring top talent

• Cost savings by improving internal business processes

• Product (and process) innovation

To my demise of being ridiculed by my colleagues who are “anti-marketing,” when I consider social business, I have to consider the brand, content, and customer experience as well. All three of these elements must co-create value to its stakeholders. Consider the Social Business Value Creation Model in Figure 2.4.

The model looks complicated, but it’s quite easy to understand. Let’s start with the area marked number 1.

Customers provide value to your brand in a variety of different ways. The most obvious is through sales. The more they buy from you, the higher your revenue will be. This is value. They also provide value by indirectly selling your products to others, which is a form or brand advocacy (that is, when they aid and influence their friends down the purchase funnel through organic conversations)—definite value creation. And whether you solicit it or not, in some cases they will give you feedback about how to improve your products or services. Sometimes the ideas will be good, and other times they won’t. This completes a one-way value exchange from the customer to the brand.

To complete the value chain and moving on to number 2, your brand provides value back to the customer simply through two-way dialog or general community engagement. The good news is that many customers don’t need incentives to talk about you or with you. They just want to know you are listening. And even then, some customers just have a natural affinity toward your brand and will talk about you regardless if there’s an absence of engagement. Having an amazing product or service definitely helps too.

While saying “thank you” or retweeting your customer’s content creates just a small percentage of value, there is a lot more to it. You must be prepared to solve your customers’ problems quickly and efficiently. Doing so not only provides customer value but also drives brand advocacy. The 2012 State of Social Customer Service Report showed that 71% of customers that get their problems solved quickly and efficiently are more likely to recommend that brand to others. In some cases, you might have to provide sales support if the opportunity presents itself.

As we transition to internal elements of the value chain, it’s important to emphasize that there should be a core team that is responsible for driving all of these work streams, both internally and externally. In the next chapter, I discuss this concept, referred to as a Centralized “Editorial” Social Business Center of Excellence, in more detail.

A social business strategy creates value internally by enabling the brand to scale through content governance, process creation, and technology enablement. In looking more deeply at number 3, value is created when structures and workflows are put in place that allow for team collaboration and knowledge sharing, whether it be various marketing, product or country marketing teams. Employees and teams feel a sense of empowerment and ownership when they are a part of an initiative that delivers significant value to the organization and brand. They will naturally own it.

Also there is a high degree of value when teams and employees are able to increase their own social proficiency. This is done through technology and training.

To close the loop on the Social Business Value Exchange Model, employees and teams deliver value back to the business in a variety of different ways. First is through product and process innovation. A few years ago, I was at a marketing conference for grocery executives. I was talking with a VP of Marketing for a well-known grocery retailer, and he was telling me that his business was growing and expanding really fast. So rather than opening up additional stores, he wanted to first see if he could optimize the checkout process, so he had hired a Six Sigma Black Belt to try and eliminate the waste. It makes sense, right? He just wanted to get customers through the checkout line faster. The first thing I asked him was if he involved the cashiers in this initiative. After all, they do live through the process day in and day out and help customers eight hours a day. He scratched his head and said that it was a really great idea. Not sure if it ever happened.

The point is that when teams come together to solve a specific business goal or challenge, great ideas are born. If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can thank an employee. Prime came to life in late 2004, the result of a years-long search at Amazon for a scalable loyalty program. An Amazon software engineer named Charlie Ward first suggested the idea of a free shipping service via a suggestion box feature on Amazon’s intranet. And rumor has it that Amazon Prime accounts for 20% of Amazon’s overall revenue. Not a bad idea if you ask me.

Empowering employees is a huge opportunity in value creation. Employees of a company are trusted as external spokespersons when consumers seek information about a company’s product and services. They are even more credible than the CEO, according to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer. However, empowerment is not actionable. Simply creating a training program, telling employees to join Twitter and engage with customers won’t work. A social business strategy, if done right, will enable and mobilize employee advocacy and brand journalism through technology, process, content enablement, and ongoing best practice sharing.

A social brand is any company, product, or individual that uses social technologies to communicate with customers, their partners and constituencies, or the general public. It’s a very basic definition, but going back to the value exchange model, it’s essentially numbers 1 and 2. It’s the way a brand communicates externally, whether they do a good job or bad one.

I defined a social business strategy earlier in the chapter. Again, it is a documented plan of action that helps evolve and transform the thinking of an organization bridging internal and external social initiatives resulting in collaborative connections, a more social organization, and shared value for all stakeholders (customers, partners, and employees).

So in other words, having a social business strategy enables better content, smarter marketing, and more effective customer relationships. Figure 2.5, created by the Managing Director of Edelman Digital in Chicago, David Armano, shows the relationship between a social brand and social business and how each must work together to produce business results.

The following is an example that will help bring clarity to the differences between a social brand and a true social business.

John is irritated because he dialed in to a customer support department and was put on hold for 30 minutes. No one ever answered his call. He goes to the brand’s Facebook page and leaves a comment expressing his anger. No response. He then @mentions the brand directly on Twitter. No response. So he writes a blog post criticizing the heck out of the brand and shares it all over the social Web. Still, no response.

In most organizations, a corporate Twitter account is owned and managed by someone in the Public Relations or Marketing department. And because of the organizational silos that still plague businesses today, these teams probably aren’t talking with their colleagues in customer support. So here’s a situation where a social brand is being unresponsive and angering customers because the escalation processes don’t exist and there is an absence of internal communication and collaboration.

Now, let’s take a different angle. Assume the marketing or PR person did escalate John’s tweet or Facebook comment to customer support, which then took care of his issue. He’s happy now and he’s telling others. And then the same thing happens with Mary, Chris, Steve, and several other customers. And the customer support team realizes that it needs to shift internally to address all of these online inquiries. Progress, for sure. Happy customers are always a good thing to have.

But a social business strategy goes above and beyond addressing isolated customer support issues. It takes that customer feedback (because its people are communicating and working together internally) and fixes the root cause of the problem, whatever it is.

Another quick example that has been cited in hundreds of case studies and blog posts is when companies create products with their customers, giving birth to innovation. Take the Starbucks’ Splashstick as an example—the little green stirrer that also prevents the spillage of hot coffee. The Splashstick was a suggestion from a community member in the MyStarbucksIdea community website. In co-creating a product with its community, Starbucks changed the coffee-drinking experience for millions of customers and solved a vexing business problem of hot coffee spillage.

Of course, I’m oversimplifying the issue because situations like these take time, a commitment to change, processes, and the establishment of governance models. But, Starbucks is a good example of an organization reaping the benefits of social brand and social business alignment. First, they are using social technologies to communicate externally with their customers. They communicate publicly with their partners (employees who work in retail stores) using Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/starbuckspartners). And, lastly, they are taking the collective feedback from the community and innovating their products or service and solving customer support issues quickly and efficiently—all characteristics of a successful social business.

So to recap, here is why a social brand and social business are completely different:

• A social brand focuses on external communications.

• A social business focuses on building collaborative business models that enable external communications and marketing.

• A social brand is primarily about engagement with customers.

• A social business empowers and enables employees to communicate externally with customers.

• A social brand is owned by marketing.

• A social business should be owned by the entire organization.

• A social brand is measured by clicks, impressions, reach, Likes, comments, retweets, and so on.

• A social business is measured by a change of behaviors—specifically when social behaviors become a part of employees’ daily workflow.

One way in which social brands and businesses are the same is that they serve the same purpose and underlying goal, which is creating value for all stakeholders—customers, partners, and employees. Customers create value by offering insights and opinions (both good and bad) about his or her brand experience. The social brand creates value with the customer by listening, engaging, and solving problems and then sharing feedback and insights internally. And finally, the social business creates value for customers by listening to the collective feedback of the community and innovating its products, services, policies, and processes—thus, creating the full cycle of value creation.

Sprinklr’s engagement platform allows you to publish simultaneously to multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, Wordpress blogs, and YouTube Channels—even Weibo, RenRen, and QQ. This functionality alone will save you a lot of time not having to repost the same material multiple times. The platform has built-in Participation, Spam, and Influencer Indices that tell you which of your friends, fans, and followers are the most active and most relevant within your communities. Additionally, the system allows you to search, filter, and analyze audience members or create rules to automatically tag, profile, and prioritize them for you, taking advantage of its built-in Natural Language Processing technology to determine the sentiment of each conversation and provide a score for each message.

Figure 2.6 is a screenshot of Sprinklr’s engagement dashboard, which allows for community managers and/or customer support agents to drill down on the community activity.

Sprinklr also gives you the capability to build Social Applications and deploy them—with varying degrees of permission and governance—to regional and local areas. The Social App Suite allows you to build polls, contests, surveys, and more. One of the more powerful uses is for social customer service application, reducing time-to-resolution and improving customer satisfaction for large brands such as Target Canada. Essentially, the application lives within Facebook, but it’s connected to an existing database of answers to give customers the ability to ask specific questions or search through the knowledgebase to find answers. On the back end after a customer asks a question, support agents or community managers are notified and can either answer the question directly or escalate it to someone who can, all through the Sprinklr platform.

As described earlier in the chapter, governance is a huge challenge for brands today and this is where Sprinklr really excels. The platform allows you to create custom workflows and controls that determine who in the organization can post content, respond to content, approve and edit content, add new channels, configure permissions, and run reports. This is essential in media company operations. It also comes in handy if you work in a decentralized organization where there are multiple stakeholders using social media to engage with customers. The system allows administrators to monitor the activity of all users; it also allows moderators to monitor the activity of customized groups of users and social network accounts. Sprinklr provides reporting widgets to add to its Reporting Dashboards (covering logins, actions, and so on) by user, groups of users, accounts, and so on. It also provides an audit trail visible on each message actioned against in some way (for example, moved to a queue or replied to) in the system. Finally, Sprinklr provides a centralized calendar that will help you get a view of the content planning process, which is essential as you prepare your brand to transition into a media company.

Having a lot of amazing data is worthless unless you can distill it into actionable insights and takeaways. Sprinklr’s reporting engine offers you the ability to sort, analyze, and present data across one channel, multiple channels, functions, and also at the brand level. It reports on engagement (Likes, comments, shares, retweets), share of voice, community growth and attrition, and also provides operational reporting details, such as average response time, time-in-queue, and others. There are 300 predefined native reporting widgets. Figure 2.7 shows one view of Sprinklr’s current reporting dashboard.