1. Suitable Human Resources 1.1. Introduction Some argue that human resources professionals are late-adopters when it comes to anything technology related, including social media. But the popularity and possibilities that social recruiting have brought to the profession are causing HR pros to take notice. While part of HR’s role is to mitigate legal risks, another very large component is to help support and cultivate the corporate culture. As social media becomes more defined in the business world, human resources professionals will have a significant opportunity to leverage this powerful medium in many aspects of the business. So when it comes to implementing a social media strategy while having no clue of how to do so, isn’t it a good idea to find or train the most suitable people for the job? If you want to use your existing employees as social media marketers, it is fine because they already know the product better than any other external associates but shouldn’t they be eqquiped with the additional knowledge of how to advertise and promote yourself online? If you feel like outsourcing, you should pick the the best professionals associated with social media. It is a good idea to know what are the best criteria that will make you select the most suitable agency of freelance professional. The aspect you might have not thought about, is finding new employees for the vacancies that come up in your company and not for your social media campaign, using the digital channels. How can you do that without being misled or lost in that huge number of potential new recruits. Keep reading to find out how.
1.2. Who should apply social media strategy on a company and how? The HR within a company that should apply social media marketing department along with some help from the IT department and they should be trained on the additional social marketing P’s as explained below. Like commercial marketing1, the primary focus is on the consumer--on learning what people want and need rather than trying to persuade them to buy what we happen to be producing. Marketing talks to the consumer, not about the product. The planning process takes this consumer focus into account by addressing the elements of the "marketing mix." This refers to decisions about 1) the conception of a Product, 2) Price, 3) distribution (Place), and 4) Promotion. These are often called the "Four Ps" of marketing. Social marketing also adds a few more "P's." At the end is an example of the marketing mix. Product The social marketing "product" is not necessarily a physical offering. A continuum of products exists, ranging from tangible, physical products (e.g., condoms), to services (e.g., medical exams), practices (e.g., breastfeeding, ORT or eating a heart-healthy diet) and finally, more intangible ideas (e.g., environmental protection). In order to have a viable product, people must first perceive that they have a genuine problem, and that the product offering is a good solution for that problem. The role of research here is to discover the consumers' perceptions of the problem and the product, and to determine how important they feel it is to take action against the problem. Price "Price" refers to what the consumer must do in order to obtain the social marketing product. This cost may be monetary, or it may instead require the consumer to give up intangibles, such as time or effort, or to risk embarrassment and disapproval. If the costs outweigh the benefits for an individual, the perceived value of the offering will be low and it will be unlikely to be adopted. However, if the benefits are perceived as greater than their costs, chances of trial and adoption of the product is much greater. In setting the price, particularly for a physical product, such as contraceptives, there are many issues to consider. If the product is priced too low, or provided free of charge, the consumer may perceive it as being low in quality. On the other hand, if the price is too high, some will not be able to afford it. Social marketers must balance these considerations, and often end up charging at least a nominal fee to increase perceptions of quality and to confer a sense of "dignity" to the transaction. These perceptions of costs and benefits can be determined through research, and used in positioning the product. Place "Place" describes the way that the product reaches the consumer. For a tangible product, this refers to the distribution system--including the warehouse, trucks, sales force, retail outlets where it is sold, or places where it is given out for free. For an intangible product, place is less clear-cut, but refers to decisions about the channels through which consumers are reached with information or training. This may include doctors' offices, shopping malls,
mass media vehicles or in-home demonstrations. Another element of place is deciding how to ensure accessibility of the offering and quality of the service delivery. By determining the activities and habits of the target audience, as well as their experience and satisfaction with the existing delivery system, researchers can pinpoint the most ideal means of distribution for the offering. Promotion Finally, the last "P" is promotion. Because of its visibility, this element is often mistakenly thought of as comprising the whole of social marketing. However, as can be seen by the previous discussion, it is only one piece. Promotion consists of the integrated use of advertising, public relations, promotions, media advocacy, personal selling and entertainment vehicles. The focus is on creating and sustaining demand for the product. Public service announcements or paid ads are one way, but there are other methods such as coupons, media events, editorials, "Tupperware"-style parties or in-store displays. Research is crucial to determine the most effective and efficient vehicles to reach the target audience and increase demand. The primary research findings themselves can also be used to gain publicity for the program at media events and in news stories. Additional Social Marketing "P's" Publics--Social marketers often have many different audiences that their program has to address in order to be successful. "Publics" refers to both the external and internal groups involved in the program. External publics include the target audience, secondary audiences, policymakers, and gatekeepers, while the internal publics are those who are involved in some way with either approval or implementation of the program. Partnership--Social and health issues are often so complex that one agency can't make a dent by itself. You need to team up with other organizations in the community to really be effective. You need to figure out which organizations have similar goals to yours--not necessarily the same goals--and identify ways you can work together. Policy--Social marketing programs can do well in motivating individual behavior change, but that is difficult to sustain unless the environment they're in supports that change for the long run. Often, policy change is needed, and media advocacy programs can be an effective complement to a social marketing program. Purse Strings--Most organizations that develop social marketing programs operate through funds provided by sources such as foundations, governmental grants or donations. This adds another dimension to the strategy development-namely, where will you get the money to create your program? After explaining the P’s of SMM it is time to see how to guide your employees to use social media correctly. Training is a very important aspect when dealing with employees, for any success some form of training of employees must be done. In this day and age the social media has become a big driving force in the business world. It is therefore important for employers to make sure, that the employees make use of the social media as a means of
bringing in more revenue. The following tips will help an employer train their employees more about social media. 1. Drafting of a policy for social media is the best way to start off with the training. The policy can be used as a public message that can be shared with customers and existing partners. The policy should elaborate on the commitment of the company to listen to the customers and partners and also be a social organization that wants to have conversations all the stake holders. When the communications channels between the employees and customers, then there will be many constructive interactions with the customers and anyone in the sphere of influence. 2. Employees will naturally use the social media for their personal gains too. Because of the aggressive marketing tools and methods that other competitors have employed, it is crucial for an employer to encourage and also train employees how to market their services or good on-line. Therefore employees should be trained how to tap into the social media groups like Face book, twitter among others on how to attract more customers and how to market their products. 3. Employees being the first contact in the social media groups, they should be trained on how to brand and market the goods or services well enough online. The social media policy in place should be flexible but also allow the employees to socialize with their main goal of driving traffic to the company website or office. 4. Training of employees on how they can share company information in the social media in a professional manner is very important. It is a good idea for an employer to motivate and reward employees for a job well done on the social media scene. But the employees must always abide by the rules and regulations stipulate din the social media policy at work. 5. Trying out new dynamics and adapting of new training programs that will help the employees learn more about the social media marketing tools, and is a good head start for any company. Let the employees be flexible and change their social media marketing styles, they should be able to adapt any new workable social media marketing tools that are unleashed regularly. The employees should be able to engage freely in conversations with customers using the social media marketing tools.
1.3. How should a company hire people associated with social media? This is the true value of social media for your online presence. In an era of greater transparency and authenticity, social media is rapidly delivering a new standard of interacting more person to person, so the right people should be hired in order to provide the greatest value to your company.
a. Hire a skillful Social Media Manager2 A good Social Media Manager must have the following skills:
1. Passion: You may agree or disagree here, but I think the single most important characteristic in any people-facing job is passion. If you are truly passionate, you will easily develop a lot of the other characteristics below, as well as learn competencies. It's also one of the most difficult characteristics to fake; if you aren't passionate, people can tell. There are several reasons why passion is paramount. Firstly it's an all-consuming job, so if you really don't love it with every fiber of your being, it will be drudgery and you will burn out quicker than you type your next tweet. Secondly, people can tell when you don't really care, and if you are in the frontlines evangelizing your company, you won't garner enough credibility in the market. Passion is contagious, and the best sales people are the natural ones. At the same time the toughest sales job you will ever do is on yourself; so if you are truly passionate, committed and knowledgeable, you won't have trouble influencing others without "selling". 2. Domain expertise and credibility: As I mention above, the passionate person with a strong capacity for learning, will learn competencies particular to your company quickly. Therefore, don't make a mistake of hiring based on a couple of technical skills over the characteristics in this article -- those can always be taught. However, you do need to evaluate this person's professional credibility in the general space you are in. I'd certainly recommend listening to social media conversations to understand who the formidable bloggers, thought and conversation leaders are, and either hire them or rely on their word-of-mouth recommendations. Because this person will be the "face" of your company, you want to make sure they are credible and know what they are talking about. Check out this brief video I created on finding the right people through social media. 3. Natural Evangelism: Following from above (passion and credibility), your social media / community manager will be an evangelist of your company and your products. Because this person will represent your company in many ways, ensure that this person's value system, brand and voice are consistent with your brand and value system. 4. Service DNA: Because this person is the face of your company, (s)he needs to be infallibly committed to helping people in social channels. Your customers, prospects, partners, analysts, etc. will ask for your help and advice, and you need to be there. In reality, there's oftentimes more than one person can handle, and we'll talk about building a team a little later. It's important for this person to realize that customer service is the new marketing, and to be able to instill these values in the rest of the company. 5. Personal, personable, firm and respectable: Related to the above, your "face" has to be approachable enough for people to want to connect with. This person will be the proverbial "guy/gal you'd love to have a beer (or carrot juice) with". At the same time, this person is not a pushover, and knows how to establish boundaries effectively. Being service oriented does not mean that you will entertain foul behavior, or cater to trolls. 6. Thirsty for knowledge and committed to education: Social tech move at breakneck speed these days; there's a new social network or product, it seems, daily. As a social media practitioner, you must keep your toolset full of sharp new tools, but also must have enough experience to tell what a real trend is and what's a shiny new object that will burn out in 3 months.
7. Risk tolerance, ability to fail fast: The fast-changing landscape of social technology also necessitates more and faster course-correction. It's absolutely crucial to commit to social media programs and stay with them long enough to evaluate their success or failure. However, it's just as important to remain flexible and nimble, allowing to course-correct. Your social media leader must be comfortable with constant change and failing fast, because the faster you fail, the faster you learn and move on to something that works. 8. Balance of perfectionism with a bias for action: To say that the social media world expects real-time is an obvious statement. Therefore, your social media leader should have a definite bias for action. While creating quality content is important, it's equally as important to avoid going into analysis paralysis or get caught in an endless loop of approvals. I am certainly not advocating publishing blogposts without proofreading them; I am simply saying that if perfection means inaction, you should choose action. If you wait on publishing blogposts or tweet, it will indeed be yesterday's news tomorrow. 9. Advocate for community and for the company: Your social media leader is in a unique position to be an advocate for both, the company / brand and the community. Although some may think the two goals compete with each other, they really do not. When you are an advocate for the community, you help the company design better products and services. Therefore, you are able to evangelize on behalf of the company more naturally. Providing an excellent and customizable customer experience makes the customer happy, boosting advocacy, loyalty and revenues, and in turn making the company happy. 10. Strategic: You should hire your social media leader with the expectation that this person will set the strategy for the whole company, ensuring that the right things get done, and that the people inside the company are working together like a welloiled machine. Strategic, big picture thinking, coupled with the willingness to roll up sleeves and execute, is a must for this position. Either eventually, or from the beginning, this person will be managing other social media and community managers to help execute. Because of its strategic importance, this position will need to provide leadership for senior management as well. 11. Business savvy: The problem with a lot of self-proclaimed social media "experts" is that they lack a broad-based business education. Ensure that your hire has a general business savvy and understands marketing, sales, operations, P&L, product management, business process and customer support fundamentals. Social media is not a silo, and being able to understand its relationship to other business functions is critical. 12. Innovative self-starter: Especially if this position is new to company, and because a lot of social efforts are still in uncharted territory, this person can't wait for directions from the boss. Oftentimes, directions from the boss won't come at all, because this person will know more about social media than the C-suite. Leading change, being able to build something from nothing, setting and executing strategy, sometimes in the face of internal skepticism, are not easy tasks. Even though it's important for this person to self-direct, the direction has to be consistent with the overall business's strategy.
b. Hire the right Social Media employees For3 the first hire, the focus should be on someone who has a variety of skills, including, of course, experience with social media. This person needs to have strong communication and writing skills, as well as a good grasp on marketing and business development. Having someone who can also provide strategic insight would be valuable. This is important because a company’s initial efforts will play a major role in whether social media will succeed or fail. As a result, it makes no sense to hire someone who lacks enough experience or the right skills. In other words, don’t hire a junior employee simply because they are inexpensive and enthusiastic about social media. With a solid person in place to establish a social media program, companies can then look for social media evangelists and tacticians to help support day-to-day operations. These are people who are going to be on the front lines, talking to people online or in person at conferences, meet-ups and other events. Again, you want people with strong communication skill, and enough confidence and experience to know what they can handle, and when they need to circle back for support. These positions can be high-pressure given the flow of information come at them so it is important to have people who can stay cool when things get hot. If there is enough social media activity to justify the investment, it makes sense to hire people to monitor social media activity. While this is a tactical position, it requires people with enough knowledge and experience to recognize situations that require attention and action. At the same time, these people also need to quickly determine whether specific social media activity should be routed to particular departments so they can take the appropriate action. The hiring process depends on how a company wants to approach and embrace social media. Regardless of whether it’s a small operation or a significant part of the business, it is crucial to hire people with the right skills and experience.
1.4. How can you recruit employees by using Social Media? Finding4 the right candidate for a job is like finding a new apartment: timing, finances and quality all have to align just right. And somehow, the pool of options always seems to feel both prohibitively large and prohibitively limited at the same time. So, in both types of searches, online tools have become invaluable. But while tweeting out a call for a good real estate agent is fairly straightforward, using social media for recruiting has nuances that, if overlooked, can render the process far less useful. Here are a few key pointers from experts in the field to remember when getting started. 1. Start Early Simply tweeting out a link to a job posting might get you some viable candidates, but to really make sure you’re reaching your target audience, it’s important to cultivate your personality as an employer early on. In that analogy, your company is your brand, and the available job is just one of many products you have to offer. Keep that in mind when
cultivating a social media presence for your brand that will eventually allow you to incorporate job announcements. 2. Know Your Audience These days, it’s the rare holdout who has avoided creating a Facebook profile. But just because potential candidates have a presence on a given social network doesn’t mean that it’s the right site to use when targeting them. LinkedIn can be a good place to start, because, it has given people the permission to put their resume online, without fear of repercussions from current employers. 3. Get Creative When you make the foray into social recruiting, you are entering a space in which both passive and active job seekers are already receiving a massive amount of information on a daily basis. So, to get the best results, your message has to stand out enough to make people take note. Additionally, presenting your job openings in a creative way allows companies to show more about their personalities as organizations, which in turn helps potential candidates get a feel for whether or not the culture is likely to be a good fit. 4. Be Open in Return Finding candidates through social channels means you’ll be asking them to share information with you via possibly public means. For the process to work, employers need to be willing to share information as well (while, of course, carefully and closely guarding any personal information they might have about their applicants). Morton says some employers’ express staunch resistance to putting jobs on Twitter, when in fact, the listings in question are all on Twitter through unofficial channels anyway.
2.5. Social Media Business Readiness Even though a company sees the value of social media, it doesn’t mean the organization or its members are ready for it. In order for companies to realize the maximum benefit from social media marketing, there must be a certain level of understanding about the nature of online communities, social media sharing web sites and applications. One of the most effective ways in order to assess a company’s awareness, capabilities and resources for social media marketing is to conduct an external audit and an internal survey. Identifying a company’s current state of social media readiness helps determine benchmarks and sets a baseline from where to build from. This is part of developing a social media strategy and helps avoid the random testing many companies are calling their “social media strategy”. There are a number of free or low cost tools that one can use to identify a brand’s current social web participation, ranging from social media monitoring software to profile checking tools like KnowEm to social search tools like How Socialable, 48ers or socialmention. With many companies, there is often a mix of official and unsanctioned social media accounts setup. It’s important to get a handle on such participation, who’s managing the
accounts, whether they are run by employees or fans and what the company can learn from them. Getting a handle on the difference between how social the company is and will need to become is essential for planning, training and strategy development. As part of the evaluation process, here are a few questions companies might ask themselves and answer as they embark on a social media marketing journey: 1. What goals do you hope to achieve from a social media marketing effort? 2. What measures of success will be used to evaluate a social media marketing program? 3. What are your current social media channels and destination web sites/pages?: 4. Do you employ a full-time community manager? 5. If not, does multiple staff share the role of community manager? 6. Are you conducting a formal effort at monitoring social channels using a social media monitoring/analysis software application? (Ex: Techrigy SM2, ScoutLabs, Vocus, SocialRadar, Radian6) 7. Is there a particular business unit, division or product that can serve as a test case? 8. If active, how long has the company participated with social media sites and which? Blogging, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Wikis, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc 9. Is current social media participation on different sites coordinated? 10. Is a dashboard and campaign management tool used for social media content promotion? 11. Have you noticed any particular preferences within the target audience in their social web participation? 12. Do they prefer particular sites? (Twitter vs. Facebook – blogs vs. forums) 13. Do they comment, do they contribute content, do they tend to observe, and do they not participate at all? 14. Have you identified and engaged and/or networked with influentials in your target industry on social web sites? 15. What unique value do current social media efforts offer clients/prospective clients? What need do they satisfy better than the competition? 16. Are text content or media regularly shared on other social media sharing sites? 17. Is there a user generated content component of your web site? Profiles, comments, reviews, content sharing: text, image, video or audio? 18. What departments, business units, cost centers and approval entities would be involved with the Social Media program? Is there an internal social media council? 19. What internal human resources are available within the company for support and implementation of social media marketing initiatives? (Content creation, network development, promotion, monitoring & analytics, community engagement) Obviously each situation is as unique as the company and its objectives, but the list above can provide valuable insight into a company’s state of social media marketing readiness as well as provoking new thoughts and concepts. The more informed companies are about the social web, the more successful they will be at qualifying and managing social media marketing agency engagements.
2.6. The 3 Pillars of Social Media Readiness Years ago6 when Facebook and Twitter exploded and there was an expectation from the “social” community that brands should create blogs and communities; the brands listened. And what you’ll find today is that most brands are doing a really good job on these channels engaging with their customers. They’re listening to the conversation using social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 and Meltwater Buzz. They’re hiring community managers to empower and interact with the communities. And, while many still make minor mistakes here and there, they’re becoming more intelligent at adapting to this changing landscape. Most organizations are well on their way to becoming a social brand if they aren’t one already. Social business is not a trend; it’s a forced evolution. A social business deals with the internal transformation of an organization and addresses key factors such as organizational dynamics, culture, internal communications, governance, training, employee activation and much more. Organizations need to get smarter, acquire new technologies, intelligence, talent and motivation to become more open and transparent. They need to create processes and establish governance models that protect the organization, yet empower their employees. I’ve been fortunate to witness firsthand how organizations are evolving from businesses that merely engage in social behavior into social businesses. There’s a huge difference. Social business is built on three pillars – people, governance and technology.
The first pillar deals with the people of the organization. It addresses the need to drive organizational change in an effort to break down organizational silos and get internal teams to communicate. It’s also about activating the organization’s most import assets, its employees.
The second pillar deals with governance. This simply means that organizations need to put processes in place to manage the chaos that exists from behind the firewall. Training, social media guidelines and policies are imperative for organizations to monitor and roll out across the organization within different teams and geographies. It ensures consistency; it protects the organization and at the same time, empowers its employees. The third and last pillar deals with technology. Organizations have to invest in platforms that facilitate internal collaboration. This is essential to ensure proper communication. External campaign management tools like Sprinklr are also essential to scale, especially if an organization has multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts. Social CRM plays a significant role within this pillar. The definition of social CRM is that it’s just one component that helps organizations fully evolve into a social business. It’s a strategic business initiative that considers technology, intelligence and process; so when organizations communicate with their customers they know what to say, how to say it and when to say it in order to provide a more relevant customer interaction. What’s not visible to most, unless you’ve worked in the enterprise, is the anarchy, conflict, confusion, lack of communication and organizational silos that exist behind the firewall. This makes the process of becoming a social brand much more difficult and less effective. So this quest to become a social brand and a social business is one of simultaneous effort. Businesses more and more adopt the social conversation and are willing to spend more online as research7 shows:
2.7. The Stages of Social Media Business Integration An overnight8 success ten years in the making, social media is as transformative as it is evolutionary. At last, 2010 is expected to be the year that social media goes mainstream for business. In speaking with many executives and entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that the path towards new media enlightenment often hinges on corporate culture and specific marketplace conditions. Full social media integration often happens in stages — it’s an evolutionary process for companies and consumers alike. Here are the ten most common stages that businesses experience as they travel the road to full social media integration. Stage 1: Observe and Report
This is the entry point for businesses to better understand the behavior of an interactive marketplace.
Listening: Employ listening devices such as Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Radian6 to track conversations and instances associated with key words. Reporting: Distill existing social media conversations into an executive report. This early form of reporting is merely designed to provide decision makers with the information they’ll need for continued exploration of social media and its potential impact on business.
Stage 2: Setting the Stage + Dress Rehearsal Once the initial intelligence is gathered, businesses will set the stage for social media participation. This is an interesting phase, as it often joins Stage 1 as a more comprehensive first step. Instead of researching the best ways to engage, many businesses create accounts across multiple social networks and publish content without a plan or purpose. However, those businesses that conduct research will find a rewarding array of options and opportunities to target. Presence: Create official presences across one or more social networks, usually Twitter and possibly Facebook (Fan Pages), YouTube, and Flickr. Early on, this is often experimental, and less about strategic engagement. Analysis: Review activity for frequency (the rate of mentions), the state of sentiment allocation, traffic, as well as the size of connections (friends, followers, fans, etc.). Provide managers with a limited glimpse into the effects of presence and participation.
Stage 3: Socializing Media
The next stage in the evolution of a new media business is the proverbial step towards “joining the conversation.� As companies take the stage, they will eventually pay attention to the reaction of the audience in order to respond and improve content, define future engagements, and humanize communication. Conversation: Representative of an early form of participation, this stage usually evokes reactive engagement based on the nature of existing dialogue or mentions and also incorporates the proactive broadcasting of activity, events and announcements. Rapid Response: Listen for potentially heated, viral, and emotional activity in order to extinguish a potential crisis or fan the flames of positive support.
Metrics: Document the aforementioned activity in order to demonstrate momentum. This is usually captured in the form of friends, fans, followers, conversations, sentiment, mentions, traffic, and reach.
Stage 4: Finding a Voice and a Sense of Purpose This is a powerful milestone in the maturation of new media and business. By not only listening, but hearing and observing the responses and mannerisms of those who define our markets, we can surface pain points, source ideas, foster innovation, earn inspiration, learn, and feel a little empathy in order to integrate a sense of purpose into our socialized media programs. Research: Review activity for public sentiment, including negative and neutral commentary. Observe trends in responses and ultimately behavior. This allows for a poignant understanding of where to concentrate activity, at what level, and with what voice across marketing, sales, service, and PR. Strategic Visibility: Introduce relevance and focus. You don’t have to be everywhere in order to create presence, just in the places where you would be missed. Understanding that the social web is far more extensive than Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, brand managers search across the entire web to locate where influential dialogue transpires. Relevance: “Chatter” or aimless broadcasting is not as effective as strategic communications and engagement. This stage reflects the exploration of goals, objectives, and value implementation. Companies begin to learn that exchange is based on trust and loyalty.
Stage 5: Turning Words Into Actions
Actions speak louder than words. Businesses must act. Once the door to social consciousness is opened, bring the spirit of your company through it to affect change. Empathy: Social media personifies companies. It allows us to see who it is we’re hoping to reach, and what motivates them. Listening and observing is not enough. The ability to truly understand someone, their challenges, objectives, options, and experiences allows us to better connect with them.
Purpose: The shift from simple response to purposeful, strategic communication will be mutually beneficial. It is in this stage that we can truly produce captivating content and messages. In order to hold it, we have to give the audience something to believe in — something that moves them.
Stage 6: Humanizing the Brand and Defining the Experience Through the internalization of sentiment, brands will relearn how to speak. No longer will we focus on controlling the message from conception to documentation to distribution. We lose control as our messages are introduced into the real world. Our story migrates from consumer to consumer. This chain forms a powerful connection that reveals true reactions, perception, and perspectives. The conversations that bind us form a human algorithm that serves as the pulse of awareness, trustworthiness, and emotion. The Humanization of the Brand: Once we truly understand the people who influence our markets, we need to establish a persona worthy of attention and affinity. A socialized version of a branding style guide is necessary. Experience: Our experience in dynamic social ecosystems teaches us that online activity must not only maintain a sense of purpose, it must also direct traffic and shape perceptions. We question our current online properties, landing pages, processes, and messages. We usually find that the existing architecture leads people from a very vibrant and interactive experience (social networks) to a static dead end (our web sites). As we attempt to redefine the experience of new customers, prospects and influencers, we essentially induce a brand makeover.
Stage 7: Community
Community is an investment in the cultivation and fusion of affinity, interaction, advocacy and loyalty. Learned earlier in the stages of new media adoption, community isn’t established with the creation of a social profile. Community is earned and fortified through shared experiences. It takes commitment. As Kathy Sierra once said, “Trying to replace ‘brand’ with ‘conversation’ does a disservice to both brands & conversations.”
Community Building/Recruitment: While we are building community through engagement in each of the previous stages, we will proactively reach out to ideal participants and potential ambassadors. We become social architects, and build the roads necessary to lead customers to a rich and rewarding network, full of valuable information and connections. Stage 8: Social Darwinism
Listening and responding is only as effective as its ability to inspire transformation, improvement, and adaptation from the inside out. Survival does not hinge solely on a company’s social media strategy. The social element is but one part of an overall integrated strategy. It’s how we learn and adapt that ensures our place within the evolution of our markets. Social Media as embraced in the earlier stages is not scalable. The introduction of new roles will beget the restructuring of teams and workflow, which will ultimately necessitate organizational transformation to support effective engagement, production, and the ongoing evolution towards ensuring brand and product relevance. Adaptation: In order to truly compete for the future, artful listening, community building, and advocacy must align with an organization’s ability to adapt and improve its products, services, and policies. In order for any team to collaborate well externally, it must first foster collaboration within. It is this interdepartmental cooperative exchange that provides a means for which to pursue sincere engagement over time. Organizational Transformation: The internal reorganization of teams and processes to support a formal Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM) program will become imperative. As social media chases ubiquity, we learn that influence isn’t relegated to one department or function within an organization. Any department affected by external activity will eventually socialize. Therefore, an integrated and interconnected network of brand ambassadors must work internally to ensure that the brand is responding to constructive instances, by department. However, at the departmental and brand level, successful social media marketing will require governance and accountability. Organizational transformation will gravitate towards a top-down hierarchy of policy, education, and empowerment across the entire organization.
Stage 9: The Socialization of Business Processes
Multiple disciplines and departments will socialize, and the assembly or adaptation of infrastructure is required to streamline and manage social workflow. Social CRM (sCRM): Scalability, resources, and efficiencies will require support, resulting in a modified or completely new infrastructure that either augments or resembles a CRM-like workflow. Combining technology, principles, philosophies and processes, sCRM establishes a value chain that fosters relationships within traditional business dynamics. As an organization evolves through engagement, sCRM will transform into SRM — the recognition
that all people, not just customers, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence.
Stage 10: Business Performance Metrics Inevitably, we report to executives who may be uninterested in transparency or authenticity. Their goal, and job, is to steer the company toward greater profits. In order to measure the true effects of social media, we need the numbers behind the activity –- at every level. While many experts argue that there is no need to measure social engagement (much the way that some companies don’t explicitly define the ROI of Superbowl ads or billboards), make no mistake: Social is measurable, and the process of mining data tied to our activity is extremely empowering. Our ambition to excel should be driven through the inclusion of business performance metrics, with or without an executive asking us to do so. It’s the difference between visibility and presence. And in the attention economy, presence is felt. ROI: Without an understanding of the volume, locations, and nature of online interaction, the true impact of our digital footprint and its relationship to the bottom line of any business is impossible to assess. An immerssive view of our social media goals and objectives allows us to truly measure ROI. Stage 10 reveals the meaning and opportunity behind the numbers and allows us to identify opportunities for interaction, direction, and action. Conclusion There is a great distance between where we are today, and where we need to be. The thing about social media is that it’s always new, and as such, these stages represent a moment in time. They will continue to evolve and expand with new technologies and experiences. In the end, social media is a privilege and a tool — one more opportunity to run a more meaningful and relevant business.