Why focus on integrating social business technologies?
The trends have been discussed and explored, the case studies are readly available and the technologies are proven - now is the time to invest and build capabilities for a social business.
McKinsey highlights the case that adoption is critical for organisations to become social businesses. The simplification of integration, lower costs and adaptive systems create a rational for change that is undeniable; social business is the focus for 2011.
Benefits of being a social business:
- Increasing internal efficiency and knowledge collaboration
- Improved customer relationships
- Improved innovation through customer participation
But it is the need to adapt to changing customer behaviours and maintain mind share in congested markets that is driving much of the change. Let's revist some of the trends that are happening that affect how organisations market to customers.
Many organisations are still grabbling with how to use social media to engage their customers, but besides a few leading brands many are failing. But why? Well one of the main reasons is that in changing over to social media many are still broadcasting information and not engaging in developing a relationship. For others it has to date been a tactical dip in the water often isolated from the main organisational strategy.
Organisations now need to recognise the greater impact of a social business strategy to engage customers and unlock value.
5 steps in developing a social business strategy
The American Marketing Association (AMA) article on social business design, highlights the changing nature of work, a shift to cultures of sharing, and evolution of personal technology create emerging market opportunities. It points to a social business strategy.
1. Learn first - Explore
To start with, an organisation and key stakeholders should use an expert to quickly get up to speed with the technologies and how they are being used. A good consultant can deliver this and at the same time focus on your industry and/or market and what is relevant. Also use and involve people in the business who are interested and knowledgable. This is the explore stage of developing a social business strategy.
2. Framing and developing the questions
Develop the questions that apply to the organisation. These lay the foundations for developing a strategy and will help to prioritise any research needed. Involve key stakeholders in formulating the questions; some people have different perspectives, roles, knowledge and skills. These all add value at this stage. As a team prioritise them and sort them into long term and short term.
Here a few key questions as examples:
- How are our customers using these social technologies
- What markets/products and customers should we focus on
- What internal changes might be needed
- How do these technologies change our business model
3. Benchmark the business
Many of the questions that around strategy often relate to markets and competitors. We have in an earlier blog covered some of the key tools for social monitoring. However here are some further reports and information that may be useful:
- Media Monitoring: The Complete Guide (pdf)
- The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 (pdf)
- Generations 2010 from (Pew Internet) pdf
Why benchmark your brand/business? Benchmarking helps you understand your market, competition and provides you with recommendations to differentiate. A good benchmark report will provide strategic options towards developing a competitive advantage. A benchmark report can be used to understand where your customers are, who are key influencers, their interests...It can be the start point for understanding how you are going to measure your business.
4. Identify the opportunity and invest
Choose a project that can deliver some tangible wins. If it is marketing to your customers, then consider that the ultimate goal is to focus on the long term aim is to build a community around the brand and delivering sustainable value. This means tactically building on each promotional campaign to develop the brand community rather than disposing of customer data and assets each time. This then engages customers in each stage of the brand journey.
A critical part at this is to set the goals, objectives and review the measures that you are going to use. We dealt with the ROI measures that can be used in an earlier blog.
5. Content, Quality and Engagement
Content is the reason your customers come to you, the reason they will connect emotionally with your organisation or brand. However, in todays digitally diverse world many organisations under estimate the time, effort and cost of good quality content. The content strategy is vital and should be thought of early. Multi channel communications must have consistency to reinforce each other and produce a unfiying customer engagement.
Managing and producing content is becoming increasingly difficult due to the technical skills required.
Key tips
- Know Your Voice - Everything you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand
- Time Your Content - Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to pproduce and when you’re going to publish
- Add value - Know your Customer. Why does somebody follow you? Why do they like you? It’s because your brand offers them something; understand this track it keep it fresh.
- Solve Problems - Humans have survived for so long because they’re great at answering questions. Work collaboratively with your brand community to solve their problems, help with their interests...
- Be True - Good content isn’t fake. It doesn’t make promises that it can’t keep. It’s human and honest and that is why it makes a human connection with its audience.
As with any business the more time and energy that is spent at the planning stage improves upon the execution. It is about being great, delivering to high standard and implementing well and a good strategy determines much of this.
Be Agile
In today's changing world organisations need to adapt continually. The days of annual long range plans are gone. Scanning the environment, brnging on board intelligence and then adapting plans are vital to success. So set the goal of becoming agile and adapting to stay ahead.
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