Social Business and Strategy Thoughts

What is a Social Business Strategy?

A strategy is quite simply it is the long term plan on what to do to achieve a goal.

A good strategy defines a very clear route on what an organisation is looking to achieve and answers the question on how it will do this. A social business strategy then is focused on how an organisation is to integrate social technologies to help it achieve its goals. There are two areas of opportunity for an organisation; to improve performance and productivity internally and to improve customer engagement externally.

To make some decisions then about a social business strategy organisations have to think about how the context of these within their business and the fit to their customers. Before deploying resources (people, money...) some key questions need to be answered...e.g.  how will these technologies affect our business model, what new models will evolve...

How do we develop a social business strategy?

If you understand your business goals then aligning a social business strategy to your goals becomes easier. For most organisations the primary need is to effectively integrate social technologies into marketing to their customers. But targeting how you are going to do this requires some research. Why? well there are a host of reasons here are a few:

• You need to differentiate your product/service and have a unique proposition/strategy compared to your competitors


• Because the more you understand your customers the better chance you have of finding unique ways to interact with them, engage them and add value to your communication.
  
  
  
  • The aim is to understand who your customers are, where they are and what they are interested in, what problems they face, what behaviours they exhibit, what they think about your type of products/services...
  
  
  
  


• The best marketing insights come from research and then provide unique ways for genuine customer engagement


• If you know your market better than your competition chances are you will have a competitive edge; be able to change faster and adapt.


• If you understand your current position ve. competitive brand you will have a benchmark point from which to improve and understand how to set a strategy tht creates a tangible point of difference.

Where to start?

This all depends on the size of your oganisation, structure, culture...but an initial opportunity is to identify what is being said about your brand/business/product or service on the network. Many tools exist from simlple to more complex.



Our Blog on Social Media Monioring Tools covers many of the main free and paid for tools that you might use. But in order to start with you need to set yourself some objectives for what you are going to listena for and research.

• Define an Objective


• Decide where to monitor


• Decide what to monitor


• Match your requirements to the right technology (social monitoring tool)

The online landscape is saturated with more than 200 tools and platforms claiming to be able to help you track and assess mentions of your business or brand in social media channels. While there remains a lot of churn in the field, a number of listening platforms have evolved to help you go beyond basic monitoring into an integrated approach that helps inform multiple parts of your business: product development, customer support, public outreach, lead generation, market research and campaign measurement.



Many organisations have now got beyond the question of the need to apply social technologies and now need to answer the questions of how to integrate these. In moving to a social business they recognise that they do not have the skills. Importantly the questions that they need to strategically answer and the research needed sit outside their scope and so they need to partner with an agency.

For others that have already tested solutions scale and integration become critical; but scale often means setting a strategy to migrate from legacy systems. However, the strategy needs to be set for initially integrating solutions into CRM, marketing and sales solutions for marketing, customer service and sales.

Some of the challenges facing organisations today are how to :

• Integrate solutions in the enterprise space for CRM


• Building internal capabilities and teams (training, education and recruitment)


• Work across divisions and departments to develop projects - traditionally it is marketing that has led social media strategy but now internal communications, PR, customer service... need to be involved.


• Develop business model/stakeholder by-in and ROI


• Develop clear marketing strategy including integration into website - see below (click to enlarge).

What do you think the big challenges are now?

How well are organisations researching and setting their strategies?