Organize Your Social Business. Revolutionize Your Communications.

Social media is moving beyond being the sole domain of the passionate, but often over-worked, corporate social advocate. It is gaining the ear of the C-Suite with nearly 40 percent of CEOs placing social media on their personal agendas. A recent study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found 79 percent of 2,100 participating companies are either currently using social media channels like Facebook and Twitter or are preparing to start social media initiatives. The evidence points not just to the growth of social in business, but considering it more deeply, the need to prepare for and manage social media’s scalability as well as mitigate its potential to fragment and silo as it grows across an enterprise.

The ingénue technology of the later years of the 2000s is all grown up. With that comes closer evaluation at the executive level for its importance as a business driver and a shift toward greater consideration of its accountability via analytics. Social is also branching out beyond its traditional homes in marketing, PR, advertising and digital agencies to areas like CRM and sales. In HR, where organizations are capitalizing on the enormous power of social to amplify corporate culture to future prospects, more than 50 percent of organizations surveyed across the banking, manufacturing, IT, retail and telecom sectors indicated that social is driving their hiring initiatives.

The once powerful Why discussions around social media and business are now shifting responsibly towards questions of defining its How and perhaps How Much. As social expands across teams, departments, business units and to the enterprise level, the need for robust tools, good planning and the ability to dig deeply into data to support and build its case is growing right along with it. Like the proverbial journey of a thousand miles, or kilometers if you prefer, the evolution from a single social advocate to the social enterprise that is revolutionizing the way businesses communicate each and every day has a very logical first footfall. As David Armano, EVP, Global Innovation & Integration, Edelman Digital stated succinctly, “Getting organized around social is the most important first step towards social success.

Five Steps To Social Success

Successfully organizing your social business starts with a series of steps that are similar to those an individual would take to successfully engage in social media. We can learn from and adapt the methods of single successful social users and amplify them to facilitate conversation and meaningful relationships across very large teams or between businesses and their consumers.

1. Determine Leadership. Organize Teams

Your people need to be empowered to begin to develop relationships and have conversations with consumers. That starts by identifying leadership and establishing roles. Who leads? Who follows? With leaders and team members in place, the picture of your social structure is clear and the need to identify social goals becomes evident.

2. Audit and Validate. Use Cases You Will Support

Which areas of your organization are most going to benefit from the application of your social resources and best leverage social platforms? Are you doing this for marketing? PR? Crisis management? For new product development or human resources? In what areas can you establish meaningful two-way relationships with the consumers who most crave dialogue?

3. Provide Tools That Satisfy Business Needs

Centralize control over your social tools and make decisions on which social networks you will be active. It may be that you already have individuals using separate social tools to execute programs over a variety of separate social networks. A siloed social structure can be a barrier to the sharing of information, creating consistency of best practices and can get in the way of the seamless collaborative experience that is social at its most powerful.

4. Tap Into Internal And External Ecosystem

Do you have a strong partner network where there have been social successes? Is there support around the issue within your industry vertical? Talk to people within your ecosystem about where they’ve been successful and what learning they can offer to your organization. Build allies who can help you seed topics and drive meaningful conversations around areas in which you’re hoping to create change.

5. Enable Systematic Rollout And Success

Invest in education and training. It bears repeating. Invest in education and training. The primary reason we put so much time into HootSuite University is we believe that education is paramount to success. You also need to thoroughly test your tools before going live to make sure that not only do they work, but that they work for your purposes. Finally, measure everything you do. But don’t stop at reports. Take those measurements and turn them into actionable insights for your team.

The Social Business

The early years of social media within business were dominated by marketing and PR departments or by partner organizations associated with those areas, companies like traditional and digital agencies or PR and media relations firms. These early adopters established, propagated and continue to create many of the industry’s best practices.

The emerging trend over the past year is one of social media spreading out of those areas and into other departments within business and across enterprises.

Social is helping people get their work done more efficiently, amplifying corporate culture on behalf of HR, powering thought around R&D, developing and nurturing leads for sales and keeping management informed about the success or failure of initiatives.

Whether your organization is trying to build greater social capital, engage with influencers or manage and build communities around specific areas of interest, social gives you more feedback and drives deeper insight than ever before. You get a constant stream of thoughts from your community and have the potential to tap in to greater competitive understanding because you’re hearing what your consumers say as they say it, directly from their own fingers. Ultimately social gives you the power to use this information and insight to mediate your own conversations and reengage with your consumers with increasing sensitivity and empathy.

Organizing Your Social Business

Your teams are in place. You’ve made decisions about social networks and created branded pages. You’ve tapped in to your internal and external ecosystem to understand social as it relates to your industry. You’re ready to engage with consumers, colleagues, fans and influencers. How will you go about it?

Teams are Social

At HootSuite we start by establishing your master Organization beneath which there are Teams and Team Members. Your Organization has global control and oversight over all of your social activity. Your Teams and Team Members are each oriented departmentally and tasked with managing certain social networks and profiles. Though they operate independently, there is free sharing and exchange of information across Teams as well as the ability to assign tasks to one another. Team Members are each given independently-assigned and appropriate access to create or publish content across their designated social profiles by their Team Leader. Organized and provisioned, your teams are ready to tap in to the real value of social influence.

Much of the most valuable new information and ideas you collect from social media come from the people with whom you have the weakest ties6 . They are also known as your new friends. As you create more ongoing conversation outside your closest social circles, you gather more meaningful information you can pull into your established networks for discussion. You introduce new knowledge and information to your existing ecosystem while at the same time expanding it. The power of this new information is amplified by the strength of the bonds you share with your established groups and increases the potency of its referral and recommendation. As you’re able to have more dialogue with your new friends and acquaintances, you’re constantly feeding new knowledge back into your networks and business, sharing what you find most engaging and keeping everyone equally informed and up-to-date.

So why do people follow brands online? The reasons are myriad. A recent study from Performics7 shows some are looking for coupons or discounts, to get advice on a purchase or connect with customer service, while others identify with the brand or want to feel connected to others with similar interests. Broken down by industry vertical we see high demand (67 percent) for discounts in Personal Care but relatively low demand (24 percent) in Financial Services. The desire for access to Customer Service is highest in automotive (26 percent) and financial (30 percent), but much less so in Healthcare (6 percent) and Travel (9 percent).

A study from Nielsen8 looked at why people like brands on Facebook specifically. The strength of the lure of discounts and special offers was seen to be especially strong on Facebook and, interestingly, significantly stronger in North America than in Europe. North American consumers are looking to their affinity for a brand to have some return on their investment for time spent with it. I’ve paid attention to you, now reward me. There are also drivers like being first to get updates or simply showing support for a brand and interestingly Europeans are more likely to like a brand because a friend does than North Americans.

[Download PDF to see Charts]

Marketing is Social

There is an interesting disharmony when you look at the reasons marketing, who led the charge into social media for business, is using social versus why their customers are engaging with it. A 2011 study9 conducted with marketers currently using social found that the primary reason they were engaged in social was to build brand awareness (17 percent) rather than offer coupons and discounts. If you take the top four activities of social marketers polled, nearly 50 percent of online programs are engaged in matters other than what social consumers are requesting. Does this mean all social programs should be centered on coupons and discounts? Not at all, but clearly there is some guidance to be taken from the data.

Customers need to be at the center of their own experiences. It may seem obvious to state, but marketers often mistakenly try to put their products at the center of the customer’s world or try to move the customer into the center of the brand experience. The reality is that customer is in the middle of their own world, some of which may include experiences with brands and products. Social only heightens the effect of this disconnect when it occurs.

Brands need to look for ways to move into their customer’s world and engage them in meaningful conversations. Surround your customer with marketing and pr, service and support, sales or any of your customer-facing roles in an integrated manner. Nurture, build and manage your customer relationship to a rewarding place. If you do it well, you elicit allimportant customer advocacy.

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Customer Experience is Social

The customer experience is increasingly social and we believe that the strongest driver behind this growth is the ability of your customers to either advocate for or complain about an experience with your brand. In either case, the effect is amplified.

In order to manage this new world of customer experience, you need to understand all of the personalized touchpoints a customer has with your brand and how your messaging can be adjusted and refined to reflect the sensitivities of each instance. Then you want to empower your employees to deliver on these optimized messages to reduce friction around customers who are just trying to get what they need to do, done. When you reduce friction and you take a step closer to increasing retention, but more importantly, you begin to create truly empathetic customer experiences that bring to life your organization’s true value.

CRM is Social, Social is CRM

To be successful at the enterprise level, it is essential to think of social as CRM.

In a business context, social becomes one of the most effective tools for understanding, engaging and helping our customers. As an asychronous model, it shares strengths with email over phone in that it allows you to prioritize responses and set manageable SLA (service level agreements). It lets us converse with many people, each 1:1 at the same time, which helps a social CRM or support person be more effective.

Today, people use social contact lists as the basis for their contact management, effectively blending Twitter, Facebook and Google contacts into one list on mobile devices. It follows through most CRM systems where we can now monitor the social activity of a customer and/or use the social profile of a customer to augment CRM data, often in real-time.

Social CRM has emerged as a contender category to capture pent up demand for this obvious integration and all of the major CRM vendors are responding with social bolt-ons with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Regardless of tech roadmaps, social is already proven to be a powerful customer relationship management tool across the sales or acquisition funnel, and it’s important not to think of it just as a proven channel for support. Social is a way to empower your customers to communicate both positive and negative experiences with your brand and to have you help them. For that to be effective, social needs to be integrated into your current CRM and support systems.

Sales is Social

Customers with unified sets of interests are going to discuss them online. Shoe people are going to talk to shoe people. Restaurant lovers will engage with restaurant lovers. In the technology sector, every new release and firmware update is scrutinized and analyzed, shared and discussed. Hence sales and sales intelligence is increasingly social. Social helps you research and better understand customer needs, collaborate and share learning across large account teams. It positions you to evaluate and dig in to competitive threats. It helps sales communicate better with other customer-facing teams like marketing or customer service to better integrate your offering.

HR is Social

Some of social’s biggest strides outside of marketing are taking place in the HR department. At HootSuite, by nature of our business, we’ve seen an explosion in the social résumé where candidates are reaching out to us via Twitter, videos posted to YouTube and any number of displays of creativity placed within the social sphere.

Social is used powerfully as a recruiting tool and as a way to engage future employees. Perhaps its most significant role is as our own Director of HR, Ambrosia Humphrey puts it, “To amplify the culture of an organization.” Instagram and flickr are formidable tools for allowing future prospects to peer into an organization and see the environment and culture of the people who work there.

Outside of a social media environment, a Wipro study from 201211 looked at uses for social media by industry. The study showed active use across the banking and financial services, IT, manufacturing, retail and telecom sectors. Not surprisingly IT was particularly engaged in social from an HR perspective, but the numbers across all verticals weren’t far removed from IT’s level of integration. No less than 55 percent of surveyed organizations use social for sourcing (with IT at 64 percent), 49 percent use social for pre-joining engagement (IT, 57 percent) and 45 percent use social for induction and orientation of new employees (IT, 50 percent).

[Download PDF to see Chart]

Big Data is Social

All social roads lead to data and data is the interface for business. Social data is commonly visualized within interactive dashboards and as reports where you’re able to take a quick top-line look at numbers. Increasingly we’re seeing the ability to click deeper to look at anomalies in numbers, differences between results over geographic areas and better map out the behavioral nuances between customer segments. We can then stream that data into existing channels and distribute it to appropriate places, marketing data to marketing or sales data to sales.

With HootSuite you can leverage our integration with Adobe Digital Marketing Suite to create custom reports. You can also use in-dashboard measurement tools like Facebook Insights and Google Analytics. You could, for example, look at Social Traffic Generated per Employee and evaluate which of your employees are high performers driving social engagement with your customers -- a useful performance management tool. You can look at page views generated by social network or establish which social accounts are driving the most revenue. From this data, you can begin to form new metrics like lifetime value of a socially engaged customer or look at your top influencers and see how they’re able impact your bottom line.

What we’re building toward is what we call Full Path ROI. Where did the traffic come from? What did they do click-wise? What was their overall pattern of movement? Were there purchases or trials and if so did they trigger any amplification in terms of shares, likes, referrals or recommendations? When they shared it, what was the sentiment around it and what did they say, specifically, about it? Finally what countries or regions did they share it across?

We created a simple tool to measure the benefits of your increased investment in social and quantify its outcomes. It takes into account the number of employees working on social media, their average salary and social media accounts managed as well as percentage of time spent on social. If you consolidate all your programs into one effective platform, get all of your data into one place, get this connected to your CRM system and your support teams empowered and in place, what kind of cost savings will you realize? If you like new iPads, we measure it in numbers of shiny new Retina displays, but more germanely, how many new employees could you hire with the money that you’re saving?

Social Business Maturity

We built a social business maturity model that allows organizations to assess where they are in their development and what their logical next steps are. Social maturity is not a competition. It’s not a race. We’ve simply observed this pattern of development and seen it shown repeatedly to be effective.

Social Advocate

The most common first stage in the evolution toward a Social Enterprise is the emergence and identification of the Social Advocate. Often a passionate and successful social media user on a personal level, the Social Advocate brings a natural and intuitive understanding of social and social tools to your organization. However a single Social Advocate is obviously limiting in terms of scalability, which makes necessary the creation of Social Teams.

Social Team

Groups of Social Advocates working departmentally or cross-functionally are defined as Social Teams. Team members work collaboratively and are able to assign and delegate social messaging tasks. Questions of organizational transparency arise and discussions around employee empowerment begin. Resources like time and tools are allocated to allow Social Teams to dig deeper into analytics to measure key performance indicators.

Social Business

The shift from the Social Team to Social Business stage is accompanied by an organization-wide shift in consciousness around social. For the Social Business, social tools come first. Employees are educated and empowered to engage customers in two-way dialogue. There is a thorough integration companywide of the concepts of transparency and openness. The organization is comfortable having naked conversations in front of its customers, partners and even competitors.

Social Enterprise

Once you’ve standardized process, empowered teams, added tools and put policy in place governing social engagement, you begin to reveal yourself as a Social Enterprise. Perhaps the final stage of this transformation is the point at which all of the process, which has been directed outward toward the customer, is turned inward to fuel better internal collaborative practices. The level of social engagement is now equal both inside and outside the firewall.

Global Social Collaboration

We’re on a long road from the era of the single social advocate to one of the mature social enterprise, where social ceases to be a single person’s job and becomes a significant part of every role. But we are, unquestionably, on that road.

Social is revolutionizing business communications. It provides, in many ways for the first time, an effective way to mediate conversations around brands by providing the ability to listen, deeply and in real-time, to customers, competitors and influencers. You’re able to engage with those stakeholders in increasingly connected and empathetic ways on the platform(s) where the conversation is already occurring. And through analytics, you can better understand the outcomes of your listening and engagement and use real data to close the loop on decision-making. Ultimately social advocates, teams, businesses and enterprises will use social to overcome geographic, language and time zone barriers for true global collaboration. But right now, it’s time to get organized.