How To Create A Successful Social Business

By Charlene Li on March 11, 2013

Are you a social business? By this, I mean are you aligning your social strategy to business goals? In a new Altimeter Group Report, “The Evolution of Social Business“, my co-author Brian Solis and I found that this was not the case. Only 34% of businesses we surveyed felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes. Brian goes into detail about our findings in this post.

Our research found that organizations typically go through six stages of social business evolution. But this doesn’t mean that you have to wait until Stage 6 to realize business impact. Rather, it’s not only possible but crucial to focus on achieving business results right from the very beginning. The six stages are as follows (for a deeper dive into each, please download the report):

A great example of this from the report comes from Shell. They launched the Shell Facebook presence only in January 2012 and they mostly post content on the page and moderate comments. But they see tremendous benefit from this activity because their business goal is to understand and improve their reputation with customers and partners. They ask the question, “To what extent is Shell meeting customers’ energy needs in socially and environmentally responsible ways?” The key here is that this is not an effort isolated to Facebook — they measure reputation across ALL media channels so that they can see their activities impact reputation differently. Moreover, they measure this DAILY. Shell may be early in their social business journey, but they make sure that they see business impact from their efforts.

Creating Your Social Business Strategy

The focus on business goals is the key to having a coherent social business strategy, which we define as “the set of visions, goals, plans, and resources that align social media initiatives with business objectives”. That alignment and focus on business objectives forms the foundation for the strategy, no matter where the organization is on their evolution. Just 28% of respondents in our survey felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. A mere 12% were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year. And, perhaps most astonishing, only half of all companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”

But there is hope. we found a set of best practices common across all development stages. We call these the Success Factors of a Social Business: 

  1. Define the overall business goal and align social media strategies against it.
  2. Establish the long-term vision for becoming a social business.
  3. Seek and earn key executive support and sponsorship based on the business case, not the trend.
  4. Beyond marketing and service campaigns, develop a list of prioritized initiatives that will demonstrate business value at the enterprise-level and in key functions/lines of business and plot them on a two-to-three year roadmap.
  5. Train and educate executives and employees not just how to use social media, but also how social media can impact business objectives and how to develop and run programs that do so continually.
  6. Get the right people involved at the right levels. An effective social business strategy takes a unified approach with cross-functional support. It’s a combination of social media savvy and business acumen.
  7. Invest in technology only after your vision and strategy are set. Technology and social media in general are only enablers to the overall mission and purpose you set forth.

Applying The Social Business Success Factors

From the research and from our work with clients, we have found that these success factors become especially important when the organization moves from one stage to the next. Some of the most common issues we’ve seen organizations face include:

  • Getting executives to buy into the social strategy — and fund it. Factors #1 and #2 which use business goals and a common vision to align the organization, become crucial. Sometimes this can be accomplished with a short education session, but more often, it requires that social strategy be built into the very fabric of the executive’s work and priorities. This is done only by strongly linking social activities to the 3-5 strategic goals that executives care about. If social doesn’t help the executive accomplish their mission critical goals, then it won’t ever make it on to their radar.
  • Creating a coherent strategy for social business. As crazy as it may sound, we’ve been working with clients to create three year roadmaps for their social business strategy. That’s not a typo, although it may seem impossible to do this in a fast-changing technology landscape. The key is to focus on the long-term strategic business goals of the organization and to make technology decisions ONLY after the vision and strategy are set.
  • Establishing governance. This is the perennial question, “Who owns social media?” This isn’t a simple issue determined by company size, maturity, or industry. It’s base much more on how the organization sees social playing a role in the company in the future, and creating a roadmap to bridge the reality of today to the future. One organization we worked with envisioned a multiple hub-and-spoke model with product and country teams. But to get there, they realized they needed to be temporarily centralized first, move into a basic hub-and-spoke with defined responsibilities, and a migration path for governance to pass into the spokes in a few years after training ensures that the skills and capabilities are in place.
  • Engaging and transforming the organization. This is perhaps the most challenging problem facing senior executives — they see the need to redesign and retool the organization for greater flexibility, adaptation to a changing landscape, and resilience in the face of increased competition. CEOs see social technologies as a way to harness and bring together employees, customers, and partners, but don’t have a roadmap to be able to do this.

By keeping in mind where you are in your social business evolution AND using the success factors, you’ll be able to start tackling some of these tricky issues. We’ve seen firsthand that this is not an easy journey, but it is one that you can successfully navigate. I’d love to hear how your journey is going — what stages are you in and have you encountered similar challenges? If so, how has our organization managed to move forward? Add your comments below or send me an email with details — we’re always looking for more case studies!

If you’d like to learn more about how Altimeter can help your organization move quickly and efficiently through the social business journey, please get in touch with us at sales@altimetergroup.com.

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Why Most Social Strategies Fail

By Charlene Li on November 7, 2012

When I ask people what their social business strategy looks like, I usually get the following response, ”Oh yeah, we’re on Facebook.” The conversation continues apace:

- Twitter account…check.
- YouTube videos….yup.
- People who seem to know what they doing with those accounts…kinda.
- Metrics….Likes.

But that isn’t a strategy – it’s a series of tactics. Having a Facebook page is like having a telephone — it’s a tool that needs a purpose. What you DO with Facebook to meet customer expectations and attain business goals lies at the center of a coherent social business strategy.

My colleague Brian Solis and I are in the midst of conducting research on what makes a good social business strategy and a key finding is that as companies evolve their social initiatives, the efforts get disconnected from business goals. So while the company grows in its social media efforts, strategic focus, with a clear goal in mind, falls to the wayside.

This isn’t about waiting until companies have reached a stage of “maturity” before they are deemed to be successful. Rather, we found companies thriving at every stage of social strategy evolution. The key is coherence, where the business goals, executive support, social business capabilities, and the value created by both internal and external social initiatives all work together in harmony.

Here’s an example: one company we spoke with focuses most of their social efforts on developing their Facebook presence. The company rarely replies or engages with people who post on their page. On the surface, you might dismiss this company as not “getting” social media because they don’t actively engage in a two-way dialog.

But in so many ways, their strategy is far more coherent than companies that blindly engage for the sake of engagement. That’s because they are very clear about the purpose of their Facebook presence, which is to showcase the personality of the company. While they enjoy having millions of fans, the key business metric they track is reputation, which is used across all aspects of the business. On a daily basis, they ask their Facebook fans, as well as people in other channels, how they are doing on delivering their products, and if they are doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. They can then compare which channels are effective at driving their goal of improving reputation.

So how can you tell if your social business strategy is successful or failing? One way is to look across the elements of your social strategy and see if they align with each other in such a way that supports clear business goals. Are your capabilities in line with what you are trying to achieve, or have you bitten off too much and are not realizing the full potential of your efforts? Do you have the organizational governance in place to allow disparate business units to align their social efforts against a common enterprise goals, or is each line of business pulling in separate directions?

Another way to gauge where you are with your social business strategy is to take Altimeter’s Social Business Strategy Survey at http://svy.mk/QkcYRH. The aggregated results will appear in an upcoming report, and as a thank you for sharing, you’ll receive a data cut that you can use to benchmark your company against other organizations of the same size. You will receive this benchmark data after the research report is published.

The survey looks at the following topics:

  • Strategy: What are common goals and objectives? How do you measure the value of your social business efforts?
  • Organization: How are your social business efforts organized? How many people are dedicated to social business?
  • Budget: How much are you spending on external and internal social business efforts? What are you planning to spend on technologies and services in 2013?
  • Social Media Policies: What policies do you have in place? How well do employees understand those policies?

Please note that we plan to end the survey in the next week or so, so please take it as soon as possible! Also, please forward to others who may be interested or share with your social networks. Link: svy.mk/QkcYRH.

Lastly, please share why you think your social business strategy is successful — or on the flip side, what is dysfunctional about it. We’d all love to learn from your experiences!

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Obama vs Romney in Social Media: Who’s Using It Best?

By Charlene Li on October 11, 2012

[crosslinked from LinkedIn]

As someone steeped in social media, I’ve been watching each of the presidential campaigns closely to see how they are using social media well – or not. [Disclosure: I worked on Obama’s campaign in 2008 and have donated to it this election season. I also went to the same high school and business school as Romney. To the extent possible, I’ve tried to be objective in my analysis, but inevitable, my biases will come through.] Here are some observations, as well as opportunities for the future:

  • It’s Not About the Numbers. I’ve seen many commenters point to the overwhelmingly higher numbers of Likes and Followers that Obama has over Romney on Facebook and Twitter, respectively. It’s easy to get lured by those numbers, but they are highly misleading because Obama has had four years as candidate and President to gather his followers. What will matter in this election is how engaged these followers are, in not only amplifying their candidates’ message, but whether they can get people they know to vote.
  • Each Campaign Plays to their Strengths. My colleague, Susan Etlinger, who researches social media analytics, cautioned that looking at the stats alone don’t tell the full story. As an example, she pointed me to recent data from Pew that shows Democrats and liberals as being more engaged politically than Republicans. Her advice: Look at each of the respective campaigns from the perspective of where they are starting from. With Republicans less likely to energize their base via social networking sites, they are more likely to focus on awareness and outreach to Independents, whereas Democrats will be keen to get an disengaged base fired up to get out the vote of intended Democratic voters.
  • Romney Makes Smart Use of Facebook Marketing. Romney has made good Facebook ad buys, especially with Sponsored Results where Romney ads started showing up next to search terms such as “democrat” and even “obama”. The results have been significant – Romney has been gaining Facebook Likes at twice the rate of Obama.
  • But Romney Misses the Opportunity to Be Personal. While his campaign has mastered social media marketing, Romney hasn’t capitalized on social media’s ability to be personal and be direct. The tweets are annoyingly in the first person when it’s clear that Romney is not writing them. My hope is that the new-found, more personal Romney that is currently on the campaign trail – telling his personal story directly rather than through surrogates – will also make an appearance via social media. While Romney himself may not feel that comfortable engaging in the back and forth of social media, even a video of him speaking directly to people in social media, would be a bonus.
  • Obama Appears On Uber-Cool Reddit – But Dodges Tough Questions. Obama  appeared on social news site Reddit, where he engaged in thirty minutes of “Ask Me Anything” (AMA). While Obama gained serious social media cred with his appearance, answering 10 questions and saying that the Reddit experiences was “not bad”, he also avoided by several tough and popular questions such as the legalization/regulation of marijuana dispensaries, aliens (!) and lobbying. While the Reddit session may be called “Ask Me Anything”, it could be more correctly characterized as “Ask, but I may not Tell”.
  • Obama’s Social Media Team: Masters of The Moment. The Obama campaign tweets between 10-20 times a day. That’s usually 3-4 times more frequently than the Romney campaign. The result: Obama’s team has a lot more practice and better sense of what resonates and gets spread. This culminated in the picture-perfect moment during the Republican National Convention when Obama’s Twitter account sent out a picture of the President sitting in his chair, a response to Clint Eastwood’s discussion with a the invisible Obama. What the Obama campaign did was leverage what Hamish McKenzie so eloquently described as the emotion of the moment and created the most tweeted post for the entire Republic convention.

The key for Romney in these closing days of the campaign is to tap into his loyal base on sites like Facebook and Twitter to share with their undecided friends the Mitt that they know and believe in. But socialgraphics – the social behavior of key audience groups – are stacked against him. According to Pew, only 25% of Republicans are likely to recruit people to get involved with political issues that matter to them, as opposed to 35% for Democrats. But even worse, social networking site (SNS) users (84% of SNS-using Republicans and 79% of SNS-using Democrats) say little or nothing of their recent posts have anything to do with politics.

My takeaway from this analysis is that while the campaigns are using social media in creative ways, they both still miss more opportunities than they capture. The biggest is that neither has created a culture of sharing with their followers. Activity is still focused on messaging, and a predictable call-and-response routine of asking for donations and the cash register singing.

In the end, votes win elections. With a dismal 58% of the US eligible voters actually voting in the 2008 election, the campaigns could be doing so much more to engage people in a dialog, encouraging us to share our views not on politics but the issues we care about. But in the polite company of our friends, we do just the opposite and hide our political leanings from each other. My hope is that in the waning days of this election cycle that more of us will be inspired to engage in civil discourse directly with each other, in the social channels that we inhabit.

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Google+ The New Enterprise Social Network?

By Charlene Li on August 29, 2012

by Charlene Li and Chris Silva

Google announced Google+ for Enterprises today with Hangouts integration into Docs and Calendar as well as administrative controls such as default posting to only within the company. We’ve been doing some research on the topic of enterprise social networks and, with Google moving into this market, have some thoughts around why this is a bigger deal than just another Google feature announcement.

IMG
Google In The Office, Image Courtesy Of A Prescient Post On Using G+ At Work By Digital Telepathy

Google has a few things going for it that the pure plays like Yammer and Socialcast in this market don’t have and that tools like Microsoft’s Sharepoint have not yet built out:

  • Google Plus wins on affinity. Google has been steadily building it’s devoted network of over 5,000,000 enterprises that initially looked to the search provider for email support based on cost, and stayed due to apps and integration. Many have seen additional cost savings given the ability to move away from costly office suites as Google offers a parity of experience for simple document editing and sharing, with additional features such as support for mobile environments and better collaboration tools. Adding Google+ with tight integration just sweetens the pot. If social networks are a communication and community buy and not a technology buy, the affinity power of the Google stack of apps and services is a formidable foe for pure plays like VMWare’s Socialcast tool but less so for tools that integrate with larger systems such as Salesforce’s Chatter. It’s worth noting that, as of the announcement, Google was mum on what integrations with other, third-party enterprise apps would take place to allow Google+ to feed other stores of information. their ultimate decision on this advanced level of integration could determine long term success against tools like Chatter and, to a lesser degree Microsoft’s Sharepoint.
  • Google lowers the enterprise social barrier to entry. Many businesses will be tempted to try social networking inside of the org for the first time since the product comes at no additional cost. Some may migrate from their existing third party tools like Yammer or Socialcast to Google+ given that it works with a wider swath of tools that competitive offerings when considering integration with Google Apps. There’s a downside to this Googlification of the enterprise, however. Many users will have an existing personal Google identity they’ll need to reconcile Google+ to, though support for switching is possible across multiple accounts on most Google services of late. A more pressing problem is that someone could have TWO activity streams on Google+, which would be confusing at best, downright creepy at worst. This concern may not be too much of a hurdle given the overall challenge it’s been to get consumers to embrace the network, but it is a problem that other social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have figured out because they are not tied to a specific email address but to a person.
  • Google has figured out how to make its tools intriguing. Elements like Google+ Hangouts were the stand outs at the time of the original Google+ launch, but relegated to the walled garden of the Google network. The company has smartly started to expand potential use of the tools outside of simple social contexts by adding Hangouts to Google Mail, recently Google Docs and what believe is the killer feature, Google Calendar. Companies that don’t yet “get” social are likely to see the addition of Hangouts as a collaborative tool with a great audit trail. And the social interaction — as well as the inter-team communication that it fosters — will be an organic side benefit. That said, Skype is a solid asset in the Microsoft arsenal with no small user base – wel over 400 million at last count – and making similar integration with existing office tools should be a minor addition for Redmond; having said that, it hasn’t taken place yet, which boggles the mind looking at a company so focused on the idea of collaboration.

Will Google+ for enterprises save the oft-maligned network? We think that a better way to think of this is what Google+ for enterprise reveals about Google’s intentions for its social efforts. Google+ doesn’t seek to be the biggest social network or the one where people spend the most time. Instead, Google+ seeks to be the most embedded social feature in the lives of its loyalist users so that they will never want to leave Google.

Look at Facebook’s biggest problems — it needs to constantly innovate and offer new features to fight off upstarts and retain its users. LinkedIn struggles to get people to even come to their site for more than a few minutes a month. Google+ isn’t a destination — it’s a ubiquitous presence that’s always there and now all the more so if  you’re a Google Apps user. This is about social being where you need and want it to be — it’s social being like air.

Do you think Google+ for Enterprise will make a difference against competitors? Do you agree that it makes Google+ more relevant — or will it have little impact? We’d love to you know your thoughts so please share with us!

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Analysis: Why Buying Yammer Makes Sense for Microsoft

By Charlene Li on June 26, 2012

Microsoft announced that it would buy Yammer for $1.2 billion, after a week of speculation that the deal was imminent. From my perspective, having researched the enterprise social networking space (see report), the acquisition is a continuation of current trends in the industry and makes a lot of sense for both MSFT and Yammer.

Yammer CEO David Sacks wrote in a blog post about the acquisition, “When most people thought social networking was for kids, we had a vision for how it could change the way we work.” When Yammer launched at TechCrunch four years ago, it won the “best in show” award from judges and it’s been on a rocket ride since then for two simple reasons — it’s free and people love using it. The result: 85% of large companies have Yammer inside their walls.

That love-driven virality is a key reason why Microsoft bought Yammer — after all, who would use the word “love” to describe Microsoft or a product like SharePoint? The fact is that Yammer and its competitors are creating new way for work to get done, that is not only effective but also — dare we say it — makes work fun. Microsoft knew that it was behind in the enterprise social networking space and could either build organically within SharePoint or acquire. I think they did the smart move by buying Yammer as it gives them not only the largest independent player, but also penetration into virtually every company that already is using its products.

The challenge going forward is how Microsoft will integrate Yammer into its Office offerings, in particular, SharePoint. Yammer already enables integration with SharePoint that inserts microblogging capabilities right into SharePoint, making the enterprise app much more social. Up to this point, the main selling points of ESNs has been that they just had to be better than SharePoint’s built-in social tools. That is no longer the case, so you’ll see other enterprise apps companies scrambling to snap up remaining players like Moxie. Here’s a graphic from my ESN report from February that shows how the world (used to) stack up in terms of players — this is a game being played by the big enterprise players now.

Fig. 7 Enterprise Social Networking Technologies Evolve From Three Scenarios

While there is concern that adding Yammer makes worse an already-confusing mix of Microsoft offerings, it’s nothing compared to the bewildering situation facing CIOs when it comes to ESN. One CIO shared with me that he faces a situation of having Salesforce’s Chatter, VMWare’s Socialcast, Yammer, and SharePoint all running within his organization. And that didn’t include rogue installations of Box and Google+.

In the end, it makes sense for each company to have one — and only one — enterprise social network in order to ensure universal access. Thus ESNs like Yammer become battlegrounds in the way that other foundational enterprise tools like email, IM, and CRM have become. In this way, Yammer makes a whole lot of sense for Microsoft, as it becomes more integrated into all of its offerings, rather than remain a standalone. Here are some examples:

  • Any organization with a SharePoint installation will now get supported integration of an ESN into their organization – and more importantly, make sure that the technology actually increases business value.
  • Any organization with Yammer but that doesn’t have SharePoint will become a lead for Microsoft.
  • Office 365 gains a huge foothold into SMBs that may have already implemented Yammer, but would never consider SharePoint. If they are already using Google Apps, integration between Office 365 and Yammer becomes a potential switching point.
  • Microsoft Dynamics has a potential answer to Salesforce Chatter.
  • Provides a counter to IBM’s Lotus Connections.
Taking all of the above into consideration, the $1.2 billion price tag begins to make sense. But the intangible brand value goes back to where this blog started — the potential that we as workers and companies will again love Microsoft. Even if that translates to just a chance for a mild “like” for Microsoft products because they enable social connections, it will have been worth it for Microsoft to acquire Yammer.

 

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