Social Media Strategy, Policies and Guidelines for Engagement

Intro

In this week’s blog there’s an interesting mix of topics dealing with social media business, strategy, and policy – the latter being a bit of a dry topic! There’s plenty of material to deal with but what is quite amazing is the maturity of the topic, social media in business, with many enterprises still trying to either develop a presence or build a meaningful strategy. What is abundantly clear is that social media is here to stay and like all forms of technology its shape and form are constantly evolving – it’s a dynamic & exciting enterprise that poses many challenges and opportunities to business large and small. Something to consider….. Larry Weber notes (in his book Everywhere) that the “largest impediment to becoming a social enterprise is usually culture” (p. 24). The term “culture” is often over-hyped term but as Weber has noted without complete acceptance and adoption of a social business approach, successful transition to a social business will be difficult to achieve

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What are the elements of a social business strategy?

In the2013 Altimeter report by Li and Solis the authors make two very important distinctions concerning the success of a social business strategy – that is alignment with the business goals and organisational alignment to deliver to those goals.

The Altimeter report also identified six distinct phases of development, in essence a cycle, leading to a successful social business– they are:

1. Planning – listening to learn – this involves finding out about their customers social behaviour
2. Presence – staking a claim – using mature channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube to cultivate a following with simple measures such as the number of likes, hits, re-tweets, traffic counts etc. that provide a gauge on interest and potential engagement
3. Engagement – deepening relationships though dialogue – connecting a deepening customer care relationship through listening, consulting and advising. For example, an energy company providing simple ideas on power saving methods, or advise on power efficient appliances
4. Formalised – organising for scale – establishing organisation wide governance. Engagement across the business especially at executive level
5. Strategic – becoming a social business – integrating into all areas of the business – best practice developing metrics framework, such as including within a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure engagement, activity, loyalty, referral levels & outcomes
6. Converged – social becomes fully integrated within the business strategy – the business is social

Organisations grow through these stages and become transformed to social businesses

How can you assess the maturity of a social business strategy?

Altimeter conducted research into social media strategy across a number of American businesses to assess their maturity– their conclusions (published here) defined social business strategy as “The set of visions, goals, plans, and resources that align social media initiatives with business objectives”. They also noted

What are the success factors of a social business strategy?

The Altimeter report defined a number of success factors. They include:

1. Business goal definition – alignment to business goals, critical to the success of a social business strategy – and an essential element with any business strategy
2. Long term vision for becoming a social business – communicating the long term vision to stakeholders and initiating organisational change aligned to delivering the strategy
3. Key executive support – developing the social business culture using a top down approach
4. Initiative roadmap – prioritising activities – linking to business value, planning for the future, iterative processes to re-evaluate, assess and monitor performance against objectives
5. Process discipline and ongoing education – the continual and relentless drive excellence
6. Staffing – utilise outsourced specialist capability to develop standards whilst building internal capability
7. Technology selection, but only after strategy is set. It’s more about the people and culture than the technology

Source – click here

Social Media Policy

Forming policy around a subject that blurs the lines between public and private present’s challenges and opportunities to create a collaborative framework. Both IBM & Coca Cola offer useful guidelines that are based primarily on practical common sense, openness, trust, honesty and raising the awareness that once something is published in the public domain it generally can’t be retracted and has the potential to go viral & global – in essence BE CAREFUL, think before you act, and be considerate with your views and opinions.

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Li, C. & Solis, B. (2013). The evolution of social business: Six stages of social business transformation. Altimeter Group.
[online] http://www.slideshare.net/Altimeter/the-evolution-of-social-business-six-stages-of-social-media-transformation

The Coca Cola Company (2012). Online social media principles. http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/online-social-media-principles

1. IBM social computing guidelines: blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and social media. After reading the guidelines watch the video from this site

KPMG (2011). Social media: The voyage of discovery for business. KPMG Research Report, July, Sydney