Excited about your new Facebook page but don’t know what’s next? What does a truly advanced company look like in social business? They can say yes to seven or more of these ten criteria.
We’ve been interviewing the most sophisticated brands in the world when it comes to social business for our upcoming report on “Enterprise Social Strategists Role”. We’ve come to learn which companies are advanced and why. Secondly, I meet a variety of companies who tell me they are “Very advanced, having done this for a few years, and have dozens of Facebook efforts” but when I ask them some specific questions on their sophistication, they often retract their statement.
How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business Maturity
Corporations that have these and other following elements in place, may truly be sophisticated when it comes to social business:
- Clear understanding of customers’ socialgraphics. Clear understanding of how their customers use social media by knowing the socialgraphics of your customers. Granular knowledge of where their customers are, which behaviors they use, who they trust for information, and how they influence their peers in the context of their own products.
The true test? Your company can adjust budgets of your integrated social strategy based on data –not gut feel. - Your organization is in Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic formation. Social technologies enable all employees that want to talk to customers to do so. This means a massive change inside of your organization to get ready. Your company is sophisticated if you’ve organized in the Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic and all employees clearly know their role, process, and contact points.
The true test? A product crises has emerged on YouTube on a Friday evening before a three day weekend and you can sleep peacefully. - Corporate website integration: Social sign on. When customers come to the corporate site, they can see which one of their friends uses which product, and what they think about it. Common technologies would include OpenID, Facebook Connect, and other social sign on technologies. See my keynote presentation on the maturity roadmap to follow.
The true test? You can disable your corporate registration page and use social logins instead without fear of reduction in leads. - Personalized corporate website based on social data. When a prospect (someone who’s never logged into you website before) arrives to your corporate website, they receive a customized experience based on their social IDs. This would be based on Social CRM infrastructure, social sign on technology and a large inventory of personalized content.
The true test? The voices of the consumers real world friends emerge above that of the brand right on the corporate website, see Levi’s foray. - Thriving advocacy program: customers are actively selling on your behalf. The sophisticated marketing program isn’t really the company talking much at all, instead they’ve a thriving advocacy program and word of mouth program that encourages customers to recruit prospects for them –all unpaid. Learn how to do this, by reading this piece on Forbes.
The true test? most leads are coming in through existing customers –not your sales team. - A community of customers supports each other, reducing support center calls. A company that has a thriving branded community where customers are self-supporting each other with little aid from the brand or the support team is a sign of a sophisticated social support program.
The true test? A majority of customer support issues are resolved by community faster, with greater satisfaction than your dedicated support team. - Anticipation of prospects and customers using Social CRM technology. Brands can anticipate before a customer has a problem, or grab leads “right out of the air” by using brand monitoring software, intelligent keyword monitoring and responding to be faster than real time using Social CRM strategies.
The true test? sales and marketing are getting leads before the consideration phase, and the support team reduces inbound calls by triggering the community to resolve a potential issue before it’s escalated. - Innovation of new products with customers using web collaboration. Companies that use these same tools to glean input from customers (ethnographic data collection) or create private communities, or use collaboration and innovation tools like Ideastorm or Uservoice and build new products and services demonstrate true sophistication.
The true test? faster time to market on products because consumers have dictated the specifications, and less inventory as the product is built on spec. - Supply chain is influenced by social data in real time. Social media isn’t just about marketing and support, but is very valuable in listening to customer signals then to anticipate which products, services, and teams should be when and where.
The true test? Your company is sophisticated if you’re using social data to adjust your supply chain in real time based on customer signals from checkins, tweets, and plancasts. - Real time reporting of revenues, costs and efficiency: I’ve met with some of the most advanced teams, and they have clear reporting and can measure the increased revenues (over the total cost of the program) to tell their executives the true ROI of their business program.
The true test? Real time dashboard measures the health of all social channels revenues, CSAT, sentiment and overall program costs.
We’ve done research on the roadmap for companies to reach these 10 levels of nirvana, but have found few companies that have done a few, or even a majority of them. If you know of any companies that have achieved five out of ten of these criteria, we’d love to know, please leave a comment.
Update: I asked folks in Twitter which brands are scoring well, here’s what they said (I’ve not done analysis to confirm):
- Intel’s Bob Duffy says they score over a 5
- Dell’s head of social Manish Mehta emailed me to tell me they are a 6.5 and will continue to improve
I see a Social Maturity Model in the making.. Think CMMI for Social.
Great piece. I'd suggest not all the criteria are on the same level though. For example social sign on for a corporate site is a tactic more relevant to certain types of companies than others (some don't even need sign on) versus innovation on new products. In our case – we do the first with Pepsi Refresh Everything but its not needed as much for our corporate site. And with programs like Dewmocracy we do a lot of customer co-creation.
(I'm re-posting my comment because I think I might have forgotten to hit “post” last time; please ignore me if I'm duplicating)…
Enjoyed this post, Jeremiah. The one other thing I'd like to see is a focus on internal communication and systems; wiring that in is so critical to businesses being able to respond in real time and understand how efforts in one area of the business can impact another. Many of the companies I see making strides with social media put a strong emphasis on their internal communication as well as their external efforts.
Thanks and cheers!
Amber Naslund, Radian6
Really interesting POV. I suspect that this guide will vary greatly if the company is in the product vs. services business, regulated vs. unregulated, and direct vs. distributed model. That said, very clear perspectives for where organizations “should be”
OH wow, very good tips indeed. Good stuff.
http://www.real-privacy.ua.tc
When referring to subject matter experts in this space we used to reference a few professionals … that list has now come down to just one!
Your continued contribution and insight serves as a road map for smaller agencies. So on behalf of us all … THANKS!
And great post!
I would love to see some of the reports for #10: Real time reporting of revenues, costs and efficiency. This seems to be the most challenging area for me, as if is tough to measure influence you had on a person(s) via social tactics when you are selling B2B and there are soo many people involved within the sales cycle. Being that social tactics trend much lower to actual cost per lead, there is huge opportunity here for companies to create much higher ROI. Another challenge I have seen recently is measuring all social referrals via web analytics, being that it seems URL shortnening services are breaking some of the tracking. And who wants to have to force tactic codes on everyone?
As always, great post.
wow I would just like to say Congrats. I have never seen this site until 10 minute's ago and my first impression was quite bad. You see I clicked one of your link's from a facebook discussion and the first thing I thought was “how can this person be telling me how to drive more traffic to my facebook page but then not not have any retweet's or people sharing said person's content on facebook” slightly confused I gave in to curiosity and decided to look at the most recent post and BAM 500+ plus retweet's, let's say that shut me up!! It's amazing what can be achieved through hard work and perseverance. So again Congratulations!
Some pretty big hurdles to overcome to reach maturity. Not sure the ROI at present is going to be too positive as you reach to achieve all these benchmarks. If a company sincerely and earnestly applied their resources to achieving with a modicum of success each and every standard what would you think they would reap in return?
Atlassian meets or exceeds expectations in almost all of these criteria.
Hi Jeremiah – as requested…
Here's some examples… All Atlassian. Get a drink, you'll be here a while. 😉
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Public Dashboard into their documentation and much more. Community can log into this and add comments to pages. http://confluence.atlassian.com/dashboard.action
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Atlassian Developer Network with downloads, getting started, examples, IRCs, etc. to get going. http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEVNET/Welcome+to+the+Atlassian+Developer+Network
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AtlasCamp “community building” is a good current (in process at this writing) example – attendees have a list of online tasks, tweets, engagement, points, e2.0 competition, etc.: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ATL/The+Great+AtlasCamp+Game+2010
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Atlassian Dragons is also a great example – having participants tweeting their progress… in fact, many that do the dragons were never on twitter before: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ATLAS/Here+Be+Dragons
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Atlassian blogs are constant, and engaging – also emailed out for subscribers, or RSS feeds. In general, a constant and great stream: http://blogs.atlassian.com/
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Atlassian forums are a HIGHLY engaged area – up to 1000 posts a week… (I know – since I feed them to a filtered email and don't even get them all). : http://forums.atlassian.com/index.jspa
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Atlassian tweet accounts (@atlassian, @JIRAGuru, @ConfluenceGURU, @atlassiandev, etc..) for most products, most campaigns or events (@AtlassianSummit, @AtlasCamp, etc.), and often “fans” of Atlassian have created accts to assist in “rallying the crowd”…
Follow the “Atlassian” word (and product names) on twitter – and the community involvement and excitement shared is endless.
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Atlassian support is all done via their own product – JIRA online.
https://support.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa
Their own product issue tracking list is all visible too. Also Dev Network JIRA: http://jira.atlassian.com
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Atlassian Plugin Exchange, which also invites community comment and contributions: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/home
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Their Twitter “widget” is embedded in their website and they encourage #COnfluenceTips, #JIRATips, etc.. and even have a “badge” for community members to put on their website. http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Tips+via+Twitter
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Extensive archived conference presentations. : http://www.atlassian.com/summit/2010/presentations/general-sessions/atlassian-summit-2010-keynote-1.jsp
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Facebook page is quite active with blog and other announcements. : http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/AtlassianSoftware
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Partners are encouraged to be “Social” on Alassian's behalf, or related. Highly active and found easily on twitter, facebook, etc. : http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/APW/Partner+Wiki+Home
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Likely missing some – but this is a pretty good list on its own I think, to the topic – ..