7Summits Agency

Social Business Success Depends on Alignment with Your Strategic Plan

Note: This article was originally published for 1 to 1 Media on January 10, 2011

Help your company devise scalable social business strategies

Many companies struggle with the planning, ownership and execution of social business programs. More often than not, marketing and communication teams play a leadership role in driving social media initiatives, adoption of best practices and program execution within their organization. However, a recent 1to1 Media article, “Putting Customer Service in Charge of Social” pointed out the deficiencies in limiting your social media and customer experience efforts to any one area of the business. As you look at developing and evolving your social business strategy in 2012, here are some grounding concepts that will help you focus, engage others and prioritize what you need to do.

 Moving Forward: Business Case Development and Planning

Companies often focus on how to use social media in their business by asking questions like: How do we create a fan page on Facebook? Do we need to be on Twitter, LinkedIn or Foursquare? How do we get viewers for our YouTube videos? Should we develop a customer support community? These are the wrong questions and focus. When looking at developing a sustainable social business model, start by prioritizing which aspects of social media are relevant to your business based your organization’s strategic objectives. When developing an approach to social business, the right questions include:

• How can we increase customer satisfaction and retention?
• Will this help us provide a consistent customer support experience at a reduced cost?
• How can we better align innovation with market demand?
• How do we increase sales and market share?
• Can we organize our employees and internal knowledge more effectively?

If you are the internal champion for your social business initiatives, ensure that you have a solid social media strategy and business case developed that addresses these types of questions before engaging stakeholders within your organization. Do not get stumped when someone plays the social media ROI card. This standard push back to anything social media related is getting old, however you need to be prepared to answer the question with a thoughtful response and data. The first step to answering how you intend to prove ROI is to look at your company’s existing business needs and the associated measures. Then work to map these back to your proposed social media programs. With that being done, you can correlate how your efforts will contribute to moving the needle. For instance, let’s say your proposed project is focused on creating a dedicated customer support community similar to Apple’s, here is a quick mapping of the business needs and how they can be supported through social media:

Business Need	How a Dedicated Customer Support Community Can Help
Reduce customer service operation costs	Decrease the volume of support calls by enabling customer self-service (customers supporting customers, FAQ’s)
Increase customer satisfaction	Enables authentic two-way conversation with customers (Faster, higher quality support)
Provide contemporary way for customers to give feedback and share ideas	Becomes a central location for ideas, feedback and co-innovation

Continue Reading.

 

top