Social Business: Are You A Player?

Does the path to transforming your organization into a social business seem overwhelming? Then put the challenge in perspective: Facebook has 845 million active monthly users. If you could connect with even a fraction of them every day, how might that improve your business’s bottom line?

Apply The Social Business Framework

To help organizations “get social,” we here at Innoveer have created a five-part Social Business Framework, which identifies the business opportunities and best practices associated with using:

• Social Strategy: Connect your social business plan to your CRM strategy
• Social Marketing: Listen, influence, and attract new customers
• Social Selling: Network with, engage and make offers to your social customers
• Social Service: Create collaborative communities and support customers via social media
• Team Collaboration: Improve collaboration to attract, acquire and retain more customers

Use our framework to identify the social opportunities that offer the biggest upsides for your business. Because it probably goes without saying that every organization already lives in the social spotlight. Run with it and capitalize on social networks, or face the consequences, (competitively speaking).

Identify Social Opportunities

When it comes to overlaying social capabilities onto CRM programs, however, many marketing, sales and service executives ask us what they should do first.

To answer that question, we recommend that you conduct a social landscape review, which involves four steps:

1. Catalog: Review your business’s current approach to social CRM (if it has one), including any/all ad hoc efforts
2. Compare: Study how your competitors are using social CRM
3. Listen: Employ a social monitoring tool such as Radian6 to scan and monitor the social universe, relative to your company and brands
4. Improve: Review Innoveer’s Social Business Framework to identify the biggest opportunities (and when practiced by your competitors, threats) to your business

Create A Social Playbook

Once you’ve identified new social media opportunities for your business, it’s time to put them into practice. That’s where a social playbook will come in handy. This playbook should identify the steps your business will take, and detail a related plan — focusing on high-return, low-investment opportunities first — for getting social.

For example, Innoveer is currently working with a medical device manufacturer to create a social playbook that details the right social business steps for that organization, followed by a plan for putting the right processes, technology, and training in place. That plan will call for implementing high-value items first, backed by short project phases and quick wins to help the social business program rapidly build momentum.

But not all social business plans start from scratch. Notably, Innoveer worked with a major high-technology firm to catalog the social plans and strategies for its 15 different divisions, so that the business could consolidate all of those approaches to maximize brand exposure.

Reviewing the social landscape won’t be a static exercise, as the state of the art continues to improve. For example, one of Innoveer’s health insurance customers is taking a hard look at handling inbound cases via Facebook and Twitter. While that’s not yet the norm, within two years, expect it to be de rigueur. The question, as with so many aspects of social CRM and customer experience, isn’t if you should jump, but when you will.

Learn More

Think social business plans are just for major players, like Disney and Ford? Think again. In the early days of websites, if your business didn’t exist online, people soon began to think it didn’t exist at all. Same goes for social networks.

To help organizations identify the most direct path to becoming a social business, Innoveer offers social business workshops to enable senior managers and managers alike to understand the social-related opportunities and threats they face — in other words, their social landscape. The next step? Create a social playbook, which targets the biggest social-related business benefits via a rapid-action plan.