Social Business goes mainstream

Do you still believe business leaders don’t get it and want to give some good advice? Think again. Last week I spoke in front of a group of executives from various industries. The speaker right before me talked about how important social media is for business. Somebody in the audience stood up and said:

“This is all very interesting but we are not here to learn how important social media is – we heard that in the last 3 years. We are here to hear how you implement it, how you create and execute a strategy and how you measure results.”

Pewh – lucky me – that this was outspoken before my presentation.

While I presented best practices that we developed in the past three years such as the four quadrant assessment model, the social media strategy hexagon, the NCP model and other methods and frameworks the most interesting part were the questions and to see what status quo of many businesses is. In the past two years, most CEOs put social media into the marketing “box”. However most of them didn’t see any positive result. I asked what kind of result they expected and one put it together very nicely: “I expect to become a more attractive company where more people like to buy. But just doing a Fan page a tweeting doesn’t get us there.” A CFO responded “You may be surprised to hear that from a CFO, but I’m not looking into an immediate ROI, I’m looking for one of three trends: More productivity, less cost or more revenue.” I liked the word “trend”.

It was very clear to me that the days of evangelizing social media are over. Who didn’t get it by now will learn it the hard way in the next few years or will never learn it. Continuing to argue what companies should or shouldn’t do is a waste of time. There are hundreds or even thousands of companies that seek a profound solution – not some philosophy or esoteric vision how things could potentially be.

The upcoming Social Business Executive Summit by Customer Think end of May is probably excellent timing. executives will hear best practices and experience based strategies and ways to execute social media building a better customer experience, gaining better customer relationships and a higher degree of advocacy.

At the Executive Summit in May I will talk about what I learned from social media implementations in the past few years, touching on social business execution and concrete results – and how it turned out for the respective businesses (small and large). Look forward to see you there.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS