The Seven Success Factors of Social Business Strategy

Charlene Li, Brian Solis

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118715918
• eBook ISBN: 9781118715925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

How to align social media with business strategy for real results

For years now, businesses have approached social media in an experimental fashion unconnected to real results. There's a reason why the question about ROI is met with such hostility. But it's time for businesses to get serious about social. In this concise e-book, noted authors and disruptive technology analysts Charlene Li and Brian Solis present seven powerful factors for designing and supporting an effective social business strategy. Li and Solis studied how the best companies create measurable value that aligns with overall business objectives and outline how to incorporate these insights into your strategy and planning process.

Li and Solis focus their findings and recommendations on how to convince and even rally decision makers at the executive level. Based on interviews with thought leaders, surveys, and extensive research, they show you how to define your social strategy, create alignment across the organization, and use that strategy to support overall business success.

• Offers actionable best practices for getting the most bang for your social marketing buck
• Explains seven key success factors for effective social marketing that cover everything from long-term vision and executive support to staffing and technology investment
• Written by Charlene Li, bestselling author of Open Leadership, and Brian Solis, bestselling author of What's the Future of Business, The End of Business as Usual, and Engage

Chapter 1

The Evolution of Social Business

It’s about time that social media and social business grew up.

When we ask people what their social business strategy looks like, we usually get the following response: “Oh yeah, we’re on Facebook.” The conversation continues apace:

• Twitter account: check.
• YouTube videos: yup.
• Strategic plan: Sure, we’ve got a content calendar for the next six months.
• Metrics: Engagement of course, likes, retweets, views. We’re all set.

But that isn’t a strategy—it’s a series of tactics masquerading as a master plan. Having a Facebook page or Twitter account is like having a telephone or a printer—they’re tools that need a purpose. What you do within these social channels counts for everything. Not only will they help you meet customer expectations and achieve business goals, but thinking about the bigger picture and the overall purpose helps establish a competitive product or service. It is, after all, customer relationships that lie at the center of a coherent business strategy. The same is true for a social business strategy; however, it is not so true with most social media initiatives out there today.

To prove it, we studied how businesses were developing social media strategies and whether or not strategists aligned strategies with business goals. The results were a mix of the expected and the surprising.

Based on interviews with organizations that are investing in social media at varying levels, we learned that there are notable differences that exist between companies implementing a social media strategy and those that are building a social business. A social media strategy lays out the channels, platforms, and tactics to support publishing, listening, and engagement. We define a social business strategy as:

The deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.

A successful social business strategy requires alignment with the strategic business goals of an organization and organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy. However, in a survey of social strategists and executives conducted by Altimeter, we found that only 34 percent felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes.1 Only 28 percent felt that they had a holistic approach to social media wherein lines of business and business functions work together around common goals. A mere 12 percent were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year. And perhaps most astonishing was the fact that only one half of companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.” So while the company grows in its social media efforts, strategic focus with a clear goal in mind often falls by the wayside.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, though. We also discovered that the more sophisticated companies possess two important criteria for a successful social business strategy: (1) social media initiatives are clearly aligned with the strategic business goals of the organization, and (2) these companies invested in the organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy.

Creating a Coherent Social Business Strategy

This book focuses on how to develop a successful social business strategy that’s both useful and continuous. A fully formed, coherent, and integrated social business strategy doesn’t appear overnight—it develops and evolves over time.2 As with any strategy, your goals will change, the vision will evolve, and the roadmap and detailed execution plans will adjust accordingly. A good place to start is with this question: where are you in this journey and where do you need to go? As you create your social business strategy, put it into the context of where you are on your journey, and make the most of the opportunities to maximize value.

Here’s an example. Royal Dutch Shell concentrates its social presence efforts across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Its Facebook presence, launched in February 2012, is a core primary channel. Their goal: To showcase the personality of Shell in operations, drilling, retail, and careers. The key metric they use is reputation, asking a random population on Facebook—as well as across traditional media channels—two questions: (1) On a scale of 1 to 5, To what extent do you think Shell is actively addressing future energy needs? And (2) To what extent do you think Shell meets its customers’ energy needs in socially and environmentally responsible ways?

The company rarely replies or engages with people who post on their page. On the surface, you might dismiss this company as not “getting” social media, because they don’t actively engage in a two-way dialog. But in so many ways, their strategy is far more coherent than that of companies that blindly engage for the sake of engagement. Read that again. Engaging isn’t always a staple in strategies or metrics. It comes down to aligning social media strategies with business objectives and desired activities and outcomes. Shell measures Facebook on a daily basis to see how reputation is trending in its Facebook community, versus other channels, and thus is able to correlate how Facebook content impacts perception of reputation. In this way, Shell is able to connect a measurable key performance indicator (KPI) to a business goal. They can then also determine which channels are more effective at driving their goal of improving reputation and then invest accordingly.

Sometimes the best strategy is to look inward rather than outward. Instead of comparing where you are to others, look at the success factors of social business strategy to uniquely focus on your organization’s priorities and aspirations. To describe the essence of the journey, Ford CMO Jim Farley used an analogy: “We’re in the awkward teenage years where we have a strategy but it’s not executed the same way in all parts of the company.”

Introducing the Seven Success Factors of Social Business Strategy

So how can you tell if your social business strategy is successful or failing? It takes more than everyday metrics to show that you’re on the right path. To develop a successful social business roadmap takes benchmarking as well. In addition to the stages a business goes through, we found seven success factors that were common in companies that are seeing business impact from their social strategies. Benchmarking against the following success factors will help you invest in the efforts necessary to evolve social media strategies into meaningful social business transformation.

The Seven Success Factors of Social Business Strategy

1. Define the overall business goals. You can’t align your social strategy with your business objectives if you don’t even know what your objectives are. Define and refine.

2. Establish the long-term vision. If you’re not striving toward the end goal, you’re likely to veer off the path. If you want your team to fully invest in your social strategy—and you need the support of your entire team—you’ll need to communicate your vision with clarity and passion.

3. Ensure executive support. In the early days you may be able to fly under the radar, but at some point, if you want to truly have an impact on the business, you’ll need the backing and support of key executives.

4. Define the strategy roadmap. You already know your business objectives and have a clear vision. But how are you going to get there? Plan out your route, what roads you’ll travel, and what roads you’ll avoid.

5. Establish governance and guidelines. Who is responsible for executing the social strategy? What’s your process for listening and responding to your customers? If you clearly define this process and then stick to it, you’ll spend less time floating along throughout the social sphere and more time strategizing your social growth.

6. Secure staff, resources, and funding. In the early stages of social growth, you might outsource your social media campaign to an agency, and that’s fine. But you should also be looking down the road and planning to develop internal resources to take your company to the next level as your social prowess—and your business—grows.

7. Invest in technology platforms that evolve. Resist the temptation to jump on the latest technology bandwagon before you have a long-term strategic plan in place. Hold off on making significant technology investments until you’re equipped with a sound vision and strategic plan.

The organizations we studied didn’t necessarily have each of these success factors fully developed; rather, we found that it was much more important that each factor was aligned with immediate and long-term business goals. We also learned that these success factors aren’t followed in a linear manner; rather, they each coalesce with each other to form a coherent strategy for where that organization is in its social business journey. They are interdependent and often overlap, and they carry different levels of importance depending on the strategy. Essentially, the appropriate design of any of these success factors depends on the others.

As you go through this book, review the elements of your social strategy and compare them to the Seven Success Factors. Assess alignment and any gaps. Then review business objectives and priorities at the brand or business level as well as within your function. Are your capabilities in line with what you are trying to achieve, or have you bitten off too much and are not realizing the full potential of your efforts? Do you have the organizational governance in place to allow disparate business units to align their social efforts against a common enterprise goal, or is each line of business pulling in separate directions?

Moving forward, you will define clear business goals and use them as the foundation for horizontal and vertical social media programs that all point to one common vision.

How to Use This Book

This book breaks these seven factors into three phases: The first three factors (Goals, Vision, and Executive Support) are discussed in Chapter Two, as they represent the foundational layer of the social business strategy. In that chapter you will learn how to lay the foundation of your strategy to withstand the buffeting winds of technological change.

Chapter Three looks at the crucial strategy roadmap, which lays out what you will do—and just as important, what you won’t do—with your social business strategy. We provide several frameworks to help you identify, prioritize, and lay out a three-year roadmap. Yes, you read that correctly: a three-year strategy!

Chapter Four examines the governance of the social business strategy, which involves aligning the organization and processes around the execution of the strategy roadmap.

Chapter Five examines the last two success factors around resources and technology. We provide several data points that will allow you to benchmark where you stand vis-à-vis similar organizations.

So let’s dig into the details, starting with laying the foundations of your social business strategy with a clear idea of what bus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Chapter 1: The Evolution of Social Business
• Chapter 2: Laying Foundations: Goals, Vision, and Executive Support
• Chapter 3: Setting the Strategy Roadmap: Identify and Prioritize Initiatives
• Chapter 4: Aligning the Organization: Establishing Governance
• Chapter 5: Aligning Resources and Technology
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors