A guide to creating a strategy for social media

1. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
Graham Honeywill
Amberbuzz Consulting Oy
12th January 2010
Version 1.0
Background and introduction.......................................................................................2
Why?.......................................................................................................................................3
What is a Social Media Strategy? .................................................................................4
How do you develop and launch such a strategy?................................................5
About Amberbuzz Consulting Oy ................................................................................7
Appendix 1 - Corporate Active Listening checklist tool ....................................8
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2. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
Background and introduction
Social media is a recent phenomenon that is starting to challenge the operating
models of many businesses. It provides a simple ubiquitous environment for
consumers to share their views and ideas with each other. In doing so it creates an
enormous opportunity for business leaders if they are prepared to adapt their
internal and external communications framework from “telling” to “active
listening”.
Examples of opportunities?
Example 1 – Brand advocacy – Just imagine how it would be if all your
customers were so passionate about their experience with you and your
company that they tell all their friends – no, insist to all their friends – that
they experience the same. That’s brand advocacy. Social media provide
fantastic opportunities for you to encourage, support, monitor and
understand your power of brand advocacy. Remember – people will talk
anyway, by embracing the opportunity you can become an active participant
in the dialogue. Visit www.dellideastorm.com to experience how Dell
Computers is creating brand advocates from the community.
Example 2 – Corporate Active Listening. According to Wikipedia, “Active
listening is a structured way of listening and responding to others. It focuses
attention on the speaker. Suspending one’s own frame of reference and
suspending judgment are important in order to fully attend to the speaker.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_listening). The ongoing development
of Social Media forces businesses to become “Corporate Active Listeners”,
or die. But isn’t that what business is all about anyway? Who wouldn’t want
to be part of a business who’s focus was on active listening and responding
to the needs of their customers and consumers?
Example 3 – Social CRM. Customer Relationship Management – hands up who
has NOT tried to implement this over recent years. CRM is often considered
to be a system issue (let’s buy a CRM system) or a process issue (let’s
develop a CRM process – and then buy a CRM system). However, according to
Wikipedia, “Many initiatives often fail because implementation was limited
to software installation, without providing the context, support and
understanding for employees to learn, and take full advantage of the
information systems.[2]”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management). The
processes and systems needed for effective CRM can only work if they are
firmly embedded into the values of the company, visible in the daily
workings of the company. By embracing Social Media, your business is well
placed to deploy a successful CRM model by providing the “petri dish” for an
effective CRM culture to develop and flourish.
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3. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
This document outlines your considerations in developing a strategy to manage and
lead development and use of social media, both internally, within the organisation,
and externally between your organisation and your customers and partners.
Why?
Here are eleven scenarios that might apply to you.
1. You need to build the base for social networking within an organisation,
between organisations, and between all stakeholders and advocates of an
organisation’s brand (employees and consumers, customers and suppliers).
2. You want to integrate social media as part of your overall digital channel
strategy, on the internet, on the intranet, on extranets with your business
partners, using social media sites to improve “reach” and help drive traffic to
your web sites.
3. You’re trying to establish the basic social media framework within an
organisation, supporting knowledge management initiatives and projects.
4. You want to develop various forms of brand engagement, internally and
externally building a framework for brand advocacy to improve brand value.
5. You want to develop your internal values through an open dialogue and
simplified “many-to-many” communications model in the company
6. You want to finally solve that annoying customer CRM problem and recognise
that the solution to CRM is not a process issue but a social networking issue.
7. You want to improve your network of strategic vendors and recognise the
value of social networking as the basis for collaboration – especially regarding
R&D partners.
8. You want to manage what other people are saying about you and your
company in social media.
9. You want to introduce thought leadership and storytelling to your online
content mix and recognise the value of social media to build thought leaders
and find stories.
10. You need to increase the visibility and effectiveness of your organisation’s
services and recognise the importance of digital communities in this – allowing
consumers to help each other (while you learn from their dialogue).
11. You need to develop a platform architecture for your organisation that will
integrate content management, document management, knowledge
management, search & metadata management and identity management and
support the above scenarios.
As you can see from these scenarios, the complexity in building a social media
strategy lies in the multiple perspectives that you need to consider. If you want to
build an effective strategy, one that will last you for 2-3 years into the future, you
need to at least evaluate all of the above situations, identify and engage those
individuals within your organisation who are lying awake at night thinking about
these issues.
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4. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
To make life even more difficult, as soon as you start thinking about social media
you will find yourself facing several complex issues that drive to the heart of your
business model:
Competitors vs collaborators – what is the acceptable balance between the
open sharing of information and ideas, and protecting the intellectual
property and proprietary thinking of the company? Effective social media
changes the balance between openness/trust and security/secrecy – for this
reason it needs to be carefully planned.
Business vs the individual – where is the dividing line between an individual’s
own identity and views, and those of the organisation that she represents? In
the real world there is an implicit distinction between the individual and their
organisation, and we are somehow “wired” to recognise this distinction, with
the corporate values as a guide. In the digital world this “wiring” needs to be
reconsidered and the corporate values possibly reassessed.
Hierarchy vs network – Do you work a hierarchical organisational structure?
One where you need permission from your boss before talking with his boss?
Naturally, social media forces a level democracy into any organisation. This is
not to say that hierarchical management structures disappear but rather to
say that communications become somehow more exciting, clearer and simpler
– flatter.
The “Corporate Active Listening” checklist can be used as a starting point for this –
to help you answer the question “why?”
What is a Social Media Strategy?
An effective social media strategy contains three broad components:
1. A description of the current state - what already exists that can be
leveraged? Here you need to consider a range of topics including:
• Corporate desire and intent – gather and analyze the existing corporate
strategy, relationship marketing strategy, service strategies, brand
strategy, knowledge management strategy, communications‘ strategy,
enterprise architecture.
• Individual desire and maturity – surveys and interviews to establish what
people might already be doing or what they would expect and need to be
doing – using the “perspectives” in this document as a guide – to assess the
social networking maturity of the organization or target group.
• Customer and partner expectations – surveys and interviews – with the
customers/partners and with their internal relationship owners, the sales
and R&D teams – to define the maturity of the market, identify
development opportunities that might exist and social media activities
already underway that you can leverage.
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5. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
• Current web site traffic sources – analysis of web site KPIs to identify how
effectively social medial is delivering traffic to your web site.
• Current operating model – the processes and capabilities already in place
to manage and leverage social media.
2. Your target state, a “Digital strategic intent”,a clear set of objectives for the
use of social media, internally and externally, integrated with the web
channels. The target state must include:
• Business intent – what aspects of the business strategy will be realized
through internal or external social media
• The community itself – how it will operate to deliver the business intent
• The community audiences; why they will participate; their motives or
expectations, the scenarios that describe their tasks and journeys
• The content and capabilities needed to support this as a digital
community
• Integration with the brand and corporate values – the tone of voice for
content and moderation activities
• The moderation and security enablers that will be implemented as
elements of the operating model
• The integration points across channels - how the community will
integrate with the web – to drive traffic – and the offline channels at
events etc
• The processes and platform capabilities needed to support this strategy.
• KPIs – what success looks like to bring the business case to life
3. The roadmap and next steps to deliver the strategic intent, projects by period
for the next 2/3 years:
• social media developments online on the internet or intranet,
• content strategy to support engagement and integrate with existing
content plans,
• KPI development including optimisation development
• Communications plan (change management plan)
• Risk and mitigation plan
• Immediate next steps and quick wins
• Budget plan
How do you develop and launch such a strategy?
The key to building such a strategy is effective engagement with the primary stakeholders,
building on what already exists to create an objective and actionable plan that reflects the
ideas and needs of the business.
The overall process can be seen in 4 phases:
Current state
· Identify and interview key target group areas (knowledge management, marketing
comms, services, sales development, internal and external communications, R&D
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6. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
development, online team, corporate security team) to discover existing plans and
objectives that can be supported by social media activities.
· Research how your brand and brand keywords are being reflected in social media
(blogs, groups, issues).
· Research competitor and best in class social media.
· Conduct internal operating model review (SWOT analysis)
· Analysis of web metrics with specific focus on “reach” metrics (sources of traffic to
the web sites) and “nurture” metrics (returning visitors)
· Internal survey to establish current social media awareness and involvement level
· Desk evaluation of business, marketing, communications, internet, IT, brand
strategies and plans
(Deliverable – current state analysis and baseline)
Vision and target state
· Explore conflicts (hierarchy/network; collaborate/secrecy; business/individual)
· Identify high level personas and communications scenarios
· Develop vision, “active communications” plan (“straw model”, review process)
· Establish metrics, targets and business case
(Deliverable – target state, personas and scenarios, high level business case and KPI
framework)
Roadmap development and execution planning
· Roadmap plan
· KPI targets by period
· Social media operating model (core/context analysis)
· Enterprise architecture high level requirements
(Deliverable – roadmap, immediate next steps, possibly also next project scope)
Launching the strategy (building your digital community)
· Review the current behaviour and motives of the personas and the channels they
currently use, and build scenarios to integrate the content of the new community
into user “journeys” (reach, engage, activate, nurture)
· Build a dynamic (co-created) content strategy – focus on the personas and scenarios
from the previous step, (the target community) to identify what they want to
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7. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
experience, and balance this with what you want to share and facilitate, using your
brand strategy, corporate security strategy, corporate values and existing web
content strategy and plan as your guidelines.
· Design the experience you plan to offer to your community, integrating existing
social media (eg: facebook, twitter) and existing corporate web sites with the
scenarios developed in the previous step.
· Configure and/or build the tools and processes (registration, monitoring, back end
processes, brand, tracking, content planning and creation, translation).
· Plan and execute cross channel activities to seed awareness and interest. Launch and
run the community
Each of these steps needs to be carefully planned and can vary from a simple desk exercise
of a few days to a project of several weeks, depending on the scope, complexity and current
state of material available.
About Amberbuzz Consulting Oy
I am a small, independent consultant, based in Helsinki, Finland. I specialise in Digital
Channel Strategy development and execution activities including the activities described
above.
I have two primary modes of operations:
1. I will work directly with you and your company to provide independent and objective
strategic services, tailored to your specific needs
2. I will work through Digital Media Agencies, either our own or as selected by our
clients, to augment the agency skills with the necessary consulting (strategic and
facilitation capabilities).
For more information please contact me, Graham Honeywill at graham@amberbuzz.fi.
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8. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
Appendix 1 - Corporate Active Listening checklist tool
How
effective
is
your
“Corporate
Active
Listening”?
Corporate
Active
Listening
-­‐
your
ability
to
integrate
your
business
into
Social
Media
and
the
“buzz
“
of
the
internet.
Get
it
right
and
you
can
“strike
gold”
with
improved
brand
advocacy,
closer
consumer
dialogue,
effective
customer
processes,
increased
customer
and
consumer
satisfaction
–
all
impacting
the
bottom
line
of
your
business.
Get
it
wrong
and,
well,
you
have
problems
–
what
are
your
customers
saying
to
each
other
about
you?
How
is
your
competition
able
to
bring
better
products
and
services
to
market?
But
how
to
assess
yourselves
and
your
marketplace?
Well,
here
is
a
simple
checklist
you
can
use
to
start
the
process
–
to
conduct
an
initial
evaluation
to
your
effectiveness
in
Social
Media
use
–
how
well
you
listen!
1. Public
Social
Media
evaluation:
This
first
set
of
questions
is
to
do
with
your
external
presence
–
how
you
integrate
and
deal
with
the
external
social
media
world.
Question
Risk
and
opportunity
Do
you
have
a
process
in
place
to
Risk
is
that
your
brand
is
under
threat
monitor
social
media
for
key
issues
from
destructive
blogging
activity
and
impacting
your
business?
you
don’t
know
until
damage
is
done.
Several
tools
and
services
are
available
to
help
you
monitor
these
dialogues
and
you
need
someone
in
your
organisation
who
can
use
these
tools
and
who
is
empowered
to
act
if
needed
Do
you
integrate
social
media
into
Opportunity
is
to
build
a
brand
other
marketing
channel
activities?
advocacy
network
across
social
media,
which
can
then
form
the
glue
between
channels
and
between
campaign
activity
Effective
use
of
Wikipedia
for
thought
Opportunity
to
use
wiki
entries
as
a
leadership
form
of
thought
leadership,
unbranded
but
ensuring
your
voice
and
point
of
view.
Risk
is
that
your
a
wiki
entry
can
be
placed
under
threat
of
attack
Evidence
of
cross
linking
from
social
Opportunity
to
use
social
media
as
a
media
to
site
source
of
qualified
site
traffic
–
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9. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
especially
useful
in
B2C
environment
Social
media
promoted
on
main
site
Opportunity
to
provide
richer
experience
for
the
visitor
by
extending
the
capability
to
social
media
in
addition
to
onsite
content
and
capability
Evidence
and
effectiveness
of
Opportunity
to
show
prospects
some
corporate
external
discussion
forum
part
of
how
they
can
engage
if
they
become
customers
2. Social
media
as
an
internal
(Value
chain)
dialogue
tool.
This
set
of
questions
concerns
your
internal
social
media
capabilities
–
how
you
utilise
social
media
tools
and
capabilities
internally
and
across
the
value
chain
of
customers,
partners,
suppliers.
Question
Risk
and
opportunity
How
is
the
corporate
phone
book
Intranet
and
internal
social
media
need
utilised
as
a/the
hub
for
social
media
to
integrate
–
and
the
most
frequent
within
the
organisation?
and
most
valuable
resource
on
your
intranet
is
your
phone
book
–
connecting
people.
By
integrating
internal
social
media
to
the
phone
book
you
create
a
holistic
information
resource
for
your
network.
How
effectively
is
social
media
used
as
Social
media
and
CRM
share
the
same
the
basis
for
an
effective
sales
audience
and
focus.
engagement
with
your
customers
and
Opportunity
to
use
social
media
to
prospects?
connect
internal
sales
teams
with
customer’s
contacts,
influencers
and
decision
makers
How
effectively
does
social
media
Opportunity
to
engage
resellers
with
integrate
your
resellers’
business
into
your
brand
so
that
this
advocacy
can
your
business
translate
into
stronger
consumer
loyalty
How
effectively
do
your
social
media
Opportunity
to
improve
your
cross-­‐
channels
support
an
extended
process
company
value
chain
processes
model
for
business
partner
through
improved
collaborative
engagement?
capabilities
What
opportunities
are
there
for
Opportunity
such
as
customer
self
service
efficiency
through
help;
service
comments
as
sources
of
collaborative
social
media?
co-­‐created
content
driving
new
sale:
new
service
models
such
as
recycled
equipment
resale
auctions
etc
How
do
you
use
social
media
channels
Opportunities
to
engage
employees
in
within
the
organisation
to
develop
and
brand-­‐related
activities
and
to
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10. Corporate Active listening -
a strategy for social media
support
brand
advocacy?
integrate
brand
and
corporate
values
How
does
social
media
support
your
Opportunity
to
tie
internal
and
community
and
social
responsibility
external
CSR
activities
programmes?
How
well
do
you
utilise
social
media
in
Opportunity
for
internal
team
internal
and
external
team
development
and
for
dynamic
teams
development?
etc
Do
you
have
the
necessary
capabilities
Opportunity
to
support
sharing
in
place
for
knowledge
management
knowledge
–
links
especially
to
phone
practices
and
projects?
book
and
brand/corporate
values
How
effectively
to
you
use
social
Opportunity
for
executive
team
to
media
for
executive
engagement
(for
engage
with
employees
example
executive
blogging)
Do
your
information
security
policies
Risk
of
conflict
here
–
especially
support
and
encourage
effective
social
concerning
IT
implementation
of
media?
corporate
security
policies.
This
needs
to
be
addressed
in
order
for
internal
and
external
programs
to
flourish
How
effectively
do
you
integrate
Opportunity
to
develop
true
thought
internal
and
external
social
media
leadership
from
internal
social
media
channels?
activities
that
can
then
spread
external
What
capabilities
are
provided
for
Opportunities
for
employees
to
start
to
Elective
Push
channels
(for
example
manage
their
own
information
flow
RSS,
podcasts
or
subscribed
email)?
What
opportunities
or
capabilities
are
Opportunities
for
innovative,
low
cost
there
for
virtual
world
concepts
to
environment
for
collaboration
and
support
showcase
or
collaboration?
showcasing
How
to
use
this
tool
Each
question
shown
here
represents
a
risk
and
opportunity,
which
can
be
prioritised
to
form
the
basis
for
a
simple
development
roadmap
and
plan.
Once
you
have
evaluated
your
situation
against
this
checklist,
describe
the
risk
and
opportunity
and
then
set
a
priority:
Priority
1
–
critical
to
the
current
business
plans
Priority
2
–
creates
new
opportunities
Priority
3
–
seems
like
a
good
idea
but
not
critical
This
prioritized
list
can
then
form
the
basis
for
a
social
media
development
project,
establishing
a
Social
Media
Strategy,
or
justifying
a
social
media
monitoring
process
and
tools.
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