Integrate Social Media into Business Process

How do we implement social media?  What are the steps?

Social media should support business process, too often social media is an orphaned concept that gets little respect within the top decision-making ranks.  This fragmented environment means that social media activities have little chance of supporting the overall enterprise and established business processes.  This is a common and in my opinion, a large mistake.

Most often social media projects are set-up in the I.T. department and a marketing executive launches a single campaign once all the accounts are set-up.  The media buy gets the lion’s share of marketing funds and the social media campaign is at a disadvantage to begin with.  If the executive or executive team isn’t prepared to commit to a deeper process integration long-term, that organization’s social media efforts will be less effective as a result.

An effective deployment of social media means a weaving of skills and brand objectives within an evolving corporate culture.  However, companies such as Zappos are rare.  Like anything in business, social media can come with risks, with every tweet a brand can be put at risk if the organization is operating without a clearly defined mandate.  This risk can be too much to handle for many organizations.  A recent example is described in this Brian Solis post about the NFL’s recent ban on tweets before, during and after games.

This “culture of sharing” if properly embraced can produce measurable and sustainable impacts within a marketplace, especially if employee teams become “cross-functional” and empowered where social media skills are concerned.  The real elements behind that success reside with the ability of the corporation’s culture to evolve. Can the business integrate, adapt and evolve existing processes to include social media?  Is there a management willingness to do this?  The question I hear most often in this discussion is related to “value.”

Here are some examples of companies generating share-holder value from delivering customer value within the social web.  Dell suggests $3 million dollars in one Information Week report from this Twitter account. http://twitter.com/dellOutlet

Here’s a great post by Jeremiah Owyang on how HP integrates social media into business processes.

Regardless of where your organization is in the above discussion, typically it all starts with someone inside who is a champion for the idea of adopting social media.  If you are that champion, stay strong.  You’re about to be up against some very strong “don’t rock the boat, we don’t understand it, it’s too risky” type resistance.  Start with education, it’s the key to moving forward.