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.

Social media vs traditional advertising

When was the last time the number of “impressions” your ad campaign generated also told you how many conversations about your brand were happening in real-time?

When was the last time “frequency” explained how many times a customer mentioned your brand, product or service to others and the sentiment of that comment?

When was the last time the above information actually told you “why” people were buying your stuff?  Or why they didn’t buy?

The truth is, most organizations despite the decline are still spending large dollars in the traditional advertising space and are justifying these expenditures on metrics that are estimates in many cases.  Then those same executives look at social media investments with risk in their eyes, a lack of understanding and claiming there’s no way to measure.

Top executives claim there’s no budget for social media.

What they’re really saying is “we don’t understand.”  Then they provide a media buyer with $250,000.00 or more to go fire away at the big three, print, television, radio for a 90 day campaign.  Why?  Not because it’s necessarily the right answer but because it’s what they understand and the safe move.  Now in this recovering economy there are shifts in these patterns to be sure.  Much of the traditional ad industry is feeling the effects.

Every once and a while, I come across an executive who has thought the above questions through and has realized that the ability to hold conversations, build rapport, inspire action directly on a mass scale or one on one and track all of those activities is definitely appealing. “Welcome to the social web.”

Social media metrics do exist, they’re just different.

Social media is word-of-mouth advertising ON FIRE!  You have to change how you look at measuring things.  Measuring conversations is a hands on job.  You can’t just tally up the traffic numbers and say we won.  You have to dig deeper than that and it is possible to do so.

A strong online campaign will demonstrate “engagement” levels that will include a number of things.

My definition of social media “impressions” would constitute the number of times elements of your campaign get mentioned across blogs, articles, comments, video, images, mass-media, micro-sharing platforms, social networks.  This information would also include, “sentiment and influence within micro-tribes.”

Beyond just eyes seeing the message, many other things can be identified.  Did your message move or inspire further actions or discussion publicly online?  If it did, this can almost certainly be tracked.

What was the sentiment of action taken?  Are citizens blogging about your message, brand, product or service positively or negatively?  If they explain their position and why they feel the way they do that can be identified.  Did they spoof your television ad on Youtube?  Did they create a twitter hashtag and engage others on Twitter?

The interaction and what can learned within the social dynamics identified can help your organization understand your customer and their relationships or “social networks” better.  That understanding can lead to emotional engagements, emotional engagements can lead to influence and influence leads to action.  The social web is where you need to commit your resources long-term and you need to do it, yesterday.

Where’s the value?

The value is in the human connections and relationships generated between your brand and your customer.  Those connections properly nurtured will build loyalty and loyalty means repeat business and influencing new business.  The social web is the perfect environment for this.  That’s where the value is.  This doesn’t happen overnight and it isn’t easy.  However, the ability to amplify a message is immense and shouldn’t be ignored.  The problem isn’t with the social web, the problem is with current organizational mind-sets and it’s time for a change.  If you truly understood the social web, you’d never call it a fad.

• The Social Web Isn’t Just for the Young Anymore (gigaom.com)
• Forrester: Social networking grows up (infoworld.com)