Intuit is frequently referred to as one of the rare examples of a successful social business that operates within the confines of a regulated industry. Christine Morrison, Intuit’s Social Media Marketing Manager and architect of much of this success, recently shared some lessons learned from Intuit’s journey at Social Business Summit 2010. Christine’s presentation, and a key theme of the day, are embodied in Intuit’s simple and powerful philosophy: “We don’t do [social] for fuzzy reasons. We do it because it makes good business sense.”

Put another way, Intuit treats their customer community as a strategic asset and not some strange non-core element of their business.  Like all other business assets, social initiatives must have a role in strategic planning and ultimately contribute measurable value to the business. Intuit has succeeded by framing social media in the context of existing business functions like customer research and product development. In doing so they’ve not only wrapped their arms around social media, they’ve also accomplished something rather unique – they can prove social is good for their business.

Christine’s presentation traced the evolution of Intuit’s product and customer research efforts from a program of visits to customer homes and businesses (called a “follow me home”) to a world of online community and embedded social functionality. Positioning social inside this framework accomplishes two things. First, it places social media on the leading edge of an existing continuum of tried and true customer research methods. Second, it allows Intuit to measure the outcome of social initiatives with existing metrics. The result is a targeted approach to social business that fits naturally into an existing way of looking at business assets.

The outcomes speak for themselves:

• Members of the Intuit community offer effective customer service at almost no cost to the company (the most active community member has addressed more than 50,000 tax questions).
• Calls-to-action are broadcast to users’ social graphs, but originating inside Intuit software, drive 30% more conversions than traditional advertising.
• A private customer community has generated more than $10 million in new revenue for the company.

Measurable wins like these illustrate that true business value is realized when customer community is treated as a business asset and not an experimental campaign.