A BBC report today quoting ONS figures for December 2011 highlights some of the losers:

“Christmas trading was a mixed bag for retailers, with Debenhams reporting flat sales. But High Street electronics and entertainment retailers, including Dixons, Comet, HMV and Game, reported sharp annual falls in sales, as did supermarket chain Tesco … Chains including fashion retailer Peacocks, lingerie firm La Senza and outdoor specialist Blacks Leisure fared worse and are now in administration.”

But who did well and why? Next brand sales were up 3.1%, with their direct catalogue and online business compensating for a fall in sales at retail stores. According to the BBC, discount fashion retailer Primark reported revenue growth of 16% in the 16 weeks to January 7, whilst online fashion retailer saw growth of 10% in UK sales and 93% elsewhere in the final quarter of 2011; meanwhile, luxury fashion brand Mulberry saw a rise of 25% in sales for the 16 weeks to January 14, whilst Burberry reported a 22% rise in final quarter sales for 2011. In general, despite a prevailing atmosphere of austerity, it seems luxury brands are doing well in the UK.

Did social engagement affect UK retailers this sale season?

So, what can we learn from the online social engagement of leading retailers and how much of an influence was this on their performance? Thanks to our Social Business Index platform, we were able to run some numbers on leading retailers over the holiday sales period in the United States, and I thought it might be interesting to do the same in the UK. We found a few supporting pieces of evidence to support what we now know about sales performance:

1. Next had an online conversation volume roughly 6 times greater than Marks & Spencer and almost 10 times greater than John Lewis in the run up to Christmas, thanks to a lot of campaign activity and conversation in their online channels, which performed very well.
2. Next’s and Marks and Spencers’ conversation volumes peaked before Christmas, whereas John Lewis peaked after Christmas during their traditional clearance sale period, as did Argos.
3. John Lewis enjoyed the most conversations about customer service topics, especially in the post-Christmas sales period, with Argos also having a relatively high proportion of conversations in this period focus on similar issues (although not necessarily for the same reasons – sentiment is still hard to measure with any certainty)
4. Marks & Spencer enjoyed a boost to its online conversations before Christmas due in part to a TV ad campaign and a relationship with a show called X-Factor.
5. Music and electrical goods retailers such as HMV and Comet, who in the past have  been popular during sale time, performed very poorly in terms of conversation volume, reinforcing the impression that their sectors are among the hardest hit by pure online retail models.

Whilst there was indeed a correlation between online social engagement and sales performance, causality is harder to identify within the marketing campaign mix used by the retailers. Clearly, the impact of pureplay online retailing continues to be felt on the high street, even in areas such as clothing that were previously seen as harder to sell online, but the picture is not as simple as it may seem, and retail is not dead yet.

It is interesting that John Lewis and Marks & Spencer are starting to find the right balance between e-commerce and in-store retail, and both appear to be investing heavily in online, with M&S reportedly expecting multi channel revenue to hit £300-500m by 2013/14. Both retailers have relatively active social media presences –  M&S has over 527k likes on Facebook, with an active community using their regular polls to comment on the page, whilst John Lewis have 693k likes on Facebook, with 4,874 people talking about them, and a very active twitter presence that enjoys 17k followers.

Can social help create experience-led ‘bricks + clicks’ differentiation?

Having taken their time to embrace e-commerce, could these two iconic companies pave the way towards a more sophisticated bricks and clicks strategy for retailers? They are both known for experience, customer service and quality, and this gives them a good degree of customer loyalty.

In an age of abundant choices and competing pressures for our time and attention, the basic approach of choosing or curating product selection, letting people browse in a friendly and supportive environment and giving awesome customer service is still a winning formula, and one that pureplay online retailers cannot always match. Apple has already shown that physical retail stores can be re-imagined and rejuvenated by focusing on customer experience, resulting in it’s stores enjoying higher sales revenue per square foot than Best Buy on one hand and luxury jeweller Tiffany on the other, although revenues in 2011 were only 1% up year on year. Apple is now looking to make this experience available more widely than its flagship city stores by offering mini-stores within Target stores in the United States.

I think there are plenty of other categories of goods where the additional cost of physical retail locations can be offset by the gains of human service, great curation and conversation, and not just the quirky map sellers and antiques shops I enjoy browsing through in Greenwich market at the weekend.

There are three things I think any successful bricks and clicks strategy needs to focus on: experience, curation and service. These must apply across both online and physical interaction, and this is where social media can really come into play by spreading the word about the fabulous experience your stores offer (location based services, facebook, recommendations, twitpics, etc.) and enticing people into a commitment (wishlists, baskets, product selectors, click and collect) that they can fulfil when they arrive at the store. But how many stores can really say they manage the online/offline handoff so elegantly? That indicates an organisational design problem where retail operations are managed differently to online and customer service channels.

To provide truly amazing experience, of course, requires a lot more than snazzy social media campaigns and Facebook likes and fans. It requires the foundation of a connected company, where the best employee brand ambassadors can be scaled to provide support and advice on social channels; it probably also requires some thinking around Social CRM and how this can be used to really get to know customers and their needs. Finally, of course, it needs tight feedback loops between action and results to achieve the kind of closed loop ROI that traditional marketing spend has spent years creating. This is where our integrated approach to Performance Brand Marketing comes into its own: strategic social engagement backed up by solid, close-to-real-time metrics and measurement.

There are very few organisations that have the depth in social to develop not only an overarching social experience strategy for brands or retailers, plus design the connected company underpinnings to make it work, plus the kick-ass social engagement campaigns and content to bring it to life. I am very excited to be part of one that does, and we will be talking a lot more about this side of our work throughout 2012.

Give the people back their air (or at least their voice)
Once you fight through the panic, remember that the core job will always be the telling of relevant and engaging stories. It became trickier when we left the old advertising model:  broadcasting a message about the brand or product features and assuming that the target audience receives it. In other words, cast a wide net with a one-way, outgoing dialogue. Nowadays, we help brands create experiences that engage the consumer while giving them ways to share that experience, either back to the brand, or in a small scale broadcast among the consumer’s social graph (with their implied endorsement). We give consumers the tools to evangelize for the brand. Social media marketing should inspire conversation around, with, and for our client brands. Brand-loyalists seek opportunities to delight in and declare their delight about their favorite brands. We create the destinations, pathways, and tools for fans to share their enthusiasm.

Medium, message, and authenticity
Social media has heralded the age of authenticity. Inauthentic behavior, like trying to skirt around an issue of communication, can be disastrous (we’re looking at you, Netflix). Communication breakdown also happens to brands through the misuse of technology. Authenticity becomes corrupted whenever the message is not clearly conveyed. The danger lies in losing or confusing the message due to lack of adequate knowledge of the delivery system. But as the method of delivery shifts constantly (web, mobile, apps, YouTube, Facebook, even augmented reality installations), the restrictions and features inherent to each technology help shape both the design and the concept itself. Design departments need to, at the very least, keep a constant dialogue with development teams. At the very best, companies need to harbor and nurture cross-discipline hybrids, if for no other reason than to act as translators between development and design. This removes potential barriers between the consumer and the brand. The medium is the message. So let the medium inform the shape of the message.

We can work it out
So, what do we need to know? At the risk of sounding like a supremely stoned guru, we need to know what we don’t know and better know those who do know what we don’t know (man). We must create cultures that allow for technology and creative to overlap, communicate at most phases of a project, and collaborate on concepts and solutions. Cutting creative out of technical solutions and excluding development from helping shape a concept is so 20th century thinking. Projects end with either a fantastic design/creative concept lost in a poor technical solution or an innovative and elegantly developed engine, ultimately rendered unusable due to design or UI missteps. The two main production disciplines of creative and technology, when working more closely together, actually can ‘know’ everything. We don’t need Creative Technologists, just the right kind of creative thinkers and communicators on both teams. Whatever your title, be it Media-Diviner or Social Video Transmogrifier, make the effort to understand the medium (down to the nitty-gritty) with the help of your more technical brothers and sisters.

This decision seemed completely obvious. I was new to town and interested in independent music, so I naturally gravitated toward a site that existed to unite people within that particular subculture. I began meeting awesome people with whom I’m still great friends today, and the site played a substantial role in my everyday life. I was stoked to find my niche. My parents, and some peers, did not share my enthusiasm.

You see, social networking in the year 2000 was not looked upon like it is today. The closest thing to social networking prior to that time was online dating, and that carried a definite stigma. Most people thought I was crazy for putting my photo and personal information on display for the world to see. “You’re going to get a stalker,” they warned. A cynical few chided, “You’ll never have a legitimate connection with the friends you make.” I laughed because I knew they didn’t get it.

Two years later, a little site called Friendster started causing some buzz in the internet world. The next year, people abandoned Friendster for a more innovative and user-friendly site known as MySpace. Before I knew it, the connotation of social networking had totally changed. Facebook’s rise to prominence after 2006 sealed the deal. By 2010, everyone and their mom (seriously) was using a social network.

During the positive shift in the social landscape, I found my way to a career in this space. Just as I had to defend my decision to join my first social network back in 2000, I had to convince businesses that they had a lot to gain by establishing a presence on contemporary social networking sites. After years of being met with cynicism, something finally clicked. Businesses finally saw the value of social.

Today, I know I am lucky to be surrounded by a group of brilliant colleagues who understand—and innovate on—every facet of the social business. I am also lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Just as my parents eventually realized I wasn’t wasting time on my first social network, companies are overcoming their fear of social and are ready to take their relationships with customers to a new level. This shift can’t be attributed to luck. Luck is too dismissive. This is the natural progression of the business world, and we knew it would come sometime.

Now is our time. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to be a part of this. My roots run deep in social; my online activities have defined nearly all of my adult life. Every day, I get excited about going to work and making an impact on this space that I know so well.

My mother used to always tell me, “Chase what you love and everything will fall into place.” People participate in social media driven by personal interests; this characteristic is implicit to the success of social in recent years. All too often, people wind up in careers that have no alignment with their personal interests. But every once in a while, passions and professions perfectly align, and that is what I get to walk in to every morning. It’s enough to make me think I am a lucky person after all.

The Social Portfolio Problem

Externally, social media is not a department. It is not a group or a team. It is a cross cutting evolution of an organization’s engagement with its constituents. For large companies this drives enormous complexity. There are hundreds of brands that need a voice. There are dozens of operating geographies that must deal with the cultural nuances of their region. There are many operating divisions and internal groups with independent priorities and initiatives. All of these groups, and often the combinatorial explosion of the intersections between each are establishing a presence in social media. And each of these is managing its own set of social accounts on a variety of platforms usually with a distinct team at the helm, executing in relative isolation.

This distributed, decentralized complexity breeds significant problems and opportunities. How do you share policies and procedures when it is unclear who is participating in social media? How do you cross pollinate best practices and innovation that rises up from the genetic diversity offered by mostly autonomous execution? When crisis hits, how do you quickly identify and coordinate the individuals that need to be on message with a response?

Social Portfolio Insight

In response to the challenges and opportunities we have seen, Dachis Group is announcing the public beta release of our Social Portfolio Insight product. Social Portfolio Insight offers organizations a solution to the complexity and dynamism inherent in managing and coordinating a distributed portfolio of social accounts.

Maintaining an Comprehensive Social Directory

Built on top of our Social Business Intelligence as a Service big data analytics platform, Social Portfolio Insight takes advantage of the platforms detection and crowdsourced certification of company owned social accounts. Social Portfolio Insight opens up that always updating list of accounts, as well as the rich metadata surrounding each to the company who owns the accounts. It couples this with a productivity UI that allows the company to augment and manage this directory via bulk uploading and visual organization tools. The maintenance of this list is distributed throughout an organization through a lightweight social network of social media strategists and practitioners across the organization.

Understanding the Social Portfolio

Social Portfolio Insight provides a unique application which lets a company analyze their social presence through the lens of platform, owners, geographies, departments. The platform also provides at a glance insight into audience and conversation health, quickly identifying hotspots globally. Finally, it also provides high level benchmarking capabilities allowing an organization to analyze its platform, brand, and region coverage compared to industry averages. Of course, all of this information can be exported for further analysis and reporting.

Collaboration

Social Portfolio Insight also contains a lightweight collaboration layer that enables an organization to pinpoint a class of social practitioner and then message them. For example, if a crisis erupts in a specific country, those who contribute to that country’s social presence can be immediately identified and talking points disseminated.

Help Us Make This Better

Social Portfolio Insight is available as a free beta to anyone who is currently registered for the Social Business Index. Simply log in to your Index account, click to profile on the main navigation and follow the beta sign up instructions in the upper right. We would love to hear your feedback and comments. You can reach us at socialbusinessindex@dachisgroup.com, @dachisgroup, or by contacting to any Dachis Group employee.

The Car Dashboard

When one thinks about a dashboard, the first thing that most people think of is a car dashboard.  Car dashboards have changed over the years, of course, and include such features as outdoor and indoor temperature, average gas mileage, compass, seatbelt warning light, etc.  But at its essence, a car dashboard includes an odometer, a speedometer, a coolant temperature gauge, a fuel gauge, and a tachometer: collectively considered the most essential instruments in the dashboard.  These instruments measure distance traveled, current speed, coolant temperature, amount of remaining fuel and rotation speed of the wheels, respectively.

For a complex machine like a car, it’s pretty amazing that those 5 instruments can tell you exactly how your car is performing, more or less.

At its core, the car dashboard, as a whole, serves to dynamically visualize to the driver the current state and health of the car. It would be foolish to think that one could drive for long using merely the speedometer, for example, to guide your journey, or simply the odometer, for that matter.  One could overheat the engine or run out of gas without the slightest hint that such an event was imminent.  It’s possible, however, that one could do just fine for a while.  One might have gotten good at estimating how far one could go before filling up the gas tank or how fast one is going without breaking the speed limit.  But for an activity that kills 113 drivers a day in America, driving with as many essential instruments at your disposal could be the difference between life and death.

The Social Media Dashboard

Similarly, most social media dashboards get it wrong because they include some – but not all – of the instruments necessary to run and optimize a successful social media department.  Many social media managers think that they are doing fine with the metrics and measures they currently measure, rationalizing approaches with statements like, “I measure what I can” or “at least I’m measuring something” without ever fully realizing why they are measuring those things in the first place.  As a result, social media marketers find it difficult not only to justify their role and need for budget, but also to play a meaningful part in the marketing mix, hampered by legitimacy and credibility issues. Ironic, because social media marketing is the most measureable marketing channel that has ever existed.  If your social media dashboard is not telling you exactly how your efforts in social media are contributing to your business objectives, you’re just not trying hard enough.

The Engagement “Sweet Spot”

Social media is completely ingrained into the daily lives of your customers and they are adapting to the myriad ways that marketers are trying to reach out to them.  Brands constantly seek the “sweet spot” to engage with customers and prospects in meaningful dialogue to reap the benefits of all the time, energy and investment spent on social media efforts.

To ultimately reach the “sweet spot” with your customers, you’ll need a dashboard that will report all necessary metrics that inform you, in real time, on progress towards stated social media objectives.  The best social media marketers are the ones capable of adapting to information presented by ramping up or down on engagement tactics or adjusting the engagement strategy outright, while shifting budget, resources and time allocations.

So the first question to ask yourself is when building a dashboard is, “what are the business objectives you are trying to achieve through your social media marketing efforts?”

Social Media Business Objectives

From my experience, most brands tend to have these objectives (whether they know it or not), although there are many more:

1. Branding
2. Funneling Traffic to Purchase
3. Fostering Customer Loyalty
4. Delivering Customer Service

Depending on what a brand is selling, it might adopt one or more of these objectives.  For example, a large retailer like Walmart might aim to adopt all of these objectives while a brand like Red Bull might focus more on branding and customer loyalty.

Whatever objectives one adopts, the path towards credibility starts with orienting measurement of objectives to business goals using impartial, transparent and accountable measures.

More importantly, it’s vital to limit what you measure so that the dashboard is a succinct and clear indicator of progress toward defined business objectives, while delivering diagnostic insight and predictive foresight in order to stay nimble.  In other words, if one’s dashboard doesn’t deliver actionable insight into past activity and prognostic information about future plans, your dashboard is merely going to be a collection of numbers, causing one to celebrate when certain numbers go up and to lament certain numbers going down.

In my next post, I’ll lay out precisely the types of metrics and measures one should keep an eye on to track whether you are achieving your social media marketing goals.

That’s not to say that some organizations, either by inclination or through gifted leadership (or both), won’t naturally adopt social business methods. To them, the patterns, tools, and modes of participation are even easier ways of working than what they do today and there are relatively few obstacles. Those aren’t the companies that will ultimately have a dark night of the soul as they look at what their competitors are starting to accomplish and wonder how they can get there too. As the evidence mounts that socially engaged workforces, along with their trading partners and customers, result in more productive, efficient, and profitable enterprises, it will be — by definition — the organizations less likely to be able to make the transition that will have the most challenges and the longest path.

This was a key point made at Dreamforce, namely that there is a growing “social divide” between 1) our customers and workers, and 2) our organizations, the latter of which have been much slower to adopt social methods of engagement, both internally and to the world at large. Like Benioff, I’ve long predicted that the gap between how we’ve changed as a culture and society will become untenable with the relatively slow rate at which many of our businesses are adapting to these changes. Benioff has gone so far as to seriously suggest that there will be a “Corporate Spring”, analogous to what’s happened in the Middle East this year, that will change the status quo positively from companies to governments as aging and obsolete methods are cast aside by workers for better social ones.

Frankly, this loss of control is evident in many organizations when they do any kind of application audit these days: Workers are using the means that pose the least barrier for them in getting their work done. Social media is increasingly winning the growth game with shadow (unsanctioned) social tools for collaboration, for example. These are technology and behavioral shifts that just about every CIO is closely tracking at the moment.

But the transition to the social enterprise, as inevitable as some (including myself), think it will be, will not be as simple as buying the latest social software solution — no matter how good — and declaring victory. For starters, the process involves genuine cultural change even more than than it requires technology enablement. Then there is the sheer size and variability of the enterprise itself to contend with. The truth is that as compelling as comprehensive platform visions such as what Salesforce articulated last week are, the journey towards social enterprise involves conscious decisions to change organizational behavior, business strategy, and technology.

How Social Business Convergence Is Happening

Here is my premise: Just as the early rise of departmental use of social media in marketing, communication, and collaboration has escalated to more organized and sophisticated methods, I’ve noticed that there has started to be what I’ll call a convergence to social business. This is opposed to a “revolution” or a “transformation” though those will certainly happen in the large over time. Instead, based on what I’m seeing in the case studies, stories, research, news, and with clients are the following changes that — is a series of loosely connected yet closely related changes — gives us a portrait of how our organizations are most likely to evolve in these directions over time. The exact details may vary for you, but this is how organizations generally will make the transition to social business:

• Moving from some participant channels, then to all separately, and finally together. Right now most organizations are just developing their social engagement capabilities for B2C, B2B, E2E, and E2B. They will develop them separately for the most part, then learn the importance (and need) to cross-connect them strategically and then begin unifying the platforms, organization roles, resources, and processes so that there is consistency, reduced duplication, better governance, and higher business impact. The organizations that can do this in the fewest steps will be the winners and they will be aided by increasingly mature platforms from the largest vendors, though some companies will roll their own.
• Going social generally first, then connecting social activity to work processes. Those that have been following the extensive discussions recently in the social business community are becoming more aware of how important that social activities be integrated with high value work streams. If business applications for customer care, product development, operations, and so on are isolated from social tools, then by definition there will be limited impact. Most organizations will adopt general purpose social communities (internal and external both) and then begin the hard work of integrating them to line of business applications as well as producing new kinds of socially-enabled applications that didn’t exist before, such as social intranets, location-based apps, and much more. Lesson: Those that can put social to work with business apps via a more direct and meaningful route will generate substantially more business value than those that don’t.
• Starting at the departmental level and then creating enterprise-level social business capability. This is the story around the social business unit and CIO-level programs to provide the strong technical support. Unfortunately, cultural support for change will lag in many organizations that don’t have strong social business leaders at an executive level, as serious a hindrance as not having social business capabilities themselves.
• Top-down leadership and grassroots initiatives meet in the middle, then sort it out. Most organizations have blogs, wikis, social CMS and other social media lurking in the margins, some even that are quite successful. At the same time, many organization are indeed pushing out official efforts but ones that don’t necessarily have support and buy-in from workers. Very often, the issue is with different parts of the organization at approximately the same level will engage in internecine conflict until their approach, platform, or preeminence wins out. While this is what happens at first, slow in same cases, though more quickly for high functioning organizations, the issues get resolved and the various parts of the organization generally becomes “calibrated” in the same direction, resulting in a unified approach to social business in general.

It’s clear that social business can be an arduous and difficult road for some, but it’s also a profoundly rewarding one as organizations consciously update their digital strategies for the 21st century to reflect the realities of and changes in the modern world today. The good news is that we now know more than ever before what the broad outlines of the transition to being a social enterprise will look like. I think you’ll find that aids like the list above helps see the context and the eventual end point to aim for. There are also many other valuable lessons learned accumulating in places like the Social Business Council and the Community Roundtable. For now, smart and forward-thinking organizations will begin looking more holistically at how they are evolving and develop strategies to make the transition with the least disruption, fewest steps, aimed at the most constructive and valuable outcomes.

What else are you seeing in terms of convergence of social business activities in your organization?

Technology of any kind isn’t very useful to us unless it’s put to work. This is where one of the most interesting new parts of the social media landscape has been forming, namely in the new field of social business intelligence. This is the discipline of monitoring the whole of the social media world while continuously deriving insight from the aspects of it that matter to you, strategically or tactically, depending on your needs. I say aspects instead of conversations, because while analytics will give us useful metrics, it’s only until we apply the lens of business intelligence to the data itself can we clearly see the deeper and larger scale implications for our businesses.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of blur between social analytics and social business intelligence. They’re both relatively nascent fields that have plenty of overlap. So where social analytics is about the measurement and data mining of the social universe for any reason, social business intelligence is concerned with a more holistic process aimed at specific business outcomes, depicted conceptually in the visual below.

To be sure, there are many different flavors of social business intelligence just as there are many reasons why organizations will want to create business processes around the feedback loop that forms. Currently, many of the processes involved are manual and ad hoc as the industry has felt its way forward and learned how to engage more meaningfully with social media. A few companies on the leading edge have increasingly formal social business intelligence processes based on sets of capabilities they’ve acquired or built. Other firms have hardly any technology at all, other than perhaps some reports and spreadsheets.

They are all seeking the same thing however: To pinpoint the opportunities and identify the events that matter most to them so they can engage. The actual response to social business intelligence insights will vary entirely based on what is learned. It can be strategic and affect how the companies evolves its products and services or the way it engages in entirely new and innovative ways with customers. Or just as likely, it’s on-the-ground insight that drives individual interaction or collaboration with prospects, customers, business partners, and others whose current and past activities social media have been identified as important.

Developing your social business intelligence capability will be a journey that will have stages, like any other process of development. For most organizations, it’s just a set of experiments at the moment. But over time, with hard-won lessons learned, it will become more formal and institutionalized. Usually too soon, the question of centralization will come up, since it’s often one of the experiments in a particular corner of the organization or another that will have significant success. It almost certainly will be asked if it makes sense to share this best practice and locate it in the social business unit or other centralized social media management capability. For now, encouraging decentralized experimentation is more important than achieved the economies of scale, since local successes are rarely likely to meet the whole organization’s needs. What’s most important is making as many discoveries as possible about what works and what doesn’t.

Right now we are tracking a rapidly growing and expanding set of providers of social business intelligence. Products like Radian6, Kontagent, and SAS Social Media Analytics are just three examples out of many of social analytics tools that also provide some level of deeper social business intelligence features. Over the next few years, there will be numerous entrants into this space, as well as additions to existing social media services, as the industry as a whole learns the ways that companies can turn their social engagement with the world into real opportunity and value.

Often starting as a secondary requirement of early social media monitoring and listening efforts, for now, these are the leading drivers behind social business intelligence capabilities:

Drivers of Social Business Intelligence

• Marketing Optimization. Marketing has long been an early adopter of social media, and it’s no different with social business intelligence. Now instead of reports and dashboards that merely show the what, marketers can find out the why. With social business intelligence, companies can craft much more detailed yet fully integrated qualitative pictures of the inbound funnel, identify why engagement strategies are working or not, and organize systematic, yet mass-customized responses in scale.
• Capturing Ideas and Unmet Needs. Going beyond the trend analysis of analytics allows the processing and isolation of the deeper implications of social media activity. Social business intelligence can capture innovation, new ideas from the marketplace, identify customer wants and desires, and identify the gaps in your organization’s services.
• Situational Awareness. Identifying and tracking the top trends, understanding when critical situations arise to protect customer experience or brand, and much more. Going well beyond low-level analytics, social business intelligence can help make sense of more data than any manual or raw analytic process ever could.
• Customer Care Opportunities. Fully empowering Social CRM, social business intelligence can augment the interaction with customers in social media by improving the triage, prioritization, and resolution process of customer care.
• Sentiment Analysis. While social analytics can provide some basic insight into a customer’s state of mind, only more sophisticated methods can semantically process and assess the actual meaning of the social media conversations involving your company or its products in order to derive actionable insight.

As I pointed out recently, the focus of your social business intelligence efforts will be rooted deeply in business-specific motivations, thus these are just a small sample of the ways organizations will employ the capability. To give you a better sense of the possibilities I will explore specific examples of companies employing the strategies above successfully in upcoming posts.

What does all this mean for you now? In my opinion, it’s virtually certain at this point that social business intelligence will become a vital component of the way that companies derive bottom-line benefits from social media including revenue growth, innovation, cost reduction, and more successful line-of-business operations. So connect to the world, start your experiments, and start learning how to make it work for you.

One of the biggest challenges these efforts face, whether they are internal or external, is that engagement via social media is generally perceived as a voluntary activity. As in, workers can collaborate and customers can choose to interact with a business through older channels that are often more familiar and better supported by the organization itself. Or they can engage through social channels. For people to choose the social path of engagement as the most suitable one, there need to be motivations and incentives that are aligned with that path.

As companies seek to ensure the highest level of success with their social business efforts, I am seeing that they want a proven, reliable way to drive adoption of their social business strategy, whether it’s an Enterprise 2.0 initiative, a social media marketing program, or Social CRM effort. But social media is not as deterministic and controllable as the channels that have come before it. It’s one of the reasons I say that adoption of social media can only be co-created. It is as much up to the those engaging to create value, sustain engagement, and build community as it is to those that sponsor them. You can’t own a community like you can buy software or a marketing campaign, social business is a two-way street like nothing quite like it. This makes adoption of social business a very different creature from the way businesses used to engage before.

Fortunately, after over half-a-decade of experience in scale, we can see the broad outlines of adoption, which have stages that are very different based on the state of maturity and overall rate of social business adoption in the organization. In other words, as much as we might like it, there is no “one size fits all” approach to it. Fortunately, we can organize around these different stages, which fall roughly into four parts given below. Specifically, these are:

Phases of Social Business Adoption

• Early adoption This is the most nascent and delicate state, where there is perhaps only a seed of community and there is no network effect yet or core membership that can help with the essential work of social business building. The goal is to validate the direction, tools, and social business design. This is often called the pilot phase.
• Critical mass adoption This is transforming a successful early adoption phase into broader uptake that is self-sustaining. I’ve previously observed that this critical mass is around 20% of workers, but has been verified as even less.
• Mainstream adoption There is usually a long pause between the first two waves of adoption and late adoption. Early adopters are often very early and the remainder are often represented by those who have challenges in engaging in a different way, for a variety of reasons. Specific steps must be taken to address these adoption issues.
• Sustainable adoption A successful social businesses contains communities of people, their business activities, and supporting tools. They will largely self-organize and grow on their own once you’re well into the critical mass phase and beyond. However, these communities can also decline over time without appropriate care and nurturing. Employees move on, customers decide to leave, your company changes direction. All of these affect the long term health of your communities, and so specific adoption strategies are required for as long as you have a thriving social business environment.

This post is part of a four part series on social business adoption that will explore each of these phases, with early adoption being examined here. For this effort, I’ve contacted over a dozen experienced social business practitioners, tapped into my research, and aggregated the results of numerous case studies. The outcome is what you see here and while it’s probably as definitive as you’ll find, it’s a necessarily limited view of a rapidly moving new field. Also, in the end, what drives adoption best is whatever actually works for your social business project, and what works best for your project often isn’t what’s in the check lists, no matter how good. Social isn’t as predictable or as deterministic as we might like, and that’s the challenge. Of course, it’s also a large part of the opportunity to drive innovative new outcomes you could never otherwise achieve or imagine. So while your mileage may vary somewhat, the adoption strategies presented here can be a very useful jump start of your social business journey.

Recognizing that that although social business is part of a single continuum across workers, business partners, customers, and the marketplace, that internal use of social business and external uses involve participants that have a very different relationships with the organization. Adoption strategies therefore vary the most between these two groups and so they are presented here separately, though there is often significant cross over, particularly in areas like community management and connecting social business activities to relevant business outcomes and bottom-line benefits.

Note that these adoption phases also take place during the journey of becoming a social business in the large and will be directly informed by that journey. Individual social business efforts, and their adoption strategies, should be loosely connected to what the entire organization is doing and “calibrate” to align themselves in the same direction.

Early Adoption Strategies – Internal Social Business (aka Enterprise 2.0)

While the blur between internal and external communities continues to increase, for now most efforts are still separate. Listed beow are the top adoption strategies for external social business efforts. Begin with these but experiment along the way and find the adoption patterns that are unique to your environment, culture, and constraints.

• Establish a clear purpose. Ill-defined and vague social business efforts end up with a similar outcome. As Susan Scrupski, who formed the active and highly engaged Social Business Council (disclaimer: this is a Dachis Group online community), conveyed when I asked her what the single most helpful action she took to foster adoption was this: “We established a clear purpose for the community, combined with fostering a sense of trust and a culture of sharing.” Clearly stated intents and objectives let participants self-select, join in, and find what they are looking for while contributing more of the same.
• Identify and engage adoption champions. Locate and identify unofficial leaders in your target community and get them involved and participating early. They will ultimately do the bulk of the work during the early adoption phase in drawing in participation using the social networks and good reputation.
• Help leadership set the tone. One of the biggest triggers for adoption is when leadership clearly communicates how they’d like workers to participate in social business. While setting a personal example through participation is best, all it takes is direct, regular, and public involvement by several well-respected executives.
• Communicate clear policies for usage (cans and cannots.) Social media policies have come a long way from the 7 page fine print of years gone by to simple and clear directives. Specifically, the lessons learned over the years have distilled to focus on explaining exactly what employees can and can’t do in the most understandable terms. Bonus points for providing effective suggestions on when they should use social business solutions.
• Test social UX usability with workers. Inexplicably, usability of a social business design is too often under-tested or performed as an afterthought despite it being one of the biggest drivers of early adoption. If you don’t have budget set aside for A/B testing (which is proving to be the very effective, though more expensive) and time in the schedule to fix the biggest usability barriers you discover, you will take an adoption hit.
• Use a consumer-style marketing campaign. How you communicate to workers and the tone you use will set stage for the way its perceived, and in the early days perception of everything. It must be credible but it must also be memorable and convey what’s new and provide motivation to join and try it. John Woodworth of 3M Lab Collaboration used this approach successfully: “Employees already have a preferred product. By using market segmentation and a value proposition for each ‘segment,’ we identified what they would need and how they wanted it delivered. A good customer doesn’t just try your product; they buy it often and endorse it. Focus the sales on finding the ‘good customers’ and the best markets.“.
• Strategic community management. Especially early on, the facility of community management is one of the only real assets you have to drive social business transformation and adoption. Rachel Happe, co-founder of the The Community Roundtable and a world authority on community management, notes that “community building is a critical element of social business success and typically organizations cannot get there by deploying social technologies alone. There are a variety of contextual factors that can increase or decrease the ease of building a community but there are also some common best practices“. I’ll note these best practices in this list.
• Connect to business purposes. This seems obvious stated this way, but many look at social business approaches as a horizontal or general purpose communications method more akin to e-mail to IM than a way to improve a specific business activity. Sometimes this is true of course, but the best results often seem to come from those that aimed their social business design at a specific business opportunity. As Lauri Buczek, social media strategist at Intel, recently noted in Mark Fidelman’s Sure Fire Ways To Become A Social Business, “First, identify the business objectives.” Ken Domen, an enterprise collaboration lead at a large enterprise, conveyed to me that finding a “killer app” that solves a particular business problem better than before is a strong adoption technique. For example, Ken finds that IM and calendaring apps, embedded contextually in his social environment, to be particularly effective.
• Proactively share the adoption process. Communities are built by their members, not companies alone. Time after time, as I see particularly effective examples of social business, I see that this is a core value. The more the process is open and members are encouraged and empowered to provide structure, rules of the road, and spread the word, the more ownership, involvement, and productive work results. Experimentation should be encouraged. A leading example is SAP’s million-plus member Community Network (case study) with their SAP Mentor program.

Early Adoption Strategies – External Social Business

As social business scales up and goes external, successful adoption has a new, though often complementary set of requirements. Some of the differences revolve around motivation in that external participants aren’t typically paid to work for the organization like internal participants and so usually have a very different set of reasons they are involved. Other issues that tend to be unique to external social business includes appealing to a much broader demographic and competing with similar communities elsewhere on the Internet.

• Identify and engage influencers. Enlisting those with strong reputations and contacts related to the purpose of your social business effort has long been understood as an effective adoption pattern. Engagement with influencers takes many forms and should be connected to adoption whenever possible early on.
• Use content as a participation seed. At first, there’s little in a new community to draw in initial participation. Rachel Happe says this is one of her top three adoption patterns: “Create a content calendar that provides members with something they value and creates opportunities for them to interact.” Obtaining seed content can be resource-intensive and can require more investment than expected if influencers are not well-engaged early. This should be sustained until at least the critical mass phase of adoption and usually beyond.
• Go to the audience, draw them in. Building a community on a far corner of the Internet makes it hard for new participants to find it. This is one of the reasons that Facebook pages have become so popular, by going directly to where a vast, already social and participative audience is. There are many approaches to this but it can greatly aid adoption when integrated properly.
• Personal engagement from key business stakeholders. Having the presence of company leaders and providing structured access to them by recognized members of the social business ecosystem provides the deep engagement that’s more likely to both increase participation and lead to useful outcomes. SAP’s Community Network does this proactively (see case study link above.)
• Reward the remarkable 1%. By now just about everyone is familiar with the 90-9-1 rule, where 90% are passive browsers, 9% contribute a little, and 1% account for a disproportionate amount of the value created. These are rough numbers for external social business participation. While the specific technographics continues to fluctuate a little as the market evolves, the key to driving adoption is ensuring that your most valuable contributors are incentivized appropriately to contribute, once you identify who they are. While timing and perceptions of conflict of interest can be issues, rewards typically run the gamut from simple recognition to more formal business relationships.
• Proactive community management. Community management continues to make my top list of what helps define a successful, vibrant social business. Rachel Happe includes this in her top three list as well, noting “allocating a full-time community manager that both encourages member activity and keeps the conversation on track.” The biggest misstep I see many social business efforts make is greatly under-resourcing this capability early on. SAP’s Gail Moody-Bird has observed that resources like this “are not a part time job for everyone.“
• Keep it simple. To be usable and effective for the broadest demographic, simplicity in joining, user experience, and conversation are essential to reduce abandonment and maximize the value being exchanged. This is Rachel Happe’s top adoption point as well, “keep the functional environment simple so new members quickly grasp how to participate.“
• Be authentic, don’t overproduce. Over the years, as I’ve collected best practices for online communities, I’ve noticed a common pattern. The fanciest and slickest social business experiences don’t necessarily achieve nearly the uptake as ones that are simple, basic, and straightforward. Though social media marketing aspects of social business can be an exception, excessive polish conveys a sense that too much lipstick is being put on. As John Hagel has talked about a trust paradox and social business, that being truly genuine and letting human realities be exposed is much more likely to sustain adoption and less likely to actively repel participants.
• Employ the “Us First, World Second” strategy. Time and again, when I’ve spoken to social business efforts, they explained how in the early days everyone was on deck in the organization and helped create the seed of participation. I’ve even heard it phrased that at first “it was 90% us and 10% them, and then later it was 90% them and 10% us.” Driving early adoption in this was is successful but unsustainable at a high level for long and must be timed right. “All hands on deck” may be problematic for your organization for various reasons but it’s a powerful tool for early adoption when it can be used.
• Build trust and a culture of sharing. This is one of Susan Scrupski’s adoption lessons and has been repeated by just about everyone I’ve spoke with over the years. It’s not just enough to build trust, the culture must be one where the free exchange of ideas is valued and encouraged, because that’s the observable value that drives innovation, better decisions, and more. Building that culture requires leading by example and rewarding contributors both.

Note that this list cannot be exhaustive and there are literally dozens of techniques large and small that one can attempt to drive adoption of social business. You should also never forget the fundamental cycle of listen, analyze, measure, and respond. However, these cover the more widely used and repeatable techniques that I’ve seen of the many social business efforts that I’ve examined over the years. I’ll be covered the remaining adoption phases in upcoming posts but welcome your feedback to improve and extend this list.

This week I’ve spent a lot of time looking at one of the next frontiers of social business, the intersection of application software and social networks. As I examined on ebizQ, the next app you use is increasingly likely to be inside a consumer social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn (no solid word yet on how Google+ apps will work.) This trend is also moving into the enterprise as social apps have started becoming available in Enterprise 2.0 platforms, as I recently looked at in detail with Jive Software’s Apps Market for their popular social business platform.

Social applications are increasingly proving to be an effective way to direct community-based activity into useful directions and social networks are a natural home for them. By providing application experiences within the users current social context, applications can lightly structure or orchestrate collaborative behavior at useful outcomes. Driving outcomes like this have proven effective across virtually all the departments and functions of the modern organization.

However, as ripe with potential to reap meaningful ROI from social networking, social apps are just one intriguing examples of the overall evolution of social business. The big picture has been growing clearer in the recent years, even as the landscape keeps moving, as companies have learned to update their digital strategies with social business and begin to genuinely apply what we now understand as the truly transformative power of social media to how they run their businesses.

A Four Step View of Social Business Maturity

The social business ladder, when dealing with the connection of an organization to the broader external marketplace, can be said to have four major steps. Organizations typically start by trying to drive the world to their online presence, a clear extension of their Web sites and typically consists of the addition of blogs, customer discussion forums, and other basic social features. This is effective and useful, to a point, but it’s limited to basic information discovery, high-level awareness, brand messaging, and communication. It is also typically the purview of just one part of an organization, usually corporate communications and/or marketing.

However, companies typically realize there is much more to the social business story than basic social media. They then reach for the second rung of the ladder: Going to the world. This was made easier by large global social networks like Facebook and Twitter — as well as regional social networks in countries where these two market leaders have stiff competition. Driving the market to a social media presence on a corporate Web site is hard work, expensive, and limited in effectiveness compared to just going directly to where the world already is. The second rung is about building reach, establishing network effects, and connecting within the social channels that almost everyone already uses. This is a much more scalable and effective approach and is exemplified by Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and decentralized badges and Like buttons that connect an organization’s content and experiences that are elsewhere on the Web back into the world’s main social ecosystems.

Going to the world is powerful expansion in the way of thinking about and applying social business, but it’s just halfway there. More mature organizations have figured out how to more deeply engage the world via social business by greatly “turning the knob to the right” in how they listen, analyze, and engage. Scale is the name of the game when companies progress to the third rung of social business maturity. Listening to and understanding where all the important conversations are, tapping into them in a timely fashion, systematically understanding their implications to the organization, and ensure that appropriate responses, from simple information returns to complex marketplace collaboration, take place. All of this drives better decisions and results across all lines of business. The list of areas that benefit from engaging with the world including sales, marketing, innovation, hiring, support, operations, supply chain, and more.

Most companies are on the first two rungs and some companies are now on the third rung of this social business ladder. A few companies however, are progressing to what appears to be the next and most advanced level. This stage of social business is the most transformative of all and the natural outcome of the relentless blur that I hear about from more and more C-level executives as they witness the boundaries of their organization changing under the relentless pressure of the new, often highly social, ways that workers and customers use technology to connect with each other. The broad changes that businesses are experiencing are extensive yet they are also looking to be one of the most rewarding ways that we have to enlist the creative and productive output of the global population in rebuilding and growing our businesses. Businesses are asking “What will power next-generation enterprises?” A large part of the answer lies with mature social business approaches on the right side of the chart above. I’ll be looking at some of the more significant implications in the fourth rung in upcoming posts.

How Do Organizations Get There?

To get there, the enterprises of the very near future will have to be more visionary in an on-the-ground and effective way than they are today. As IBM’s Sandy Carter pointed out recently, based on her many conversations, there’s still work to do to communicate that social business involves far more than just PR or marketing. It requires engagement by the entire organization. McKinsey also recently underscored the inverse point, that “we’re all marketers now“, just further proving the point that we’re all much more involved in everything now as business activities become far more connected. In the end, the companies that can manage risk well while enabling their own disruption by climbing the social business maturity curve will be best situated to take advantage of the very significant and measurable benefits.

Where are you on the frontier of social business and why?