How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business Maturity

Categories: Social MediaPosted on September 2nd, 2010

Excited about your new Facebook page but don’t know what’s next? What does a truly advanced company look like in social business? They can say yes to seven or more of these ten criteria.

We’ve been interviewing the most sophisticated brands in the world when it comes to social business for our upcoming report on “Enterprise Social Strategists Role”. We’ve come to learn which companies are advanced and why. Secondly, I meet a variety of companies who tell me they are “Very advanced, having done this for a few years, and have dozens of Facebook efforts” but when I ask them some specific questions on their sophistication, they often retract their statement.

How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business Maturity.
Corporations that have these and other following elements in place, may truly be sophisticated when it comes to social business:

Clear understanding of their customers socialgraphics. Clear understanding of how their customers use social media by knowing the socialgraphics of your customers. Granular knowledge of where their customers are, which behaviors they use, who they trust for information, and how they influence their peers in the context of their own products.
The true test? Your company can adjust budgets of your integrated social strategy based on data –not gut feel.
Your organization is in Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic formation. Social technologies enable all employees that want to talk to customers to do so. This means a massive change inside of your organization to get ready. Your company is sophisticated if you’ve organized in the Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic and all employees clearly know their role, process, and contact points.
The true test? A product crises has emerged on YouTube on a Friday evening before a three day weekend and you can sleep peacefully.
Corporate website integration: Social sign on. When customers come to the corporate site, they can see which one of their friends uses which product, and what they think about it. Common technologies would include OpenID, Facebook Connect, and other social sign on technologies.
The true test? You can disable your corporate registration page and use social logins instead.
Personalized corporate website based on social data. When a prospect (someone who’s never logged into you website before) arrives to your corporate website, they receive a customized experience based on their social IDs. This would be based on Social CRM infrastructure, social sign on technology and a large inventory of personalized content.
The true test? The voices of the consumers real world friends emerge above that of the brand right on the corporate website, see Levi’s foray.
Thriving advocacy program: customers are actively selling on your behalf. The sophisticated marketing program isn’t really the company talking much at all, instead they’ve a thriving advocacy program and word of mouth program that encourages customers to recruit prospects for them –all unpaid. Learn how to do this, by reading this piece on Forbes.
The true test? most leads are coming in through existing customers –not your sales team.
A community of customers supports each other, reducing support center calls. A company that has a thriving branded community where customers are self-supporting each other with little aid from the brand or the support team is a sign of a sophisticated social support program.
The true test? A majority of customer support issues are resolved by community faster, with greater satisfaction than your dedicated support team.
Anticipation of prospects and customers using Social CRM technology. Brands can anticipate before a customer has a problem, or grab leads “right out of the air” by using brand monitoring software, intelligent keyword monitoring and responding to be faster than real time using Social CRM strategies.
The true test? sales and marketing are getting leads before the consideration phase, and the support team reduces inbound calls by triggering the community to resolve a potential issue before it’s escalated.
Innovation of new products with customers using web collaboration. Companies that use these same tools to glean input from customers (ethnographic data collection) or create private communities, or use collaboration and innovation tools like Ideastorm or Uservoice and build new products and services demonstrate true sophistication.
The true test? faster time to market on products because consumers have dictated the specifications, and less inventory as the product is built on spec.
Supply chain is influenced by social data in real time. Social media isn’t just about marketing and support, but is very valuable in listening to customer signals then to anticipate which products, services, and teams should be when and where.
The true test? Your company is sophisticated if you’re using social data to adjust your supply chain in real time based on customer signals from checkins, tweets, and plancasts.
Real time reporting of revenues, costs and efficiency: I’ve met with some of the most advanced teams, and they have clear reporting and can measure the increased revenues (over the total cost of the program) to tell their executives the true ROI of their business program.
The true test? Real time dashboard measures the health of all social channels revenues, CSAT, sentiment and overall program costs.

We’ve done research on the roadmap for companies to reach these 10 levels of nirvana, but have found few companies that have done a few, or even a majority of them. If you know of any companies that have achieved five out of ten of these criteria, we’d love to know, please leave a comment.

Marketing Tactic	Why It’s Important	Opportunities of Social Technology
Market Research	You can’t effectively reach consumers till you know about them, and market research is a key function for any corporation. For some time, market research was limited to focus groups, consumer testing, and survey based methodology. This includes both traditional marketing research groups as well as competitive intelligence groups.	Now, with the advent of social technologies, at least three forms of opportunity have emerged: 1) Using brand monitoring technology to harvest what consumers are already saying in social channels, 2) Harnessing the crowd to find out their real time reactions, see how Communispace and Passenger have done this. 3) Using innovation tools like Salesforce Ideas, UserVoice, GetSatisfaction to build products in real time with consumers.
Corporate Website	The corporate website is a source of product factual information, and pro-brand materials. This is the master repository of a brand, it’s products, and services.	Social technologies are being integrated in three phases: 1) Standalone tools like communities are built, but not integrated, 2) Social login systems like FB connect and Open ID are increasing conversion rates 3) Social context is being developed so content is served up on the fly from social data. See my keynote at Gilbane’s CMS conference on social and corporate website integration.
Intranet	Marketing must influence internal stakeholders, including sales, field marketing, and product teams. The intranet is a key internal repository of information, this would also include any associated email communications.	Social technologies are being deployed internally like PBWorks, Socialcast, Basecamp, and Yammer without the consent of IT. The opportunity to use these tools to allow teams to find experts, information regardless of region or time are ripe.
Email Marketing	Email, one of the primary forms of digital communication is often a highly trusted source when customers have opt-in. When you look closely, email is a social network, see how Google wants to do it. In fact, the root information requirement for Twitter and Facebook is a verified email.	Email marketing companies are starting to offer ’sharing’ features so recipients are encouraged to quickly share the information with their peers, as well as offering brands SMMS systems to manage this information. Expect the Facebook inbox and email marketing to quickly merge in coming years,
Search Marketing	A mature practice that attracts buyers and prospects during their core information seeking phase, SEM is critical to reaching the information starved through well placed sponsored information and advertisements	We’re also seeing an influx of social advertisements appear as the social graph is infused in search results. Example: We’re starting to see the content our friends recommend in search engine results, and Facebook’s foray with social ads.
Search Engine Optimization	Fine tuning websites so they are the first choice in organic search results is both a science and art by experienced practitioners.	Social media tools, esp blogs and ratings and review sites like Yelp score high in organic search due to many incoming links and freshly updated content.
Advertising	Often the bulk of most marketing budgets, advertising is key in many phases of the customer journey, in particular driving awareness and consideration.	Like SEM listed above, advertising can become more efficient in the future by tapping into social profile data (who is this person) and their social graph (who do they trust) to serve up relevant content. As Facebook spreads their features all over the web (analysis), expect a new form of advertising to appear based on social data. Twitter’s “Sponsored Links” bodes similar experimentation
Sponsorship	Marketers drive associative branding and qualified leads through sponsorship opportunities.	Social helps in two specific ways: New influencers have emerged such as ‘Mom and Dad bloggers” creating more niched inventory with deeper engagement to sponsor. Furthermore, all traditional sponsorship activities can use social marketing for further engagement.
eCommerce	While over a decade old, online shopping has continued to be primary low cost driver for the brick and mortar company.	The mainstay integration has been consumer ratings and reviews from the aggregation of the crowd, often powered by vendors like Bazzarvoice. Yet expect new forms of eCommerce to evolve as an individuals social graph is connected to eCommerce tools. See how Levi’s has done it, and attend our conference, the Rise of Social Commerce.
Mobile Marketing	While in it’s infancy, marketers may use these tools to connect with consumers as they are on a specific location, during a certain part of the day, with greater context.	Now, as consumers indicate their location and time while on the go, marketers may reach them using a variety of contextual information, advertisements, and harnessing what their friends have done before them in the same locations. See how Starbucks sponsored mayorship in Foursquare to increase both loyalty and WOM.
TV/Radio	The pioneering mediums in the electronic communication realm, these mediums provide content in a one way format.	Programs (radio hosts, newscasters, and stations) are using social technologies to infuse a two way relationship with listeners by finding new content in social channels (Watching Twitter) as well as integrating the voices of the audience, and empowering communities to build around them. Perhaps more importantly, this creates new forms of inventory for these mediums to enable brands to sponsor or get involved with.
Print	From newspapers, magazines, to flyers, nothing creates an experience like holding physical paper in front of you.	Nearly all of these publications have associated social media properties, from Facebook fan pages, to supplementary blogs. In fact, if paper adoption continues to decrease, these social tools provide a low-cost method of publishing and interacting with their audiences. Magazines like Dwell have launched thriving online communities and nearly all national and many global newspapers have adopted social media in their online resources.
Field, Persona, Channel, and Regional Marketing	Marketing teams are often segmented by regions, or to sit with sales units in the field, or even to target specific consumer types, like moms. This segmented marketing approach is key for deeper context in approaching unique markets.	Like in other forms, don’t expect a one-size-fits all approach, each audience type will have a different penchant for social media technologies, which we call socialgraphics. Expect a tailored approach using social technologies to emerge for each of these groups as you reach different audiences.

Criteria	How They Scored	Our Take: Why Brands Performed This Way	How Brands Can Improve Their Score
Set Community Expectations	2.08 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands failed to be clear why they were doing a Facebook effort, likely due to the fact that they jumped into the the social network bandwagon. Most brands are experimenting, and are unable to articulate their purpose	Clearly have a business objective and be sure the site goals cascades these objectives. By not doing so, sets company up for a potential backlash as unchecked or unsolved customer woes can quickly cascade to their friends, on brands owns pages.
Provide Cohesive Branding	3.90 (Adolescence or “Climbing”)	Brands showed some sophistication from over a decade of online interactive marketing has taught them how to cascade their experience to all touch points	This is a huge risk. Customer that have product complaints may echo them loudly here, and if the brand doesn’t respond, this public griping could escalate into a full blown groundswell. Continue to reflect the brand in all digital channels, but don’t overwhelm the member experience.
Be Up To Date	5.00 (Exceptional or “Escape Velocity”)	Brands have a strong legacy of broadcast marketing, which is also know as message bombardment. Brands demonstrated an incredible ability to propagate messages at a rapid rate, not unusual for other mediums as well.	Continue this energy of being interactive with their customers, but in addition to populating the Facebook page with up to date updates, ensure they are engaging in a two-way dialog.
Live Authenticity	2.87 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands suffered at being ’social’ in a social network, and are in many cases afraid to show their human side. Decades of being logo centric has cascaded to social networks and most members may question having conversations with a logo.	Behave in the same way the members are behaving: be social. Put the human side first by showing the team photos, giving human replies, and responding with first and last name.
Participate in Dialog	3.10 (Adolescence or “Climbing”)	Mixed bag of performance, while some brands may interact, often it was inconsistent. Even after a few years of social marketing blogging, forums, and Twitter, brands are still struggling to have real conversations with their members.	Interact with customers by engaging in a two way conversation. To scale, you don’t need to respond to every message, but set expectations on how frequently you’ll respond.
Enable Peer to Peer Interactions	2.03 (Immature or”Take off”)	Poor performance from brands here. In many cases, we expect brands hid from these features as they are difficult to moderate, manage, and risk of conversations going awry.	Better features are needed by using third party community applications, as well as hiring seasoned, well trained community managers to monitor and moderate.
Foster Advocacy	2.27 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands are barely able to participate in the conversation let alone rely on the advanced features such as sharing or using your own members to share on your behalf.	At the bare minimum, encourage members to share content with each other and to cascade the branded experience to friends. As brands gain confidence, create formal advocacy programs.
Solicit a Call to Action	2.45 (Immature or”Take off”)	Unsure of even interacting with their members, it’s no surprise they didn’t know how to engage them for next steps or even conversion.	Don’t rush this. Until you’re scoring 4 or above on the previous mentioned criteria, I encourage brands to avoid this. Yet, for those that are succeeding in the other criteria, they can help members with conversion.

Challenge	Description	Why it’s Painful	How it will be Resolved
1. Noise overwhelms signal	With over 50mm tweets each day (more stats here), and more coming, there’s an excess of noise. Expect this to increase as the ‘Internet of things’ and inanimate objectives emit signals.	A compounding problem. Finding the needle is an incredible challenge as the haystack continues to grow. As a result, individuals and companies will rely on analytics tools to derive what’s important, meaning they have less time digging in deeper as their viewpoint becomes larger.	Expect social inbox aggregators to filter signal like Facebook, Google, Bing, Salesforce, and eventually social analytics and then social insights vendors, We’ve mapped our a roadmap in our Social CRM report, but expect companies like Crimson Hexagon, Crowd Factory, to be the filter and conduit for advanced listening and analytics. On the consumer side we can already see the Facebook news feed pruning the most relevant information from our average of 150 contacts.
2. Amateurism threatens expertise	The social web is like a vuvuzela, everyone has one, blows it, resulting in a pure buzzing sound. Now, this means that non-experts are commenting and asserting influence in areas where only experts had voices. Andrew Keen has explored this topic at great detail.	Media, journalists, photographers, videographers, and all other IP or media based industries are impacted as everyone is on the game. The challenge is, with amateurs and prosumers in, it’s created challenges. For example see keynote panel at SXSW debating crowdsourced graphic design vs the elite professionals	New markets are being developed that meets the needs of both the expert elite class as well as those of the masses. We’re seeing experts adopt these same tools of the masses, for example, nearly every online newspaper has integrated social technologies.
3. Power shift to participants	Those who use social technologies like ratings and reviews are sapping power from those that don’t. Furthermore, voices from those with simple tools like blogs, score well in search engine results pages, a common starting place for information seeking.	Research on trust, such as Edelman’s trust barometer indicates that people trust others like them, in almost every situation. As a result, institutions and organizations are being cut out as an unneeded middleman.	In order to get back trust, these institutions have to use the same tools as the commons. The challenge is developing a significant shift in mindset and deployment.
4. Fast moving industry creates confusion	There are few other industries that move as quickly as the social space. A combination of low barriers to entry of commodity technologies fused with injections from venture money there’s constant innovation.	The technology is innovating faster than companies and institutions can’t keep up. Furthermore, the list of choices is staggering, such as the 145 brand monitoring vendors and 125 community platforms.	In the end, consumers will define which technologies are adopted and at what rate. To keep track of these trends, a combination of research from analyst firms and vertical specific media sites like AdAge and News blogs like Techcrunch, Mashable, RWW will provide illumination.
5. Risk of overhype	Fast growth, consumer adoption and celebrity adoption of these tools has lead to a media frenzy. Yet this space can quickly get overhyped as small changes in Facebook features yields huge news coverage.	Perspective is lost when we’ve over focus on the disruptions from such simple technologies. If there’s excess hype, then there will be a continued flood of investor money spurring more cloned companies –exasperating the situation.	Decision makers should focus on business needs and business goals before succumbing to the latest headlines about Facebook changes and look at the long term aggregate view. Use data to construct a long term view.
6. Lack of qualified talent	Finding the right talent is a challenge. For example, within the corporate space, companies have only been adopting these tools with great fanfare for a few years (Scoble, being one of the starting block at Microsoft in 2006-2007)	Companies are ill-equipped to take advantage of this fast moving pace. As a result, while those with experience and talent will quickly find an increase in salary, the demand for recruitment will result in a lot of job hopping.	Time will slowly give experience to this budding industry, it’s not something that can be rushed. Yet professionals should continue to tap into education, blogs, books and conferences to stay abreast. This is an opportunity for publishers, educators, conference creators, and existing experts. See this list of those in these roles in corporate now.
7. Measurement elusive	While engagement (the interaction) of these tools and technologies is high, it’s not an effective form of measurement. Secondly, while the interaction is high, it’s been difficult to tie back to commerce.	While it’s easy to measure pokes, RTs and likes, they don’t tie back to true business measurements or KPIs. Companies want more fans for their Facebook page but aren’t sure why. As a result, efforts will spin focused on less meaningful metrics without a clear impact to business.	All companies and professionals should measure their efforts based on business objectives. In our latest report on social analytics, we’ve categorized this into 4 major areas: learning, dialog, supporting, and innovation. Then, you can work with brand monitoring vendors, insight vendors, and eventually business intelligence software vendors. Lastly, we’re hosting a conference on social commerce to tackle many of these issues head on.
8. Disparate Data and Irregular Standards.	There are many vendors that are constructing their own systems. Each social network has their own API, and despite efforts to bring standards, the fast moving landscape makes it difficult	While the cultural impacts have been severe for many companies, gluing together ever-changing data sources creates confusion. As a result, data will end up in silos that the CTO will have to glue together later, as well as the ever constant management of data formats.	Although foundations have been setup to lead OpenSocial, there are other vendors like Gigya and Janrain are starting to provide technology that can manage the multiple identity systems. Expect new tools like Social Inbox Aggregators to start to fuse information into one place, and eventually passing to Business Intelligence systems.
9. Culture shift creates an internal rift inside institutions.	For nearly every institution, this has caused an internal cultures shift. A few reasons: Power has shifted to the participants and companies realize they must now participate. The ‘always-on’ mode means that business doesn’t stop at office hours, and now employees can choose the technologies to be used over the CTO.	As a result, companies are struggling to get organized internally, and formerly silo’d groups (like Marketing and Support) must come together to support the same customer. Furthermore companies who stem from command and control must give way to anarchist Cluetrain talk in order to stay relevant.	The biggest opportunity is for internal evangelists and change management teams to lead the charge. However they won’t do it alone as analyst firms will provide education and guidance and an emergence of new types of consulting agencies like Dachis Group, Ant’s Eye View, will enter the fray along with traditional agencies like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, and Edelman. They won’t be alone as consulting firms like Deloitte and McKinsey will quickly come on board.
10. Privacy Woes scare companies and consumers.	As more individuals share information the greater the risk that this content can cause harm by malicious parties. Furthermore the more brands use this data to do accurate marketing, the fear of ‘big brother’ will increase.	Facebook is the most telling example, as information that was first promised to be ‘just for your friends’ continues to be more open. As they slowly shift towards a more open model, you can see the reactions from consumer, press and media.	Over time, society will start to normalize (look at Generation Y’s openness) and sharing will often be a default norm. Expect services to emerge that will remove and hide information from the internet in order to keep consumers safely tucked away.

Category	Description and Example	Current State	What no one tells you
Brand Monitoring	Aware. Simple aggregation and reporting –without any real intelligence. These technologies scrape and aggregate what’s being discussed by a topic, channel, or group and derive alerts and workflows.	Commodity technology. I started a list in 2006, yet now there are over 145 indexed by E&Y employees. These technologies do not provide intelligence, or predictive behavior modeling.	The smart brand monitoring companies have already started their integration plans. They don’t want to end up being trilobites and have become part of a larger system: Recent acquisitions include Scoutlabs+Lithium(community), Filtrbox+Jive(Community), Techrigy+Alterian(WCM) and others.
Social Analytics	Intelligent. Derive meaning what social data means. These companies provide intelligence and answer “Why are 500 people a week tweeting about goat milk?” Companies who derive intelligence from social data like Crowd Factory, Crimson Hexagon.	Emerging features are coming around. These tools help true data analysts derive meaning from patterns, and how it influences large scale commerce.	This space is still evolving, and expect that the business intelligence software vendors like IBM Cognos, SAS, Qlikview, Oracle, and beyond to start acquiring data streams in the social space and coupling with their engines within the next 12-18 months. Even analyst Esteban Kolsky agrees
Social Insights	Predictive. These companies can predict what consumers will do based upon social data. I’ve seen early examples from community platform Lithium who’s able to predict within 45 minutes if a community will be successful based on comparing to historical data, but for the most part, that’s limited to community data –not the whole social web.	Not here, yet. Right now, systems are just aggregating content to make meaning out of it, yet there’s no clear set of companies that are able to truly provide predictive recommendations.	Look for companies who have data across a value network. What’s that? Data in multiple companies from manufactured, supplier, retailer, to consumer. Expect companies like Bazaarvoice to be able to yield insights as they collect data from multiple manufactures like HP, Dell and are used on retailer sites like BestBuy

[A fundamental mindset change must occur as brands approach social networks. In addition to interactive marketing (human-to-computer) brands must add social marketing (peer-to-peer) to their playbook.]

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