We’ve seen some major users of internal community platforms take a naive swing to using public social networks such as Linkedin Groups as a solution to their ESN and social community needs – often citing cost. As Ray Wang said very recently:

Social’s emergence in business is changing how people work with each other. Previously, relationships were mostly driven by cost which resulted in the devaluation of people and ultimately customers, says the analyst. As a result, everybody revolted and set up their own communities to engage with each other. But now, he says, businesses are asking themselves how to bring that back inside the organisation?

In our experience there is a common element in those decisions – they have always been promoted and lead by a social media person, not a social business person, and there’s a big difference. No doubt that Facebook and Linkedin and other public social networks have a role to play in many social strategies, but not as a substitute for a Enterprise Social Network.

Social everywhere

Here’s the fundamental technical reason why – collaborative functionality needs to show up at the source of the event or problem – inside the CRM, BI, and ERP applications where process output needs to be either corrected or enriched by people coming together, that is in the workflow. It also has to integrate with the core document management email and the communications systems.

Very recently Dion Hinchliffe said that “it was time to move beyond the portal model as the organizing principle”. We agree 110% and that’s why we talk about enterprise social as a platform and not a destination.

Social strategy

Facebook lives in the public environment of the web, it’s driven by it’s own strategy as $100b+ market cap business. As a component of any other company’s strategy it plays only a small part e.g. in their marketing or their attempts at community engagement. On the other hand, when we consider Enterprise Social Networking this is often expected to play an important strategic role in an organisation, in relation to one or more key business objectives.

An Enterprise Social Network will have defined outcomes which could never realistically apply to any kind of Facebook or Linkedin presence. (Not to mention the fact that Facebook or Linkedin can arbitrarily and at their sole discretion, without recourse, black out your presence – permanently!)

Besides the platform and process issues, there are the strategic, cultural and people issues.

Implementation strategy – can Facebook be the model of voluntary adoption?

But really, no-one is seriously suggesting that Facebook would be the Enterprise Social Network, rather they are implying that a Facebook-like approach to using such a system in an enterprise environment might be the way to think of the implementation approach – after all, so many employees happily use Facebook, right?

Well, no – wrong. You can almost be certain that translating an employee’s appetite and cultural ease of using public social networks into an enterprise internal social network implementation strategy is a recipe for failure. Why? Because the context is completely different.

Employees are used to using social networks in their personal lives they want any corporate social networks to be equally as easy to use. That expectation is actually the crux of what CEO’s often mean by “Facebook for the enterprise” – which is certainly a legitimate aim as far as the single issue of usability goes. So Facebook as a measure of the ease of use – fine. As a model of voluntary adoption in the enterprise – mistake.

Enterprise social needs to link to business objects

For one thing, consider that a successful ESN implementation starts out with a strong business strategy deliberation and description which necessarily embraces a certain vision and leadership. That’s not the way people approach their social network activities. For another, the reward and recognition within the enterprise is very different to outside.

That means that there need be a whole lot of cultural issues to consider in relation to people sharing information, feeling confident about doing so, about seeing more senior people sharing, about learning how to share and what to share, about how people can be approached and they respond through the internal network, what type of information needs a workflow, approval, staging etc. Not to mention the design of the distributed social activities when integrated into other enterprise applications. That is, there has to be a lot of business, process, architectural, governance, people and cultural analysis around how enterprise social relates to the current and future business objects, as Brian Solis says.

Brian Solis refers to Charlene Li‘s report on Enterprise Social Network adoption and the “three critical painpoints” which impede ESN success:

1. Lack Of Metrics Means Business Impact Goes Unmeasured
2. Rapidly Developing Technology Platforms Create A Myriad Of Confusing Options
3. Integration Into Existing Platforms, Workflow, And Access Remain A Barrier

Here’s a recent example of point #3 where success has been achieved through Integration. The example shows that this is not a simple thing to achieve, and it requires substantial corporate attention, integration and resources, but pays back with outstanding results.

On May 6, Dell posted a plan on IdeaStorm describing a proposed specialty laptop, upgrading an existing machine to target people who write wireless apps and other Web-based software using a variation of the Linux operating system called Ubuntu.

By Monday, customers had posted 83 ideas for refinements to the machine on IdeaStorm, covering specific software bugs to broader issues such as whether the screen should be shiny or not. In addition, 35,000 people visited Barton George’s Web posting about the new laptop — 10 times more than any other posting he’s ever made, he said. [Barton George, Director of Marketing for Dell’s Web vertical] The laptop is due on the market by year’s end. Dell says the process produces more detailed feedback than traditional focus groups, and builds links to an important group of customers.

The point here is not the external innovation community, but it is the ability of Dell to internally harness and act upon the feedback. That takes internal collaboration and an effective internal social network. The coordination and process flow across all the relevant parts of Dell is the key to its value  - the ability to get it to the right people and for them to be able to interact with and on that information.

Think about it, this example is a big deal. It involved assimilating and communicating and assessing and deciding on issues with substantive effects on product design, product features, product performance, marketing, support, sales, production. That’s everything. And in “community” time so that the community was engaged. That’s a huge ask of an organisation and takes a well functioning ESN. It also requires a internal cultural acceptance of the value of customer feedback, and the desire to nurture it and utilise it throughout the organisation.

Enterprise social needs to link to other business metrics

As a final example, if we delve into impediment #1 a little more, then we start bringing measures into play with respect to the internal social network that we also use in many areas of the business:

How Execs Are Using Social Media

1. Stakeholder Analysis/ROI
2. Business Case
3. Use Cases
4. Change Management
5. Existing metric improvements

These are the kinds of business measures and KPIs against which the social network of the enterprise needs to be measured.

It’s not about organic social adoption in the enterprise

The three critical pain-points serve as one example of the critical issues facing successful implementation of an Enterprise Social network. Each of those require a specific plan within a strategy of implementing an ESN. These are issues which must be addressed with actions and resources, and on top of that there are many other issues. On the other hand, if we literally took a “Facebook” approach of organic growth and adoption then these pain points would not be visible nor addressed in a plan, and would therefore be active impediments to success.

Those considerations take considerable effort and hard work – it’s not at all the “organic adoption” approach implied by “Facebook for the Enterprise”.

What is the best way for a CEO to emphasize the ease of use of social while setting expectations that enterprise social is still a complex corporate project?

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson
http://xeeme.com/walter
Tweet to @igo2

Related: Social Business – 3 Keys to Success by Rob Howard.

We believe that a social media strategy is fools gold. Organisations who profess to have a social media strategy or who have an agency working to create a social media strategy are missing the point entirely.

These organisations almost always have difficulty in:

• Convincing the executive why integration of social networks is important – i.e. not able to garner C-level support;
• Getting beyond low-level metrics like fans, followers, friends, connections, tweets, retweets etc. which are soft metrics which have a place but are not the core of an effective Social Business strategy;
• Explaining the ROI associated with their social media initiatives;
• Getting beyond words such as listen, engage (ment) or participation in social networks;
• Extending the use of social capabilities beyond marketing – they don’t see how to use social networks and constructs to enhance all business processes nor how to distribute social across the enterprise.

The problem, in short, with a social media strategy is that it becomes an end in itself and is seen as yet another silo in already fragmented organisations.

As Jay Baer recently pointed out the objective is not to get better at social media and social networks; the objective is to get better at business by incorporating social media into your business strategy. Or, as Olivier Blanchard puts it ‘Your business doesn’t plug into social media, you plug social media into your business’.

And for mine, that is what a Social Business strategy does – it takes your business goals or objectives and enhances the strategies for achieving those goals with the incorporation of social strategies and then tactics. A very different result and approach.

Organisations that take this approach:

1. Have executive support to incorporate social media into the mix of tactics, spend and programs across the board. The Executive never questions the value of social media activity at the workplace;
2. Focuses on metrics beyond friends, fans followers etc and has targets associated with the business goals. So if the goal is to increase revenue, and one of the targets is to acquire new customers then one of the measures might be “Net New Customers” acquired through Facebook with associated targets;
3. Can always show the ROI of a program (think tactic) and doesn’t get bogged down in a meaningless debate on the ROI of social media and social networks;
4. Gets way beyond the buzzwords to focus on the outcomes. For example, ‘engagement’ is not an end unto itself. Having engagement that cannot be tied to a business outcome like increase in revenue, net new customers, more frequent orders, large average order sizes and so on is fairly meaningless;
5. See social media as adding value way beyond marketing to customer service and support; product innovation, talent acquisition, employee satisfaction and more.

We believe that a Social Business Strategy beats a Social Media Strategy everyday. 

What about you?

Please comment below.

WillB Follow @wbosma
http://xeeme.com/willbosma
Tweet to @igo2

Related: Enterprise Social Networks – 5 Roads to Failure.

Whether you are doing monitoring internally already, or thinking about the business value of social media monitoring, or having it done by a third-party, you’ll gain new insights into what can be done, what you should do, what you can ask for, and how it helps you improve your business outcomes.

Thursday 24/05 1pm: Webinar One: Social Business Intelligence – An Introduction

Thursday 07/06 1pm: Webinar Two: Social Business Intelligence – Assessing your Social Strategy

Thursday 21/06 1pm: Webinar Three: Social Business Intelligence – Assessing your Competition

Thursday 05/07 1pm: Webinar Four: Social Business Intelligence – Monitoring to Engagement

Thursday 19/07 1pm: Webinar Five:  Social Business Intelligence – Assessing the Major SMM Tools

Your presenter, Michael Green is the CEO of iGo2, a social media strategy and intelligence consultancy. He has been designing and developing leading technology and business strategy solutions for major blue-chip corporations across the world since 1993.

These Webinars will be held every 2 weeks on Thursdays, commencing:  May 24, 2012 to Jul 19, 2012 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM AEST

REGISTER NOW AT:  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/436639938
Live event is free.  Recordings available for Silver, Gold and Platinum Members of Network Central.

Once registered you will receive an email confirming your registration with information you need to join the Webinar.

System Requirements: PC-based attendees Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server, Macintosh®-based attendees Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer.

MichaelG Follow @michae1green

Tweet to @igo2

Those at the top certainly need to signal their intent to embrace change, and to practically embrace the relevant social technologies. They then do not need to busy themselves in social, but to ensure that the people issues, platform issues and process issues are aligned with their social business transformational goals. The reason that they must focus on these issues, as against “being social”, is because these issues solved allow employees to embrace social and to succeed.

Think of it this way – consider an organisation in which the top leadership team has embraced social tools and media and is active in promoting the value of these to the organisation. This would look exciting, and very promising, in the eyes of an outside observer. After all, it’s the leadership from the top which we so often state is fundamental to social business success.

However, if the employees are not afforded equal social access, equal degrees of freedom to act, equal opportunity to engage, and equal opportunity to experiment and fail, then ultimately the whole initiative will slowly wither from within. In a nutshell, this happens because employees quickly sense the lack of consistency of action and opportunity between what is asked of them and what they can do, and a lack of mutual commitment between the leadership and themselves with regard to the social business outcomes.

Here’s what “a Dell employee“ said recently in a comment on a blog post:

“… any company that thinks all of their success comes from a handful of employees at the top is on the fast track to going out of business“.

They went on to say that “all studies on productivity, creativity and innovation show that empowered individuals and open communities foster continuous innovation, and egocentric leadership is the fastest way to kill a culture“.

The points that this person (who appears to be this person) made really captured my attention, for a number reasons:

• Firstly, Dell is a very successful business;
• Secondly, it has reinvented itself several times over, and come out a healthier and more profitable business;
• Thirdly it has mastered a succession of different disciplines which were core to each of its reinventions – starting with logistics and distribution, then eCommerce, then marketing, then support, now social business, and coming up the services business;
• Fourthly, it has always had a relentless focus on driving costs out of the business yet has simultaneously improved employee engagement and retention.

So Dell is relentless, Dell is focused, Dell is successful and Dell knows that empowering employees and deploying social technologies is all about good business.

And as icing on the cake Dell uses Telligent as its social technology for collaboration and for customer support, which iGo2 represents in APAC, and it’s great to see such profound business results from the Telligent Community platform.

Those are the reasons why I am so intrigued by this employee’s comment.

So what can we learn from Dell’s social transformation?

There are some major mind-shifts needed:

1. The need for an executive mind-shift to a recognition that the people who will have the next great product idea could be anyone (the teams that have empowered our success with social media are probably inversely correlated with age and experience);

2. The need for a strategic mind-shift to accept that contextualizing strategy at the regional, local, or even at the individual level will become increasingly necessary not only for success, but also for survival in the Cloud era;

3. The need for a power mind-shift to empower grassroots movements within the organisation e.g. where leadership has been bold enough to allow and foster new ideas;

4. The need for a spiritual mind-shift to embrace the new and unfamiliar, which will inevitably arise because of the points above.

The ultimate health check

Ultimately, the health of a business’s social transformation is measured by taking the pulse at the interface between employees and executives, and I quote the “Dell employee”:

IMHO the biggest strength of Michael Dell has been to recognize these trends and help to support the notion that large businesses will have to be rebuilt not from the top down or from the outside in, but from the inside out through increasingly intelligent, motivated and empowered employees and it is only through a healthy partnership between employees and management that a large organization act as an agile, continuously adapting system.

For me, this single comment by the unknown-Deller gives the most significant insight into why Dell should not be underestimated by any of its competitors, even those that feel they are invulnerable at present. And it offers huge insights for others seeking to transform their own business by highlighting the essence of the challenge and solutions.

What is the most important role of leaders in assisting the transformation to social business?

How important is it for them to be spending energy being busy in social as compared to spending energy clearing the path for employees to fully utilize social?

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson
http://xeeme.com/walter
Tweet to @igo2

Related: Social Business – 3 Keys to Success by Rob Howard.

What are your views on the Facebook IPO?

If you take the Facebook $104b market cap to support the $1b Instagram acquisition (a 13-person company with no revenue stream at all) you derive a 89-to-1 price to earnings ratio.

To give you some perspective Google and Apple are selling for 18 and 17 times earnings respectively.

Extremely expensive!

What are the latest Facebook user statistics in Australia?

A key measurement of Facebook’s $104b valuation is average revenue per user (ARPU) or how Facebook is turning you and I into revenue producing customers. Today ARPU is $1.17 based on last quarter.

This values the 10.9m Australian Facebook users at $51m per year.

You recently blogged about the Australian impacts of the Facebook IPO – could you tell us more?

We see three key impacts in Australia, namely:

1)   Facebook will become corporate Australia’s best ‘friend’ – as a result of moving from a private to a public company Facebook is going to be under pressure to support its valuation. We will see them investing in their corporate sales organisation.

2)   Online marketing spend will move – we have already seen this with announcements from the CEO of Procter & Gamble and Ford (20%). Losers will be Google and traditional media.

3)   Acquisition – Facebook will be ready to invest to support revenue growth. Facebook is built as a platform to integrate to e.g. Instagram (although Facebook issued another 23m shares to support this acquisition). Zynga (Farmville) today accounts for 12% of Facebook revenues. Facebook will seek innovative acquisitions to support repeatable revenue opportunities. Australian innovators on the Facebook platform would be well positioned.

What advice would you have for corporate Australia?

Social success is driven by you and not Facebook. This is the classic example of  Ford who has driven close to 10m Facebook users to connect with them versus Kia Motors.

The answer is simple – Facebook is a site that connects nearly a billion people to each other globally. It is your job to create a vibrant and engaged community that is aligned to your business objectives. Clear and organized strategy for content messaging, process integration and customer needs as the focus.

What about Zuckerberg’s “The Hacker Way”?

“The Hacker Way” is Facebook’s innovation framework supported by Social principals.

Clearly the IPOs of both LinkedIn and Facebook have legitimized Social to support Innovation, Collaboration, Corporate Communication, Employee Engagement, and Customer Engagement.

Corporate Australia must evaluate how Social can aid these outcomes to support business objectives. The replacement of legacy email systems and intranets should be high on the agenda of corporate Australia.

Would you buy?

Through its platform Facebook could be anything it wanted to be – digitally. Even a Bank. I am buying!

Other Notes:

1. FB ad revenue for 2012 will be $4.2 billion – up 32% from 2011 – and will reach $12.6 billion by 2017
2. Mark Zuckerberg has shown himself to be a very good manager and CEO and has steered FB though many privacy issues successfully.
3. Capturing more ad revenue is in #1 and also there is even more revenue which FB will capture in the non-ad space and in particular virtual money.
4. This all means that Facebook has the best software platform, people, customers, and opportunities of any company on the face of the planet to be anything that they want to be – digitally.
5. They almost certainly will become the worlds biggest virtual currency provider.  That’s just throwing a switch for them. They could become a bank overnight in any market they chose, it’s just a matter of which regulatory environments are most attractive for them to enter.

Do you have any views on the Facebook IPO? Please share them…..

@michae1green

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In my presentation to the Australian Lotus User’s Group 2012 conference I gave some tips for IT Groups wanting to claim their stake in the implementation of social business. The conference title is a little anachronistic as the dominant theme now is social business and IBM Connections. And the audience is mainly IT folk, which is not necessarily where the social business challenge lies. In the implementation of social business the IT Group has potentially a lot to lose, as we’ve seen by “shadow social IT” in the form of Yammer. So how can the CIO Group hammer a rightful stake in the ground?

Shadow social IT

We’re in the era of shadow social IT, following on from the shadow IT era of apps such as Salesforce.com whose sales reps studiously avoided IT, and the era of cloud where even IT infrastructure purchases skirt around IT, and now social, as exemplified by Yammer. In fact if you accept the McKinsey definition of “social technologies” as in Tough Times, Social Technology and the Innovative CIO by Michael Hugos then shadow social IT is potentially massive.

The challenge for companies selling social platforms such as IBM with IBM Connect or Telligent with Telligent Community & Enterprise is to move out from IT and (a) sell social to the lines of business and (b) help implement social, while taking the CIO and IT with them. That’s necessarily a more complicated effort than bypassing IT and selling direct to end-users. And even more complicated again is the fact that the people currently using social media within a target customer may not the ones who understand the strategic impact of social business, nor have any idea of how to implement it. So engaging with those users is not going to help the big-picture thinking and discussions which are needed, in fact it may hinder because they current “social media” people feel threatened.

Perhaps an even greater challenge is one faced by CIOs to overcome the image of the CIO/IT Group as the blocker or at least the brake of social within the enterprise.

So how can the CIO take a proactive role, and be a positive force in the transformation to social business?

Use some of the core CIO Group skills

The transformation to a social business is a complex journey, and in a complex organisation it requires a holistic approach and cross-functional planning and coordination. Social business, as a enterprise-wide endeavour, has to include thorough processes and structures for such things as strategy, change management, governance, architecture, cross-company and cross-functional communication and coordination, federated organisation, change control, pilot projects, and outsourcing selected areas.

Guess what, the Office of the CIO has been doing similar things for a very long time. For example the core functions of successful CIO organisations were codified in Marianne Broadbent’s The New CIO Leader: Setting the Agenda and Delivering Results (first author, HBS Press, 2005) and, for example IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results by Peter Weill & Jeanne Ross (2004).

Those core functions include strategy, governance, commercial & vendor management, architecture, business enhancement and technology advancement. Within those are the roles of managing supply and demand, cross-business planning and coordination, and understanding what is embedded into business units and what is central to the office of the CIO.

You can see that many of those same issues and requirements are part of the transformation to social business. For example Sandy Carter talks about a Digital Council for the enterprise, in her social business book Get Bold. That’s a version of a IT Steering Committee with perhaps broader scope. Cisco has a Social Media Center of Excellence, which as a company-wide approach to social business is not unlike a well-planned federated approach to IT planning and operations.

The CIO Group as leaders

When you think about it, few other parts of an enterprise have the broad cross-functional role, and the established management functions and procedures, which IT has. And a well functioning CIO Office has all the background and wherewithal to understand very quickly what kinds of processes and people and procedures and platforms will work effectively for social business in the enterprise.

CIOs who have the ability to extract, and abstract, that knowledge, and to embed it and perhaps uplift it a level, offer their enterprises a real head start in the complex journey towards social business transformation.

One of the keys to this abstraction and uplifting is firstly to engage with colleagues who are intimately familiar with the customer-facing aspects of the business e.g. sales, support, marketing, and then round out with business development, collaboration, and product innovation. The idea there would be to take a journey with those colleagues on how the established knowledge and processes of the CIO’s function can align with a holistic approach to social business.

Once that first journey is concluded, and ideas about processes, people and platforms clarified, then the business operations leaders need to be consulted and the operational details worked through. That means, as in the Cisco sense, what can be centralised, what decentralised, what outsourced, and how is it all managed and coordinated.

The opportunity for the pro-active CIO is to “leverage social media to extend your role in driving customer focus” as Len Peters recently said.

Conclusion

Using their expertise and long experience CIO’s and their functions can bring real value and real leadership to the social business transformation journey – provided they can escape the perception of blocking and can abstract and re-apply their core functional skills.

What is the most important role of the CIO in assisting the transformation to social business?

How different is that role depending on whether it is starting with a social business platform, or a point-solution for a business function?

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson
http://xeeme.com/walter
Tweet to @igo2

We’ve previously posted a variety of posts on social media monitoring, including “Social Media – 5 Tips on How to Gain Insight from Monitoring“, “Social Media Monitoring Tools – 5 Key Features” and “The 5 W’s of Social Business Intelligence – An Introduction“.

In this post we are talking about assessing the competition. Here are our 5 Key Tips on using social media monitoring for competitive analysis:

1. Understand Why You Should Assess the Competition

There are really two sides to this – why do it, and why use social media? Differentiating your brand and your products or services presumes you know your competitors are doing – how they are positioning their brand and products and services. You won’t stand out from the crowd if you don’t know where they are, how they are behaving and what they are saying. And you need to know what, if anything, they are saying about you or to stand out from you. This will determine a lot about your overall marketing strategy and also how you integrate social into that strategy.

Why use social media? Firstly, there is a wealth of data there. Secondly, its in context to the markets and customers your business is trying to serve. Third, it contains unfiltered and unbiased data if you analyse correctly. One of the big problems in organisations is that competitive analysis usually starts from a view of ‘having the best product or service so lets focus on our features to compare’. It contains customer sentiment regarding these questions rather than an analyst’s view of the competition. Plus, social data is immediate, scalable to any level and unique. Competitive analysis should be a key component of any social media monitoring program and is integral to your social marketing

2. What should you monitor at the Competition?

3. What to Assess at the Competition

You are trying to understand what your competitors are doing on the social web; what they are saying and when they are saying it. You want to know who their key people are and who they are engaging with. If possible you want to find out who influences them and more importantly, their customers. And most importantly, you are trying to understand what their customers are saying about their products and services – providing you opportunities to not only differentiate but potentially engage their customers directly. Your social media monitoring should reflect that.

4. What Results are you Looking for For?

5. Social Media Presence Analysis

In the same series, read also:
-> The 7 advantages of Social Business Intelligence
-> The 8 Challenges of Social Data Streams
As well as:
-> Social Media Monitoring Tools – 5 Key Features
-> Social Media – 5 Tips on How to Gain Insight from Monitoring
And more…

Let’s look at the Top Twitter Influences Globally – @abcnews, @sunriseon7, @collingwood_fc

We have included the full list (spreadsheet) at the bottom of the blog post.

What was being spoken about over those 68,177 conversations?

How many conversations and which social channels did they originate from?

Herewith the list of all the Twitter Influences TW Influencer Data

@michae1green

1. News Ltd Steams in on ANZAC Day
2. ANZAC Day a Buzz with 37k Tweets and 18k news mentions

At 7am the morning of ANZAC Day, in Australia, we thought we’d look at the weeks Social Media activity.

Further to that what are the discussions about and related word cloud for the 49,102 conversations.

Who is talking?

Where are they talking from?

Tomorrow we’ll post an analysis of the full days conversation.

Lest we forget

@michae1green

We summarised the last post as follows: regarding your social assets and connections as a positive force in crisis management – and planning for them to support that objective – is an essential step in moving towards Brand Resilience, which in turn utilizes Brand Breadth (Resilience = Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Friction + Brand Stock).  For the fuller definition take a quick look back at Brand Resilience 2 – social strategy and brand breadth.

Recap Brand Breadth and Social Presence

Brand Resilience is a function of Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Friction + Brand Stock. We define Brand Experience as containing two components – Depth and Breadth.  Brand Breadth is an idea which embraces all the “non-operational” touch-points, and especially social media and the “social presence” of a brand. This concept of Breadth is crucially important today for brands, because it has a significant impact on Brand Resilience. One of the pillars of Breadth is social, but it is not about social media marketing, rather it’s about extending the power of social business.

By social presence we mean the assets comprising your visibility, currency, reach and influence in the social media – what we’d call your social architecture. Add into that activity, relevance, content, people, coordination, consistency and you generate a social presence value, which is a core element of Brand Breadth. To elevate social presence into social presence value and hence Brand Breadth you have to be able to do something with that social presence relative to your business objectives and business strategies.  The combination of social presence value and the internal social business strategy and processes is the infrastructure of Brand Breadth.

The core tasks – pre-engagement and segmentation

Today you need to be able to use social media and social business practices as assets, otherwise they will surface as liabilities, particularly in Stage 2. Building Brand Breadth requires planning, preparation and practice across the organisation and in developing the social presence, more specifically the social presence value. That’s because the latter comes down to people to people connections – and that is not done overnight, and it’s not something that you can do without having practiced it in social media.

There are two keys to how Brand Breadth helps in a crisis, the first is in pre-engagement – with customers and beyond in social media. The second is in triaging or segmenting the pre-engaged customer base and and the social media presence and working with those segments pro-actively in different ways, with different business strategies, to achieve a common goal of restoration of brand trust.

How can Brand Breadth helps and how you build it

To use Brand Breadth in a crisis you have to first have it! If you don’t have it then you cannot use it. Here are the core steps of how to built it:

• Hygiene Step #1 – You know all the basic social touch points of your customers. You’re collecting this right, just like you collect their emails and phone numbers?
• Hygiene Step #2 – You understand which of your customers are Social VIPs – for the sake of this hygiene step you can define that simply, as you wish.
• Hygiene Step #3 – You are able to coordinate and integrate social interactions with your customers with your overall objectives and other customer engagement objectives. You do have social engagement with your customers, right?
• Hygiene Step #4 – You have a social architecture which is aligned with your social strategy which in turn aligned with business strategy. You do know where you are present in social, and why, and who is interacting in those places and how, and how well they are performing in terms of engagement and communication with all other relevant parts of the business?
• Hygiene Step #5 – You know how the whole digital online world perceives you at any point in time and you integrate this into your business decisions and communications actions. You do monitor, analyse and measure sentiment, brand mentions, competitor activity and relevant risk across social media?

If you have all the above in place then you have the social business process and communications systems linked with business objectives and social presence – giving you a basis for building Brand Breadth.

You can next ensure that you have some of the basic things in place, those that go beyond the elementary listed as “hygiene” above – meaning that if you don’t have the hygiene steps then you best go back and set them up. There are no shortcuts to effective Brand Breadth. Here are the next set of foundation steps:

• Basic Step #1 – You have triaged, segmented, sliced & diced, your customer base, into relevant whatever segments – marketing, behavioural, life-stage, next event, CLV, implied NPS, at risk, price sensitive, vanity, loyalty etc. You do have a quality segmentation of your customer base?
• Basic Step #2 – You know the social presence of your customers and their social presence value (as compared to their basic social touch points in “Hygiene Step #1). You are measuring the authoritative bloggers, those running influential forums, and those with massive twitter reach?
• Basic Step #3 – You know, from all corners of your social presence, those within it which have influence, authority, reach and standing and who are not current customers. They are not current customers but you know what they do, and have engaged with them in a way, and because, it is relevant to your business objectives and brand management strategy.
• Basic Step #4 – You know how to use all of the above in a cross-functional cross-business-unit coordinated way accurately, completely and aligned with current business initiatives. You understand that this is not about social media marketing?

With those steps in place you have a nice foundation of Brand Breadth, which you now need to activate and shore up.

• Activation Step #1 – You are listening, networking, contributing, participating in the social realms of your customers in a style and manner which adds value according to their identified segmented customers needs (review Basic Step #1). That is, you are pre-engaged; which is one of the key elements of “preparation” – you’ve made it!
• Activation Step #2 – You are doing the same as above across your entire non-customer social presence, which means having relevant coordinated content and real people each of whom has their own real social media presence – another key component of preparation.
• Activation Step #3 – You understand not only the social presence value of each of your key customers and key social contacts (as per Basic Steps #2 & #3) but also how that maps into business strategies, plans and potential actions, for example, how this maps on to the scenario of a brand crisis? Do you see where we are heading?
• Activation Step #4 – You have content ready, social business training done, protection plans in place, risk management understood, crisis management trained for, and communication plans for all stakeholder and social media groups in place, operating, and where appropriate rehearsed.

Congratulations – you have a new asset – Brand Breadth, which will you will be able to effectively deploy to help mitigate the damage from a brand crisis.

Do you really need Brand Breadth?

Well it depends on how much you need to transform into a social business, and how much social media could potentially damage your brand and equity value through an unforeseen crisis. Without Brand Breadth, it’s hard to manage the risk, with it, there is a important part it plays in your risk management processes. But of course, it’s value also extends far beyond risk management and a brand crisis, and that’s where the business strategy question comes in of how much you need to be a social business in order to succeed in the future.

To achieve Brand Breadth appears to be a massive amount of work, and it is at face value. You have to have clear business objectives, and the brand elements form just one business strategy of those serving those objectives. The strategy of transforming to a social business is also delivering to those business objectives, and not an objective in its own right. However it you transform to a social business then the related additional work to develop effective Brand Breadth and Brand Resilience is a marginal but non-trivial addition to your people, processes and platforms - that’s the key point.

Brand Breadth outside the context of a social business transformation is meaningless, just as social business outside of clear business objectives is meaningless.

Example of using Brand Breadth

How would having an effective Brand Breadth work in practice – in a brand crisis? Let’s think of a generic “Qantas” brand crisis, along the lines of any of those that they had last year. What happened in those events was that Qantas went into crisis management mode as those crises evolved exactly along the lines of the Four Stages. They had a fire hose of activity to deal with on Twitter and then had to deal with Facebook and all that overwhelmed their small social media team, who at face value seemed to be the only people handing the social presence, the social storm.

Each of those “PR disasters” was pre-planned – they were premeditated actions with unexpected consequences. The one big event that wasn’t pre-planned was an engine exploding on an A380 over Indonesia and the aircraft having to return to Singapore enduring dire systems problems, but landing safely. Qantas ran that event up the social media flagpole and saluted it as a great success, an opinion not universally shared.

While the planned events offer the chance of using Brand Breadth for prior analysis and communications planning, the unplanned events also totally benefit from it by way of the role that Brand Breadth plays in an organisation and the preparation and practice which is a routine occurrence.

This how a planned event, e.g. a social media marketing campaign, would utilize Brand Breadth as part of risk management and mitigation:

• Pre-Event Step #1 – Understand the mood and sentiment of your customers and non-customers in social throughout your social presence. If you have a past history of “behaving badly” and you are the likely contender for the “perpetrator” title in the current crisis (Stage 3), you need to know it, and to think super carefully about your planned event and any potential adverse reactions – this idea is encapsulated in our Brand Resilience formula = Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Friction + Brand Stock. The fabulous thing about social media is that you can get this “Brand Stock” reading from your social presence network – loud and clear.
• Pre-Event Step #2 – Understand across your entire customer and non-customer social presence which people are likely to be strong advocates, advocates, neutral, detractors, and strong detractors. In particular understand this for each segment of your segmented customer base – now you are getting into the realms of big data and more importantly the meaningful analysis of big data.
• Pre-Event Step #3 – Select or prepare content for each of the groups above, and for each of the segments in your segmented customer base, and select and train the people who will be dealing with those different groups in social according to the findings of steps #1 & 2 above. You have to be prepared for the mood of the reaction according to your analysis of your Brand Stock.
• Pre-Event Step #4 – “Test market” the planned actions with different groups in social, through the selected people, and assess feedback. Forget focus groups, that’s looking backwards.
• Pre-Event Step #5 – Map the different “reaction” scenarios to the resources needed to engage through your current social presence with the various identified segments, and to cope with any extra levels of engagement which might erupt.
• Pre-Event Step #6 – Review and make sure that your cross-functional and cross-business unit coordination, escalation, communication and decision-making processes are in place and work.

Then push the button!

In the event of an unforeseen brand crisis you can now activate the operational plan built upon your established Brand Breadth:

• Operational Action #1 – Listen, analyse, understand and reflect on the social feedback.
• Operational Action #2 – Categorise the feedback in to your customer segmentation and social analysis of them and your non-customers. Are there any new influencers and authorities who are participating, and why, and what are they saying and what are their possible objectives?
• Operational Action #3 – This is the core of the value of Brand Breadth in this crisis – utilise the specific communications and engagement plans (a la Pre-Event Step #3) for each of the customer segment groups and the breakdown of the non-customer social presence, and in particular focus additional resources on those who you have identified as potential advocates. Additional resources will be required for this latter group as the approaches have to be by people and personal – that takes time and effort and people!
• Operational Action #4 – Once the crisis hits it is going to move very quickly into Stage 2, and this includes the “reputation repair” process. This needs careful attention, and monitoring – the role of listening out for, listening to, and nurturing those in your customer base and those in your social presence with authority, influence, and reach becomes critical. If you have effective Brand Breadth you will be able to focus resources on those key groups, and be less distracted by other groups, and stand the maximum chance of managing any brand damage.

Summary

The nub of a Brand Breadth plan for a brand crisis is this – you need know your customers’ social world, and that of the people which you reach through your effective social presence, and you need to be organisationally capable of utilising that information effectively, selectively and personally when a crisis hits. The value of that extended resource in defending and protecting your brand is what will reduce the risk of brand damage and hence increase its resilience, along with the other factors of Resilience – Promise, Breadth, Friction and Stock.

What might you do differently in harnessing social assets in a brand crisis?

How much value does the concept of Brand Breadth add to your approach to managing brand value as a business strategy?

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson
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Here’s a quick link to “The Four Stages of Highly Effective Crisis Management: How to Manage the Media in the Digital Age” on Amazon.

Quick link to Post #1 How social media enables brand resilience

Quick link to Post #2 Brand Resilience 2 – social strategy and brand breadth

Quick link to Post #3 Why building Brand Breadth is important for Crisis Management

Here is the COMPLETE SET of this post and the three previous posts on Scribd as a PDF.