Getting Started with Social Business: Building the Culture

By Hyoun Park Feb 23, 2012

In my previous article, we discussed the five key drivers for adopting Social Business. With this follow up, we will what companies have done who have been most successful in creating an optimal culture for Social Business deployments. By understanding the processes, skillsets and organizational structures associated with business value, we will see how companies have prepared themselves for collaborative success.

To recap, the five key drivers for adopting Social Business are:

Effective partner/supplier collaboration
Need to increase innovation
Identifying new market opportunities
Increasing employee cohesiveness on a global/enterprise-wide scale
Fear of losing proprietary and institutional knowledge

Each of these profiles had different strategies and focus areas for their social deployments.

To discover best practices associated with the culture of Social Business, Aberdeen first surveyed 270 organizations on their collaborative practices and performance. We defined top performers as those who had increased revenue and gained a positive Return on Investment (ROI) on their Social Business solution to see how successful companies were using social technologies.

We then identified the top 20% of all respondents, normalized for company size, and compared them to all other companies. By doing so, we compared 54 companies that averaged 28% revenue growth and a 108% ROI (meaning that they had fully paid back their costs) to 216 other companies that averaged 4% revenue and a 36% ROI (meaning that they had not received enough direct value to pay back their investment). How did these companies differ in their processes and their organizational capabilities?

Three Processes & Policies Enforced by Best-in-Class

#1. Department-specific policies for collaboration and informal processes associated with Social Business

The management of Social Business cannot be either too strict or too loose; it requires a steady hand.

On the one hand, Best-in-Class companies were 70% more likely than all others to set department-specific collaboration policies because every job role gains different benefits from Social Business which must be accounted for. In a product development or brand development team, creativity and ideation may require massive group interactions that can be quickly escalated to voice and video. In contrast, an accounting group seeking to close the books at the end of the quarter may only need targeted interactions associated with revenue and expenses, but in a very timely manner.

In each case, the department should set appropriate guidelines to incentivize appropriate behavior rather than simply provide the same undifferentiated toolset and rules to all employees. On the other hand, there must be room for new discoveries as well.

Although some Social Business tools are a couple of decades old, such as online community boards and group chat (originally known as USENET and Internet Relay Chat), many of these tools are relatively new both to the enterprise and to end users. They must be given some room to develop new use cases that may not be defined. Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Best-in-Class companies had collaboration processes that were regularly used, but had not been formally documented yet because they were still new or experimental. By finding the balance between hard-line discipline and unfocused wandering, companies are more likely to gain value from Social Business

#2. Integrate online Social Business functions with in-person and live collaboration & optimize internal collaboration applications with a formalized process

Although Social Business can provide great value, it is typically an asynchronous tool where employees interact with each other at random, interspersed moments. This provides value, especially with interstitial moments when employees may provide quick insight. However, there is still the need for employees to work together at the same time on the same project while keeping the wisdom and insight gained online. To optimize these benefits, Best-in-Class companies were 175% more likely than all other companies to have a process to properly move the conversation between live and Social channels.