Using Social to Drive Business Value in 6 Easy Steps

By Jacques Pavlenyi (@mediamutt) Feb 21, 2012

As technologists and engineers we love shiny new objects. I'll be the first to admit it's fun to dive right under the covers and see how all the moving parts look and fit together. But it's easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. This is business, not consumer technology; focusing on the technology too often means losing sight of business outcomes.

So it's always a good idea to regularly return to basics. And what's more basic than a return to business fundamentals. An analysis of where CMS and social fit into your organization doesn't have to be a huge, multi-year, strategic project (although it can be). It can be as simple as a departmental “skunkworks” project.

Here are 6 simple, but important steps to get the most out of your technology:

Align with business objectives “It's about the task, not the tool”. Prioritize your initiatives based on what your business needs most.
Pick a Project Once you've settled on a project that has merit, form a small group with the right cross-section of participants. Not so big that the management becomes unwieldy ("too many cooks"), but not so few that the project is starved of resources.
Short-list your requirements If you could redesign the process to take advantage of newer technologies, what would it look like?
Set measurable goals Don't measure without an objective. Ensure the project has a set of goals, and those goals are measurable in some way, before starting the next step.
Rapidly iterate Build a sandbox. Test it out. See what works and doesn't. Quickly iterate and repeat.
Measure and Communicate How are you actually doing? What is going well? What's holding you back? And who should know about it and when?

Alignment with Business Objectives

We at IBM have identified the top 5 business processes that are most positively impacted by social capabilities and content. Which processes are most important to your business?

Human Resources: improving the effectiveness of people by enabling the right talent and content to come together at the right time
Sales and Customer Engagement: Increasing sales by connecting sellers to the insights and expertise they need to better serve their customers
Risk Management: Reducing risk exposure by increasing transparency and strengthening operational controls
Marketing and Customer Service: Building customer advocacy by reaching, attracting and retaining more customers through engaging experiences
Product and Service Innovation: Bringing successful new products to market more quickly by understanding and aligning to customer needs.

As an example: out of these priorities, let's say your company's top priority over the next 3 years is improving customer service.

Pick a Project

To pick a project, think about where CMS and social technologies can have the most immediate impacts. At IBM, we found it useful to organize those impacts in 4 different categories:

Reach: Reach people where they live and work; connect through identities on consumer, b2b and corporate social networks; and communicate on the associated channels.
Engage: Enable people to engage productively in a business context; develop personal insights and social intelligence; and facilitate emergent processes.
Discover: Monitor and analyze social data to discover new business insights; analyze identities, social graphs, communication channels and social content; and identify opportunities, problems, solutions, valuations, etc.
Act: Act on insights for business advantage; integrate social capabilities into the enterprise in order to act on new opportunities; and make better decisions, optimize processes in real time and govern and manage risk.

Continuing with our example, you may find that your customer service call center representatives are having problems finding the right expert in a timely way to solve customer problems over the phone.