An 8 Step Roadmap for Developing a Social Business Strategy

I recently participated in a NewsGator webinar on the topic of developing a social business strategy. On the webinar, I shared an eight step roadmap for how to get started creating a social strategy quickly, cheaply, and easily. I thought it made sense to share it here too. Enjoy!

Step1: Emergence

In this step, the organization is not using social technologies in any formal or organized way. Instead, individuals or small groups within the organization are experimenting with social technologies to determine whether there is business value to them.

1. Encourage innovation
2. Find external reference examples
3. Prototype
   1. External
   2. Internal

Step 2: Strategy

Once the organization begins to develop experience with social technologies and has identified potential business value from their use, it is important to create a framework that identifies how it expects to use these technologies, and the goals and objectives for their use.

1. Conduct an organizational assessment
2. Conduct a brand assessment
3. Begin the planning and project management
   1. Identify appropriate team members
   2. Identify potential resources required to proceed
   3. Prepare a project plan with timelines and budgets
   4. Identify critical success factors
4. Establish an initial governance framework
   1. Develop an initial social media policy
   2. Develop an initial security plan
   3. Develop the initial project team
5. Conduct internal marketing
6. Develop the social business team
7. Develop the social business strategy
   1. Formal business case
   2. Risk assessment
   3. Culture assessment
   4. Process assessment
8. Develop the organization-specific social business roadmap

Step 3: Development

With the strategy in place, the organization can make informed decisions about what tools to implement, how to implement them, where to implement them, and how they will potentially scale more broadly within the organization.

1. Identify desired functionality
2. Identify desired deployment options
   1. Commercial
   2. Hosted/SaaS
   3. Internal
   4. Mobile applications and widgets
3. Implement the desired solution(s)
   1. Determine necessary and desired capabilities
   2. Select the tool(s) that will provide those capabilities
   3. Procure the tools
   4. Install the tools
   5. Configure the tools
   6. Configure the administrative roles
   7. Conduct the proof of concept and/or pilot
   8. Roll out
4. Develop and deliver training and support
5. Integrate the solution(s) with other systems

Step 4: Monitoring

Initially, the organization should spend time monitoring and listen to the conversations taking place in and around a particular tool to get a sense of the nature of the tool, the content of the conversations, the target audiences, and who the leading participants are. This is perhaps more visible in externally focused processes but is important for internal ones as well.

1. Monitor internal sites and comments
2. Monitor external sites and comments
3. Set up queries and alerts
4. Empower community managers

Step 5: Participation

Once the organization has done some listening, it will be able to participate more meaningfully and should begin doing so according to what it has learned about the target market and the nature of the conversations on the various tools.

1. Seed content into the tools
2. Ensure consistent messaging across platforms

Step 6: Engagement

The goal is for participation to move to engagement – from speaking at or to customers to engaging with them. This means creating processes to respond to issues, both internally and externally, and ensuring that communications are clear, accurate, and authentic.

1. Plan for engagement
2. Evolve the technology and communication
3. Evolve the culture

Step 7: Governance

This step describes the process for developing an effective governance framework for social business processes. Some of the steps are specific to certain tools or capabilities, while others are more broadly applicable, such as an acceptable usage policy.

1. Develop pro-active governance
   1. Develop appropriate use policies
   2. Provide guidance on comments and engagement
   3. Provide guidance for any topics or tools that will be monitored or prescribed
2. Develop and implement active governance
   1. Provide internal monitoring for sensitive or confidential information
   2. Address security considerations
   3. Enforcement
3. Provide retroactive governance
   1. Conduct post-publication auditing and review
   2. Address records management/archiving
   3. Address and prepare for migration
   4. Address legal issues

Step 8: Optimization

Once social business processes are in place, they should be actively managed and reviewed to ensure that the organization realizing the expected benefits. This includes but is not limited to monitoring the tools in real-time, identifying and measuring specific metrics, and training users on new or evolving tools and processes.

1. Management tasks
2. Monitor the tools and processes
3. Measure and analyze social processes and usage
4. Continue to educate users and management