Organizing for Social Media Success

Chris Boudreaux, Senior Vice President of Management Consulting, Converseon

In 2010, social media reached a tipping point. It is no longer treated as an experiment or pet project. Leaders in very large enterprises are committing significant people and money to achieve business objectives through social media. CFOs are asking for real business cases, because managers are asking for real investments in resources. Vice presidents and directors are assigned social media goals in their personal performance plans. In short, corporate social media is finally “growing up.”

As a result, we will soon begin to demand the same levels of reliability and accountability from social media that we demand from the companywide functions that social media support, such as IT, HR, marketing and finance. As the science of measuring social media matures, organizations will demand that this element deliver quantifiable business outcomes, and that performance measurement exist in full integration with existing measurement capabilities. Specifically, social media will not get its own dashboards; instead, metrics will appear within existing dashboards.

While the majority of leaders welcome the maturity of social media capabilities in the enterprise, most still wonder how to make it happen. In a lot of organizations today:

• Ownership is unclear. Everyone wonders, “Who owns social media?” For example, accountability for blogger relationship management and outreach remains vague, and is often contentious.
• Strategy and planning are fragmented. Even though every functional area can benefit from many of the same tools (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) and listening platforms, each functional area, business unit, and global region typically plans its social media efforts in isolation. As a result, there is a lot of redundant investment and activity across the enterprise.
• Measurement is superficial. Many social media teams simply report whatever metrics their tools provide, such as overall sentiment regarding selected keywords and keyword volumes. They are unable to tie social media activity to business outcomes, forecasting, or insight.
• Execution falls short of expectations. Too many organizations invest in social media without determining what they expect from their investments. As a result, they do not recognize when they are underperforming, and simply hope for better outcomes the next time around.
• Staffing is reactionary. Few companies have taken the time to define specific social media roles and responsibilities that allow the organization to proactively identify, hire, and develop proficient social media practitioners to lead and evolve their social media capabilities. As a result, any social media effort inevitably becomes someone's secondary responsibility.
• Training focuses on individual tactics. Most social media training that is sold to large enterprises still focuses on tactics and guidance that apply to individuals, but not to large organizations.
• Tools do not align or integrate. Most large enterprises have purchased multiple listening tools, all of which report different metrics, with little hope of reconciliation. In addition, social media measurement exists in isolation from Web analytics and customer analytics, leaving business leaders unable to determine where and how to invest.

Why is all of this occurring? Because most enterprises are still trying to figure out exactly how to achieve success in social media. The answers are available, fortunately; many of them rely on lessons from the past 20 years of business process reengineering, application rationalization, and functional shared services.

Most organizations’ social media efforts look a lot like their e-businesses did in the late nineties: Each business unit had its own Web site, with its own Web infrastructure, its own shipping carts, and its own customer experience. Performance varied widely; the customer experience was very inconsistent; and redundant costs were everywhere. Eventually, most corporations determined to concentrate their e-business operations into a more centralized technical infrastructure, with IT operating as an insular shared service that optimized the performance of e-business capabilities across the enterprise.

At the same time, Michael Hammer, author and management expert, preached the benefits of business process reengineering and establishing internal “customer champions” to break down existing corporate silos. During that time, CEOs around the world selected influential senior executives to lead the charge across their organizations, with the goal of seamless and consistent performance for their customers. They mapped out business processes across various units, and consolidated many functional teams into shared services groups. The investments in these very large change initiatives were significantly fueled by fears of Y2K disasters, which led every large company in the world to rip out and replace many of their existing IT systems.

Throughout all of that change, the organizations that succeeded applied many of the same principles that led to enterprise-scale success in social media today, including:

• Establish an internal champion. Social media crosses every functional area of your business. You need a senior executive with strong internal relationships to take the lead, invest his or her own dollars, and get everyone working toward common goals.
• Begin with business objectives. You must determine what social media investments to make, based on how you expect them to support your business objectives. The days of experimentation are over. If your managers still want to “test and learn,” then you probably need to import some social media experience into your team.
• Create a social media center of excellence. Almost every organization benefits from sharing or coordinating certain social media resources and capabilities across the company. For example, someone should be accountable for defining a single social media measurement framework; and you'll want to deliver training consistently across the organization. Make sure employees are reporting performance regularly; and someone should ensure that all product marketing plans apply social media tactics reliably.
• Focus investments on business processes. Most social media efforts require significant coordination across functional teams. Think of that collaboration in terms of the business processes it is going impact. Examples include demand generation, lead management, customer analytics, customer service, recruiting, and staffing. Instead of investing in more Facebook fans, think about how that investment should drive awareness, gain leads, or lower costs per customer support interaction.
• Remember culture and communications. Consider the ways that your internal culture (or cultures) will impact your plans. Proactively communicate, and determine how you will manage cultural change where required. This is especially important for companies with lots of mergers or acquisitions in their history (or their future).

We've realized by now that social media imposes significant change on the way we do business—both inside and out. Successful companies begin internally, with careful examination of the people, processes, tools, and data required to achieve their business goals through social media. They then chart a reasonable course to continue social media performance at enterprise scale.

The End of Listening as We Know It: From Market Research Projects to Enterprise Value Creator

Yoram (Jerry) Wind, the Lauder Professor, the Wharton School, and Stephen D. Rappaport, the Advertising Research Foundation

Called “the world's largest focus group,” “free mind-reading,” and other superlatives, many researchers have grabbed onto social media listening as the latest way to harvest consumer “insights” from “rivers” of “authentic, unfiltered conversations” in the social Web. Listening is seen as a priority for companies of all sizes. However, we argue that listening's potential is severely limited by a widely held conventional mental model. The mental model is short term in focus and fails to lay the groundwork for a model of listening that will provide companies with insights, competitive advantages, and the ability to create value through time, and carry them through the disruptions we know will inevitably occur (though we're not sure when or how, quite yet.).

Mental Models

In both our business and personal lives, we have unique ways of seeing the world, mental models of how and why things work or fail, whether it's a business success, a new idea, or why Brad and Jen will not get back together again. Neuroscience teaches us that we actually discard most of what we take in through our senses. Instead, the world we experience evokes an internal model of reality—our mental model. When you stop to think about this, it makes sense: How else could we survive in the world if we didn't have a way for rapidly dealing with situations? Stereotypes perform a similar function. Without them, we would suffer from mental paralysis caused by the need to organize our understanding of the world each time out.

The fact that mental models are so helpful is what makes them so hard to break. That's not bad when they still explain things correctly in a stable environment. However, outdated mental models can be a detriment in today's complex, uncertain, and changing business world. What usually happens is this: We hold tight onto these models even after they've failed, and risk succumbing to insanity as Einstein defined it—doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. What we need to do is replace those old, ineffective models with new ones. That's a considerable challenge, but it's one we can certainly meet.

Listening's mental model is no exception. In our view, it concentrates applications in two areas—consumer insights and customer service—the so-called sweet spots. Consequently the industry is only getting more of the same, as “smart” money bankrolls similar listening startups. And as the market takes shape around commodity offerings, researchers view listening as just another research method to be trotted out as a buzzworthy alternative to focus groups. “We're hip, we're listening,” they claim. But they're not.

The New Mental Model for Listening

The new mind-set must allow listening to become a continuous, sustainable activity that is embedded throughout the organization, and must become a resource for creating significant enterprise value. A new mental model must allow listening to achieve its promise.

We contend that the mental model has five aspects: who we listen to; why we listen; how we listen; what we listen to; and engagement. Each category has one or more rules. We use a straightforward method for presenting the current and emerging mental models through a series of statements beginning with “from” the old and “to” the new.

Putting the New Mental Model to Work

The first step in changing a mental model is, unsurprisingly, to change your own thinking. If you're a golfer or even follow golf casually, you've probably noticed that some pros are shooting lower scores than ever before. A short while ago, shooting 59 in a competitive round was an extraordinary, exceptional achievement; it's still rare today, yes, but it's happening more often. There are more scores in the low 60s than ever before. What's more is that these scores aren't achieved by the superstars, but rather by the capable and less-heralded tour players. And it's not due to the equipment; it's due to a change in golfers’ mental models. Over the last several years, the golf school that has been rated most highly is run by two instructors Lynne Marriott and Pia Nillsson, not gurus like Butch Harmon, Hank Haney, or David Leadbetter. In Marriott and Nillsson's program, called Vision 54, they ask their pro golf clients the following question: “You've played this golf course umpteen times and birdied each hole at one time or another. Why not birdie every hole in one round?” Traditionally, golfers didn't think like this, but a group is beginning to do just that, and scores are dropping. Remember the four-minute mile? The common belief was that it couldn't be broken—that is, until Roger Bannister said: “Why not? I will.” Over the following three years, 16 other runners broke the four-minute mile barrier, because it had been a mental barrier, not a physical one. The notion of physical limits to performance seems almost quaint, because our mental models have changed so much.

Adopting listening's new mental model requires a change agent, and it begins with you. But like scientific paradigms, new ideas don't simply win out on their merits. They require evidence, acceptance, a supportive culture and values, and business processes built on listening, sharing, and consultation, all to support enterprise value creation and increase accountability. Without those there's no reason why others should stick their necks out. They'll simply do what most workers do best: support the status quo ante.

Benefits of Adopting Listening's New Mental Model

We believe that listening's new mental model will help companies turn themselves inside out. This will enrich all management functions, by shifting their attention 180 degrees from their internal focus to an abiding external focus on all relevant stakeholders. Listening will be a force that drives the conversion of firms locked on managing customer relationships to management by customers. Instead of customers relating to a company in ways the company determines, the company will relate to its customers in ways customers want them to. That's a big flip; and although it will challenge management, it will help bond companies and customers more closely together, through better consultation and dialogue.

The day is coming when companies will furnish the right offering—whether a product, service, solution, or experience—to the right people at the right time; manufacture more effectively and efficiently; and greatly improve marketing, distribution, and service. Additionally, the mental model supporting enterprise listening is key to effective risk management and capturing new opportunities. These benefits can contribute to achieving the objectives relevant to all stakeholders, and becoming a source of sustained value creation.

You might be thinking, “Well, all that sounds great; we'll be set.” Although we make the argument that effective listening, following our 10 rules, is a necessary condition to reap the benefits we list, it is not sufficient. You must implement your takeaways from “listening” to our words.