Framework for Social Business

Advertising has witnessed a paradigm shift over the years and social media has played a pivotal role in this change. It has redefined the brand-customer engagement by providing more power to the customer. Social Media has been a disruption. Period.

Leading practitioners have realized that potential of social goes beyond advertising and brands have the potential to leverage it at a much broader scope. The article ‘Social for Business – a myth or reality’ articulates the scope very well.

However, seamless execution of binding social media with Marketing, Sales, Service & Support, Community & Collaboration, Product & Innovation and Customer Experience is a challenge due to multiple factors around people, processes and technology. Some of common challenges are – which function should control social media, what should be the budget, how should the ideal team be structured, what are the right business metrics for calculating ROI amongst others.

The solution lies in establishing a social business framework that would support all use cases. The framework should comprise of:

a. Strategy – Any social media initiative needs to be based on a clear strategy, which in turn should be aligned with business objectives. The strategy document can include consumer’s social persona, business KPIs to measure and social media channels to adopt for each use case.

b. Content – Once the right strategy is in place, the second component is Content. Brands need right type of content in form of text, visuals and videos optimized for social channels that gels well with strategy.

c. Engagement – Social media is all about engaging conversations around a use case. Based on whether the business objective is looking for product feedback or sales leads or increased awareness or customer support, the brands needs to serve the right content at the right time to drive engagement. For example, promoting social customer support to mobile users who are browsing support page in an E-commerce portal will lead to increased loyalty with social and mobile first consumers if serviced appropriately.

d. Response – Once the social media becomes engaging, it will end up being the default mode of communication for all your stakeholders - customers, employees and partners. They will raise issues, share feedback and talk about things, which could be of potential interest for a brand. Hence, response management becomes critical. Brands need to have listening, sentiment validation and response mechanism in place as one negative post has the potential to reduce a brand worth. A well-defined internal response framework cutting across different business functions with clear ownership and timelines will ensure continued engagement and loyalty.

e. Analytics – For each use case, brand needs to collect the right information and have the right analytical model in place so that there’s continuous optimization to achieve the business objectives.

f. Technology – Last but not the least, each of the above components needs underlying technology as an enabler. A robust technology solution that can seamlessly integrate with various social channels and is flexible enough to talk to existing enterprise and other third party systems can bring in the desired efficiency.

The above six components is what is needed to overcome the challenge around people, process and technology to help you adopt social for business.

Gupta leads the Social IQ product line at TO THE NEW and has extensive experience in the Social CRM and Customer Experience domain. Prior to this, Gupta has worked in Infosys and Verizon.