The Three Elements of an Effective Social-Business Strategy

Paul Greenberg defines social business as "the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation."

After taking the audience's pulse at last week's Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference, I realize that Paul's definition is already a traffic light behind Main Street. The rapid rate at which companies integrate social media into their business operation is astonishing. Search Engine Journal reports that in 2007, only 17 percent of companies used social media. The prediction for 2012 is 43 percent. Today, more than 80 percent of companies use social media for recruiting. One company represented at the conference reported that 20 percent of its new leads come from its social-business strategy. Another company reported that leads created through social media are three times more likely to close than leads generated by marketing.

While individual social-media tools add little value and offer no ROI, a social-business strategy leads to quantifiable results. Here is my definition of the new face of social business: the alignment of content, conversations, and collaboration with the company's business strategy.

On a tactical level, a social-business strategy relies on three core elements:

1. Content. Ownership of a product or service is always preceded by ownership of the related content. Content is like a currency that companies share to earn interest in the marketplace. Good content leads to better conversations. Good content educates customers. Good content catches customers. For example, at HubSpot, all 100 salespeople are asked to create and maintain a blog. The results: more traffic to the company's Website, higher search-engine optimization ratings, and unprecedented sales growth year over year.
2. Conversation. In the new world of social business, the sales pitch has been replaced by a fluid conversation between equal partners. The focus is on situational fluency. If the prospect has already completed 80 percent of the fact finding in the purchase process, it's the salesperson's job to deliver the remaining 20 percent within the allocated time frame set aside for the conversation. In their one to many conversations, smart companies have shifted their strategy from thought leadership to community leadership. Good community leaders set conversational boundaries that prevent members from going on rabbit trails or engaging in "wild west" behavior. It takes a well-managed community with clear boundaries to close more business.
3. Collaboration. New social CRM tools, such as Jive, Lithium, or Salesforce Chatter, have given companies the opportunity to collaborate across the organization, eliminating silos while maintaining a steady focus on business at hand. Smart companies extend the collaboration pipeline to include their customers. By elevating customers to the status of equal partner, companies can co-create their future.

While the benefits of transforming a company into a social business are clear, what's not clear is the path to get there. While the Internet has the potential to replicate the agility of our mind on a screen, the number of available tools to create an effective social-media strategy is staggering.

Success doesn't depend on choosing the right program like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, but on selecting the right apps for creating and delivering content, enabling conversations, and building communities. With so many programs to choose from, companies have the luxury of creating a social-business app universe that will help them achieve their business objectives.

Here are a few tools that can help you win:

HubSpot Content Creation Kit: http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-kits/

Top 10 Social Media Blogs: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/top-10-social-media-blogs-of-2011

Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization, an excellent book by Oliver Blanchard: http://www.amazon.com/Social-Media-ROI-Measuring-Organization/dp/0789747413/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319311737&sr=8-1

A social business conference – "Sales Strategies in a Social & Mobile World": www.sales20conf.com/socialmedia

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Comments

[Mark Stonham]

Hi Gerard, a great post that reflects how quickly concepts are developing in Social Business.

I'd add to the discussion a different perspective on the three 'C's you mention, each at strategic level:

1. Content is essential, and the strategy in Social Media Marketing may well be to create your own, but could also mean inviting partners to contribute. In Support the strategy might be to encourage Customer or User Generated Content.

2. Conversation, especially in Customer Services area, could mean a strategy to encourage fans and advocates to pass on their experiences to people posting questions, and reward them appropriately.

3. Collaboration has great potential in the selling activity and process, where the strategy may be to reduce unit time and cycle time using new tools, enabling new, better ways of working.

In larger companies, different business areas, functions, departments will have different needs and opportunities to consider introducing relevant social approaches, and resources to execute and benefit from doing so.

An enterprise Social Media strategy would need to consider these many differences.

[Mini MBA]

Thank you so much. This was really great.

[How to Start a Business]

There are six basic facets of institutional logic that great companies use to their advantage: a common purpose; a long-term view; emotional engagement; community building; innovation; and self-organization.

[Mark Stonham]

Hi Gerhard,

Fantastic points raised. I read it 3 times to fully grasp your message.

The whole topic of Social Business brings in so many dimensions, it makes CRM seem straight-forward in comparison, and there was significant investment, pain and unfulfilled expectations aplenty in that field over 20+ years, so Social Business will be a long term, disruptive change.

To me, content, conversation and collaboration represent 3 stages of the journey, one building on the previous. And beyond potentially Cultural Conversion (in a religious, heart and mind, sense to pick another 'C')

There is also the people, process and technology triplet, where people includes both vendors and buyers, process is the sales cycle but also the buy cycle, and technology is the multi-layered apps, infrastructure and carrier (and I recall IBM layered architecture of 25 years ago).

There's also the strategic, operational and tactical dimensions, simplistically at company wide, departmental and campaign/personal.

Where CRM was/is essentially internal Social Business is fundamentally bridging internal and external, and therefore an order of magnitude more complex as a change project.

Hubspot and other pioneers have the advantage of a Sales 2.0 mindset and a blank sheet of paper, and their success will enable these changes to cross the chasm to early majority and beyond.

The Rock Star analogy is excellent - one succeeds handsomely, and in business that may well be by taking sales and customers away from the other 99 who are just slightly behind the curve.

We live in interesting, and challenging times.

It's great to be part of it.

Mark

[john mista]

Very useful as I consider our marketing plan. Many thanks for the tips and the ideas. It is a big step out for a lot of us and that we need all the assist we can get.

[mharris InsightDemand.com]

Two great sentences all rolled into one great insight.

"In the new world of social business, the sales pitch has been replaced by a fluid conversation between equal partners. The focus is on situational fluency."
"If the prospect has already completed 80 percent of the fact finding in the purchase process, it's the salesperson's job to deliver the remaining 20 percent within the allocated time frame set aside for the conversation."

This will require Salesperson to be even better than they are today.

As for Social Media, I sometimes wonder if winning at Social Media is like being a rock star. Yes 1 in 100 get it right and get the traffic yet there are 99 others who invested time and didn't get onto Google's first page?

[CaitlinMarketng]

Fantastic post. The social business hinges on 1:1 conversations. Collaboration is the next evolution for social media in business, and the potential value of quality conversation increase exponentially when they happen face to face.