June 2, 2011

Accelerating Your Social Maturity

by Sean Corcoran and Christine Spivey Overby for Interactive Marketing Professionals

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For Interactive Marketing Professionals

June 2, 2011

Accelerating Your Social Maturity

An Empowered report: How to Move From Social Experimentation to business transformation

by Sean Corcoran and Christine Spivey Overby with David M. Cooperstein, Josh bernoff, nigel Fenwick, tJ Keitt, Zach Hofer-Shall, Doug Williams, Clay richardson, Sarah Glass, and Angie Polanco

ExECut I v E S u M MA rY
Customers and employees are becoming increasingly empowered by social technologies, dramatically changing the way they communicate and collaborate. To succeed in this new world, companies must make fundamental changes to resources, skills, tools, processes, and culture. Forrester calls this process of change social maturity, and it consists of five stages: 1) dormant; 2) testing; 3) coordinating; 4) scaling and optimizing; and 5) empowering the workforce. To help accelerate the companys social maturity journey, interactive marketers should act as shepherds coordinating across functions and demonstrating to senior executives the benefits of social tools.

tAbl E O F CO n tE ntS
2 An Empowered Organization Requires Social Maturity Mature At An Organizational level 5 Introducing Forresters Social Maturity Model laggards: Still Socially Dormant the late Majority: Getting Off the Ground the Early Majority: Coordinating the Organization Early Adopters: Scaling And Optimizing the Innovators: Empowering the Workforce
rECOMMEnDAtIOnS

n Ot E S & rE S O u rCE S
Forrester interviewed 28 vendor and user companies, including bazaarvoice, best buy, branch banking and trust, Dachis Group, IbM, newell rubbermaid, razorfish, Starbucks, and telstra.

Related Research Documents take Control Of Your Social Marketing Program April 14, 2011
Social Media Marketing Metrics that Matter February 22, 2011 benchmarking Social Marketing Plans For 2011 October 14, 2010

12 Interactive Marketers Must Embrace The Role Of Shepherd 13 Supplemental Material

2011 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reproduction or sharing of this content in any form without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@ forrester.com. For additional reproduction and usage information, see Forresters Citation Policy located at www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

Accelerating Your Social Maturity

For Interactive Marketing Professionals

An EMpOwERED ORgAnIzATIOn REquIRES SOCIAl MATuRITy As more customers and employees increasingly use cheap, accessible technologies, companies need to prepare their organizations for a new way of engaging individuals. Ultimately, companies must ensure that employees have the necessary skills and technologies to solve their customers problems. Companies stand to gain much from the effective use of technologies like social, mobile, and video:1

Customer advocates generate higher profits. Social technologies give customers more access

to the brands they love. This in turn enables brands to energize advocates, the 16% of people who make 80% of the online conversation.2 These empowered organizations engender customer loyalty and smartly leverage earned media, resulting in higher customer lifetime value and a more efficient advertising spend.3

Streamlined business processes lower operating costs. Email, file sharing, and intranets give
employees limited access to knowledge and talent in large companies. Social technologies, by contrast, change the way people connect and share information within a company just as social networks have done in their personal lives. Employees armed with community tools and internal blogging can more easily share information, while business process management augmented with social technologies will create a more streamlined workflow.4

Co-creation increases product success rates. New technologies allow customers and

employees to have a greater voice in the product development cycle.5 By incorporating greater input of people closest to supply and demand, companies can expect lower rates of product failure, faster ideation, and ultimately more successful products and services. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) and JPMorgan Chases Chase card services used a private online community to engage customers in the co-creation of IHGs new version of the Priority Club Select Visa card resulting in an 80% lift in new accounts compared with the legacy card.6

Mature At An Organizational level One of the key facets of the empowered organization is the use of social technologies to transform the companys communication and collaboration. Companies will grow more familiar and facile with these tools through a process that Forrester calls social maturity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, social maturity isnt just a thriving advocacy program or social sign-on website. While those are important early steps, social maturity goes deeper, representing a fundamental shift in your companys organizational and cultural mores. Forrester has identified six criteria for you to address on the path to maturity (see Figure 1): 1. Experience. This is as straightforward as it gets if your company isnt using any social applications, then you cant even reach an early stage of maturity. But its not just implementing technologies; its also documenting and sharing learnings across the organization.

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2. Resources. Social maturity requires new responsibilities and skills. Not only are new people needed to manage technologies and the conversation created, but many current employees will need training and guidelines. And as employees skills and responsibilities change, so does the organization. Most companies must go through a similar process: They start using social media in a decentralized manner as social technologies spring up organically; then they turn to a centralized model to coordinate; and finally they decentralize by empowering relevant employees to use social tools to do their jobs.7 3. Process. You can plan and organize for social applications, but if you havent created the workflow for how to manage them, then you cannot advance. This not only includes how to manage a community or listen to the social Web but also how to incorporate social technologies into existing business processes. There are three types of social processes: 1) task-oriented (e.g., a process for energizing advocates); 2) cross-functional collaboration (e.g., cross-departmental business rules for how to use a shared technology); and 3) business process change (e.g., social co-creation). 4. Measurement. Valuing social tools and contributions is critical. As Manish Mehta, VP of social media and community at Dell, told us, ROI must become embedded in functions alongside other social enablers. This criterion includes basic data collection, the use of quantitative and qualitative measures, and the move toward Social Intelligence with the ability to tie it back to real business objectives.8 5. Commitment. To mature, management must commit by creating a companywide vision and developing a long-term plan for empowering employees and customers. 6. Culture. A socially empowered culture is both top-down and bottom-up. Senior management sets the social priorities relative to other strategic programs. At the same time, the groundswell must also take hold organically with more employees buying into the benefits of using social technologies to do their work.

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Figure 1 the Common Stages Of Social Maturity

Dormant Dening Resistant to any characteristic use of social technologies due to unwillingness to participate or analysis paralysis Experience None Testing Individuals or departments test in isolated pockets. Coordinating Management begins to coordinate across teams and departments. Scaling and optimizing Empowering

Organization shift Organization toward growing empowers all and improving relevant social applications. employees by fostering and rewarding HEROes. Established customer and employee applications in place with continuous testing Social media organization in place with at least one full-time resource Organization takes action in social conversations (i.e., product or service changes). Evolving into Social Intelligence by integrating with other measurements Full managerial support culminates into companywide philosophy. Social activity becomes more common in everyday work processes but not fully ingrained. Core business applications have social features; customer and employee applications begin to blur. All employees encouraged, enabled, and rewarded for using social technologies Social elements incorporated into key corporate business processes (e.g., CRM) Social Intelligence takes hold.

In customer applications (e.g., Facebook) or employee applications limited to collaboration (e.g., Yammer) Individuals use applications part-time to help with current jobs.

Use of customer applications expands; employee applications still mainly for collaboration Shepherds bring teams together and form governance council. Move from strictly task-oriented to cross-team as departments work together Includes qualitative measures like sentiment

Resources None

Processes None

Strictly task-oriented (e.g., community management or listening) Limited to collecting activities (e.g., tracking number of followers) Limited managerial support and no long-term plan or philosophy Social makes little impact on most employees day-to-day business.

Measurement None

Commitment None

Management commits to long-term plan and governance. Employees have guidelines but social not integral in daily work

Empowering employees is a business imperative. Social plays key role in day-to-day jobs of all relevant employees.

Culture None

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InTRODuCIng FORRESTERS SOCIAl MATuRITy MODEl While social activities start almost anywhere in an organization, companies across different industries and regions will experience common stages of changes as they implement, manage, and optimize these technologies. To illustrate this journey, weve adapted the classic Diffusion of Innovations updating the language to illustrate the particulars of social maturity (see Figure 2).9 Understanding these stages is the key to driving change:

Laggards: the dormant stage. Whether its due to regulation, a conservative culture, an idle Late majority: the testing stage. Most of the late majority is now testing some customer

customer base, or just a lack of interest, laggard companies which Forrester estimates to be one in five do not currently use any social tools.

applications. Like the groundswell itself, this activity is typically bottom-up occurring in isolated pockets with minimal guidance and commitment from management.

Early majority: the coordinating stage. Management in this stage has recognized both the risks
and rewards of social technologies. They bring teams together for not only program execution but also long-term planning, knowledge sharing, and governance.

Early adopters: the scaling and optimizing stage. These leaders have coordinated

organizations and built long-term plans to go along with a wide array of social applications. Think Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Ford. Theyre now focused on optimizing their processes and creating scale with their applications.

Innovators: beginning to empower their employees. A few select organizations like Dell and
Zappos.com are on the verge of breakthrough: empowering their full workforce to use social technologies to solve problems and make better decisions.10

Figure 2 Companies Are Following the Early Adopters In Social Maturity

Early adopters Early majority Innovators Empowering Scaling and optimizing

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Laggards Late majority

Coordinating

Testing

Dormant
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laggards: Still Socially Dormant Forrester estimates that nearly one in five companies is not using any social technologies.11 This is often due to conservative cultures, heavy regulation, or companies with customers and employees that are not active with social technologies (like certain B2B and heavy industries). Some, like a financial services company we spoke with, are still inactive due to paralysis by analysis in which they plan but never actually implement. We dont expect all laggards to commit to the long term: According to a 2010 survey of interactive marketers, 25% of respondents have no plans for implementing a long-term plan for social marketing in the next 12 months.12 But many will, and there are tactics for accelerating the journey. How to accelerate to the next stage: Focus on then advertise the small victories. There are a variety of roadblocks that companies face when working with social media (see Figure 3). To move beyond this stage, you should:

Use the POST method. Forresters POST method is a proven formula that requires that you

start with people (P), objectives (O), and strategy (S) and then choose the technologies (T) last.13 Following this method means that you wont make the rookie mistake of focusing first on the social tool as in, We need a Twitter strategy.

Focus on one simple application first. Dont spend as much time on planning for a full social

media strategy but rather start by doing something. Many successful firms first broke down barriers by launching one successful application. For example, Best Buys internal Blue Shirt Nation community not only helped lower employee turnover but also increased participation in the companys 401(k) plan.14 But dont just simply collect a bunch of data from a listening platform. Instead, start with one objective, identify key metrics that tie back to that objective, run an audit over a set period of time, and then share the metrics that matter with the appropriate leaders of each relevant department.16
15

Conduct a listening audit. Listening is often a great first step.

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Figure 3 Social Maturity Prompts Many Concerns

In regards to your organizations use of external social media tools, please indicate which of the following are most concerning to you. Lack of resources (people) Measurement/ROI challenges Negative feedback from customers Lack of budget Legal issues Company bureaucracy Lack of employee training/experience Lack of senior management buy-in and support Technology/infrastructure development Data security and risks Negative feedback from peers within the company IT liability Other 4% 4% 3% 10% 8% 26% 23% 23% 22% 21% 32% 43% 50%

Base: 95 US companies with 1,000 or more employees (multiple responses accepted) Source: Q3 2010 Global Interactive Marketing Social Marketing Maturity Online Survey (n = 195)
59690 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

The late Majority: getting Off The ground The late majority, representing approximately one-third of all companies, is entering a stage in which a groundswell of social activity is happening internally but not coordinated across teams. From a social maturity perspective, theyre almost entirely focused on implementing new technologies and the early processes to manage them. These companies are often B2B, regulated, or simply resourcechallenged. Typical characteristics of this group are:

Tests that center on popular customer social applications. Most of these companies are using

popular technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to test the waters. For example, Penske Truck Leasings marketing department started to use tools like Twitter to see how they fit into its overall marketing plans.

Social activity that is driven by HEROes in isolation. Companies at this stage have a few

HEROes (highly empowered and resourceful operatives) innovative information workers that find a way to use social technologies to do their jobs.17 Theyre developing task-driven processes, such as learning how to manage a community effectively. At this point, these HEROes dont yet participate in long-term planning and cross-team collaboration.
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A measurement approach that is limited to collecting volume metrics. Because social

technologies are web-based, they tend to offer a slew of data. And with eight out of 10 survey respondents now listening to the conversations on the social Web, the data is especially abundant.18 Yet the late majority is still collecting simple volume metrics like the quantity of followers, likes, comments, and visits, rather than more complex calculations like quality of participation and user impact.19

How to accelerate to the next stage: Foster cross-team coordination. Most of the testing that happens in the late majority is in isolated groups, such as an interactive marketing team testing a community or an eBusiness team experimenting with ratings and reviews for eCommerce. To accelerate progress, you should:

Hire or appoint shepherds to lead social media across teams. Coordination requires at least

one senior manager, or shepherd, to coordinate and organize the appropriate resources including marketing, PR, legal, customer service, HR, and IT. IHG, one of the largest hotel companies in the world, recently hired a social marketing manager to coordinate social strategy across the global organization. This means coordinating social media not only at the global level, but also at the local level which is critical for a company with more than 4,400 hotels in 100 countries and territories.

Implement a training program. Social technologies require new skills. At this stage, you

should begin putting together at least basic training programs. Australian telecommunications leader Telstra has successfully implemented two types of training: 1) any employee that could talk about the company online must pass a training session through an online module, and 2) any employee using social technologies regularly must attend an in-depth, one-day session.

Improve processes for managing applications. At this stage, the teams that have built

successful social applications should begin to develop more sophisticated processes for managing them. This includes the development of editorial calendars for communities, rules of engagement for customer interactions, and methods for cross-team collaboration.20

Correlate social data with existing marketing metrics. To move beyond simply collecting fans

and followers, start by correlating the social data you collect with existing marketing metrics like the reach of paid media. Networked Insights, an analytics company that uses social data to help companies better inform their media planning, has shown that companies like Best Buy, Chrysler, and Volkswagen received lifts in social media conversation due to their Super Bowl commercials.

The Early Majority: Coordinating The Organization The early majority, also representing about one-third of large companies, is at the stage in which management recognizes the benefits and risks of using social technologies and begins to coordinate the usage across the organization through corporate governance. While these companies are still testing new technologies and developing more sophisticated processes and measurement, the big focus is on resources. Specific characteristics of this segment include:

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Shepherds forming a governance council. In this stage the shepherds have the power to

bring together people from across the organization to create governance rules. Sometimes these shepherds are the HEROes themselves but are more often managers that have influence with other managers across departments. According to a survey of interactive marketers, 31% of large companies currently have governance councils.21

Social media policies that are put into effect. At this stage, customers and employees require

guidelines for using social technologies to protect against security breaches, legal vulnerabilities, brand erosion, and reduced competitiveness. More than four out of 10 interactive marketers report that their organizations have a social media policy in place.22 Shepherds should work with legal and HR teams to develop a policy that provides an essential guide for employees on how to conduct themselves in social media for personal or business reasons. This typically includes legal obligations, standards of conduct, and how to handle mistakes.23

The implementation of dedicated resources and organization. Its at this stage that companies
begin to address the resource challenge head on. Some companies hire one person (e.g., social strategist) to create and implement a long-term plan, while others build an entire department. When IBM started to experiment with social technologies, it built a team dedicated to identifying the latest trends and sharing best practices across the company. This department grew into a matrix hub-and-spoke model with a central team, plus full-time resources that sit within not only product teams but also regions.

The formation of cross-team processes for responding to customer feedback. While most

companies are listening, many are still not taking action on information. But Bravo Media did so when it introduced a T-shirt on its eCommerce site featuring a quote from the popular show The Real Housewives of New Jersey. The shows audience didnt think the quote represented the brand, and they let Bravo know it through various social applications. Bravo then pulled the T-shirt and let the audience know that it had listened and taken action.

The key to maturing beyond the early majority: Convince management to promote it. The early majority is making progress in coordinating across the organization, but to mature into the early adopter stage, companies must:

Present a long-term plan to educate and inspire senior leadership. For companies to move

into the next stage, they must work to educate senior leaders on the realistic benefits of social media. To do so, work with other members of the governance council to create a long-term plan that incorporates both a vision and a detailed road map for how to meet it. Nearly four in 10 interactive marketers have already developed a long-term plan, while another 36% plan to in the next 12 months.24 But dont stop there. Present it to senior leadership to educate them on the realities and to inspire them to get involved. As a shepherd from a global healthcare company told us, We had made progress with social, but what really propelled us forward was the support of the CEO and COO.

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Document a philosophy and employ tools to create consistency. Governance policies help

employees know what they can and cannot do; philosophies help create a consistent mindset. With more than 20 million Facebook fans, Starbucks has become a leader in external social activities.25 And as Matthew Guiste, who heads social marketing for the brand told us, We have two rules for social media: First, it must always provide value, and second, dont mess it up. But practical tools are also needed to help give employees a road map for how to act consistently. Mars did this by creating a checklist of best practices that all brands must adhere to when implementing social media into their marketing programs.

Early Adopters: Scaling And Optimizing Forrester estimates that nearly one in five organizations has moved beyond coordinating and is also seeking ways to optimize and scale existing applications. This means a shift away from a strict focus on organization and resources to a focus on more sophisticated processes and measurement. Characteristics of this group include:

A move toward Social Intelligence. Companies at this stage typically move beyond collecting

followers to a more sophisticated use of social data for intelligence and optimization. For marketing, this means identifying and building relationships with the most influential customer advocates in social media (as well as detractors), including identifying them in existing customer databases.26 It also means leveraging real-time conversation as one input for optimization. For instance, Sony Pictures Entertainment works with analytics firm Covario to track online conversation about its movies before they open so it can adjust its marketing tactics on the go.

The use of social tools to drive fundamental business change. Its one thing to listen and

respond. Its entirely different to change your product development or business model to include the use of social technologies. Of the companies we surveyed that are involved in social technologies, 33% named product/service innovation as a business goal for customer social applications (see Figure 4).27

Enhanced collaboration based on internal social applications. While many respondents

are using employee social applications to foster innovation, manage projects, and share best practices, fewer are taking it deeper and using them to work with suppliers or to locate expertise within the organization. The US Department of Defense is doing this by using Jive Softwares community platform to capture feedback and surface critical process improvement that would be difficult to identify during face-to-face sessions.28

The key to maturing beyond the early adopter stage: Create a culture that embraces it. Culture is the focus for early adopters looking to move forward. As they scale and optimize their social activity, getting the entire workforce to embrace it is the next step. To reach this point you must:

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Activate your HEROes. Currently HEROes come from an empowered group of employees

that includes only 20% of information workers.29 To move to the next stage, you must make it a priority to not only identify your HEROes but also create ways to enable them to innovate. Defense contractor BAE Systems recognized that there is a risk in not tapping into the collective wisdom of its people and has made it a mission to move from a culture of need to know to a culture of need to share.30

Encourage new HEROes. To create more HEROes, companies will need to give their employees
the tools and the incentives to become more active with social technologies. To improve innovation, The Chubb Corporation initiated an innovation challenge to employees and then gave them access to both an intranet and an idea-sharing tool to submit and comment on ideas. A smaller group of executives stress-tested the most popular ideas to ensure they could be implemented. The process generated more than 600 ideas, and The Chubb Corporation eventually put three of them into action.31

Figure 4 Product/Service Innovation Is Still A nascent Social Media Objective

For what business goals are you currently using or planning to use external social media tools? Increase brand awareness Increase customer loyalty/brand favorability Public relations and/or reputation management Increase purchase consideration Market research and/or Customer Intelligence Increase sales Increase market share Product and/or service innovation Other 9% 47% 43% 37% 34% 33% 76% 76% 88%

Base: 95 US companies with 1,000 or more employees (multiple responses accepted) Source: Q3 2010 Global Interactive Marketing Social Marketing Maturity Online Survey (n = 195)
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The Innovators: Empowering The workforce There are a select few such as Dell and Zappos.com that are on the verge of a new stage: empowering their employees to regularly use groundswell technologies to solve problems for customers. This is one big step toward becoming an empowered organization. And this isnt just about implementing technologies and their processes, resources, and measurement. These companies have a culture of sharing and innovating across the workforce. In this stage:

Employee participation reaches a point of scale. At this stage, companies have implemented
enterprisewide employee social applications to most of their workforce. For instance, United Business Media built an internal community to support a new collaboration initiative across dozens of its companies spread throughout 30 countries. With a single community using accessible features, the company was able to achieve adoption rates approaching 80% of the 6,500 employees in 12 months.32

Social technologies become a key factor in business process management. Business

process management, the systematic approach to improving business processes, has become a key priority at organizations such as Wells Fargo. Because social technologies offer better collaboration, more efficient communication, and quicker access to expertise, companies will begin to incorporate them into key business processes moving forward.33

r E C O M M E n D At I O n S

InTERACTIvE MARkETERS MuST EMbRACE ThE ROlE OF ShEphERD

because of the nature of the role managing emerging technologies and sitting at the cross roads of marketing and It interactive marketers often find themselves working across roles and departments to develop and implement a social media strategy for the company. to succeed, interactive marketers should embrace this cross-functional opportunity and take the following steps:

Frame the success of social programs in the context of the CMOs marketing mandate.
Social media should not be a line item on a marketing or media plan. treating social technologies as one aggregate channel will hinder your social maturity. Instead, look for opportunities to create social engagement in all of your current marketing initiatives.34 Work with traditional counterparts to audit the CMOs marketing priorities, and then identify how to incorporate social technologies for more effective results.

Involve IT counterparts early on. Most interactive marketers know to pull in legal, corporate
communications, and Hr, since social tools touch these key functions. but many still avoid involving It because social technologies are often easy to self-procure. this often happens because interactive marketers looking to embed social technologies into their everyday processes often run into the It wall as lee bryant of Dachis Group described it. Yet It

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brings important experiences to the table, like knowing how to integrate new technologies into the company infrastructure, how to protect against security breaches, and how to deal with mistakes. Interactive marketers should set the precedent of including the CIO and other relevant teams early in the process for success in the long term.

Encourage the use of employee collaboration tools. With their familiarity with social
tools, your interactive marketing team members are the perfect people to test employee collaboration tools. Places to start in your teams everyday business processes: idea development, campaign management, and team communication, and then begin to invite other teams to participate. bbvA S.A., the second-largest bank in Spain, developed an internal blogosphere for better collaboration that has grown to 500 blogs and 50 posts per week.35

SupplEMEnTAl MATERIAl Methodology In Q2 2010 we surveyed 95 professionals from companies with 1,000 employees or more to benchmark their social maturity. The survey included a mix of B2C, B2B, or both; from Europe and North America; and from industries ranging from manufacturing and finance to business services, retail, healthcare, and travel. Forty-two percent of the respondents were in marketing or PR, but there were also respondents from market research, eBusiness, information and knowledge management, and many other roles. But one thing tied all of the respondents together: They were involved in their companies social initiatives, either internally with employees or externally with customers. What we found was that all faced a common set of challenges. Companies Interviewed For This Document 360i A global healthcare company An alcoholic beverage company Bazaarvoice Best Buy Branch Banking and Trust Bravo Media Citizen Bank Converseon Covario Dachis Group Dell Discover Financial Services First National Bank of Omaha Headshift | Dachis Group IBM InterContinental Hotels Group Intuit Jive Software Newell Rubbermaid Penske Truck Leasing Razorfish

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Scottrade Starbucks Telligent Systems EnDnOTES

1

Telstra USAA Visible Technologies

Its becoming imperative for organizations to empower their employees to solve the problems of the empowered customer. Source: Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, Harvard Business Press, 2010. For marketers seeking the sort of reach offered by advertising, social media has posed a challenge. Based on our surveys, we now know that people in the US generate more than 500 billion online impressions on each other regarding products and services more than one-fourth the number of impressions advertisers make. Furthermore, 16% of online consumers generate 80% of these impressions. See the April 20, 2010, Peer Influence Analysis report. Customer lifetime value is a powerful metric that rewards marketers for understanding their relationships with their customers. But while it is one of the more valuable measurements for marketers, many companies either do not collect the data or do not properly act on the data. See the March 11, 2009, Executive Q&A: Customer Lifetime Value report. The goal of enterprise collaboration is simple: broaden information sharing, communications, and access to expertise. Yet the technologies and policies weve applied to the problem have largely failed. Email, file shares, and document workspaces, by design, lock information away by prioritizing information control over broad access and sharing. But social networks like Facebook have redefined the power of broad sharing. See the November 19, 2009, Harnessing Social Networking To Drive Transformation report. Social technologies have emerged as a critical tool for consumer product strategy (CPS) professionals. Social co-creation gives CPS professionals the ability to embrace consumers and leverage their insight to improve existing products or create new ones. See the July 9, 2010, Social Co-Creation report. InterContinental Hotels Group and Chase card services won a 2010 Forrester Groundswell Award in the B2C Embracing category, and for good reason. These two companies hired a private online community vendor, Communispace, to define and engage a group of customers to co-create the next version of the Priority Club Rewards Visa card. Over a 12-month period, product strategists at IHG and Chase worked with Communispace to engage consumers throughout the product development process, ultimately developing a new card that to date has been well received in the marketplace. See the December 17, 2010, Case Study: IHG, Chase, And Consumers Co-Create A New Rewards Credit Card report. There is no easy answer to the right organization for social technologies as it involves a companys industry, structure, philosophy, and resources. Early adopters have taken different paths to success in organizing for social technologies. Large companies like IBM and Dell have had success taking a more centralized huband-spoke approach while other companies like Newell Rubbermaid have taken more of a decentralized approach, diffusing social activities out to the different brands and teams.

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Listening platforms power marketers as they collect and track their brands, products, and customers through social media. But marketers struggle to fully make use of these insights from the masses of data available. Marketers must turn to Social Intelligence, the concept of turning social media data into actionable marketing and business strategy. To get the most from the social media data they collect, marketers must develop a broader strategy internally or, with help from a listening platform service team, integrate social data with their existing customer data, and share the data across the organization to ensure that all teams benefit from the insights. See the March 12, 2010, Defining Social Intelligence report. The Diffusion Of Innovations is a theory of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. Because there are fewer differences in the social activities of early adopters and innovators, weve combined them into one segment that were simply calling early adopters. Source: Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, Stanford University (http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/ Diffusion%20of%20Innovations.htm). Thanks to the groundswell, your customers now wield unprecedented power through social, mobile, and other technologies. Your employees are already using these technologies to transform the way you do business. You can lead them or block them. You must empower employees to meet the demands of empowered customers. Source: Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, Harvard Business Press, 2010. A 2010 survey by PR firm Burson Marstellar found similar results with the Fortune 100 as only 79 of the companies were leveraging popular social applications such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Source: Burson-Marsteller (http://www.burson-marsteller.com/Innovation_and_insights/blogs_and_podcasts/ BM_Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=160). The use of social technologies for marketing is still at an early stage. While a few companies have created an explosion of social media participation, many other companies have yielded smaller yet promising gains through activities as disparate as a corporate blog, YouTube channel, or Facebook presence. Yet despite all of these initiatives, most interactive marketers are still trying to determine how to incorporate social media marketing into their larger IM plans. In fact, only 39% of interactive marketers at large companies (with $500 million or more in revenue) have a long-term social media marketing plan for their organization. See the October 14, 2010, Benchmarking Social Marketing Plans For 2011 report. POST was originally created in 2007, and literally hundreds of marketers have used it for social media marketing. See the October 9, 2007, Objectives: The Key To Creating A Social Strategy report. One of Best Buys earliest and biggest success stories with social media was its development of its Blue Shirt Nation employee community. Source: Katharine Grayson, Best Buy employee site a model for big firms, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, May 4, 2008 (http://twincities.bizjournals.com/twincities/ stories/2008/05/05/story1.html). In a 2010 Forrester survey more than seven in 10 interactive marketers identified listening as a groundswell objective they are currently implementing or planning to implement in the next 12 months. See the October 14, 2010, Benchmarking Social Marketing Plans For 2011 report.

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Social media contributes value to interactive marketing programs in many ways but measuring that value is difficult. The sheer volume of social media metrics can quickly become overwhelming and distracting for key stakeholders. To keep your team focused, you must become the hub of your companys social media marketing reporting and create standardized reporting templates and frequencies for different types of stakeholders: frequent reporting of digital metrics to community managers and social media strategists, per-campaign or annual reporting of branding and trial metrics to other marketing team members, and quarterly or annual reporting of financial metrics to executives. See the February 22, 2011, Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter report. Only empowered employees can respond at the speed of empowered customers and theyre often information workers outside of IT. We call these innovative information workers HEROes highly empowered and resourceful operatives. The HERO Index is a new tool we have developed to measure just how empowered and resourceful your own employees are. Our data reveals that some industries (like technology products and services) and job descriptions (like marketing and nonretail sales) harbor more HEROes than others. See the June 18, 2010, The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees report. Marketers are fast adopting listening platforms a technology and analytics infrastructure that mines a wide variety of traditional, online, and social sources to extract and deliver Customer Intelligence to shape a firms marketing strategy. See the May 5, 2009, How To Choose A Listening Platform report. Marketers often frame this question as, What is the ROI (return on investment) of social media? but financial metrics are just one way of evaluating social media marketing programs. Social media marketing delivers a wide range of benefits to organizations that are beneficial in the short term and long term in ways both quantitative and qualitative. To properly value the impact of their social media marketing investments, interactive marketers must align their objectives, metrics, targets, and strategies across four perspectives the financial perspective, the digital perspective, the brand perspective, and the risk management perspective. See the July 16, 2010, The ROI Of Social Media Marketing report. Social customer service can provide support to customers before, during, or after their purchases. While customer adoption of social customer service is nascent, satisfaction levels are high. eBusiness professionals are looking to social customer service to improve customer satisfaction and achieve goals including deflecting support calls, reducing problem resolution times, and improving knowledge bases. To determine whether social customer service is right for your organization, we recommend four steps, which are summarized in our people, objectives, strategy, and technology (POST) methodology. See the May 10, 2010, How To Create A Social Customer Service Strategy report. Source: May 2010 US Interactive Marketing Online Survey. The January 2010 Global Social Media Online Survey collected responses from 303 social media users in full-time employment. Source: January 2010 Global Social Media Online Survey. See the April 21, 2010, The CIOs Guide To Establishing A Social Media Policy report. An effective social media policy provides an essential guide for employees with respect to their use of social media, whether they are engaging in social media for personal or business reasons. Research shows that employees using social media read their organizations social media policies when they are available. See the April 21, 2010, The CMOs Guide To Establishing A Social Media Policy report.

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Source: June 2010 Global Interactive Marketing Social Marketing Maturity Online Survey. In July 2010 Starbucks surpassed the 10 million like (formerly fans) mark on Facebook. Source: Mark Walsh, Starbucks Tops 10 Million Facebook Fans, Marketing Daily, July 14, 2010 (http://www.mediapost. com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132008). Fans and followers are helpful for brands, but the people who bring the greatest value in social media are not just fans but advocates people who can and will support, engage, and share information from and about the brand. But not all advocates are created equal. The best advocates are Mass Influencers who create the majority of influence impressions and posts for a brand or within a category. There are three ways to turn Mass Influencers into advocates find them, promote them, and attract them to your brand. See the September 29, 2010, Three Ways To Find, Create, And Energize Advocates report. This data is consistent with Forresters survey of consumer product strategy professionals, which revealed that 69% say that their organizations have a person or team whose job is to monitor social media and communicate with internal teams, but that 18% say that their company has formal processes in place for communicating social media data to product teams; perhaps your company is one of the 54% that use social media but do not leverage social technologies for product strategy purposes. See the June 30, 2010, Product Strategists Want Social Innovation report. As business process management (BPM) adoption continues to spread, more business process professionals are tapping social techniques to extend the reach and impact of their process improvement efforts beyond traditional boundaries. During process design, teams leverage social tools to more easily engage stakeholders in process discovery and definition, including frontline workers, customers, and partners. See the February 24, 2011, Social Breaks The Logjam On Business Process Improvement Initiatives report. Source: North American Technographics Empowerment Online Survey, Q4 2009 (US). When one of the worlds largest defense contractors says, We need to move from a culture of need to know to a culture of need to share, you stop and listen. Competing in an industry driven by the mantra loose lips sink ships, BAE Systems has identified a greater threat: failing to tap the collective wisdom and actions of its people. See the November 19, 2009, Harnessing Social Networking To Drive Transformation report. Source: Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, Harvard Business Press, 2010. Any organization with thousands of employees faces a dilemma: There is a tremendous opportunity to tap into the collective wisdom of the employees, but the scale of the organization makes collaboration difficult. With 78 businesses in the group, United Business Media (UBM) epitomizes this challenge because it has so many businesses operating independently. In 2008, the CEO and CIO embarked on an initiative to drive collaboration that ultimately led to the transformation of the organizations culture with the help of Social Computing. Evangelizing success from the top down and the bottom up and getting the technology right were critical success factors in being able to get 80% of the employees connected within 12 months and in driving tangible benefits to the bottom line. See the March 16, 2010, Case Study: United Business Media Taps Social Computing To Boost Collaboration And Savings report.

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As business process management (BPM) adoption continues to spread, more business process professionals are tapping social techniques to extend the reach and impact of their process improvement efforts beyond traditional boundaries. During process design, teams leverage social tools to more easily engage stakeholders in process discovery and definition, including frontline workers, customers, and partners. For process development, some process pros turn to social and Web 2.0 tools by using BPM softwareas-a-service (SaaS) offerings. And during process execution, teams leverage social to support dynamic business processes. Process pros must evaluate the potential impact of social to their BPM program and develop a game plan to incorporate social techniques that accelerate time-to-value and improve business and customer engagement. See the February 24, 2011, Social Breaks The Logjam On Business Process Improvement Initiatives report. Social media is now embedded in every aspect of the customer journey from ratings and reviews to like buttons to tweets. The opportunity for interactive marketing has evolved from building individual social applications to using social media to enhance a wide variety of marketing channels, including established interactive channels like display media and search marketing and even more traditional marketing like TV advertising and in-store marketing. To create the biggest sales and brand impact per dollar spent on social media, interactive marketers should work across marketing teams to incorporate social media at every stage of the customer life cycle.. See the April 15, 2011, Embedding Social Media Into The Marketing Mix report. Source: Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, Harvard Business Press, 2010.

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