The elephant in the social media room at the moment is that most corporate social media initiatives to date have been tactical experiments. Of those, few have generated meaningful business results. Sure, people have built up Facebook Fans and Twitter followers or they have launched the odd viral video on YouTube. They have claimed these as a success, but in reality these metrics should never be the end goal. The age of tactical experimentation has been characterized by:
- A focus on so-called “engagement metrics” i.e. likes, followers, re-tweets etc. over real business outcomes.
- An obsession with vanity buzz monitoring, with far too little attention given to data accuracy, data integration, insights and, most importantly, action.
- An explosion of rogue corporate social media accounts, created to support any promotion, product, department or individual employee who wants to add a social element to their portfolio (a recent client had at least 114 disconnected Facebook , Twitter and YouTube accounts a recent Forbes article suggested that organisations with over 1000 employees likely have over 170 social media accounts http://tinyurl.com/6peo9ox
- Silos between corporate social media accounts, silos between social media accounts and enterprise systems and silos between customers, employees, departments and partners.
- They are an over-used collection of examples – it’s sad but true; social business success is still not the norm.
- Their success has moved beyond a single social media campaign or departmental initiative – P&G’s success for example relies on connecting Marketing with Product Development, GiffGaff ties together Marketing, Sales & Service – all are led by their community. Zappos pioneered the concept of “everyone is in service”.
- They have not just adopted “social” technologies, but they have embraced a social mindset. One of outside-in, customer-centric thinking
- Often they have not referred to the things they are doing as “social” – after all, we have always been “social” – rather, they talk about higher-principles like “customer in control” or “delivering happiness”.
- Business model – the ability to digitize products and distribute them at mass scale or to a micro niche (both enabled by social networks) can radically challenge an existing business model.
- Culture & mindset – one thing that is clear from the failure of many social media experience is that applying an inside-out mindset to social can backfire spectacularly. Think of the way in which some companies have tried to control everything that is being said about them online – deleting negative comments or worse still posting fake reviews. Inevitable this mindset of command and control has not worked in the digital world.
- Technology – The pace of change within social technology is so fast that it places huge pressure on the traditional IT operating model. See my post on “What comes next after Facebook and Twitter. The challenge of keeping up in a constantly changing digital world.”
- Business Operating Model – perhaps the toughest and most under-appreciated challenge of social is to the business-operating model. They way people are incentivized, reporting lines, business objectives, ways of working can be placed under intense pressure by social. I have seen countless scraps between departments trying to “own” social media as well as finger pointing between silos each blaming the other for a failed campaign.