Do you still believe business leaders don’t get it and want to give some good advice? Think again. Last week I spoke in front of a group of executives from various industries. The speaker right before me talked about how important social media is for business. Somebody in the audience stood up and said:
“This is all very interesting but we are not here to learn how important social media is – we heard that in the last 3 years. We are here to hear how you implement it, how you create and execute a strategy and how you measure results.”
Pewh – lucky me – that this was outspoken before my presentation.
While I presented best practices that we developed in the past three years such as the four quadrant assessment model, the social media strategy hexagon, the NCP model and other methods and frameworks the most interesting part were the questions and to see what status quo of many businesses is. In the past two years, most CEOs put social media into the marketing “box”. However most of them didn’t see any positive result. I asked what kind of result they expected and one put it together very nicely: “I expect to become a more attractive company where more people like to buy. But just doing a Fan page a tweeting doesn’t get us there.” A CFO responded “You may be surprised to hear that from a CFO, but I’m not looking into an immediate ROI, I’m looking for one of three trends: More productivity, less cost or more revenue.” I liked the word “trend”.
It was very clear to me that the days of evangelizing social media are over. Who didn’t get it by now will learn it the hard way in the next few years or will never learn it. Continuing to argue what companies should or shouldn’t do is a waste of time. There are hundreds or even thousands of companies that seek a profound solution – not some philosophy or esoteric vision how things could potentially be.
The upcoming Social Business Executive Summit by Customer Think end of May is probably excellent timing. executives will hear best practices and experience based strategies and ways to execute social media building a better customer experience, gaining better customer relationships and a higher degree of advocacy.
At the Executive Summit in May I will talk about what I learned from social media implementations in the past few years, touching on social business execution and concrete results – and how it turned out for the respective businesses (small and large). Look forward to see you there.
Early adopters of social business and CRM may indeed lead the pack, but remember, too, the advice on how to recognize a pioneer: He’s the guy with all the arrows in his back. Latecomers to social business can learn from the experience of those that went before, minus the barbs.
Check out this blog for some additional insights: Social media networking is the new frontier for customer service operations. Now what? http://ow.ly/1Nb4h
Jeff Hazel
Director, Convergys Corporation
Indeed, the time of “WHY?” is over or your business is over. The question is HOW? NOW!
Mario
http://xeesm.com/mariopaladini
Down here in Australia we’re not quite there, but almost! This week Monday morning I was the opening speaker at an innovation conference. The organizers moved me to the opening speaker position because they jumped at my theme “From innovation to wealth creation” and they were excited by my “how” which was through customer development, based on speed and enabled by social business.
The main feedback was that the audience hadn’t realized that social media was being used in such mainstream ways by such mainstream businesses and “seriously”. There were also the questions “but there are a lot of larger companies here that don’t get it”, and my answer “well I think that the senior people do get it, they just don’t know HOW to do it properly and that’s not what they are able to get from their agencies”. As I said, we’re close, I think we’re at the tipping point, so the rest of 2010 will be exciting.
Love your HOW NOW – Mario. Right on!
@Jeff – well you are right but the cost of entry is constantly getting higher. To develop a good social graph and network is different than buying the latest technology – it cost 6 – 12 month and money is actually not an issue at all.
@Walter look forward to help in the process in July 😉 But from what I can see is Australia like UK and some Scandinavian countries very advanced in social business.
I hope we can shed some light onto the “HOW” at this weeks conference here: http://www.customerthink.com/sbs10as