The Social Media Management Handbook

Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business

Robert Wollan, Nick Smith, Catherine Zhou

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781118003527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

How do organizations manage social media effectively?

Every organization wants to implement social media, but it is difficult to create processes and mange employees to make this happen. Most social media books focus on strategies for communicating with customers, but they fail to address the internal process that takes place within a business before those strategies can be implemented. This book is geared toward helping you manage every step of the process required to use social media for business.

The Social Media Management Handbook provides a complete toolbox for defining and practicing a coherent social media strategy. It is a comprehensive resource for bringing together such disparate areas as IT, customer service, sales, communications, and more to meet social media goals. Wollan and Smith and their Accenture team explain policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities, metrics, strategies, incentives, and legal issues that may arise. You will learn how to:

• Empower employees and teams to utilize social media effectively throughout the organization
• Measure the ROI of social media investments and ensure appropriate business value is achieved over time
• Make smarter decisions, make them more quickly, and make them stick

Get the most out of your social media investment and fully leverage its benefits at your company with The Social Media Management Handbook.

Part I
Social Media Strategy for Organizations

Chapter 1
The Power and Business Risks of Social Media

Nick Smith and Robert Wollan

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Chapter Highlights

1. Executives at companies large and small have reached the point of needing to understand exactly what is different about social media and why now is the critical time to consider how, not if, they will engage their customers.
2. Social media gives companies the power to create fans, not just customers; to rally the organization to become more customer-centric; and to create new revenue streams in three dimensions.
3. Social media use also comes with two significant risks: Those who ignore the growing demand will be caught off guard and miss out on the next wave of customer relationship building; and those who do not understand what it takes organizationally to fully embrace and leverage social media will fail to realize its promise.

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In the early days of social media, companies could quickly dismiss it—for a number of common reasons:

• “We're not like Amazon or eBay. We don't need it.”
• “Our customers aren't using it and likely won't.”
• “We don't see how this would ever fit into our business model.”

However, fast-forward five years, and it's easy to see that social media has matured and is now mainstream. In fact, social media now is dramatically influencing traditional business-to-consumer models and is well on its way to changing business-to-business models.

Why? The customer franchise is rapidly embracing social media, with three groups leading the way. The massive influence of the large millennial generation, the initial adopters of social media, has been well documented. However, as mentioned in the Introduction, baby boomers increasingly are using social media—just one example of how this group is redefining what people think of as “senior citizens.” Finally, millions of first-time consumers are entering the landscape in emerging markets, and many of them see social media as a way to connect instantly with the rest of the world.

But the fact that many of their customers and prospects are using social media is only part of the reason why it should matter to companies. The more prominent factor is that social media is not simply a new channel, as some have characterized it; rather, it is fundamentally changing the business model and role of the company.

The last time companies faced such an issue was the rise of ecommerce. However, that development primarily involved adding a new channel. Yet, on a superficial level, the debate we hear among business executives today about social media bears a striking resemblance to those confusing days when the Web was being touted as the end to business as we know it. “Is it just hype?” “Do I really need to embrace it?” “How do I make best use of it?” “How do I prove the business case?” “What are the benefits?”

What Makes Social Media Difficult to Address?

Beyond the innovators and early adopters, many companies still are struggling to determine how to address the social media conundrum. And, indeed, it is a significant challenge. As noted, social media still is a new phenomenon, and, thus, there are few rules or proven best practices in place for how to manage it. It also has yet to affect the entire customer or prospect base of most companies, so companies are understandably unsure of how and where to invest in social media capabilities. Perhaps even more problematic is the fact that social media forces companies to take action based on imprecise information, which is counter to an organization's instincts.

In summing up the challenge, we've identified six factors that make social media so difficult to address because, combined, they illustrate how the conventional wisdom of customer communications and brand engagement no longer applies:

“You Give Up Control”:

• There's no viable regulation of the media, so the content doesn't have to be true.
• The impact of social media cannot be stopped or undone, even in court.

“It Is Everywhere”:

• Social media transcends traditional geographic, demographic, and economic boundaries.
• Social media content is amplified via the “viral effect.”

“It Is Emotional, as well as Functional”:

• User-generated content often is triggered by an emotional reaction.
• Social media forces companies to shift from dealing with long, predictable cycle times to having to make decisions much more quickly and with less precise information.

Each of these factors requires an organization to be extremely agile simply to keep pace. Unfortunately, such agility is not commonplace in most organizations, which is what makes dealing with social media such a challenge.

As we consider the characteristics of social media and their impact, it's clear that companies now must consider the fact there are new rules for customers, business functions, and growth strategies.

Social Media Ignites a Seismic “Shift of Power” Toward Customers and Consumers

For years we have observed a steady increase in the power consumers believe they should hold in their dealings with providers. Consumers no longer accept that they are at the end of the “conveyor belt,” simply accepting marketing messages companies push out into the marketplace and passively waiting at the company's mercy when giving feedback or lodging a complaint. Now consumers not only want to be engaged earlier in that process, but they also want to be more engaged at various points throughout the relationship (on their terms, of course)—whether that involves providing advice and feedback on the company's products and services, having access to specialized content, or getting an immediate response to their questions.

Social media provides a highly public and powerful venue for consumers to speak their minds about companies and their brands, thus enabling consumers to “call out” companies when they're not performing up to customers’ expectations (and spark a real change in behavior). And it serves as a vehicle through which consumers can force conversations with a company that they can manage more actively, a departure from the one-way transaction-based communications (in which the company talks to, not with, customers) that used to characterize the customer-company relationship. Thus, social media in many ways makes consumers co-owners of a company's brand and places them essentially on equal footing with a company.

This is something that U.S. consumer electronics retailer Best Buy has recognized, and it's a fundamental driver of the company's social media efforts. “For us today, [social media] is really about deepening our customer relationships,” said Tracy Benson, senior director, interactive marketing and emerging media for Best Buy. “[That means letting customers] know they can go to you for questions…[and] can participate in the dialogue.” Benson equates the situation to a friendship. “If [my friend] only talks to me and never allows me to talk, and if they just tell me what to do all the time, it's not a great friendship, right? It's a push. Social media gives us the opportunity to push, pull, and enable, and the return is a stronger, deeper relationship. And studies have shown that when your relationships are stronger, your customers will look to you first, look to you more often and intentionally think about you when they have a product they need to purchase.” Ultimately, the net result, noted Benson, is greater sales.

Social Media Has a Profound Effect on Traditional Business Functions

The scope and scale of social media leaves few areas of a company untouched. However, while all functions in a business are impacted by social media, some are more extensively and directly affected than others.

One way to think about impact is to consider a spectrum of influence, such as that in Figure 1.1.

FIGURE 1.1 Social Media Affects Business Functions Differently.

At the far left of the spectrum are functions farthest from the customer—such as legal and finance. These functions are likely to be least affected by social media (although they will, in fact, be impacted and have activities alongside other functions).

In the middle are functions that experience moderate impact. They include research and development (R&D) and the supply chain, which, while not directly connected to customers, play an instrumental role in fulfilling customer demand and will require new levels of agility to accommodate the always-on, fast-paced nature of social media.

At the far right of the spectrum are functions that are highly affected by social media. Not surprisingly, these include the three front-office functions of marketing, sales and service, as well as information technology (IT) and human resources (HR).

The most significant impact on the front office is that social media will prove to be the final nail in the coffin of the one-size-fits-all customer experience model. Companies have spent the past 20 years perfecting the one experience they aspire to, which they think will appropriately capture the essence of their brands. However, with the help of social media, the customer base continues to fragment into ever-more granular segments, each with highly specialized interests and needs. Thus, a company that continues to deliver an experience geared toward the masses can alienate as many customers as those it pleases. In the new era of social media, companies will have to become extremely adept at determining the experiences specific customer segments desire and then at delivering those experiences consistently and flawlessly.

Social media also is further blurring the lines among marketing, sales, and service. For instance, the concept of marketing as a stand-alone, “research and origination” channel rapidly is giving way to a model in which marketing and sales effectively become a single “engagement channel,” where customers learn about an offer, research it, consult with friends about it, and make their purchase in a highly compressed time frame. In this environment, the traditional functional boundaries between marketing and sales disappear. Similarly, the line between sales and service is blurring, as the service process becomes increasingly responsible for bringing to life the promise made by sales. In other words, customers no longer see sales and service as two distinct transactions. Rather, they view them both as inextricably linked to the overall experience they have with the company. If service falls short, it squanders the goodwill the customer felt at the time of purchase and erodes the company's credibility. Customers are blurring the lines as well. Social Media has turned customers into marketers as they leverage social media to bring their favorite products to their own networks—via enabling web sites like Lemonade.com.

From an HR perspective, the impact of social media is twofo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Part I: Social Media Strategy for Organizations
• Part II: Marketing and Sales in Social Media
• Part III: Customer Service and Support with Social Media
• Part IV: Beyond the “Pilot” Phase: The Core Components of the Agile Digital Enterprise
• Part V: Empowering Employees for Social Media Success
• Appendix 1: Solution Example: Putting Sentiment in a CRM Package
• Appendix 2: Solution Example: Merging Structured and Unstructured Data
• Notes
• Index
• End User License Agreement