The Social Enterprise – Beyond Digital Marketing

The social enterprise is an idea that extends beyond just using
social media for marketing.

But are there any benefits to social networking?

Warren Bennis is a leading thinker around leadership in a digital
world and see that organisations will increasingly use digital pathways
to drive transparency and leadership. You may think that this sounds
innocent – but he basically is saying that digital channels will change
the structure of power in organisations and that new leaders need to
look at how they use social media to lead both internally and externally
in their organisation. Large companies have also seen by opening up the
communication channels that leaders are being challenged to be
consistent in their approach and that behaviour gets discussed in
unexpected places.

Interestingly, Bennis also sees the idea of “adaptive capacity” as
central to the future. The ability of an organisation to be led by what
is happening in the marketplace by responding to the aggregate forces as
visible in a social and digital world will increasingly become
critical.

A range of leading thinkers are stating that organisations need to
think of the value it is creating for its customers and in a digital
world, this is becoming increasingly measurable.

So are you ready to open up the conversation and let your sales
people engage in social media to source customers? You may be surprised
to find that not only your marketing and sales people need access, but
also your HR, finance and operations people may be using social media as
critical tools in their business process. Employees are increasingly
using messaging to reduce complex email communications and have
interactive conversations over voice, internet messaging and private
(in-house) company social networks. It is becoming very difficult to
distinguish between the mobile as a business and a personal tool.

Recent research by Forrester indicates that 80% of customers will
consult with and rely on what their colleagues and family are saying
about products and services before making a choice. Only 36% of
customers rely on sales people. People also take to social media to
source products, complain and sometimes to praise for good service. They
find their jobs through web-sites and will decide which companies to
work for based on what others are saying. They will even Google the next
person they are meeting and will look for commonalities and interest
points in the conversations that they initiate. In fact, if you do not
find someone online it immediately will raise suspicion and reduce the
perception of transparency with that person. Customers are also
increasingly choosing to interact with products and services in more
complex applications that allow them to see inside of the enterprise and
at the same time compare themselves with others.

Measurements have changed with likes, referrals and promotions on key
sites being the order of the day for daily activities. Some thinkers are
moving beyond these basic measures with Zachary Reiss Davis from
Forrester hinting that companies need to rethink their digital measures
to move beyond acquisition to understanding them through “social
selling”.

The first measure he proposes to achieve this is “social reach,”
where you’re measure your ability to give information to people who may
or may not know about the brand. As a company you increase your social
reach by your employees being associated with your brands, publication
of relevant information into social networks and well placed
advertising. Campaigns and sites on social media attract others to
understand you better and regular communication and active growth of the
network ensures that you remain relevant. Much like in the real world
you use advertising to expand your reach, but more importantly you must
enable others to advertise on your behalf to leverage the real power of
digital marketing.

The next stage and measures the becomes “social depth.” Sales can
have the greatest impact in this stage by communicating crucial messages
and forming deeper relationships with those who are not yet customers,
but are good targets. The question is to what extent the company
understands and acts to the needs and intents of their followership. It
is great to have a lot of followers but not understanding what drives
them has the potential to backfire quite badly. By analysis of followers
and interested parties and responding to their needs the company can
maximise both the impact of its messaging and growth of the target base.
This can be optimised through analytics on properties that organizations
control, e.g. communities and forums on their websites and social
networks. Most companies have not in real terms understood who is
interested in building a digital relationship with them.

The most crucial aspect, and third stage, is to define the “social
relationship” that your organisation wants with the customer. Your
customers have purchased from you and are already engaged with your
brand, so they are the most inclined to pay attention and interact with
what you’re saying on social networks like Google Plus, Twitter,
Facebook and Linked-In. By fostering an open relationship with your
customers and giving them the tools to advocate you, you can create a
powerful exponential followership. By being ignorant of what people are
saying it can destroy masses of brand equity in a short space of
time.

These three ideas together has come together in a concept called
social selling in which social media is used to bring back the personal
touch through the mass customised selling process.

Companies are moving beyond email marketing, with blogs, webinars and
structured data making the enterprise accessible and visible and
allowing customers to compare experiences and form part of the process
of delivering goods and services in the organisation. Blog posts drive
applications and Youtube videos show you how to use them, while adverts
remind you that they are there. This type of integrated messaging is the
way that selling will happen in the future and for many is happening
today.

Not just selling is affected – supplier relationships, recruitment,
sourcing and selling are all deeply impacted by social media and it is
only a matter of time until communities are more open and applications
more universal and commonly used to conduct business in new ways.

It is already standard practice for firms to review social media
profiles of candidates. Increasingly suppliers are looking for referrals
and location based searching, mobile advertising and integrated supply
chains are ensuring that the product gets to the customer.

Most IT people will almost automatically quote Gartner on the major
trends in IT – cloud, mobile, big data, automation. They all seem to
miss the obvious and biggest trends since the idea of time was invented,
which is – SOCIAL MEDIA. It may be because they have no good way to
spend money on it and there is no big thing to buy to make it work. So
what happens is that they put in new firewalls to block people from
using it. It just re-emphasises that digital strategy and IT strategy
seems to have very little to do with each other and potentially puts the
business on a path to miss a major part of what is happening with their
customer base. Business is becoming social faster than any other trend
in business or in IT in recently history.

While all this is going on, there are actually firms that still try
to restrict access of their staff to the Internet and sceptics still
believe that social media is a hoax by marketing firms.

Reed (www.reed.co.uk) published a
study that shows that one third of companies allow access to social
networking at work, one third allows limited access and one third does
not allow any access at all. In those that do – people typically check
social media sites once to three times a day, with only 36% of users
doing so on the company computer. In those that do not – people check
social networking 5-10 times per day using mobile and other devices.

With an increasingly young workforce in a world in which developing
economies rule the markets – social media will increasingly become the
differentiator between those that are linked to the new economy and
those that are not. While there may be industries in which social media
may not be immediately relevant, it is clear that the future for all
enterprises must clearly answer how the company will respond to the
digital world and what mechanisms and strategies it will put in place to
manage its digital presence and integrated digital business
processes.

Sources:

http://hearsaysocial.com/2013/06/social-selling-webinar-recap/

http://www.dowitcherdesigns.com/blog/social-networking-in-the-workplace-good-or-bad/

http://www.shrm.org/about/foundation/products/documents/social%20media%20briefing-%20final.pdf

http://misq.org/skin/frontend/default/misq/pdf/V37I2/SI_DBS_BharadwajI&O.pdf