Social Media Marketing

110

c h a p t e r

5:

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY AND BUSINESS DECISIONS

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Create a Social Business

Part I of this book started with the engagement processes and the ways in which inter-

action and participation with social content can connect your audience with your

brand (for better or for worse!). Built into the engagement process is a recognition of

the new role of the customer, now much more of a participant in the marketplace and

increasingly in the businesses and organizations that serve it. The fi nal foundational

element of Part I—the social business ecosystem and its collaborative processes—

exposed the collective knowledge of the Social Web and showed you how to use it in

building, running, and evolving your business or organization. Collaboration between

the business as a whole and its customers is the hallmark of a social business.

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day

If some of the core social media marketing concepts are unfamiliar to you as you head into Part II,

you may find my earlier book helpful. Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Sybex, 2008) covers

the basics of social media marketing and provides a nice introduction to the fundamental con-

nection between the purchase funnel and the Social Web.

Collaboration in the context of social business means several things. First, it

means working together, which is pretty obvious. Less obvious is who is working

together. Social business implies a collaborative process not only between the business

and its customers, which is tough enough, but also within the business itself—across

“silos”—and between individual customers. Using the combination of conversations

and active listening to guide your business planning process is a logical—but decep-

tively simple—approach to social business. More often, the processes of organizational

change, of breaking down silos, and of appropriately sharing and exposing information

quickly and widely present the real challenges. It is critically important not to repeat

the business mantra that goes “Our customers are at the center of everything we do”

while operating largely without their input and without formally integrating your cus-

tomer’s experiences, thoughts, and ideas into your internal business processes. Only

when this occurs—when customer ideas and inputs are brought into the business or

organization in a visible, meaningful way—is it a “social business.”

The key to combining listening data, obtained via support forums and similar

applications, and other information gathered through direct connection with your cus-

tomers is that this needs to be connected to your business strategy and the processes

that surround it. In other words, traditional marketing is largely focused on market

study (both pre and post) that informs a message. Listening—in the simple sense—

conveys back to you the degree to which that message was consistent with the actual

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day

If some of the core social media marketing concepts are unfamiliar to you as you head into Part II,

you may find my earlier book helpful. Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Sybex, 2008) covers

the basics of social media marketing and provides a nice introduction to the fundamental con-

nection between the purchase funnel and the Social Web.