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c h a p t e r7:FIVE ESSENTIAL TIPS■operations, customer support, retail, and warranty policies...all of which exist outside
of marketing.
Don’t underestimate this. As interest develops in social technology, take the time
to look across your entire organization and create a cross-functional team with repre-
sentatives from all of the primary departments. You’ll need Legal and HR for social
media policies, for example, and you’ll need Operations and Customer Service if using
Twitter as a service channel appeals to you. Think about how you’ll build a larger team
to properly implement your ideas.Create a Shared Sense of Purpose
So, if you want to hire that next killer associate, you’ve got to make the case for hir-
ing the kind of people that understand the holistic operation of the company, and their
place, however big or small, in the generation of conversations and recommendations
on the Social Web. This means that when you are thinking of social media, you need to
be outside of marketing.
As you consider the role of social media in business, and you move the focus
beyond marketing, you cannot think only in terms of tactical campaigns. Moving
the application of social media beyond marketing requires that you anchor your pro-
grams in your business strategy. Social technology and technology applications must
be aligned with the overall business objectives and strategic efforts. If not, they will be
limited in efficacy to marketing, or to IT, or to HR, whichever organization sponsored
the tactical project that included some aspect of social technology.
Social business is all about the spread of social techniques into the organiza-
tion, beyond marketing or communications. Social business means picking up on the
dynamics of the purchase funnel and feedback cycle and then applying analogous
thinking across the entire organization.
For example, customers are creating and sharing content among themselves
for the purpose of improving their own decisions. They are curating what they create
to make it easier to find valuable content, or to indicate to whom it is most likely to
be valuable. They are rating and tagging each other so that they know who they can
turn to for what: The Advocate Mom—the mother who sits at the center of her online
friends networks on all matters “family”—is a powerful resource when your baby is
crying and all you have to go on is a kid’s tongue that is purple and fuzzy. People seek
the answers to the questions that matter to them, and they organize the people around
them in terms of what they know, who they know, and how they might be of help.
Why is that kind of care in developing and identifying specifically valuable
resources limited to promotional marketing? Change the name in the previous sce-
nario, apply it to an office, and you’ll find a very empowered, very flat, and very effi-
cient organization from the standpoint of sharing and improving collective knowledge.
It is exactly this kind of application of social technology that drives social business.