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c h a p t e r3 :BUILD A SOCIAL BUSINESS■you brand, product or service. As such, these would be the things considered “talk
worthy,” and if you were to tap the ideas directly and incorporate them in to your busi-
ness you’d be onto something. You are exploring the conversations that indicate a path
to improvement and to competitive advantage, if you can only see the way to get there.
Too often, though, instead of taking notes, marketers sit there, frozen in panic.
As a marketer, what are you going to do in response to posts like that of Figure 3.8?
Your hospital Facebook page, your “New Parents” discussion forum and your con-
nection to the community through Twitter are of basically no help in this situation.
Marketing outreach through social channels is designed to connect customers to your
business and to give you a voice alongside theirs, a point of participation, in the con-
versations on the Social Web. All great benefits, they are certainly the core of a social
media marketing program. Problem is, you’ve already done this. Yet the challenging
conversations—and opportunities lost—continue.
Distinctly separate from social media marketing, the challenge facing marketers
in health care and near any other consumer-facing business, B2B firm, or nonprofit is
not one of understanding or being part of the conversations—something already cov-
ered through your adoption of social media analytics to follow conversations as they
occur. Instead, the challenge is taking action based on what customers are saying and
then bringing a solution to them to close the loop. The challenge here is getting to the
root cause of the conversation and rallying the entire organization around addressing it.
That’s why the panic sets in, and that’s what makes social business so hard.
It’s at this point that social media marketing stops and social business begins.
Going back to the health care example, billing systems, in-room care standards, access
to personal health care records all require policy changes, not a marketing program.
Hospital marketers are certainly part of the solution, but only a part. Social busi-
ness extends across the entire organization, and typically requires the involvement of
the C-suite or equivalent senior management team. Connecting employees, tapping
knowledge across departments, and conceiving and implementing holistic solutions to
systemic challenges is difficult. What is needed is a methodology that can be consis-
tently applied. Touchpoint analysis—referenced in more detail in Chapter 5, “Social
Technology and Business Decisions” is extremely useful in this regard. Touchpoint
analysis helps pinpoint the root causes of customer satisfaction as well as dissatisfac-
tion. Social business takes off from this.
In short, connecting employees in ways that encourage knowledge sharing
converts whole teams from “I can’t do this in my department” paralysis into “As a
collaborative business, we can solve this.” It allows employees to more fully leverage
learning, by being aware of what is going on all around them in the business and in the
marketplace. Customers are often more than willing to share their ideas, needs, sugges-
tions, and even to put forth effort. The problem is, as the “Knowledge Assimilation”
sidebar shows, most organizations aren’t set up to hear it. Some are actually built—or
so it seems—to outright suppress it.