Managing Social Technology By Stages - Josh Bernoff - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Managing Social Technology By Stages - Josh Bernoff - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review: "Managing Social Technology By Stages"

The questions I get from management about social applications are varied. Are we the only company that hasn't gotten started with social? These social applications are springing up all over the company. How do you manage all this? How can we prove to management that all these social applications are paying off?

Companies adopting social technologies externally and internally can expect great value from energizing brand advocates and streamlining business practices. But there's still a huge amount of insecurity when companies set off on this journey. Companies need a roadmap to guide them through the process of adoption. So we created one, based ona survey of 95 professionals involved in social strategy (see graphic). (Note that companies move from right to left on this graphic, from the Dormant stage through Testing and Coordinating to Scaling and Optimizing.) At each stage a company has different challenges and there are different best practices to follow.

Companies in the dormant stage (less than one in five large companies now) haven't really gotten started. I recently worked with a Midwest hospital and a defense contractor in this stage. To get these companies going, we recommend starting small and succeeding quickly — with a Facebook page around one product or service, for example. It's great to start with listening tools like Radian6 to get a bead on what people are saying about you in the groundswell.

About one third of large companies are in the testing stage, just starting out. They usually begin with listening (monitoring social chatter) and talking (outbound social applications like Twitter accounts and Facebook pages). But the most powerful social applications are energizing applications (enlisting customers to influence each other by word of mouth) that tend to come later in corporations' embrace of social.

Another third of large companies have moved on to the coordinating stage, with multiple social efforts spreading around the company. Crucially, the right strategy here is not to put all the social efforts under one manager. Instead, appoint "shepherds" to help lead social media across teams in marketing, customer support, HR, and IT. For example, Home Depot coordinates a Twitter feed to answer customers' questions, extensive ratings and reviews on its site, YouTube videos, and abranded online Home Improvement community.

The remainder of companies, the smallest group, have mastered social. The challenge here is to scale and optimize efforts. At Dell, Manish Mehta has a weekly teleconference with managers throughout the organization responsible for the hundreds of social applications the company deploys, from the Twitter feed @DellOutlet that promotes overstock computers to IdeaStorm, the online community that solicits ideas for new Dell products. Coordinating measurement is also key: at financial services company USAA, for example, social media managers have proven that ratings and reviews generate a 17% increase in clickthroughs to product purchase pages.

To move forward with confidence, know where you are on this roadmap, and know where you're going. If you want to learn more, have a look at the newly updated paperback edition of Groundswell, which includes a new chapter on social maturity based on this research.