SociView

December 15, 2011 - by Suki Johal

Social Business phase 1: finding everyone. Not as simple as it sounds.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts exploring social business.

If you’ve been following our Social Business blog series, you should be aware of what a Social Business is; the four stages of readiness; and why it’s important for your business.

So now it’s time to dig a little deeper into the different phases of Social Business enablement.

In this blog, we’re going to look at the “who”, the “why” and the “how” of phase one – mapping your social landscape.

The “who”

Map and segment to understand the connection between:

Your official accounts – accounts you control
Your endorsed accounts – partners, employees
Your influencer accounts – media, industry bodies
Your unofficial accounts – customers and prospects

The “why”

So why is this stage fundamental? Let’s put it simply. Imagine you’re organising a wedding. You need to create a guest list, work out how many heads you want to feed and send out the invites. At first it’s easy: invite your best friends and closest family. Then it gets more confusing: what about those great-aunts? Long-lost cousins? Your parents’ best friends? Then you move onto business contacts – do you need to invite colleagues? Parents’ business contacts? All of the sudden, your simple list has become confusing and difficult to manage. Now imagine you’re a multinational enterprise with offices all over the world, with different marketing teams operating from each location. You can’t possibly know where everyone is, who the key players are and what social resources you already have.

“The average number of social media accounts held by large corporations is 178.”
(State of Social Business report, 2011)

Accounts held by a corporation are accounts that can be controlled. But what about the accounts that are not controlled? That number will be significantly larger than 178.

The “how”

So how do you map your social-media real estate? With SociView, that’s how. Unlike other Social Business applications, SociView is not a listening or implementation tool. It doesn’t tell you what you customers are saying at a moment in time, but instead it enables you to have an eagle-eye, categorised view of what your current social-media real estate looks like. A new mobile SociView app, released this week, allows real-time access to this insight so you can monitor it on the go.

It doesn’t end there. With accounts mapped, you can then optimise and consolidate the accounts you own.

Optimise: The SociScore enables you to benchmark accounts by visibility, influence, relevance and activity. Insight can be tracked over time and can be used to ensure accounts are compliant and consistent.
Consolidate. In social media, the paradigm of quality over quantity still exists. Having hundreds of social-media instances can simply dilute the relevance and quality of the message. With SociView, you can evaluate the effectiveness of each account so you can make smart decisions about which social profiles are necessary.

So once you have established where everyone is, the next step will be to understand how to influence them. In the next post in this series, we will focus on obtaining a 360-degree understanding of customers and building a strategy to communicate and influence your audience.

Further information on SociView can be found at www.sociview.com

November 26, 2011 - by Suki Johal

Four stages of social-business readiness

This is the second in a series of blog posts exploring social business

In the last blog post I introduced the term “social business” with the following definition:

“A social business is an organisation that has incorporated social engagement processes and technology across all areas of a business (both internally and externally) to maximise business value and profitability.”

You may still be scratching your head over what “incorporating social engagement processes” actually means, and what is meant by internally and externally. So, to start delving a little deeper into the definition, it’s helpful to clarify what is meant by internal and external audiences. By internal audience, I am referring to employees, partners, investors – any group that has a vested interest in selling a product, solution, service or company proposition. An external audience however, is any group that will be on the receiving side of the organisation’s brand messaging: customers, potential prospects, potential partners, potential investors and potential employees.

The social-business goal is to have internal audiences collaborating in order to effectively communicate with external audiences. “Social engagement processes” are about optimising human engagement at the heart of an organisation for it to penetrate across all communications externally.

With these definitions in mind, the next question to answer is: “What do you actually need to do?” As the diagram above highlights, there are four stages of social business enablement:

1) Work out where everyone is.

Before you have a party, you need to know where to send the invitations! The same process applies: before you facilitate the engagement process, you need to map your social landscape – both internally and externally. Where is everyone? How are they connected?

2) Work on your people.

With one-to-one human engagement at the heart of this proposition, it makes sense that you understand how to connect to your audience. For an external audience (anyone who is on the receiving end of your brand messaging), identify both the business and human need for your product, solution or service. Whilst a certain product may make business sense as it reduces operational costs, what’s in it for the actual target purchasers – will it help them secure their jobs by appearing more tech-savvy then other members of staff? Will it get them bonuses for cost-savings? This human need is often ignored and as a result, organisations compete for ears in a crowded space – all with similar messaging.

For internal audiences, the same principle applies. You need to activate your workforce, get exec buy-in – how will social engagement help them and how will it help the organisation? Following from this, you can develop an organisation model that places socially-activated employees into every department across the business.

3) Define the process.

So you know where to send the invitations to your party and you know how to motivate them to come – what’s next? You need to make it happen! Following this analogy (which I promise I won’t use again!), the next step is to put in place the processes to make social engagement happen. Looking at your external audience, use the insight obtained to create and tailor the messaging. For your internal audience, facilitate and connect the different socially activated workforce through listening, engagement and crisis-management workflows. To ensure people engage effectively, provide governance models and policies into best practices along with social training.

4) Identify your technology.

This is the last step before you are ready to engage. More often or not, it’s the step that organisations jump to first, but before you choose technology that can support your social business, you need to have gone through steps one to three to know what technology you actually need and who will be using it. The social-business technology space is becoming more and more crowded, with new vendors introducing tools into the market every month. Simply put, these tools aim to facilitate engagement both internally and externally. Think carefully about which tools best suit your business as a whole and ensure they work with your current processes.

So there you have it – you should be all ready to go down the path of social business enlightenment… or not! There’s a great deal of information to be taken in here, so in following posts, I’ll drill deeper into each of the stages and relate them to real-life examples of organisations that are supporting the social-business proposition. In next week’s post, however, I’ll answer the questions you may be thinking: Why should I care? What’s in it for me?

September 21, 2011 - by Suki Johal

Volume’s Chief Exec, Chris Sykes, to speak at Social Media in Action conference

On the 28^th September, Volume’s Chief Exec and founder of SociView™, Chris Sykes, is speaking at CorpComms Magazine’s conference on making the most of your social media ‘real estate’.

CorpComms Magazine is a specialist magazine for corporate communications professionals and lists most of the Fortune 500 companies amongst its readership. We’re thrilled to have been invited to speak and will be discussing the challenges of harnessing new and emerging social media channels within a corporate environment.

In his talk, Chris will recommend ways of controlling, governing and influencing your social media ‘real estate’ in order to get the most out of it. He will explain how modern technologies, like SociView™ – the world’s first social media mapping tool, allow you to geo-map, rank, categorise and analyse all your social media accounts, official or otherwise, to discover how your brand is being received by consumers, partners and shareholders etc.

For large organisations this couldn’t be more important. It’s vital to know what you are saying to your various audiences but also what your people are saying about you. Chris will explain how understanding your social media landscape forms the basis for an effective social media strategy, and how this can be harnessed to createa platform for interaction between your customers and your brand, which will help increase your lead generation, sales performance, brand and reputation.

We could tell you more, but to find out the rest you’ll have to see Chris talk on the 28^th. The final few tickets are still available at www.corpcommsmagazine.co.uk/conferences, but spaces are extremely limited, so act quickly to avoid disappointment – it’s sure to be an entertaining and educational affair.

Volume

Blog

Tag: SociView

Get in touch

Blog

Life at Volume

Volume

Blog

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

On the 28th September, Volume’s Chief Exec and founder of SociView™, Chris Sykes, is speaking at CorpComms Magazine’s conference on making the most of your social media ‘real estate’.

Share this:

Get in touch

Blog

Life at Volume

On the 28^th September, Volume’s Chief Exec and founder of SociView™, Chris Sykes, is speaking at CorpComms Magazine’s conference on making the most of your social media ‘real estate’.