Tag: Suki Johal

- by Suki Johal

New year, new predictions, new hype… our advice: proceed with caution

Leading up to the New Year and the weeks following, you will have been inundated by experts providing their predictions for the year – an annual ritual usually followed by “told you so” at the end of the year.

In her Social Business predictions, Charlene Li of Altimeter Group explains her prediction pet peeve.

My pet peeve about the annual predictions ritual is that they lack context for action. It’s nice to know that tablets and big data are important — but what should you do about it?

I echo Li’s comment. Don’t get me wrong; I think it is important to provide analysis and foresight into future trends, but this needs to be coupled with insight and direction. Similarly, overambitious statements like, “2012 will be the year Social Business will revolutionise organisations” only risk relegating this business transition to mere hype.

Those of you who have been following our Volume blog will have noticed we are doing a fairly in-depth series on Social Business. We do not believe Social Business is hype, nor do we believe it will revolutionise organisations in 2012.

As individuals, we already understand the value of communicating across social channels. We are able to share pictures, videos and updates with friends and family around the world. Social-media channels make it easier for us to communicate effectively. 2012 will be the year that businesses also begin to really understand how the communicative properties of social media can be utilised to improve business performance. Businesses will begin to understand how a socially-connected ecosystem of employees, partners, distributors, influencers and consumers will improve engagement, collaboration, lead generation, customer retention and new sales. It will be the year that organisations seek out consultants to guide them through the implementation of Social Business processes and technology.

The direction I offer around this prediction is to proceed with caution. To effectively integrate Social Business technology, processes and people, understand your options and how they fit with your current environment and culture. Evaluate all the advice, including our blog series, and understand the tools on the market. There are currently several tools available to you, but you should define your need before looking at the solution. This is a simple but often overlooked task that often results in unused and redundant technology. With 2012 likely to be a challenging financial year for most businesses, throwing money at unused and expensive technology is not a luxury many can afford.

When looking for a Social Business consultant, make sure they can provide demonstrable experience and success. Social Business consultants should have experience working inside and outside an organisation, to effectively implement social technology and processes internally to improve social communication externally to customers. Furthermore, consultants should be able to show concrete results and success stories.

We currently provide Social Business consultation to businesses varying from Fortune 50 companies to small-to-medium-sized businesses. For more information on what we have done, please do get in touch: suki.johal@volume.co.uk or via twitter: @sukijohal.

In the forthcoming blogs, we will continue with our Social Business series. The next post will focus on stage two of our methodology: consumer insight and direction.

- 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.

Social Business Building Blocks

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:

  1. Your official accounts – accounts you control
  2. Your endorsed accounts – partners, employees
  3. Your influencer accounts – media, industry bodies
  4. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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

 

 

- by Suki Johal

Social Business – Why Does it Matter?

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

In the last post in this series, we explored the four stages of social business readiness. After reading through all the information, you may have been wondering what does social business mean for you, why does it matter? To answer those questions, we have pulled together an infographic with recent statistics to highlight a few of the benefits of becoming a social business.

In the next post, we will explore the first step in our social business enablement process – mapping your social landscape through SociView.

 


 

- by Suki Johal

Social is now a business thing, haven’t you heard?

Though “social business” is a term you may or may not be familiar with, it is a transformation which will impact the way organisations conduct business operations.  Drawing on our client experiences and other game-changers in the social business space, we will be posting a blog series over the next few weeks which will focus on the people, the process and the technology involved in social business enablement. 

Introducing Social Business

We’re all guilty of dropping the latest jargon into a conversation without substantiating it, making the assumption that the person we’re talking to understands exactly what we mean. I’d like to share a dialogue I had with a client this week where I was guilty of doing exactly that.

Client: “So will the social sales enablement workshop provide best-practice tips on how to engage with leads on LinkedIn?”

Me: “Yes, but that will be the final part. We will first provide training on how to integrate social business processes and technology to identify, share and connect.”

Client: “By ‘training on social business processes’, you mean training the sales guys on how to use LinkedIn for business purposes?”

I realised the term “social business” was what was causing the confusion. So I quickly back-pedalled without the jargon:

Me: “What we would look to do is provide training on how to enable sales and marketing to effectively engage with each other internally on a social switchboard. We will walk through the social process, from identifying the leads, through to collaborating and supporting the sales cycle over social channels such as LinkedIn.”

The likelihood is, whilst most organisations may not have heard of the phrase “social business”, they are supporting its evolution in some shape or form. Our social business enablement services work on the premise that:

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. 

 

Over the last year, we’ve worked with clients to deliver internal engagement processes and technology to help support their social marketing and sales campaigns. This, however, is only the tip of the social-business iceberg. Organisations are beginning to understand the value of exploiting the communicative properties of social media (such as collaboration), not just within marketing and sales but also to support different business objectives such as product development, customer service and human resources.

Efforts to integrate social processes and technology have so far been siloed and disjointed. To fully exploit the business benefits, organisations will need to take a holistic approach when implementing new social initiatives and tools. If 2011 was the social business awakening, 2012 will be the social business ROI.

In the next post we’ll be elaborating on defining what social business is, why it shouldn’t be ignored and what you need to get started. In the spirit of collaboration, do also let us know how you are supporting it and the challenges you face within your own organisation.