Doculabs

If your company’s abilities in the Social Universe were measured against those of your peers, would you be a Leader or a Follower? If you were assessed today on your brand’s social media program, what letter grade would your organization receive? Would you pass with flying colors and receive an “A?” Blend in with the rest of the class with a “C” average? Bring home a below-average “D” grade, or worse?

In other words, what is your company’s Social Index?

Over the coming weeks, I am going to be writing about ways that you can assess, measure, and improve your organization’s social media program. When we’re done, you will have created a “report card,” of sorts, which will help you understand how far you’ve come with your social media program and hopefully give you ideas about where you may want to go next. (By the way, I freely interchange the terms social “media,” “computing,” “networking,” and you should feel free to do so as well. Also, the term Social Index is a Doculabs moniker; it’s our way of expressing a company’s relative maturity in the social media continuum.)

To start, we’re going to focus only on your company’s external social activities: your own web site and the social networks that your customers and prospects visit, such as Facebook. In subsequent posts, we’ll describe how to assess your company’s internal capabilities for social communication, as well. This is an important distinction: at Doculabs, we believe that social functionality is equally useful for reaching external customers as they are to help workers inside the organization. You’ll see plenty of posts about this from Doculabs in the upcoming weeks.

The Four Cs of the Social Index

When assessing your company’s social prowess, certain criteria can help us understand the big picture. The four key categories are Community, Content, Channels, and Control. Each of these categories contains components that can determine the quality of your visitors’ social experience.

1. Community

• Do you offer compelling social destinations, or are your social properties simply a propaganda machine? While the primary purpose of a social marketing program is to promote the brand and ultimately sell products or services, on social properties the traditional marketing assault is usually somewhat muted to encourage visitors to explore the social functionality of the site, and to become an active part of the marketing.
• Does each social component of your web site have a clear, obvious purpose? Many organizations overwhelm users with too many choices: dozens of discussion forums about topics so diverse and/or obscure that when viewed from a far, the community seems more like an abandoned wasteland instead of a flourishing garden. Sometimes offering less is more, but most importantly you should be clear about what you want users to expect. For example, “Follow us on Twitter” likely won’t motivate anyone to join your cause; however, “Follow us on Twitter and be the first to hear when {Hot new product} is available at your local retailer” just might quickly build a highly interested audience.
• Does your company’s public voice extend to your social web presence? I won’t dwell on this one, as it is Marketing 101, and an extension of other marketing practices—making sure that your customers and prospects innately feel the same “attitude” from their social experience that they sense through other channels. Because many companies have multiple people assigned to respond to social marketing tasks—such as responding to Facebook or company blog comments—communications alignment is essential.

2. Content

• Is the social content on your site fresh and relevant? By definition, social marketing content means dynamic exchanges between company and its customers, but if topics become stale or irrelevant to visitors, you’ll see activity and interest trail off quickly. The best social marketing examples generate interactivity with so much momentum that it can hardly be stopped.
• Are visitors able to contribute to the content? A sure-fire way to create the momentum that I mention above is to allow users to create reasons for other visitors to interact, share, and propagate your brand. This can be done successfully in almost any industry. Consumer Packaged Goods companies often allow the exchange of recipes. Consumer Electronics manufacturers conduct competitions where customers are encouraged to upload content created with their products and the community can vote and comment. The number of opportunities for self-generating community is limitless.

3. Channels

• How many people are you potentially able to reach? Effective social web programs are able to reach people at the wide variety of places where potential visitors spend their time. From your company web site, can your visitors easily repost your content to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or other social networking sites? Do you offer syndication of content and updates via RSS, so that users can receive them anywhere, any time, on any device or channel of their choosing?
• Are your social channels in sync? The above example allows visitors to repost content from your social web site to other social networks. But what if you’ve got a social web site, but also a Fan Page on Facebook , a MySpace page, and product training videos on YouTube? Do you have a program and processes in place that ensure continuity across them? Are the same messages, the same quality of content, and similar level of attention being given to all properties?

4. Control

• How well are you able to monitor and measure your social marketing activities? Are you able to assess the success of your social marketing activities? Companies adept in social communications use analytics programs and campaign management practices to better understand what’s working and what isn’t. Are you able to assess which social platforms are the most effective? The sheer number of Fans or members is not always as good indication if a program is working. The frequency and quality of interactions can be a much more telling measurement.
• Have you taken steps to ensure compliance with rules, regulations, and laws, if applicable? Every industry is different, but each has its own specific rules it must follow. Federal, state, and local law often controls what an organization can claim about its products and services, and public companies must abide by strict SEC regulations when communicating about their organization to the public. For global organizations, this problem is further compounded by differences in labor law and practice. Social marketing instantly exposes a company to a wide range of new risk, including communications to customers, marketing messaging, and how a company’s representatives respond while online. Having a comprehensive social governance program in place in your organization is essential to reducing the risks and maximizing the benefits of your social marketing programs.
• How well are you prepared to respond to a crisis? To react to customer requests? Social marketing can be a can of worms: while it offers an opportunity to communicate in new ways and reach diverse audiences, it can also cause harm to your brand, or even your bottom line. Customers who are unhappy with your product or service may find it very satisfying to vent their complaints in a public forum. Even perfectly happy customers may be confused about the role of your site from a customer service perspective: I’ve seen postings where a customer attempted to order a replacement part for an appliance by posting a request on the company’s Facebook Wall. Competitors may also seek to inflict brand damage with postings under the innocent guise of comparing your products theirs, under anonymous cover. The ability to respond quickly to these events is the place where most organizations fail. The social media platform and web sites where your customers are interacting with your company and brand are still completely disconnected and disparate from the systems that you use to run your business. The people within your organization who sell, manufacture, or serve your customers are rarely aware of the activities happening on the outside in the social media sites – and addressing this disconnect will be one of the greatest transformations in the enterprise. Much, much more to come on this topic over the next weeks.

Summary

By answering the questions under the ”Four Cs” listed above, hopefully you will begin to see how your social computing program is evolving. In future postings, I’ll describe how to turn your answers into a more meaningful assessment that will help you identify the gaps in your current approach, as well as spot tangible opportunities as we march forward through these truly transformational times!