My recommendation is to assess the use of social media channels for specific business processes – such as sales, marketing, supply-chain, etc..  on per-business-process basis.  The functional business unit will need to own those “social” extensions to their core business processes anyway. There might be limited subset of functions that will make sense to deploy as shared services, however most of the functions should be owned by BUs.

Let’s walk through this example:

Customer Service/Support Business Processes.

You were asked to come up with Social Media strategy for Customer Service/Support functions. Where to start???

Here is a quick step-by-step methodology that can help you to get started!

Phase 1.

Analysis

–        You need to decide which social media channels to pick for the initial phase of deployment : blogs, forums, social networks, etc;

o   First create a list of all social media channels to review [long list];

o   Then decide on how you are going to evaluate these channels – in some cases the channel that is not a highest in use by your customers might have a very high weighting factor in terms of influence on readers, etc..

o   Decide on how you can collect data needed for this evaluation;

o   Evaluate;

o   Pick 1-2 channels to start social support on.

–        Suggest people/roles to manage these new channels, assess the impact on their current activities;

–        Gather requirements on integration, reports and analytics, workflows, document them;

–        Change Management team has to be informed about this initiative and get involved;

–        Other departments, such as Training, Product Management, IT, etc.. have to be notified and included in discussions.

Phase 2.

Design .

In this phase you need to decide:

-          What tools to use to monitor selected channels on on-going basis;

-           How often to monitor/report;

-           Who is responsible;

-          Design of Workflows (who, when, does what, triggers, processes);

-          Design of Integrations into back-end systems;

-          Design of analytics and reports;

-          Training materials/plans have to be designed;

-          Development and implementation plan [time/resources] have to be completed.

-          Cross-functional processes are designed.

Phase 3.

Implementation:

-          Selected tools are deployed;

-          Assigned employees are trained;

-          Integration is done;

-          Reports/workflows are developed.

-          New processes/Tools have been tested.

-          System goes live.

I am intentionally over simplifying phases/steps in this sample Social Support Deployment Methodology as I am looking for your input here: what worked, did not work for you?

Looking forward to reading your comments!

1.       I call customer service and get to talk to an agent right away?

2.       I get a correct resolution to my problem fast?

3.       I can find a colleague in Europe who works on the same problem?

4.       Post a question on discussion board and get solution within 5 min?

5.       When my call gets transferred from one department to another I do not have to repeat who I am and why I am calling?

6.       Agent at the podium actually likes me asking him/her questions and trying to be truly helpful?

7.       I purchase products and services that are reliable enough that I do not need to deal with points 1-6?

8.       ..  you can add your Ifs here!

What is the formula of success in keeping your customers happy in most “unhappy” moments – when they contact you [in person, via social media channels, phone, etc..] with issues [or questions] about your products and/or services??

Here is my recipe:

70% – culture: customer focused company – not a person, not a channel – the whole company is customer focused!

20% – analytics and analysis – 100 degrees: why so many issues? Do we need to fix a product? Do we need to update Knowledge Base? Add agents? Increase support hours? Focus more on social media channels? Etc..

10% – software tools/solutions – the right mix of enabling technologies to support required business processes.

Is your company a GOOD COOK? What is your recipe?

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Participated:

Tatyana Kanzaveli – Moderator

Tatyana Kanzaveli, CEO of Social CRM World, has broad experience in sales, marketing and business development, technology and professional services. She held executive roles in number of start-ups and large multinationals. She was an early adopter of social media and social networking channels, using them to build successful online and face-to-face communities. Tatyana runs strategic Social CRM and social media marketing consultancy — http://scrmworld.com.  She is also an organizer and curator of TEDxBayArea events. You can follow her on Twitter: @glfceo

LaSandra Brill

LaSandra Brill is a social media enthusiast, avid blogger and marketing innovator. As Senior Manager of the Service Provider Digital & Social Media Marketing group, LaSandra Brill shapes Cisco’s marketing strategy to include a mix of social media marketing techniques leveraging web 2.0 technologies. At Cisco she is known for building and executing the social media strategy of one of the top five product launches in company history.

LaSandra is also an Ezine expert author and authors a blog, Marketing in a Web 2.0 World, where she explores how marketing is changing for B2B companies with the rise of social media and Web 2.0. She has over ten years of technology marketing, communications, and web strategy experience. Before joining Cisco, she held management positions at Mirapoint and AppStream.

LaSandra holds a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Management from San Jose State University.

Richard Margetic is the Global Social Media lead, currently responsible for Dell’s strategy, governance and presence in social media, cross-segment, around the globe. For the five years he’s been with Dell, Richard has been instrumental in the launch of Dell’s social media presence, including blogs, idea platforms, wikis and Twitter accounts. With 15 years’ experience in web  marketing and development, he was a managing global web consultant for IBM and PWC Consulting prior to Dell and led the opening of Microsoft’s Sidewalk office in Dallas.

Frank Eliason is currently Senior Vice President of Social Media at Citibank. Frank became well known in social media for the Customer Service outreach function that his team at Comcast was involved with. This work has been recognized by many news organizations such as ABC News, New York Times, Business Week, among many others. Taking the simple approach of asking “Can we help” has created new communication channels for Customers and an improved Customer experience. Prior to joining Comcast in 2007 Frank has worked in Customer Service management for Advanta Bank and Vanguard Investments. Connect with Frank on Twitter at @FrankEliason or his blog http://frankeliason.com

Sudha Jamthe is the social media strategist for PayPalX platform where she brings contagious passion for grassroots communities and social media to distrupt and build all facets of business with a methodical strategic approach.

Sudha brings 15 yrs experience in Internet marketing and is passionate about social technologies, platform play and mobile space.

She is a rare marketer who believes passionately in the power of innovative teams and thrives in developer ecosytems, leads the Bay Area Facebook and Twitter Meetups, Weekendapps, Barcamps and Community leadership summit and brings social apps to large marketing campaigns such as DEMO Live, a facebook partnership for live conference conversation, Developer Program for Bebo/AOL and Twitter Campaigns at Intuit.

Earlier she was Director Business Solutions at $2Billion education publisher Harcourt where she led strategic planning across 27 business units. She often forays into the startup world with pet side projects, a mobile middleware startup Coola, ecommerce startup Moomli, Facebook Micropayments startup Socialmints and tmeet, a twitter location application on the iphone.

She is a venture mentor at MIT and social media adviser for DEMO Conference. She has a MBA from Boston University and a BS from Madras University. She blogs at coolastory.com and lives as @sujamthe on twitter

Key points we discussed:

-         Social Media Management Systems. Core processes:

o       Listening;

o       Publishing;

o       Workflow;

o       Reporting;

o       Analyzing;

o       Integration with other systems.

-         What tools are used:

o       Over 10-15 products have been mentioned, including Sprinklr, Radian6, Group Vine, Social Ping, Omniture, Salesforce, Position 2,  ScoutLabs [Lithium], Techrigy [Alterian].

-         Organizational structures:

o       Central Social Media Team [shared services]:

• provides Social Media training;
• special sub-group on measurements – creates reports, distributes to all other teams;
• responsible for creating Social Media guidelines and standards;
• tools evaluation and selection for company-wide adoption in Social space;
• for now this team is also doing some functions that should eventually go back to corresponding BUs such as content creation, content distribution, support, etc.

Seems like this is a desired framework, some companies are almost there, some are in a process of getting there.

-         Listening at a high level works – gives a good feel on a state of the brand especially in comparison to competitive brands, however not all the data is captured by most of the known tools. Companies are using combination of local specializes searches in addition to overall listening tools to get the most coverage;

-         There is no single product out there that does most of the functions of SMMS – seems like companies are using 4-6 tools [at least] to manage overall processes;

-         Timing matters – analyze what times people are visiting key destinations and schedule your messaging accordingly;

-         Use combination of automated and manual processes/responses to manage interactions.

Join over 1000 executives from F2000 companies at Bay Area Executives meetup [it is Global and free to join!] to stay updated on other events in Social Business [Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM] space.

Huge Thank You goes to sponsors of this Global Social CRM meetup:

CISCO Systems

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Contact Me to Sponsor Next Global Social CRM Meetup

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