Infosys-Oracle Blog

To be a successful e-commerce business, an organization would need along with a good product, price, package etc, a "backbone" that supports e-commerce, namely: payment gateways for electronic payment, efficient supply chain system that ensures the right product reaches at right time to the customer and in right condition, a reverse logistics chain to handle returns, call center setup for online and telephonic support etc.

So the moot question is what do you need for your success with Social media?

First of all, figure out why you want to get onto Social Media bandwagon? What is it that you would like to start seeing as you advance into your social media initiatives? Do you want to better your customer service? Do you want to share your ideas with customers and prospects and engage them to co-create something that would be your next big product? Increase product awareness? Lead discussions and sway them to your area of specialty or expertise?  In short, determine your near and long term OBJECTIVES. As commonly said, "you cannot manage, improve or control what you cannot measure". So if you do not have any specific objectives, then how will you know that you are doing good, bad or ugly?

Output

1. Defined objectives (near and long term)
   a. Define specific measure if you would be analyzing the data captured via a business intelligence tool
2. Timelines / prioritization to meet the objectives

Hint: Ensure that objectives are in line with your business strategy be it sales and marketing or service or any other strategy. New media of interaction like Social media will always get step-brotherly treatment from the organization's older departments if this new social media is not aligned to their objectives. So in short, get a champion from top management to help you with this and engage your employees before you try to engage prospects and customers. Understand human behavioral dynamics or organizational politics to incubate Social media initiative in its early days.

Once you are done with your objectives, you need to build an organization or a support structure for the initiative. Take a case of a Business Transformation Programs at large corporations, they have dedicated team derived from key senior people from all the impacting departments and is spearheaded or championed by an executive in the top management with direct reporting structure to CxO level executive. With Social media initiatives you are trying to transform your organization but more subtly. We may not be "re-engineering the corporation" borrowed this term from renowned management authors, Michael Hammer and James Champy, but we are definitely trying to better our business. So assuming that, as part of the objective definition activity, you decided to improve on marketing, sales and customer service, you may want to derive some senior folks from these departments to create your SOCIAL MEDIA IMPLEMENTATION / CORE TEAM. Additionally, you may want to engage with corporate communications, in-house Information Technology group and some external consultants who could bring their expertise on this topic. Create the core group and build a reporting structure. Manage the team as a project with priorities and deadlines. The bottom-line of the project or initiative success lives with the core team and employees of the organization. The consultant play role in implementation and providing additional recommendations on setting new areas for monitoring and control. So own it up or you will fail in this initiative.

Output

1. Core Team
2. Defined Reporting Structure
3. Executive Sponsorship
4. Possible engagement of external partners / RFI / RFP
5. Project Management Approach

Now that you have got your CORE TEAM set on driving the social media initiative, question arises, how you sustain the momentum. To SUSTAIN MOMENTUM, you need:

1. Marketing Planning (campaign / response strategy)
   a.   Engage with customers and prospects
   b.   Building relationship with them
   c.   Grow the relationship through support and guidance around discussions and blogs and enabling co-creation of any kind
   d.   Measure how you have been able to do that
   e.   Loop back the feedback for continual improvement
2. Content Development
   a.   Professional content development (web blogs, videos, white papers etc)
   b.   Ideation / co-creation
   c.   Engaging employees outside the core group in organizational social media activities. This may involve training and making participation in social media activities as a part of day to day business activity. At a retail client I worked, every employee is required to spend one hour in self training every day. Why not institute such practice but the training, research and involvement should be in social media activities. If your organization does not have skills and utilizing Social Media for business benefits, now is the time to get trained before committing to many mistakes.
3. Technology Backbone
   a.   Security around accessing Social media sites
   b.   Building connectors with organization's social media platform which helps in initiating discussion groups, blogs, communities, analytics, polls, widgets etc
   c.   MDM, Notification services, Localization
   d.   Integration services
   e.   Interfacing applications like CRM

Output

1. Technology feasibility analysis
2. Employee trainings
3. Social Media content planning

In short, treat Social Media as a strategy and not just an initiative and Success will be yours. The key word is "ENGAGE" and strategy should be all around that key word. Engage Employees. Engage Partner. Engage Customers.