Social business best practice: Become a social media transformer

July 15, 2011

More and more businesses are exploring how they integrate social media across all parts of their organisation. We call this social business. But does your organisation have what it takes to be a true social business?

Earlier this week, Harvard Business Review (HBR) posted an article outlining 4 different types of social media strategy. Over 1,100 companies were surveyed and their approaches to social media were analysed, resulting in 4 categories:

Predictive practitioner
The predictive practitioner is a company using social media for a specific purpose, for example as a customer service or lead generation platform. These companies tend to have a uniformed approach to social media, meaning they can easily measure their activity and avoid uncertainty.

Creative Experimenter
Unlike the predictive practitioner, creative experimenters aren’t afraid of trying something new; in fact they quite like it. They have a tried and tested approach to social media. They experiment and dip their toe into new areas of social media to see if it suits them.

Social media champion
Social media champions take on large scale projects to get predictable results. These initiatives can go across a number of platforms and require input from a number of agencies and partners.

Social media transformer
Established social businesses tend to be social media transformers. They create large scale social media strategies that encompass a variety of internal and external groups.

HBR rightly points out that companies can progress from one category to another overtime.  But, as a social media consultancy, we see the ultimate goal for any orgainsation (over time) to be social media transformer. We’ve visualised our thinking in this illustration below:

So, what do you have to do to become a social media transformer?

1. Social media activity cuts across multiple functions
2. There is a central group that use social media to inform business strategy
3. Social media technologies are ‘tightly integrated’
4. Social media involves internal AND external stakeholders