Chapter 12
Social Business Supporting Capabilities
You can get a sense of what is required to succeed with social business through the trials and experiments of early adopters. These hard-won lessons have provided key insights into the building blocks of social business success. We recommend the supporting capabilities explored in this chapter to maximize the outcomes and potential value created by social business strategy. Each has a critical role to play, and while early adopters achieved some measure of success without all of these capabilities in place, nearly all of them wished they had not omitted the investment in time and resources that these require. By exploring each in some detail, organizations will get a better sense of what's needed beyond the actual social business capability itself.
Consider the situation of a frustrated worker who wanted to create a secure place for his team to work collaboratively on the intranet but couldn't figure out how to create a space and verify it was secure. He realized that the team should put its work out in the open for all to see and comment on, and they might eventually be able to do that, but the team was not quite there yet. He posted his unhappiness about this as a status update in his user profile on the company's internal social network. Surprisingly quickly and somewhat unexpectedly, a colleague responded with a social networking message identifying herself as a community manager and saying she was there to help him. She said her goal was to help him be successful at what he was trying to do. After briefly consulting with him, she went off and analyzed what the worker had done. She came back and said, “I see what you did and found the problem. I fixed it, and you and your team should be ready to work. Once you want to share this work more widely and need help, just let me know.”
This example demonstrates the degree of facilitation that's required to make any social environment successful. One of the long-standing questions of social business has been how to support the activities of those within the collaboration environment and ensure they're being successful. The answer increasingly has become the discipline of community management. Community managers are the collaborative “X factor” who make communities work. One part evangelism, one part end user support, one part collaborative facilitation, and one part jack-of-all-trades, the community manager role has proven to be critical in ensuring social business success.
A comprehensive model mapping out roles and maturity levels in community management comes from the Community Roundtable (CR), the industry's leading source of practitioner lessons learned and effective practices. The CR defines four stages of maturity and eight competencies that must be mastered by organizations seeking to manage social business communities, whether internal or external to the company (Figure 12.1). The four stages of social business maturity break down like this:
Figure 12.1 The Four Stages of Social Business Maturity and the Eight Competencies of Community Management
Source: Happe, R. “The Community Maturity Model.” Community Roundtable, June 16, 2009. http://community-roundtable.com/2009/06/the-community-maturity-model/
Community managers have complex roles and many responsibilities. Despite having the same title, external and internal community managers have very different jobs. External-facing individuals who primarily manage an organization's Facebook or Twitter presence or moderate owned communities as part of a marketing or corporate communications role are one type of community manager. Internal-facing individuals who work with colleagues trying to make the most of internal social networking environments are the other type of community manager. In both roles, community managers are involved in a broad array of activities, ranging from customer management and content schedules to brand management and marketing support (see Figure 12.2).
Figure 12.2 The Social Business Community Manager: A Jack of All Trades
The best community managers have a proactive customer service attitude, are highly supportive of their customers, and have a high level of emotional intelligence to work with the many types of workers, customers, and business partners they engage with while enabling social business. They also need to understand the business, often have technical expertise, and are well connected socially to draw participants together.
The field of social analytics and resulting business intelligence applications has recently become a new supporting capability for effective and mature social business organizations. Three key realizations are driving widespread interest in social analytics by social business practitioners.
First, social media are rapidly becoming the richest new sources of new information. Most organizations have only recently realized that the Internet, the world's largest network, is already mostly peer produced. As a result, social media generate more information than any other source. As social business also becomes widely implemented inside most organizations, the same proliferation of information will happen. The information onslaught, while containing essential information, must be filtered and aggregated into a form that's usable, insightful, highly actionable, and strategic. Organizations will need upgraded analytics and business intelligence capabilities in order to make sense of the knowledge their competitors will also be mining for better market advantage.
Second, business intelligence must take into account the whole social business ecosystem. Merely examining a company's own internal databases or even the information that business partners have is no longer adequate to build an accurate picture of key events and trends that have important business impacts. Maintaining an integrated social business view today means connecting all internal business data with external information streams, with as little delay as possible. The challenge will be that social business data outside an organization also outnumber internal data by many orders of magnitude, so sifting through the synthesized whole to spot urgent situations and important issues quickly enough to drive business decisions is the objective.
Finally, organizations must cultivate new competencies to handle an effective social business listening and engagement process or risk disruption, irrelevance, or both. Most traditional analytics departments aren't yet highly skilled at processing social media, which requires connecting distributed conversations across hundreds of social networking services, tying in any associated rich media, and integrating with decentralized blog feeds and partner ecosystems. Most businesses also can't turn today's petabyte streams of raw information into usable strategic insight quickly enough to make a difference. Moreover, most business intelligence tools are not easy enough to use in order to have a significant impact on the business. One key competence, increasingly called big data, uses cutting-edge technologies to swallow the massive streams of data in social ecosystems and quickly sort through them for business advantage. The key to this is combining social analytics, which can deal with the unique aspects of social media, with big data, which can process vast, real-time information flows quickly enough to matter. The result is something that's sometimes referred to as social business intelligence (SBI).
The resulting real-time look into an organization's internal and external social business activities must be accurate, and there must be a means to verify it. It must be timely and comprehensive, because leaving anything out will likely result in a compromised analysis. And it must be comprehensible to the average worker in the organization, although this quality separates most social analytics capabilities from actual business intelligence, while the rest is what big data help bring to the table. But this shift to social business sources for key insights will still take some time. Classic business intelligence will remain essential for the foreseeable future to look into and understand what's inside an organization's systems of record, and a few tools will even move into social business intelligence. However, the larger shift today to systems of engagement as a primary—and even the majority—source of new business intelligence will almost certainly require fundamentally new types of social business intelligence tools based on new technologies so that workers can quickly access real-time filtered data and get the insight they need to perform their jobs.
There are at least two types of social business intelligence being developed. The first is the application of a social layer within traditional business intelligence tools to enable the collaboration and sharing of business intelligence by applying social media techniques. The second type, needed for long-term and sustainable social business and a healthy virtuous listening and engagement cycle, is the use of business intelligence tools with social media activity itself—both worldwide activity external to the organization and internal social workforce and business-to-business activities.
Although social analytics and business intelligence are only few years old as of this writing, effective business strategies for them have begun to emerge. For now, most organizations try to create basic social business intelligence capabilities and build experience with them. Some organizations have rapidly discovered that the level of effort needed and infrastructure required make “cloud-based” offerings (computing as a service, not a product) an easier path to usable results (at least in terms of time to market, feature set, and maturity), acquiring capability, and starting to experiment.
Thus, the choices are the usual ones: build, buy, or use the cloud. Regardless of what path is chosen, social business intelligence invariably consists of new data techniques combined with social analytics with a domain-specific business intelligence dashboard provided on top (see Figure 12.3). Once these social business intelligence capabilities are assembled, they enable the following strategies that will become competitive differentiators or drivers of additional efficiency and productivity:
Figure 12.3 Turning Social Activity into Useful Business Intelligence
Financial services, health care institutions, and the legal industry all have serious challenges with regulatory and compliance beyond the standard ones that any large company has, in particular public ones, in terms of engaging with the world through social business. Rules regarding records retention, patient confidentiality, and data discoverability, in addition to immature legal standards, create obstacles in using social media for external customer engagement. Even internally, compliance can be a challenge to deal with among a company's own workers. The obstacles that regulated industries face in working through their social business strategy can quickly turn into a seemingly insurmountable roadblock. But as more and more organizations in these industries have success stories to tell, a picture begins to emerge on what's required in order to succeed. These new capabilities—which are actually just best practices and lessons learned for the most part—make it possible for a large percentage of companies to make a transition to social business, which seemed almost impossible a few years ago.
The arrival of potent new support capabilities makes automated social business compliance and policy rule checking easy to implement. Affected organizations now have options that don't require them to build sophisticated capabilities or solve the many difficult problems with regulation and social media by themselves. This, then, is part of the answer on whether regulated firms will be able to engage in social business and use social data safely.
The specifics of how regulated businesses can engage in social business is becoming clearer. What these businesses need is a smart and agile approach to the definition, communication, and enforcement of enterprise social business policy. In this view, organizations don't have to do it all themselves; they can leverage the experiences of those that have gone before. Also, capable new solutions can enable automated and predictive processes that make much it less likely that the company will be exposed to risk from communication outside compliance guidelines and regulatory parameters.
Figure 12.4 sets out the key elements of a new vision for an operational and dynamic social media policy life cycle. By establishing the right compliance, analytics and reporting, and business rule layers in direct concert with a well-articulated and communicated social media policy, most regulated industries can move beyond regulatory and compliance hurdles and begin accessing the benefits of becoming a compliant social business.
Figure 12.4 An Operational Social Media Policy Life Cycle
The industry has begun to see the introduction of specialized services from social software vendors to realize a new vision for social media enablement—one that's driven by policy yet helps participants feel empowered to act as they need to and knowing they'll be kept within the prescribed regulatory, governance, and policy boundaries. When it comes to the strategies that enable access to social business for companies worried about legal exposure, the best environment is one where social business actors across the company are free to create the collaborative patterns, structures, and processes they need to work together, inside, outside, or between companies. When they have an automated safety net, powered by social analytics that has been explained the policy restrictions, it ensures that workers can act with confidence and that access to social business transformation is once again possible. When corporate governance teams and senior executives come to understand that a safety net is operational at all times for all of the organization's social business activities and that it accurately represents their wishes and concerns, they have the confidence to begin driving social business objectives forward.
Three major types of activities are required to deliver on social business in regulated industries: