The building blocks of social media strategy (updated)
Here’s a handy diagram I’ve been working on to help anchor conversations about social media strategy. This is the CEO’s view and so it’s broader than just ’social media as a marketing opportunity’. This is about an organisation being ready to survive and thrive in the networked world. It’s not designed to be a primer to explain what social media is (there’s plenty of good stuff out there to cover that already) but it helps to kick off the conversation about where it fits once you ‘get it’.
This diagram is released as Creative Commons, so you’re free to copy and remix. It’s also a work in progress. Let’s discuss in the comments and see if we can improve it together.
UPDATE - 22 Dec 08: We all seem to agree that the middle box of the diagram was too difficult to understand, so I’ve changed it to something far less academic. Hopefully it’s more accessible now.
Thanks to these folks for their feedback on an early version. You guys rock! Jenni Lloyd; David Cushman; Alex Hansford; Telmo Carlos; Michael Theodoulou; Tom Chapman; Nazim Jamil.
Purpose, mission and culture
This is where it all starts. An organisation’s deep rooted purpose is more important than ever before, with human, social and environmental capital rising in importance alongside financial capital. It’s also going to be essential to ‘do no evil’ if a company is to survive and create meaningful relationships on the network.
Succeeding in social media will depend on the organisation having an open, participative, transparent, free culture. Democratic principles, for a democratic medium and economy. Further, the organisation’s culture will be exposed through social media, so it must be congruous with the mission.
Core competencies
The things that the organisation actually does: Not just its products and services, but its capabilities. Most importantly, where these competencies fit into a networked economy rather than just a competitive landscape. Think: collaboration and sharing, not hoarding.
Network awareness
All organisations are used to looking outwards, but typically they are concerned with just two things: customers and competitors. The networked world requires new habits to look outside the firewall in the form of:
Mapping: If social media is a big chaotic network, we need to map out which portions of it are relevant to the organisation to find the places where people that we’re interested in are present and identify who’s influential.
Listening: Learning what people are talking about in the parts of the network that are relevant to us, and the cultural nuances of the conversations.
Measuring: Setting up a suitable measurement model to track what’s important and how things are changing in the network.
Understanding: Actually making sense of the above and allowing the organisation to absorb that knowledge and do useful things with it.
New habits for the networked world
Open-ness: Last century’s companies were closed by default unless there was an immediate need to be open. In the networked world the reverse is true and open-ness is becoming the default. We need more transparency, trust, and open dialogue between the outside world and the people within an organisation (not just the PR people.)
Collaboration & Sharing: Once an organisation is open, it can share knowledge, ideas and resources and use them to collaborate with others in the network. Its capabilities then extend beyond its core competencies. ‘Competitive advantage’ becomes less important, as everyone in the network can generate more value by cooperating.
Re-mixing: Allowing others to combine your data and content with other sources to create new things, and using external resources to enhance your own output.
You as a platform
An organisation’s web presence in the network must become a platform, not just a destination. This includes social features and tools (blogging; wikis; ratings and reviews; user comments; online marketplaces; social networking…) and also aggregation and mashup: Sucking in data and content from elsewhere on the network and creating useful new things with it - often by combining with the organisation’s own data and content. This also extends to making your own content and data available for others to use. Become a creator and user of web widgets.
Network engagement
Having a presence in the appropriate places in the network (Think: Facebook fan pages; Twitter profiles.) Making useful contributions and having meaningful dialogue on the network, not just in the locations that an organisation controls.
Tom wrote this on 18.12.08 –
It's filed in the Social media, Strategy box
On December 18th, 2008 at 8:33 pm, Will McInnes responded:
I think I need a lot more clarity about the middle box, the markets, networks and communities, to buy this model both as the real me, and playing a client.
What does this *actually mean* to me, as a client?
What is the fullness of this?
It sounds clever, but very unreal. Please explain!
On December 18th, 2008 at 8:40 pm, David Cushman responded:
We think you rock too Tom.. Will be sharing this (and the video of you talking about it at fasterfuture.blogspot.com first thing tomorrow am.
Pile in folks!
On December 18th, 2008 at 9:00 pm, Jenni responded:
this reads like a manifesto for a new kind of business… certainly requires organisations to know themselves and have the courage to break out of established patterns of competitive behaviour. Branding specialist Scott Bedbury published a list of attributes for a great brand, which included:
1. in it for the long haul
2. can be anything
3. knows itself
4. invents / reinvents the category
5. taps into emotions
7. has a story that’s never completely told
8. has design consistency - it’s just what they do, it’s what they don’t do
8. is relevant - meets what people want, performs the way people want it to.
Strikes me that a successful approach to social media could help companies achieve most of this list - so long as they already have a clear mission / purpose and are prepared to share their culture.
On December 18th, 2008 at 10:38 pm, Tom responded:
@Will: I agree, the edge competencies are the most difficult bit to explain - especially in a concise fashion. I read a long essay by yer man Umair to get my head around it.
http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2006/01/edge-competencies-what-do-googles-use.cfm
I wrote my own (still quite long) article to try to simplify it a bit:
http://www.nixonmcinnes.co.uk/2008/01/21/edge-competencies-an-essential-economics-lesson/
I wonder if there’s a better definition out there somewhere? I’ll see if I can have a stab at making it more applicable and client-friendly.
@David: thanks! Look forward to hearing your thoughts when you blog it tomorrow, even though I’m not sure I made much sense in that video we shot!! :)
@Jenni: that’s a great list, and you’re right that everything stems from Purpose (with a capital P!)
On December 19th, 2008 at 12:36 am, Chris Reed responded:
Useful and interesting stuff, which I knew I’d be keen on…
But I think I’m with Jenni. It strikes me that the model would work well (best? Or maybe only?) with smaller businesses which have grown up with those sorts of values from day one (I don’t know Nixon Mcinnes, or Huddle any of the newer social media agencies well enough to state it for a fact, but I’d guess that they’d all be examples of where this is spot on).
The premise that “succes will depend on companies having an open, participative, transparent, free culture. Democratic principles, for a democratic medium and economy. ” is a pretty big one. And limits the model, I’d say.
But having said all that, I’m working with one client at the moment who are bringing in a new internal comms system (people-based information sharing, using a lot fo social media techniques v hoarding files on PCs), and they do have the appetite for such a change…Disintermediation in practice. (We’re helping them drive the uptake and plan/deliver comms around the roll-out).
I’d really like this model to hold true, and will let you know how it translates in this case - with thousands of employees across several different locations… So watch this space (or let’s have a pint and a chat…).
In the meantime though, a great discussion to generate and host. Nice one.
On December 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am, Will McInnes responded:
I think the point is, and it’s fairly crucial before we go gland-handing down le avenue de social media, that is HAS to be BLOOMING simple in order to work as your handy tool for anchoring conversations.
Perhaps you need to keep Umair Haque’s intention and deep thought, but express it more simply or evolve the language. Or perhaps I do!
But if we ground ourselves with our clients, and with the business community we exist to move on, and to support and to help change, right now the main box saying ‘Edge Competencies (Markets, Networks, Communities’ might as well say ‘Donkey Bouillabasse (25″ screws; Helicopter pilots; Caffe Nero). It is inscrutable, and referring to blessays - as Stephen Fry calls blog posts - as the source of meaning somewhat misses the point, no?
Unless I’ve misunderstood its purpose, the model needs to be reasonably simple, and reasonably easy to understand with or without someone explaining it. Then it can fly. Then it can live on its own and become viral, and be used by others all about this planet seeking to ground their conversations using a handy tool. Then it can deliver against our mission of creating stronger unions between big organisations and real people by being a small agent in the bigger machine.
In summary, forgetting the high-brow thinking on the topic, what do you *actually* mean by that middle box? How do you narrate it to normal people? Work back from there, and create a new description. That’s what I feel needs to happen.
Then we have something interesting…
On December 19th, 2008 at 11:01 am, Roger, Online PR Agency, C&M responded:
i think if you came up with an antonym for ‘command and control’ comms then you’d have it licked. every corporate knows they’re a little too paranoid when it comes to this stuff… so this talks to their desires.
they want to become more loosely organised but still ‘on message’. dunno - some thoughts: ‘centres (or X’s) of advocacy’ (big firms *get* ‘advocates’); ‘discussion hubs’; ‘Bla zones’; etc etc etc.
Anyways - I agree with Will…. no Haque! ..he’s just plain confusing for anyone without Umair vision : )
On December 19th, 2008 at 12:21 pm, Tom responded:
Cheers for the feedback, I think we’re all agreed that we need to focus in on the Edge Competencies stuff and make it *much* simpler to understand.
I wonder if the solution is to rename Edge Competencies to something like “New habits for the networked world” and as Will suggests, keep the high-brow ‘markets, networks and communities’ stuff in the background and focus on the principles/habits e.g. disintermediation (or perhaps open-ness is better); collaboration; sharing; re-mixing which seem much more real-world.
Then later in the conversation when you’re talking about how to become a platform or leverage value that’s out there on the network you can start talking about markets, networks and communities rather than blowing everyone’s mind with abstract concepts from the off.
Would that be clearer? Are there any other parts of this view of social media strategy that feel woolly?
On December 23rd, 2008 at 10:40 am, david cushman responded:
I’ve had some thoughts about approach which I’ve shared with Tom and which I’ll post about when I add the updated diagram on my blog later today (December 23).
On December 23rd, 2008 at 6:10 pm, Tom Nixon responded:
Thanks David.
Where I’d like this to end up is to have this diagram as a focal point for conversations about social media strategy. It provides a reference point to begin working on it which is needed because my experience of having these conversations with organisations is that the area is actually quite huge when you map it out like this so it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin, or how to explain how all of the different threads fit together.
Then what we need is a number of different processes and tools that can be used to address an organisation’s specific situation. Some examples are below. What’s interesting to me is that many of these go much deeper than a marketing-focused agency is equipped to help with, but if they are not fully explored by an organisation then social media will become just another marketing tactic and the organisation won’t fully develop to thrive in the networked world. Over time we’ll see agencies getting more and more specialist at these different areas so a large organisation can bring in a world class expert in any of the areas that they need help with.
No clear purpose and mission? Embark on a process to collectively develop a vision and mission statement.
Closed, locked-down culture? Hire a culture change consultancy to help change how people work together and how management runs the organisation.
Little awareness of what’s out there on the network that’s relevant to the organisation? Set up buzz monitoring tools. Perform a network mapping exercise to identify online communities and influencers in your space. Set up a measurement framework to help you to get some meaning from the data.
No experience of working collaboratively and sharing in the network? Run seminars and training to demonstrate how these habits have been successful for other organisations and to develop the skills and confidence to bring them to the organisation. Send representatives along to informal industry meet-ups. Or if there aren’t any, organise a hack day or a Barcamp-style ‘unconference’, or an event like Social Innovation Camp to get people working together.
Old-school ‘web 1.0′ destination website? Hire a social media-savvy web agency to incorporate social features into the user experience where appropriate. Generate new ideas for web tools to facilitate open-ness, collaboration, sharing and re-mixing. Create your own web widgets and incorporate other widgets into the site. Hire an API specialist to help you to open up your data and content.
No presence on the web outside of your own website? Hire a social media agency to train you to reach out into online communities in a way that will add value to them and be useful, or let them do it on your behalf.
On December 26th, 2008 at 5:11 pm, Nazim Jamil responded:
I think the model works, feels solid and straight forward but I can’t see it applying to larger businesses- I’ve only had experience within advertising and for mainstream brands & products, I feel that the old birds aren’t comfortable enough to even embrace social media.. maybe the model should include penetration at its top level? Maybe the current crunch can will force the adoption of new habits which will allow this to work?
On February 14th, 2009 at 6:46 pm, New organizational structures are enabling conversations and creating new markets. | Unstructured Thoughts by Taylor Davidson responded:
[...] Tom Nixon, The Building Blocks of Social Media Strategy. [...]
On February 27th, 2009 at 10:47 am, Ruth responded:
Check out the video that David Cushman made with Tom for the Faster Future blog - http://www.youtube.com/fasterfuture