Searching for THE Social Strategy?

Do you feel like your social media efforts are tactics seeking a strategy? We all heard it from colleagues and the market. Harvard Business Review currently has a good piece titled What’s Your Social Media Strategy? According to the authors, there are four distinct social media strategies, defined by a “company’s tolerance for uncertain outcomes and the level of results sought.” The strategy segmentation is so empowering with powerful impact.

Here are the segments, with my take on Marketing best practices. The article has good external case studies: https://hbr.org/2011/07/whats-your-social-media-strategy/ar/1

1.        The Predictive Practitioner: focuses on a specific area like customer service. “It works well for businesses seeking to avoid uncertainty and to deliver results that can be measured with established tools.” If you are using social media to reinvent customer service, seeking out problems earlier than traditional methods, and in the process, they are learning that early intervention drives up customer satisfaction and down service costs.

2.        The Creative Experimenter: for those ok with ambiguity and who believe social can offer ways to do small-scale tests or create listening posts. “Often driven by realities of small budgets.” For example, using Twitter with the effort to get consumers to share health tips – and even giving charity donations as incentive. It’s an effort to experiment and drive more consumer engagement with healthcare.

3.        The Social Media Champion: involves large initiatives with predictable outcomes; the authors note that this requires “close collaboration across multiple functions and external parties.” Try allowing employees to weigh in on potential business strategy. inviting employees to develop new offerings for customers.

4.        Social Media Transformer: enables large-scale interactions that extend to external stakeholders, “allowing companies to use the unexpected to improve the way they do business.”

Most recommend that a specific part of the organization, like Marketing, needs to own social media to get things started. working very closely with every business and region to help ramp up digital teams with social media experts.

The HBR authors say: “With all else being equal, the social transformer strategy can have the largest impact on an enterprise, affecting everything from R&D and operations to channel partners and customers. However, moving from a champion to a transformer strategy requires major, companywide changes to such things as incentive systems, business processes, resource management, and leadership styles. The social transformers we’ve seen often have broader social business objectives and view social technologies as a key enabler of—but not the final answer to—those objectives.”