Building the Business Case for Your Social Business Strategy

As I shared in the first post of this blog series, having a clear goal and plan for how your enterprise social network (ESN) and social business ties back to your overall business is the foundation of your strategy. In this post, we’ll go through three steps that you’ll need to take to build your strategy.

Step 1: Define Your Vision and Goals

At Altimeter, we define a social business strategy as “The deep integration of social technology and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.” As high level vision statement of what you hope to accomplish with your efforts is a great place to start. Maybe it’s becoming a more operationally efficient organization, or reducing risk. Maybe it’s giving your internal customers a better experience.

Yammer created a short list of business goals that it built into its “Working Social” interactive tool. Here’s a screenshot of that list that will hopefully spark some ideas:

While it’s tempting to check all of these goals, I suggest that you start with only a few – Yammer’s interactive tool will only let you choose two to begin. The logic: you need to prioritize. After all, strategy is what you will do and just as importantly, what you will not do.

Step 2: Map Your Goals Back to Business Strategy

Once you have a small handful of social business goals, the next step is to map each back to your business goals. Here’s a hypothetical example: Let’s say that my organization has three major strategic goals: 1) Drive Efficiency, 2) Manage Risk and 3) Improve Internal Customer Experience. In addition, I also have identified three Social Business Objectives: 1) Finding expertise from all over the organization, 2) Build a unified culture and 3) Get products to market faster.

Then here’s the simple but powerful step – create a chart that shows how these two sets of strategic goals and priorities map to each other. Note that not every social business goal maps back to every business priority – it’s important not to force connections when they aren’t there.

Example: Mapping Social Business Goals to Overall Business Priorities

In the last blog post of this series, we’ll return back to this chart and look at how you would actually measure progress toward these goals. But in the meantime, support your business case for your social business initiatives by bringing in case studies and data, especially those provided by companies like Yammer. So when leadership asks the inevitable “What’s in it for me?” question, you’ll be armed right thought starters and evidence on how an ESN can benefit your business.

Step 3: Create a Strategy Roadmap

The last step of your strategic plan is to create a roadmap – what will you tackle first, second, third? The roadmap will also be a forcing function to prioritize what you will do – because you simply can’t do everything all within the first six months of your deployment, no matter how much you want to it!

Example Social Business Strategy Roadmap

Note that this roadmap goes out for three years in six month increments. This is intentional and it makes you think for the long term about the impact that your initiatives will have on the organization. Granted, your plans three years out will be far less detailed than for the first six months, but the benefit is that it maps back to your original vision and goals (see first step above) of the impact on the business.

At this point, you should have your top-line goals mapped back to business goals, and a roadmap that shows how you are going to achieve them. Now the next step is to ensure that key people in your organization buy into your strategy – which is the subject of the third post in this blog series.