Social Business: Analysis – Part 1: Base-Lining

As announced last week, the Fundamentals series will start to get serious about getting into social business. The first phase of entering social business is the Analysis phase where we look at current position, assessing value and effectiveness as well as caveats and pitfalls.

In this post, we’ll look at base-lining, which is the idea of getting a basic feel of where you and your organization stand in the social media sphere. Base-lining consists of a series of assessments on:

• People;
• Presence;
• Reputation;
• Competition; and
• Company

Let’s walk through each one step-by-step with actions to get you started.

People

Are people—i.e. consumers, employees, vendors et cetera—are embracing and using social media, and which tools are most popular?

• List the people you know who are related to your company or industry.
• Categorize them according to their relationship to your company or industry, e.g. customer, employee or journalist.
• Find out which websites and social media platforms these people visit and use.
• Score these people on the influence/impact they have on company, brand and/or product/service.

Presence

Are you easy to find on the (social) web? If people search for your company, brand, products or services, what will they find?

• List the search engines that are relevant to your business. These may include websites like YouTube, Technorati or Twitter Search. Search for keywords related to your company, brand, products and/or services, and evaluate your position according to your marketing goals/objectives and/or your expectations.
• Create an overview of influential websites—such as review websites, niche blogs or online retailers—that are relevant to your company. Search for mentions of your brand.
• If you already have a social media presence, create an overview of all your social media profiles and their “reach”, e.g. Facebook Page members or Twitter followers.

Reputation

Within the conversations taking place online, is the opinion/sentiment around your brand positive, neutral or negative?

• Create an overview of influential websites—such as review websites, niche blogs or online retailers—that are relevant to your company. Search for mentions of your brand and assess what the tone of the commentary is.
• Search conversations on the websites and social media platforms the people related to your company use. Find out whether you’re being talked about positively, negatively or neutrally.

Competition

How well do you fare compared to your competitors?

• Perform both the Presence and Reputation assessments on your competitors as well.
• List the social media activities of your competitors. Look at where they’re active, what they’re doing, what their level of commitment is, and how they’re being perceived by their fans and (prospective) customers.
• Assess whether your industry as a whole is ahead of the curve, behind it or in the middle when it comes to social business.
• Compare the industry’s scores to your own company’s scores.

Company

How well are you prepared internally to undertake social business?

• What is the value, need and confidence in getting into social business? We’ll talk more about this in Part 2 next week.
• Which obstacles, risks and issues need to be resolved before getting into social business?
• What needs to be done to integrate social into the existing overall marketing and business strategy and activities?
• Which changes do internal communication and collaboration processes need to undergo to facilitate social business?
• Which people are needed and appropriate to champion and participate in social business?

Performing these basic tasks will give you a first feel of what your “going-in position” is for social business, and what you might need to address now or at some point in the future.

Next week, we’ll continue the Analysis phase by looking at how to assess value and effectiveness of social business to your company. Until then, the comments are yours.