Social Business: Analysis – Part 3B: Company Readiness

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

• Reasons to participate in social business (covered in parts A, B and C)
• Internal considerations
• Debunking myths
• Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into two categories:

1. As-Is and To-Be
2. Company Readiness

Today, we’ll look at a company’s readiness for getting into social business.

There are a number of considerations to take into account for assessing your internal social business readiness:

• Policy Is your communications policy prepared for dealing with social media? If your policy is more geared towards outward communications, then you’ll need to complement it with how to deal with inbound communications. We’ll dig deeper into creating a communications policy as we roll on so you don’t jump in unprepared.
• Change Is your organization able to pool resources from different departments together to engage in social business successfully? Are you able to build a team that consists of people who have different responsibilities and insights, e.g. senior management, marketing, sales, legal, IT?
• Action People are putting their thoughts about you on the social web. Regardless of what they’re saying and where and why they’re saying what they’re saying, the ultimate testament of your social business efforts is in your actions. In short, what are you willing to do with the feedback you’re receiving?
• Time Related to the previous point is the question whether you can devote the time needed to make social business a success. This doesn’t purely refer to the short-term time investment to get things going, but are you able to dedicate a good portion of people’s time to be successful in social business in the long run?

Contrary to the previous post, you do need a resounding “Yes” to the questions above to make the most of social business. As we continue this series, we’ll talk more about inspiring the organizational changes needed.

Next week, we’ll continue the Analysis phase with a fun part on social media myths. Hope to see you then and let the comments flow!