By Alex Romanovich, Founder Social2B, CMO – EuroSpaClub International

With all the excitement of 2012 predictions and speculations, we couldn’t help but weigh in with a few observations of our own. After all, we are equally excited about what Year of the Dragon (officially starts on January 23rd, according to Chinese Zodiac Year of 2012) will bring to marketers and technologist alike. The Dragon will undoubtedly make good on the promise of convergence of the three major forces in business: digital media, marketing and technology. Ironically, Michael Porter’s value chain supporting organizations, namely: marketing, information services, legal and human resources, must take the lead in defining and shaping business strategies in 2012.

The two major ‘axis of Enterprise new media’, marketing and technology disciplines, will have the leverage of many investments made in 2011 and the attention of the boardroom. Enterprise ‘spin doctors’ and ‘geeks’ will have to please CEOs and CFOs, as well as their Operational counterparts, delivering the ROI from that leverage, while finding ways to play nicely together under the same roof of ‘social media and cloud computing’. Surprising it may seem, success can only come from focus, simplicity, and collaboration. Marketers can no longer afford to wage go-it-alone campaigns and to rely on agencies, which are clamoring for bigger budgets and opportunities for ‘outsourcing’. The complexity of tools and the amount of high-risk brand exposure call for alliances and internal agreements between pundits in legal, marketing, human resources and technology communities within an Enterprise.

The year of 2012 promises to be the ‘year of more‘, according to Mitch Joel, in his Six Pixels of Separation Blog. Naturally, we hope that marketers and technologists will find ways to cope with less and still make good on the promise of Social Media and Cloud Computing. Here are a few facts and tips for marketers, technologists, legal, and HR professionals to ‘converge, integrate and simplify’ their life in 2012.

1. Tools and Business Process Integration will force alignment and collaboration

Ask any marketer today about how many distinct tools they are using and how much functionality and productivity they are delivering to the company. The answers will vary, but the overall sentiment will be the same: it’s getting more complex and more expensive to manage the environment. CMOs are simply overwhelmed by new technologies, metrics, resources, skills and self-proclaimed ‘digital media experts’. Agencies have the same predicament - they are great at delivering ‘social media monitoring’ reports and breathtaking strategies, but are still limited in activating brand strategies for their clients based on data or ‘creative sentiment’ alone.

Converge: Marketing and IT functions must work together and turn ‘spending’ into ‘lead and revenue activation’ via tools, agreed-to metrics, and a unified business investment justification. As disciplines, marketing and technology have to converge (as equals) and drive the leadership agenda for the business. Or they will face further reductions and in some cases, outsourcing.

Integrate: Marketers and Technologists must find ways to integrate processes and technologies. ‘Marketing platform selection’ or ‘marketing automation process’ cannot be done in a vacuum any longer.

Simplify: If the CEOs and CFOs can’t get it, it will not get done. All the investments in marketing, technologies and resources in 2011 have to amount to bottom line results in 2012. The priority for 2012 should be: get CFOs and CEOs to buy into the new ‘digital and social’ agenda and show results of the 2011 investments by creating easily understood success metrics and integrating them into the traditional ones.

2. Social Media and Cloud Based Tools will dominate, but standards need to be in place

Modern corporate disciplines (marketing, IT, legal, human resources, operations, etc.) are defined by tools, processes and resources. But tools clearly occupy much of our time and human investment, forcing the learning curve cycles. Marketing alone can drive organizations to the brink with tools ranging from office automation, collaboration, and research, to A/B testing, social networking, monitoring and analytics.

Converge: A ‘management coalition’ needs to drive the convergence agenda with standards in place for how information is acquired, used, and delivered, to avoid chaos and spending sprees. Marketing may want to converge ‘marketing and communications’, while IT may want to adopt a ‘cloud computing’ framework and start saving money by moving services into the ‘cloud’. Legal and HR may want to simply take advantage of all the experience, data and platforms available within the Enterprise to streamline their operations and build communities. Talent acquisition platforms can integrate with other ‘social and community building’ platforms with the help of IT and marketing peers.

Integrate: Marketers and technologists (inclusive of operations/sales CRM agenda) need to select integrated solutions (tools) in project management, automation, research, optimization, support, and digital/social marketing.

Simplify: Companies must inventory their tools and process investments to streamline operations. Integration and selection processes will help eliminate most of the excess, if done correctly.

3. Metrics, data and analytics need to drive decision making process

There is enough data and information within the Enterprise today to confuse even the most analytical and experienced management team. Yet, all that data is useless without the agreement of how business success and performance is measured.

Converge: Organizations need to adopt common digital and social media metrics to measure their success in 2012. These metrics need to be understood by the entire C-Level Suite, not just marketers and agencies, or IT gurus and their vendors. A ‘path to bottom line’ has to be clear and further simplified, hence all Enterprise disciplines must converge their metrics and assumptions to present a unified ‘success measurement framework’.

Integrate: Integration of metrics might more difficult, however. Marketing and Sales need to agree on what drives leads and closure of business - traditionally and with new social media campaigns. IT needs to understand how to enable the ‘social Enterprise’ via streamlined platforms, standards, cost measures, deployment of automation tools, and management of data. Analytics and reporting needs to be simplified and tied to bottom line results.

Simplify: Simplicity will be key in defining and tracking ‘social business’ metrics in 2012. Going back to basics, breaking the silos, and eliminating ‘job security’ will be of paramount importance for management teams. Integration of many tools and platforms, or selection of all-encompassing ones will help, but so will the collaboration of decision makers.

4. Agencies, consultants and various ‘vendors’ need to present value and new business models to their clients

Agencies and consultants have to embrace their clients and concentrate on their needs and success metrics, and not on industry trends reports. With that, they need to develop new muscles and capabilities – either through partnerships or home-grown, or risk being replaced or diminished.

Converge: PR, Communications and Marketing agencies need to develop their digital and social muscles. How they do it will depend on their willingness to break their traditional business models and their willingness to invest into additional skills or outside partnerships. Digital Agencies and Advertising Agencies also need to move away from ‘Quarterly or Yearly Reviews’ and develop a more open and transparent relationship with their clients – they have to review themselves on a regular basis to make sure they constantly deliver value to their clients.

Integrate: Integration is key in this particular case – anything from services being delivered to technology skills and analytics skills being acquired. As agencies expand and grow, bringing on new capabilities and partners, they have to delight their clients with new integrated set of services, from social media and digital marketing to creative to platform development. We should expect a few agencies investing into new skills, capabilities and resources to pleasantly surprise their clients, and guard their relationships at the same time.

Simplify: Agencies and consultants will also have a more difficult time simplifying their offerings, as they expand their capabilities. The best approach is to prune their unprofitable business segments and to concentrate on their clients’ business, adding capabilities that will directly benefit their clients. Examples may include lead generation, digital communications, social media (amplification), and design for conversion.

Whether 2012 is promising to be a stellar year of performance and leverage of 2011 investments, or a scrappy year of survival, the Enterprise and the Agency must take notice and converge, integrate and simplify their operations and day to day activity. It is the only prescription for a more measurable and more justifiable execution of 2012.

By Alex Romanovich
Chief Marketing Officer at EuroSpaClub International

Integrated marketing has been the mantra of B2B marketers for many years, as they were busy deploying CRM systems in support of sales and marketing efforts and charting new strategies for integrated care centers and marketing automation. With the advent of social media, the balance of “integration” has shifted. More attention is now devoted to content creation and curation, management, analytics, sentiment analysis, search engine optimization, knowledge sharing, and ways to enlighten customers without the hard-sell approach.

So what’s a B2B marketer to do? Continue to integrate.

Inserting social media into the mix of the existing marketing portfolio requires some planning and consideration—and definitely strategy. Consider the following aspects of integration as you are trying to experiment with social media in a B2B environment:

• Diagnose the impact of social media on your overall marketing basket. Your biggest challenge is to come out of the integration effort with more efficient and effective execution and a faster route to results. The impact of inserting social media into the existing mix may have far-reaching consequences, ranging from impact on content creation and consumption by your customer base, product marketing and development, lead generation, and conversion. Having a good diagnostic exercise will outline your risk and reward areas as well.

• Analyze your social media value chain. If you are a Chief Marketing Officer or a head of marketing, you have a unique opportunity to drive integration throughout the enterprise. The impact of social media as a business process can have immediate impact on branding and the social responsibility grid—as well as bottom line results—as it touches multiple disciplines within an enterprise: human resources, customer service, sales, and even finance. The leadership agenda will now touch on strategies for metrics and measurements, enterprise integration, budget allocation, optimization, logistics, and other aspects of the entire value chain.

• Implement social media training. This is another great opportunity for B2B marketers to integrate training and education into the overall plan. Training has been an afterthought in many organizations but is a vital part in educating the value chain on the impact of emerging trends. The social media impact topics can range from SEO and social media integration, measurement, analytics, methodology, etc. Topics may also include how to hire social media resources and leadership and how to develop and train your teams for a successful outcome.

• Consider social media content management and curation. Content is still king, and leveraging it for successful engagement and conversion is an art form. B2B marketers, especially in the technology and service sectors, have no choice but to engage their audiences with valuable educational content, proving their mettle in a highly competitive environment. This can also enhance their SEO and SEM positions along the way.

• Review tools and management processes. There are a myriad of tools and platforms out there, and they all do different things. How do you decide which ones to invest in and what each will deliver in terms of data, actionable information, etc.? Building a tool reporting architecture is extremely important, as many decisions will be made from the results of those investments. It also gets marketing closer to IT and web analytics for better result discovery and faster decision making. Building an integrated marketing environment with analytics and scalability capabilities is a must for any forward-thinking marketing leader and his or her organization.

As you begin to enter the more advanced stages of integrating social media into the overall marketing mix, build the appropriate infrastructure and environment to capture and improve ROI metrics. It starts with integration and the above steps.

What’s The Biggest Nightmare of CIOs & CTOs Today?

By Ytzik Aranov, Partner, COO, Social2B International, LLC

Historically, a key component of the value chain of every enterprise was the technology department.  It has changed names over the years from Business Equipment, to Computer Department, to Management Information Systems (MIS), to Information Technology (IT), etc., and many companies ended up with a combination of these acronyms / departments.

We also came up with a variety of titles for the chief honcho who ran these departments.  Everything from Managers, to VPs, to CIOs, CTOs, to Directors, etc., all with varying combinations of abbreviations to “specialize” their purview.

Today, we find many organization have developed “justifiable” sister entities with independent heads that are at the same organizational level as the IT Department.  These include Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Technology Officer,, Data Intelligence Officer and various “Intelligence” hybrid divisions, etc., and many more.  Let’s not get wrapped up in the far-out titles like Vice President of Pop Culture, Social Media/Community Superstar, Freelance PR Maestro, Chief Happiness Officer, Systems Wrangler, etc., ok, you get the point.

Understandably, some companies really wish to segregate Intelligence from IT and separate technological innovation from legacy operational systems.  That’s fine; whatever floats the enterprise’s boat, works.

It’s when online activity – in all its various forms – started happening that things really went haywire.  The most common battle fought today in most, well, many, companies, is “Who Owns the Web”.  The Web requires technology, right? Right.  It requires systems, hardware, software and technical expertise, right? Right.  Software? Yup.

So, in the beginnings of online communications and the early days of the Web, everything went through the IT Department.  They had the resources, only they understood the “Soul of the Machine”.  So things went on really well for a while, until GUI’s (graphical user interface) started to become very sophisticated and colorful.  That’s when companies (not the IT departments, mind you) started to realize that the look & feel was just as important as “being there online”.

That’s when they started calling for designers to get involved, then marketers, then advertisers, etc.

To make a long story short, before the CIO knew it, other departments were calling the shots on how the company’s online presence should look and operate.  With the advent of everyday tools to build your own websites, email campaigns and interactive platforms, we are now in “OCG” – Online Creative Gridlock.  The CIO knows that IT owns the Web because they own the hardware, well, sort of, if you forget about Cloud computing, and platform hosting.  The Product Fulfillment people decide when products are ready to post online, so they own the Web too.  Finance decides how to price the products, so they are owners.  While Legal says you cannot use that hot slogan on the website, Marketing is already posting product release pictures all over the web.  Let’s not forget that Sales is already taking orders online and at least 5 different departments are sending our mass emails to the entire company email mailing list!  And companies all over are violating regulatory regulations while doing the above!  Everyone owns the Web.

It’s no wonder that to post the announcement of a new product (no, not the planning, just the online Brand) takes 10 different departments, multiple teams of designers (each department by the way, has their own Web designer), and multiple channels of approval ad different C-levels just to get it launched.  Not to mention changing the color of the price text!

All the above is “BSM” – Before Social Media!  In the Social Media era we now have complete autonomy of each and every department in the organization to plan, design, launch a product, engage customers, makes the sale, support customers, socialize reviews and feedback, destroy a competitor, alienate an industry, violate regulations and say really stupid things to millions of people.  All this without any other department in the organization being involved, on a miniscule budget and with instant results!

This is the nightmare every CIO & CTO has today.  Not to mention that Legal, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc., are also barraged by this chaos.  All of sudden, the company has lost its consistent voice, its homogenous culture, its adherence to process, procedure and principles, and its unique and consistent Brand Image.

The CIO is tasked with the job of ensuring that the enterprise is fully and effectively supported with the computing power sufficient to capture corporate data, convert it to information and deliver intelligence to the organization to act upon it.

Savvy CIOs & CTO’s today understand the partnership they must develop with their Chief Marketing Officer since the CMO is primarily the one tasked with crafting & nurturing the Brand. And it all boils down to the Brand.  The one who owns the Brand, owns the media and the medium.  CIOs need to anticipate their CMO & enterprise’s needs by identifying tools, apps, mobile channels, converters, platforms, etc., that fit within an overall technology architecture for the organization.  Specifically, the CIO must build an “Enterprise Social Architecture” that:

1. Is cross-departmental
2. Is scalable up, down and across the entire organization
3. All components thereof, are measurable
4. All activity, campaigns, etc., are mapped to KPIs and to the enterprise ROI
5. Maps to every value chain component in the enterprise
6. Interacts with the entire Supply Chain & Demand Chain
7. Provides for customized departmental branding
8. Allows the Chairman, the CEO / CFO and most importantly, the CMO, with the power to ensure Brand Integrity & consistent messaging
9. Is wrapped around a platform of processes, procedures, policies and crisis management tools to effectively run the enterprise.

CIO’s that work with their C-level peers – the CMO being the “Brand Guardian” and a key partner – to architect an Enterprise Social Architecture will, in the end, win the battle since they become the Brand Enablers while empowering their CMOs to safeguard and empower the reach of their company Brand.

In the wake of Google+, law firms are being forced to rethink their strategy. Attorneys are already growing a decent following on Facebook and Twitter, sharing the latest in legal news (as well as showing themselves as likable people). Small communities are popping up around such topics as accident injury, food poisoning, and toy recalls. The addition of Google+ gives the legal industry something new to think about.

The early adopters of Google+ will have to work hard to gain the trust of the social community and get into their circles. The best way to do this would be by developing and sharing fresh and exciting content, as well as engaging with others in the public stream.

It doesn’t just take great content. Growing a community in social media requires the careful use of ad words, engagement, and thoughtful design. A professional looking page still goes a long way in today’s competitive market. For an attorney, it’s also important to come across as a likeable person and not just another lawyer.  The occasional non-business status update and genuinely responding to others in the stream will make a lawyer seem more personable.

Sharing content across multiple social platforms will also increase a law firm’s chances of landing a client. It’s already been proven that Facebook users aren’t as likely to be Twitter users. Although, the majority of Twitter users are found to be active on Facebook. Through the use of Twitter chats, Facebook polls, blog posts and now Google+ huddles and sparks… attorneys have multiple ways to share what they have to offer, listen to their potential clients needs, and act accordingly.

However, Google+ isn’t for the casual social media user. It seems to have attracted those who are typically early adopters of technology. So if a law firm is looking to expand its reach in the social media community, being a part of the new platform will show they’re forward thinkers. And the upcoming addition of Google+ for businesses will make the social transition even easier.

Here are some new terms coined by Google+:

Circles:

These are groups sorted according to their relationship to the user. Family, Friends, Clients, and even People Who Annoy Me all have their place in Google+ Circles. Status updates and content sharing can be done publicly or can be limited to specific circles. This comes in handy when you’re talking about that crazy weekend in Vegas.

Sparks:

Sparks are content create based on the users interests. This comes in handy when it comes to sharing relevant content.

Huddles:

A huddle is essentially a group chat messenger. It allows you to communicate with users in various circles.

Hangouts:

Just like it sounds… a hangout is a video chat room for groups. Users can participate via video, voice, or text chat. Content such as a YouTube video can also be shared in a Hangout.

Many specialized industries will be jumping into Google+ in the days and weeks to come. Not only would Law Firms benefit from being so technically savvy… but the medical field and financial divisions would also do well by updating their social media strategies. Take my word for it. Better yet… shoot me a message (KellyL@Social2B.com) or a tweet (@Social2B) and I’ll help to train you or your enterprise for the next phase of your social media marketing. *Photo Credit Aaron Wood on Google+*

You have a Facebook page, a account, a YouTube channel and a blog. You update them regularly and have a growing community on each of the platforms. This community could be much larger if the social profiles were integrated together. Below are some tips on seamlessly integrating your profiles and getting them the readership they deserve.

SEO:

Utilizing relevant search terms isn’t just for blog posts. Using key words tailored for you company are important even in the tweets you put out. Recently, Google announced that it’s search algorythm was adjusted to include social media. Don’t get left behind in the top searches because your company isn’t optimized properly.

Sharing Buttons:

It’s a well known fact that Facebook users aren’t avid Twitter users. By integrating your social profiles, you’re exposing your Facebook and Twitter readers to what’s happening on your blog, website, and YouTube channel. Sharing buttons, links, and portals to your profiles allow your readers to easily share and discover new content.

Press releases and email marketing:

Spread the word about your company and be sure to include all of your social profiles. In all outgoing collateral, include the many ways that your customer can find you online. And… don’t forget email marketing. Looked on by some as “spam”, emarketer recently reported that 95% of 18-25 year olds opt-in to email updates and newsletters.

Social Media Marketing doesn’t exist without some form of integration. Whether you are integrating your social media effort inside of a large organization or an independent marketer, there are a plethora of new tools to help you efficiently integrate social media based on the demands of their clients and partners. If you are a small business or a start up, don’t be left out – many of the tactics and strategies that apply in the Fortune 1000 world can just as easily be implemented by you.

Now get out there and share what you’re made of!

Kelly Loubet is the Director of Social Community Marketing at Social2B. She’s a believer in community building and using social media for good. Kelly is a mom, a writer, and a speaker. Follow her @Social2B and on her personal account @childhood. To read more of her writing, check out EverydayChildhood.com.

You have a new follower on Twitter! Great! You’re expanding your readership and increasing your  online influence. Now what? How do you retain  Twitter followers once they’ve clicked “follow”? Many  new followers click “follow” and that’s the end of  them. There’s no engagement… no involvement  whatsoever.

New followers bring a new relationship and like any new relationship, it will need cultivating. Developing personal relationships with your followers will create a loyal community. Of course having a one on one conversation with each of your followers everyday isn’t feasible, but it is important to set aside a portion of your day each day to converse with some of them.

First, see who’s speaking to you. Check your @’s and respond to them accordingly. Taking time to respond to those who took the time to reach out to you will go a long way in your community building efforts.

Second, be a source of knowledge. Answer questions and be a helpful member of the Twitter community. If you show knowledge on your topic, your followers will continually come to you for answers. Beyond answering questions, share your insight. Sharing insight on your products and services in a helpful way, makes you an expert in your field. I didn’t say “the” expert, but an expert. And there’s something to say for a knowledgeable representative. Use your expertise as a way to educate and your follows will appreciate it.

Give back. Showing that your company is community-minded is a great way to get the backing of your social media followers. Find a like-minded charity and throw your support behind them. Get your followers involved by doing a fundraiser. Perhaps a portion of your sales will go to charity. Design a campaign that fits your brand and implement it as you would any promotion. Giving back will create new cause-minded followers and bring existing followers in closer.

Have a giveaway! I’m not big on giveaways… but doing one every once in a while is a fun and exciting way to keep your followers engaged. The giveaway doesn’t even need to be related to your product or service, but could be the hottest new gadget. A giveaway like this will draw attention. One of the most interesting contests I’ve seen, involved a picture of a jar of coins and bills. Each day, the brand gave a clue as to how much money was in the jar. Followers tweeted in their guesses until finally, someone guessed right on the nose. They won the jar of money (which ended up being a couple thousand dollars). I thought it was such a creative way to keep readers coming back.

Lastly, don’t make it all about you. Share articles and insights from others in related fields. This might sound like you’re shooting yourself in the foot, but really, you’re saying that you respect and agree with the opinions of others. Sharing information from others in your field also shows that you’re up to date on the  latest techniques. A company this isn’t afraid to share information from others will gain the respect of their competitors. It also shows confidence to your readers.

Everyone knows that clicking the “like” button on a company’s Facebook page shows that company is increasing its fan base. But what happens after the click? For me… it’s often just that. A click. I’m sure that I’m not alone. So how do brands turn a simple click into loyal relationship with consumers?

It all starts with engagement. If a brand can engage its audience… they’re on the right track. Being able to excite the fan base and get them to act is key in building a Facebook community. In order to get them to act, there must be an exciting call to action. Contests, polls, and general questions encourage a sense of community. They’ve already acknowledged that they like the brand, now’s their chance to share their opinion.

In addition to a call to action, in order to engage the audience, a brand must also put out worthwhile content. Posts that both inform and entertain readers are a must. So many brands today are just putting out fluff pieces. Sure, these pieces of content keep their page fresh, but audiences want something more. They want something they can relate to. A well written post can be shared again and again across Facebook by loyal community members. Give them something worth sharing.

Finally, loyal community members want to be rewarded. Companies that find a way to give back to their fans have a much more activity on their pages than brands who don’t engage. A simple “thank you” to fans when a certain milestone has been reached can go a long way.

“Thank you to all our readers who helped us reach 10,000. We couldn’t have done it without you and your input.”

A message like this will prompt those who have been around from the beginning to comment and be proud of the community they helped to build. Beyond words of thanks, giveaways are a nice way to show your community you’re happy to have them around. Brands might also consider a charity drive. Giving back always builds a sense of gratitude in people. Nothing builds community more than giving.

These are just some simple ideas that could be easily implemented with a dedicated team. Without a team willing to put the time in to keep the conversations going… it’s not going to work. Facebook is about people. It’s about relationships. No relationship grows without some cultivation. If your brand is looking to step up your Facebook efforts, be sure you have the proper team in place. Soon enough, your Facebook community will be going beyond the “like”.

By Ytzik Aranov, Managing Partner, Social2B

For those of you who’ve been through business school lectures on Michael Porter’s Value Chain Analysis this doesn’t come as news to you.  But when asked to implement social media practices, policies, platforms, tools, etc., in today’s corporation or enterprise, we throw out all of what we learned that makes the enterprise tick and elect to “surf” it through!

Attention – and I quote:

“Social Media (in the Enterprise) is a Business Process, not a channel, department, or vertical silo”.

End quote.

You heard it here!  Think about it.  Social media touches upon every department, every business process, every channel, every prospect / customer interaction, every investor, every supplier, in short, it touches the entire organization.

In today’s marketplace, social media and an enterprise’s’ online brand architecture and social media footprint is arguably, the most important business process affecting the entire Enterprise Value Chain.  Poor implementation of a solid online & social media platform strategy & tactics directly impacts a company’s ability to market, sell and extend its brand reach, globally.  Failure to effectively implement an integrated social media strategy & tactics across the entire Value Chain could potentially lead to lower revenues (read, shareholder value), slippage in market share, increased financial exposure, risk, and more

One of the most effective measurement techniques to measure enterprise social media effectiveness, both pre- and post-implementation, is to diagnose the “Social Media Maturity Index” (see graphic), which establishes a recognizable industry-specific metric with which to assess the social media value, influence, depth, and footprint of an enterprise’s value chain components – combining both departments and business processes.  Moreover, the social media maturity Index in its very essence is a barometer of how the value chain is capable of moving at the speed of (digital & social) business today.

So, when looking for added revenue stream, cost savings, internal value, constraints, and external interfaces with the world, then social media maturity acutely identifies the lack of, or plethora, of business excellence in sync with today’s pace of commerce.

OK, skeptics, How do we drill down into the Enterprise Value Chain and establish Social Value Chain Maturity & Scalability? Let’s break it apart into pieces.  Look at the following chart that defines touch points throughout selected departments throughout the enterprise, and their social media impacts.

The same goes for every other vertical silo, and, every business processes.  Each and every business process running across – horizontally – the enterprise has multiple social media touch points.

Social media maturity, coupled with an integrated online, SEO, SEM and Social Community Marketing strategy replaces one-way communication with dialogue. Participation by customers, suppliers, employees, the industry, the market, etc., and feedback from them all (!), must be listened to because it has the power to make or break your enterprise or enterprise function.  Social media tools allow us to observe the conversations, measure, monitor, track and quantify the online & social media reach and influence. It allows us to assess and re-assess the correct strategy & tactics from the bottom up to increase revenues, open new markets, capture greater market share, lower costs and in general, improve the bottom-line ROI.

So, what about ROI?

If done right — and you’ll have to come back for a later post on this subject — the Social Media Maturity Index is then mapped by those of you honored to be the “Keeper of the Social Keys” in the enterprise, to any existing enterprise Balanced Scorecard KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in use by the Executive suite (read CFO), in order to assess true ROI, Economic Value & shareholder value. And, by the way, to justify shifting dollars from traditional advertising / marketing into your online / social media marketing budget.

In Summary:

The value in executing a Social Media Maturity Index exercise, as the very first step prior to embarking on that “Journey to the Edge of the Social World”, includes, but by no means is limited to:

• Creating a more aligned and more cohesive internal organization (whether vertical silo or horizontal business process) involved with social media and its offshoots;
• Developing a cross-enterprise social media policy – let me guess, you’re thinking about it, while hundreds of employees across the value chain are uncontrollably blogging & Tweeting about the company without any filters – to manage the social media impact;
• Channeling the endless volume of Content across the enterprise that is not “curated”, re-purposed or managed effectively throughout the enterprise, thereby losing SEO and ranking power;
• Implementing a solid, instantaneous, Reputation Management process – what’s that? – more on that in another post …;
• Hiring – training – more targeted and experienced human resources to effectively channel the enterprise’s social media assets and better utilization of current ones;
• Mapping out a better-defined path to enterprise success by assessing the maturity of the organization and its readiness to embrace a new channel (SM) affecting the entire value chain – from customer service to distributor relations to marketing;
• Establishing a quantifiable and actionable ROI – well, we know what that means (Return-On-Ignoring, Return-on-I (me!), etc. – in short, how we justify the extra capital needed to implement targeted social media campaigns to accelerate products or services sales.

The Social Media Maturity Index provides an immediate snapshot of where every Value Chain component of the organization is today is with respect to social media & market acceleration and what can be expected in terms of performance based on the overall social media maturity of the enterprise. It also maps out where each Value Chain component is lacking and what can be done to accelerate it and better sync it to the other Value Chain components thereby creating a powerhouse enterprise that socially rocks!

By Kelly Loubet – Social2B Director of Social Community Marketing

Talk to any social media consultant or social media expert and they’ll say this: If any company wants its social media marketing plan to go farther, faster, they can’t ignore the power of social media integration.

Social media integration is the syncing of all social media profiles on various social media platforms and aligning their functionality with that of a company’s main website.

Using the social media platforms that are right for a business can have a positive effect on traffic for their website. Installing sharing tools will allow a visitor to share what they’re reading with others via social networking. Not only is social media promotion the fastest way to spread a brand’s message but it also gives the customers a voice.

Social media allows customers to give instant feedback on products and services. They become a part of the social branding of a company. This is where some companies fail. If a brand isn’t responding to its engaged consumers, they lose valuable advocacy and break spread of the brand’s message. The branding can quickly go from “The company that cares” to “The company that doesn’t listen”.

It’s what we call the creation of a social value chain that enriches the brand and business growth.  Social media integration ensures that genuine interest is sparked by real people around a brand. Building a community of repeat customers will help a brand gain in social finance and create a credible social name among consumers in general.

Whether it’s social media for small business or a large B2B social media marketing campaign, companies should integrate social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to their websites. This allows customers to share content and help to spread the word about promotions across all social media platforms. Social media integration is the stuff that successful social media marketing campaigns are made of!

By Suzanne Nagy, Social2B Social Media   Coordinator

Social media is changing the way small businesses communicate with customers and market products and services. Social media gives small business owners the opportunity to access online communities that reach expansive groups of people on a personal level.

Selling your Products to an Online Community

Tips for Using Social Media for Lead Generation

Scaling Your Social Media Marketing Efforts