It’s probably since the very moment I started focusing my attention on Enterprise 2.0 that I wanted to understand how it might have worked a company where formal and informal exchanges supported each other, where communities were eventually integrated into processes, where knowledge assets could be accessed, used and constantly renewed through the participation of  all the actors involved. Not so much a world entirely made of 2.0 but more one in which social is seen as a mean to accelerate the achievement of those same goals companies have always imposed to themselves.

Over the years, this curiosity, evidently shared by many other observers and organizations, has resulted in a substantial convergence of employee participation (Enterprise 2.0), customer engagement ( Social CRM ) and open innovation under the common umbrella of Social Business. Nevertheless, beyond the high-level view and roadmap , up to now a series of obstacles and strategic myopia have severely slowed down the adoption of mechanisms oriented to co-create value through the boundaries of the enterprise.

From a business, organizational, technological perspective, companies have particularly struggled to

• Business: to frame social in a way that was understandable to senior management and could give business results
• Adoption: to ensure the attainment of a critical mass of participation needed to achieve the return on investment
• Technology: to reposition existing enterprise systems and services within the new paradigm
• Strategy: to understand, from an organizational and a workflow point of view, how to put together communities for customers, communities for employees and partners, encoded processes

In fact, these questions are largely manifestations of a difficulty perfectly explained by my friend Laurie Buczek of Intel’s “The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business“:

The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow…

The foundation for which enterprises are building their social collaborative house is cracked.  If you add more layers, the fissures widen. If you don’t provide the “easy button” with integrated tools that are “just there” in your workflow, adoption will not cross the chasm. Culture will not change.  Enterprise 2.0 social business becomes the bad sequel to Knowledge Management.

In other terms we have finally figured out that there is no Enterprise 2.0 without the enterprise. There is no social business without business.

The same idea of putting collaboration within the context of everyday work had been in fact already proposed in 2007 by Michael Idinopulos in his In the Flow and Above the Flow post, several times by Sameer Patel, in a very comprehensive way by Nenshad Bardoliwalla and more recently by Andrew McAfee. As candidly admitted by Laurie, nonetheless the same Enterprise 2.0 pioneers haven’t been able to build on this idea of integration. Even socializing as a single process (such as Social CRM or Social Product Development) doesn’t necessarily contribute to an overall view of evolution of the extended chain value.

However, with the recently concluded Dreamforce 2011 (here you can read many good ideas again from Sameer) in my opinion something changed. From a vertical focus on single processes, we are finally starting to spend time socializing the entire business ecosystem.

How to proceed in this mission? To socialize the business, you cannot start from social. You must first visualize the fundamental constructs on which each company is based. Reusing the value chain of Michael Porter and Neshad post, I tried to summarize some of the main processes that govern the existence of a business in the diagram below going from partners identification and selection, the creation, promotion and sale of products, up to support and customer relationships:

In other words, every company creates value by:

• involving partners, suppliers, employees and customers inside, outside and across enterprise boundaris (extended ecosystem)
• facing a series of horizontal phases (supplier management, product design, sourcing of materials, manufacturing, logistics, marketing, sales, customer service, customer relationships)
• carrying out primary processes cutting across the phases (CRM, product development, management of suppliers and raw materials, marketing leads and deals generation, support, etc.) and support processes (such as HR management, technology services and infrastructure, costs control)

Socializing a business then means socializing the basic constructs, namely the processes that make it possible for a company to run around the individuals that constitute it.

How can collaboration, information flows, active participation of all stakeholders be applied in a timely, coordinated and integrated manner to the entire extended value chain?

In my opinion this is the way:

There are 4 stages of socialization of the value chain:

1. Isolated and above-the-flow communities (of employees or customers). This is often the starting point for any company that begins to experiment the participation of customers, employees and other stakeholders through communities born bottom-up or in any case not explicitly connected to existing workflows. The initial investment is low, there is no integration, but the project frequently struggles to reach a critical mass of adoption and tangible returns are very difficult to measure. Almost all vendors of enterprise social software (Jive, Telligent, Yammer, NewsGator, Socialtext, etc.) have started from here.
2. Above-the-flow communities in support of a traditional process. The next step is to recognize the complementarity of processes and communities by enhancing an existing workflow (that remains unmodified) with social tools to capture exceptions to the process, not codified informal exchanges, the tacit knowledge needed to run the process. Structured and unstructured work are still not integrated, but only loosely joined (this approach was also covered by Cecil Dijoux). Returns become more tangible since you can go through the process to measure the benefits but users suffer the hassle of having to switch context to get their job done (traditional process) and collaborate (above-the-flow community). Adoption is at risk. After an initial scarce interest towards enterprise systems, the leaders of social software are all developing connectors, adapters and other mechanisms to integrate with document management systems, CRMs and other services that supports traditional flows.
3. Socialized process. In order to ensure user adoption, traditional process and collaboration have to come together by providing a single place where work is performed. Comments, posts, status updates, documents created in a group setting are finally placed back in the flow of work, just becoming additional features of the old system. The process itself is now social and it integrates with internal and external communities (eg support communities for customer care, product communities for CRM). Even if socialized, processes still remain silos, social silos supported by technological solutions that do not talk to each other. We will have a vendor for Social CRM, a vendor for the Social PLM (see Jim Brown’s post), a vendor for HR 2.0. This third stage is started already and it is at the center of the new value proposition of Oracle WebCenter, though will take many years to be fully accomplished.
4. Integration of socialized processes. Dreamforce and the vision proposed by Salesforce are here to show that you can do much better than creating a myriad of siloed socialized processes. By providing a set of common services (collaboration to be used for evolving traditional applications, unified management of identities, a mechanism for integrated social and transactional business intelligence, activity streams as a layer to collect updates from every disparate system and makes them the social object of collaboration throughout the enterprise) not only participation falls in context, where it can really affect and ensure consistent returns, but all the processes start to produce status updates that mingle into a single stream (see Tibbr of Tibco, Salesforce Chatter, to a large extent the idea behind new Oracle WebCenter-based social network). Thanks to this stream individuals can stay up to date in real time with everything happens inside the company and, above all, they can work together in context of those events (i.e. commenting, adding information, launching a video call). This also includes providing feedback that goes back bidirectionally to the original process (i.e. you are allowed to change the status of a commercial opportunity stored in the Sales Force Automation system without leaving the stream). In very simplified terms, Force.com is a cloud based platform that allows independent entities to build their own applications, add social capabilities chosen from a standard set and automatically benefit from the integration layer represented by Chatter (see for example what specialized vendors such as Workday, Kenandy, Infor, Concur are proposing).

Conclusions

I rarely cover technology in this blog. Even this time, much beyond the technical solutions now available to pragmatically implement a social business scenario, what I want to emphasize is the long-term vision that is becoming increasingly clear.

Blindly introducing additional communities and social networks within your company is not sufficient to increase social business maturity. In order to avoid lack of adoption or the construction of silos, although social ones, businesses need to enable the participation of their employees, customers, suppliers and partners directly into the flow of existing processes.

These processes will have to evolve according to Enterprise 2.0 principles by internally incorporating collaborative spaces and by contributing to an integration puzzle in which all interactions and updates will be visible and usable both way to produce value for the individual and even more for the entire company.

Much more than on vertical solutions or their socialization, the future of social business will be fought on the ability to build a comprehensive participation ecosystem enabled by efficient common services and components that are finally able to talk in a distributed and flexible way.

Web 2.0? Enterprise 2.0? Social Business? The simple truth is that companies don’t care about such buzzwords or about the same concepts behind them. For any manager in any field, the only important issue is how to find new levers to accelerate his / her career and help the company to be more profitable.

For this reason, perhaps the right question is: how can social be declined in my context (specific sector, geographic region, culture, national peculiarities, structure of the supply chain, etc.) allowing me to achieve such goals? While still understanding some general principles, I believe that to answer similar questions it is today necessary to dive into and understand peculiarities of the individual areas in which we move. A good example is the pharmaceutical industry.

Working with companies in the Pharma, you’ll notice immediately the resistance and fear of managers to social media causing a significant delay compared to non-regulated industries such as technology and communications but also a certain sense of inertia: it seems in Pharma it’is impossible to do more and no one else is doing more. But is that really the truth?

The starting point for these thoughts has been provided to me  by an upcoming I wrote together with Emanuele Scotti for AboutPharma. The overall idea was taking a picture about the level of adoption and best practices of social in the drug ecosystem. The result? So many ideas you that couldn’t find space in article. Here are then some additional points that you could find valuable.

The pharmaceutical sector is not immune to the social pressure caused by communities, social networking and other 2.0 tools. This is causing a sudden and surprising change in the behavior of all actors involved: drug companies, physicians and other providers, patients. Some numbers:

• Patients are looking for the first time at social media as a credible and open access source to learn about their health. In the U.S. 80% of surfers are looking online for information on diseases and treatments, in 34% of cases based on content generated by other users, with up to a quarter of them willing to learn more about doctors, hospitals, drugs and therapies. While not experts, 70% of surfers evaluates as credible the content generated by their peers. The same thing happens in Europe where 9 out of 10 surfers (150 million people) use the Web not only to get informed but also to assess recommendations given by their doctor
• If this is a matter of health for patients, it is also a business lever for doctors. In America, 89% considers the Internet essential to improve the medical practice, 84% looks for information on drugs and 71% takes part to social networks reserved to physicians. European colleagues are spending on average almost a day a week on digital tools and in 81% of cases Internet is seen as an indispensable source for their professional learning (Manhattan Research 2009 and 2010)
• Pharmaceutical companies and medical facilities have sensed the opportunity. To get an idea just consult the wiki social initiative continuously updated by Dose of Digital with dozens of YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and dedicated communities.

More than a thousand numbers, perhaps hundreds of platforms and initiatives can give an idea about how the pharma ecosystem is changing in any country:

• To cope with a lack of clarity and a certain difficulty to communicate with medical and health facilities, community support have exploded among patients thanks to horizontal communities such as PatientsLikeMe, Heal, AskaPatient, Patientsville, Medpedia (also open to professionals ), vertical interaction spaces on cystic fibrosis, depression, cancer, obesity, diabetes, epilepsy, ADHD , multiple sclerosis, services for verifying treatment received such as eHealthme, MediGuard, eDrugSearch, PrescriptionDrug-Info or for assessing the quality of service such as HealthGrades, FindaDoc, RateMDs.

• Un almost unlimited list of networks is also reserved to physicians in Europe and the United States again with an approach that crosses disciplines such as in the case of Sermo, Doc2Doc, Physician Connect, Coliquio, Doctors.net, DocCheck Faces and Esanum (active in Italy as well), Ozmosis or focused on individual specialties such as cardiology, ophthalmology, dermatology, cardiothoracic surgery, orthopedics, obstetrics and gynecology, spine surgery

• Albeit with some difficulties to comply with regulatory constraints still unclear, pharmaceutical and health care facilities are wondering how to ride this wave of participation. Some communities are more or less explicitly related to a product as in the case of AlliCircles for GSK’s Alli or PKU.com for BioMarine’s Kuvan. More often the focus is a specific pathology: CFVoice for cystic fibrosis promoted by Novartis, ChildrenWithDiabetes to support childhood diabetes acquired by Johnson & Johnson, Earth CML for chronic myeloid leukemia sponsored by Novartis, DepNet on depression launched by Lundbeck in Denmark, HearingJourney on auditory systems sponsored by AdvanceBionics, AdvanceBreastCancer to improve the lives of patients with breast cancer by Brystol-Myers Squibb, HowIFightMS , Gateway MS and MS Village, with blogs and communities on multiple sclerosis. Finally we have to cite tens of blogs, Facebook pages, YouTube channels and Twitter accounts such as Johnson & Johnson (J &J BTW, Kilmer House, ADHD Moms, Twitter), GlaxoSmithKline (@ GSKUS), Novartis (Facebook and Twitter), AstraZenecaUS (Symbicort YouTube Channel), Roche (@ Roche_com), Boehringer Ingelheim (Boehringer @ and Facebook).

Beyond examples, the question is what is really happening with the spread of social media and what role can play pharmaceutical companies play in this new environment?

Among many reports, some not trivial answers can be found in the EPG Health Media research 2010:

• Pharmaceutical companies are more active in social media (78%) than physicians (53%) or patients (58%). Their desire to use social media to reach and affect the whole health ecosystem is anyway not reciprocal.
• That’s why doctors and health professinals want to interact primarily with each other, much less with patients and pharmaceutical companies
• Also patients would like a wider access to doctors instead of just talking with companies or other patients. Although 65% of physicians and 70% of patients state that it is important to use social media to get in touch with each other, this rarely occurs due to lack of proper channels

• While Internet use by operators is growing, publications (98%), conferences (95%) and colleagues (97%) still affect physicians more than social media
• Although the Internet is the primary source of information for patients, the level of trust in online conversations is the lowest of all media (0% complete confidence, 19% a good confidence level compared to 37.8% of confidence with friends).

Conclusions

Social media is scaring in a heavily regulated industry as Pharma for some good reasons: the management of adverse events, respecting fair balance, off-label discussions on the use of drugs, loss of control and reputation damage of the brand, unclear rules (The FDA has yet to issue guidelines that are just been released in the UK).

Beyond the many points to be managed carefully, however, it is a fact that more than half (51%) of businesses already include Web 2.0 in their marketing mix, although spending online less than 5% of the budget at this point. In 2011 this budget is expected to grow in 57% of cases and the numbers will get probably higher once guidelines will get issued in other countries.

If social media in Pharma is not destined to disappear, we have no other option than better understanding how to capitalize on existing and future investment / effort. To do this, pharmaceutical companies have to start from the following:

• Patients are in control, not pharmaceutical companies. The rules have changed because in social media it’s people dictating the conditions under which the exchange takes place. Unfortunately pharmaceutical companies cannot force doctors and patients to interact with them, nor can they control who participates in online conversations, the themes of these exchanges or channels in which they occur
• Pharma companies can still make a difference enabling the right conversations. Giving up control can open the door to new channels in which patients and patients, doctors and doctors, but especially patients and physicians are able to get in touch
• Adding trust. Besides the creation of new channels, the entire Pharma sector has the responsibility and opportunity to act as a trusted intermediary, capable of enriching conversations with reliable information in a transparent manner because this information is based on research. This need is very strong online and addressing it would help drug producers to get back some respect and to build a new relationship with patients.
• A new way to promote your product. Influencing purchasing and prescriptions is still possible in social media times, but it should be done in a more sophisticated way. As it is already happening with B2B, given the dramatic drop in consumer confidence in companies and institutions, what more generally patients ask to multinational Pharma companies is simply to be useful by providing a decisive contribution in improving medical practice and individuals’ quality of life.

Given the different regulation that exists in Italy allowing marketeers to only use advertising for OTC drugs but not for those requiring medical prescription, which are the most interesting case studies of social in Pharma in our country?

As some have correctly pointed out commenting on the recent post on Social Business, despite the potential of the path that more and more organizations have undertaken, the complexity of this ongoing change should not be underestimated. While not claiming to already have all the answers, I will share some reflections on the possible direction I see ahead.

Let’s go back to unified Social CRM process and to the experience continuum (inspired by Esteban Kolsky ), which represents a concise overview of the former:

Now superimpose on this model my definition of Social Business. In the last paragraph we said that:

In a nutshell … a Social Business is a company that consciously decides to gain an osmotic relationship with its environment and that is able to constantly recalibrate itself based on the stimuli intercepted.

Social CRM / Business Social exist only if there are mechanisms to systematically intercept signals from the customers (and the entire ecosystem) and turn them into better products and processes, ensuring that new experiences are more responsive to customer expectations (and the entire ecosystem’s expectations).

The obvious question then is: how an organization conceptually and operationally can intercept, understand, process and transform external signals into a seamless mechanism to improve both processes and outcomes? Combining Social CRM and Adaptive Case Management.

Building on what Laurence Buchanan of Capgemini recently shared (here you can find his post and picture), I have prepared the following diagram (click to enlarge):

What does it mean?

• The model relies on three phases of use of external signals: conversations, insights and actions. Leveraging on tools to interact and listen to conversations within community of users, then on their analysis and classification in order to extract indications aimed to drive actions and finally adaptive approaches and emerging trends in internal processes, informal exchanges constantly stimulate the improvement of products and services
• Filtering and understanding conversations. Interactions between users are filtered and processed in three steps: through the answers from other users, through a sentiment analysis, through a context analysis. Once you have enabled pull (bottom-up, emergent) dynamics in a community, the same members will be able to help and provide answers to their peers. In these cases, the company typically limits itself to observe and learn. Sometimes the conversations (eg, malfunctions, failures, criticism but also positive feedbacks)  require some synchronous or asynchronous reaction by the brand.  When this happens, the sentiment analysis tries to separate the “good talk” from the “ill speak”, while semantic analysis attempts to reconstruct the meaning in order to classify the message (eliminating false positives, separating different meanings and to define the profile author) for future use. All interactions, regardless of the channel, are basically mapped to the user profile in the CRM.
• From conversations to insights. Through the filtering, each individual message is placed in context in terms of the weight of its author (relevance), the extent of his network (reach), the number of times that similar messages were recorded (frequency), the potential impact it can have on the business (here is a manual tagging). These and other parameters are used to define business rules. For example, if the message is negative, it has a low frequency and the author is an influencer (high importance and high reach) then you must respond quickly. Who is in charge of that? it depends on the topics that emerged during the analysis. If this is a problem with the service, the it will be sent to customer care. The segmentation of the author and the quality of the message help to optimize the effort, putting in place different SLAs (service level agreements) for different targets.
• From insights to continuous improvement. Beyond the individual actions that can be implemented through business rules, there are two major areas of response: The pseudo-manual 1-to-1 response and the potential improvement of the process. In the reactive response, that should be anyway supported by internal communities / knowledge bases and always stored inside the CRM, a company representative investigates the case at hand and provides an individual response to the client. The response is made as much as possible visible to other customers but it does not cause impacts on the inner workings of the company. When a particular business rule (eg. a trigger on the frequency and impact of a problem, even in the face of little relevance and reach of the author) brings to light areas where products and services must be reviewed, what the company needs is a real evolution of the internal processes. In this domain of intensively knowledge based flows, variable human actors, hardly predictable actions  (Barely Repeatable Processes), rather than processes we are facing a “template of action” guided by specific objectives and deliverables. Eg. after 100 reports about a not enough easy to use online service, you may want to act and change the service or after 1000 reports on the lack of responsiveness to phone calls, you may want to revise the organization. This is the realm of  Adaptive Case Management , an approach aimed at enabling business users to design their own (without involving developers, web services, IT)  templates of actions (the cases) during their normal activities. The system automatically brings out improvements in case management, starting from use not from upfront design. The Adaptive Case Management is a very interesting domain that bridges the gap between structured processes and the optimization of knowledge work. I’ll write again about Its importance and the difference with BPM in the near future.
• From adaptive improvement to the optimization of core processes. Finally, in some cases, the improvement involves one of the central processes that automate the operations of the business, such as the provisioning of a service, the production of furniture involving partners, suppliers and employees. Here Adaptive Case Management still allows you to investigate the problem in a more structured manner, identifying the right solution and then launching a review of traditional mechanisms in BPM. Separating the emergent level from the strictly procedural top-down approach allows you to provide more flexibility for individuals but especially more responsiveness and lower costs to the company, given that putting your hands on BPM is a bit like developing a new application with all the steps and time needed for requirements analysis, design, development, testing, etc..

To recap this long post it is interesting to note that, although the technological support is not the only or even the major issue to be addressed here, there are already tools to implement all of this (although there is no single solution at the moment). Tracing the flow, in addition to the classic BPM and CRM tools we have:

• Community tools (Jive, Telligent, Bluekiwi, Lithium, etc)
• Social media monitoring and sentiment analysis tools ( Radian6 , Sysomos , Attensity360 , etc)
• Tools for Social analytics as Attensity Analyze
• Adaptive Solutions Case Management as Papyrus Adaptive Case Management or Thingamy

What do you think?

Coming back from the Social CRM Strategies Seminar, I had time to reorder my thoughts and write down some of the ideas gathered over two days in London. I think I brought back something strong, relevant and new, at least to me.

Why companies should look carefully at Social CRM and Social Business? What kind of contribution can they make to the business?

In much of the material recently published on the topic, the answers range from participating in conversations, to preside over the new channels, to better understand the desires of the public, to build growing groups of ambassadors willing to promote brands and product, engaging users to collect ideas and suggestions. All these objectives are not only legitimate but even desirable when the company is exposed in social media. To me, none of them do anyway represent the deepest meaning of Social Business or Social CRM.

I started talking about the different phases of how organizations approach social media in the previous post Social Business Maturity Model. Within the various aspects, the model seeks to emphasize how Social CRM itself, the most hyped topic of the moment, is a central but still a temporary step on a longer and more complex shift in business paradigms. A shift toward the Social Buiness.

What is then a social business? A Social Business is to me

“An organization that has put in place the strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value”

Where is the focus in this definition? Some messages are to be underlined:

• The historical Manichaean separation between the inside and the outside environments of a company is loosing importance and with it the privileged role for those ideas and decisions that the organization pushes to the market (inside-out) compared to the reversed flow of indications that from the market reach into the company (outside-in). The flow is now effectively becoming realtime and two-way
• The decision making and change management role inside companies is no longer restricted to managers (traditional organization) or to customers (as prescribed by Social CRM). Other than managers, organizational change can be driven equally by customers, employees, partners and suppliers. All these categories are moving from supporting actors to partners and protagonists
• It’s engagement not communication that makes the internal/external flow possibile. Getting individuals engaged means accepting a variety of needs and using those needs to inform the organizational growth and evolution
• The ultimate reason of existence for the corporation is no longer to generate value for its traditional stakeholders but the maximize the exchanged value between the company and the entire ecosystem. It’s a bit like the group of stakeholders had suddenly expanded including external actors. Even with this new twist, It should be noted how this exchange is intended to amplify, within a network perspective and thanks to the ecosystem, also the value generated for the old stakeholders.The Social Business is thus an organizational construct aimed to make the company more efficient under mutated market dynamics and consumer behaviors.

In other words, there is no social business if the organization is not able to:

1. Consider individuals (inside and outside it) at the same level as traditional stakeholders. The company is serving the individual.
2. Bring down the silos and boundaries to constantly intercept the signals coming from the people (inside and outside it). The company listens.
3. Engage all the constituents to produce an effective, reactive, coordinated, transparent, appropriate response to the stimuli received, regardless of the channel of origin. The company responds.
4. Extract meaning from the captured signals (coming both from inside and outside) in order to continuously improve the working mechanisms and thereby maximize the benefits for all parties involved. The company learns and evolves.
5. All the processes are dynamically and organically optimized based on collected feedbacks and in line with the experience of all the individuals in the ecosystem. The company becomes social

In most projects related to social media that I know of, the action is mostly responsive. The company has moved its barycenter (phase 1), it has started listening (step 2) and it is structured to respond at some extent (step 3). The company, however, does not yet see social media as part of a learning or improvement process and even less as a social evolution of its culture,d ynamics of participation and workflows. In short, social media are juxtaposed on a company that is and remains 1.0.

On the contrary, the deepest contribution Social Business brings to the table is not limited to reacting. A social business, instead, converts both the signals (unlike the Social CRM) coming from employees and those coming from external actors into actionable insights, i.e operational guidelines for process improvement in a continuum of experience. In this regard, steps 4 and 5 are the keystone of the whole process and also the most complex to implement.

In a nutshell then, a Social Business is a company that consciously decides to develop an osmotic relationship with its environment and that is able to constantly re-calibrate itself with respect to the stimuli intercepted.

How to achieve, at least conceptually, this behavior is of course an entirely different story. I will come back to some of the pieces needed in future posts. Meanwhile, I’d like to know what you think of my Social Business definition and of the direction shown.

Would you like to know what works best when you finally decide to use social channels to improve your customer service? Perhaps it is too early to say and certainties are hard to find at this stage but some best practices are starting to emerge at the benefit of those companies that have the wisdom to listen.

Some very meaningful indications have been recently shared in The Social Customer Index put together by Brent Leary , one of the world’s leading experts in the Social CRM field, even more when you are turning your attention to SMEs. The research has been conducted in June on the online community associated to The Social Customer website as part of a series of surveys that will be repeated every quarter in order to better understand the most effective strategies to extend the CRM leveraging the new opportunities offered by the web.

The sample of 118 respondents, although not statistically significant, included both small and large companies in a variety of sectors and geographies and provided a number of relevant trends to watch:

• In general, social networks facilitate the achievement of customer service. Going directly to the meat: 60% of the answers show a positive impact, 35% no noteworthy result and only 5% a negative one

• Results are correlated to the maturity of the initiative. As expected, the majority of firms in the sample began to support its customers through Web 2.0 just one year ago. However there is a correlation between the maturity of the project and the impact of social media in achieving support objectives. If only 18% of the total sample had already launched the initiative two years, between those who see positive or very positive outcomes that level of maturity jumps respectively to the 53% and the 64% of the cases.

• You need support specialists to succeed. 62% of companies have 1-5 people dedicated to Social Support, while 17% do not have any resource allocated to the project. If we limit ourselves to those who have seen a positive or very positive impact, however, the number of companies without any dedicated resource goes down to 4%. On the contrary that same number rises to 31% for those firms not able to see any benefit from the introduction of social media.

• Integration with traditional processes pay. Integration with existing support mechanisms is not so much a prerequisite at this phase but more a goal yet to be achieved in many projects. Despite such understandable difficulties, the study also sees a correlation between integration and results. If 31% of the participants have already completed a total integration with support processes, the same percentage rises to 40% and 48% in those who reported positive or very positive while it gets down to 19% for those who did not notice any meaningful result from social media. In a predictable way, the integration seems also more frequent while the initiative matures.

• The results also depend on the level of interaction with the customer.If in most cases support through social channels still covers a small percentage of the total number of requests received, 40% and 60% respectively of those who have found positive or very positive impact is already handling more than 6% of requests within the community, compared to 5% for those who have not seen any result from social support.

• The management makes a difference, but companies are still preparing themselves to leverage Social Support by defining appropriate metrics and trying to understand what customers really expect from this new type of interaction. Recognition by the management, however, is the only dimension correlated to the outcomes here, given that the average buy-in is mentioned as an obstacle in 31% of the cases, compared with 12% of those who have seen very positive results and 45% for those not able to see any benefit at all .

• Facebook and Twitter are chosen by the most, but with different results. If Facebook and Twitter are quite always the environments preferred by companies in the sample (with a preference of the former over the latter), among those who have achieved very positive results, 72% chose Twitter while only 16% went for Facebook. In reality these last numbers seem to depend at some extent on the different ways large and small companies evaluate the outcomes of Social Support projects and on the preference of the latter to Facebook compared to Twitter. Among those with positive returns, however, is quite frequent the joint use of both Facebook and Twitter.

• You do not need much money. The amount of investment does not seem to have any significant effect on the outcome achieved with most of the participants who spent less than $ 5oK. The statement does not change even considering only those who have expressed very positive returns

Conclusions

Trying to summarize some of the data, although still at the beginning with the Social Support (at least in this more structured way in respect to the free use of forums some time ago) some emerging best practices should not be underestimated.

The good news is that at such an initial stage with Social Support and Social CRM, this approach means an opportunity for quite every firm, with a low investment and a real potential to improve customers satisfaction.

The participation of management, integration processes, the need for dedicated resources, the results that come with time and frequency of interaction anyway position Social Support as a strategic project, capable of improving the relationship with the client and giving new ideas for product/service, but only if framed as a path of change in the medium to long term.

To be successful it is certainly appriopriate to choose the correct channel as many agency suggest but it is even more central to involve the entire ecosystem (organization, customers, partners) in a holistic strategy with the right effort and patience.

How much do you agree with these indications?

If there is a characteristic that makes the current conversation on Social CRM so interesting and challenging, it  is probably its intrinsic nature inherently disrespectful of departments, business functions, inside-outside boundaries, separate processes.

Even only to imagine an organization that is able to generate business value strategically and operationally putting the customer at the center probably requires smoother operations and more transparent, more integrated, more coordinated actions from all the constituent parts. As if you suddenly pass by a group of soloists in separate rooms to an entire orchestra that plays in equilibrium but around the notes of a new musician that nobody knows.

Why so giving yourself so much trouble? To transform the challenges of handling a social customer into an opportunity for greater productivity, responsiveness, trust, product quality, smaller costs, recognition of the brand. The question to me is how do not forget everything we put in place over the last decade while taking advantage of this opportunity?

A good starting point has been proposed generously by Jacob Morgan in his evolution of social CRM process:

Please read the post in which this model has been presented directly on Jacob’s blog but the basic insights to me are a stronger online-offline integration, the fact that all transactions (social or traditional) are mapped within CRM and the multidisciplinary team the company now needs to come back to the customer. This is a great inspiration and you should also read the good comments (including criticism) that really add to the model.

As a part of the Social CRM work I’m doing with Open Knowledge, I thought a lot about the approach Jacob proposed and I came to the conclusion that it misses some relevant parts:

• The process is one way only: the company listens to what is said in social media or get information from the direct interaction with customers but there is no proactive action from the organization to the customer. This however is exactly what happens in the most advanced initiatives of Social CRM, i.e as part of social product development.
• The answer is not social: like pioneers in the Social CRM are well aware, when you launch a new community what you are doing is signing an implicit contract with your audience. We can call it an SLA (Service Level Agreement) or just a set of expectations but users will expect from you real, accurate, timely answers taking into account their wishes. More than answers this is a real change born out of a community based solicitation but quickly crossing the entire company with its processes, behaviors, messages, tools. It is much more than communication .. here the marketing or community management is not enough to give the answers!
• The answer is multidisciplinary and horizontal: with the Social CRM applications , you are opening the door to everything from social support to innovation, sales, communication. That’s why you need people engaged in different departments and even outside from actual departments
• There are different types of community: in many cases a strategy of social media marketing in public spaces (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin) is not enough. Many companies want to offer a unique experience to its customers by launching organization owned platforms whose interactions are bounced on social media and where listening is done via solutions for analytics and social intelligence more than with social media monitoring tools. While you can control everything that happens in a closed environment owned by the company, the boundaries of public communities are very difficult to define (that’s why in this diagram the relative box has irregular edges)
• Every social exchange must be stored: in order to really understand what the customer is asking (perhaps implicitly) and respond not only in a coordinated but also in a consistent way, you must connect the customer profile with its online interactions. I mean every interaction, occurring with the company or with other customers on issues related to the product.

The model below attempts to extend the good work Jacob did while addressing these issues:

As you can easily imagine, the point that concerns me most is the fact that you can not really make Social CRM works (but the same could be said for good social media marketing initiatives) if you are not ready  to involve the entire organization, preferably before even starting with social media. Doing this requires an Enterprise 2.0 and a structure that maps external communities to appropriate internal interactions in order to socially produce the best answers and to implement smoothly/profitably the insights from the market.

Starting from the inside has also the effect of connecting different silos, helping them to trust each other and to gain the necessary sensitivity, beginnig to work together for the external community without necessarily waiting for the entire organization to evolve in a manner consistent with the needs of social media .

What do you think? What is missing or to be improved in this model?

By now, many of you will have surely read the recent Drop the Pilot post in which Andrew McAfee, the Enterprise 2.0 father, manifested clear criticism against the way enterprise 2.0 projects are currently launched and cultivated by many experts in this domain. To say the truth, the position taken by Andrew is not completely original given that Michael Idinopulos of Socialtext had sustained the same point of view some time back, generating a lot of discussion in the community.

In the field of Enterprise 2.0, to me a pilot is

a method of co-design and adoption of new collaborative practices that follows an iterative, incremental and risk moderating approach to intentionally avoid organizational resistance

In other words, it is a strategy designed to reassure the management and especially to engage users by putting them at the center of  a content and services co-design activity.

What are the main points addressed by Andrew?

• The number of people involved: pilots are usually limited to a small number of people (a percentage of the overall number of employees)
• The low diversity of participants: launching departmental or group confined pilots that operate in a well-defined physical and operational boundary means choosing strongly connected individuals, whose distinctive personal knowledge is marginal compared to the group’s one

Even more meaningful than the criteria for pilot selection is McAfee’s belief that Enterprise 2.0 is first and foremost a matter of serendipity:

The more I learn about and think about the value of emergent social software platforms, the more I suspect that the deep meta-benefit they provide is technology-enabled serendipity, defined as ‘good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries.’ Serendipity is possible when we’re collaborating with our close colleagues on a well-defined project, but that’s probably when it occurs least often. It’s much more likely during wide forays and broad searches, the kind that are so easy to do with current technologies.

If Enterprise 2.0 was totally here, Andrew’s point would have been absolutely on the target and any pilots would not have been representative of critical mass needed to trigger  and prove the exponential dynamics of interaction evident in online community . But, in my view, Enterprise 2.0 is not exclusively serendipity.

Looking at my Enterprise 2.0 Framework, developed from McAfee’s Bull’s Eye, it should be clear how more than the strength of ties between participants, what makes a difference are the goals and needs a project is launched for:

If collective intelligence or emergent non-codified expertise are certainly two of the most original contributions introduced by Enterprise 2.0, allowing people to connect, stay in touch, collaborate asynchronously, leaving traces of partial outcomes and maximizing the reusability of these assets over time, should not be ignored at all. In my experience these are among the most frequent scenarios in small and medium enterprises (most of the Italian and European markets).

That’s why I believe broadly discarding pilots as useless or not effective towards large-scale adoption may introduce major drawbacks:

• Losing sight of the relevant benefits Enterprise 2.0 provides at the team, group and department level  (at least 50% of the diagram above)
• Introducing harmful fears and resistance among the management in terms of budget, risk, exposure to negative publicity
• Raising political and organizational problems even before showing the effectiveness of participative approaches, because if the project is not a pilot then all business functions must necessarily be involved from the very beginning
• Giving up the chance to start from the bottom up, identifying concrete problems in different parts of the organization and involving people as owners of the project.

All these risks could simply mean jeopardizing again that widespread adoption that we want to achieve avoiding pilots

So what is the most effective approach to launch and nurture an Enterprise 2.0 project that is targeted to the entire organization?

I believe a general answer simply does not exist and that the best way to go should depend on the objective (and type of need even before that) you want to address. If a small group is entirely appropriate if you look at collaboration, to address the other levels of the diagram you should actually reach critical mass but while for collective intelligence numbers are necessarily important, for the intermediate levels starting even with 30-50 people could be actually enough.

Much also depends on the severity of organizational, cultural, geographical barriers among participants in the pilot. Stronger the barriers, greater the value generated allowing people to work together. Additionally, much care should be put while considering the position and reputation of the people who are going to take part to the pilot. Intentionally selecting the right influencers, connectors and trusted sources of informal exchanges will dramatically facilitate how adoption is spread reducing both the time and effort needed.

Pilots or not? As you can see, guidelines, patterns and best practices are slowly emerging and we surely need to take them into consideration. On the contrary I believe it’s much better avoiding generalization here. So my answer is.. it depends!