Benefits of being a social business
It’s not just good to do social – we need to be social.
Social business is an evolution of social media and an evolution of business.
Content is the challenge: you need to point to it from social media, so you need to have it, and make sure it’s good.
Museum of London consider themselves ‘tactical on the social business maturity framework (see slides below).
- Objectives (from management) to increase reach and become better known (see video). Senior/employee buy-in, not as time-consuming as could have been (everyone in comms department had some skills or a willingness to learn).
- dedicated social media person integrates content, marketing and PR as part of the comms mix so there’s a devolved approach with an element of coordination
- bring together skilled people from across the organisation to contribute to the relaunched blog. Everyone who works at the museum has a story to tell and can tell it in a vivid way
- give everyone needs training – e.g. editorial guidelines, audience targeting etc.
Masterclass: Grown Up Social Media – Making Social Media Work harder for your Business
Socialising the Business (marketing operations)
Where strategy is a differentiator for competitive advantage, operations are a pre-requisite.
Marketing strategy helps meet business objectives. Marketing operations (policies, tools, processes, systems, execution) enable efficient and effective delivery of marketing. It’s not about creative, audience segmentation, channel comms, acquisition, affiliation, reporting or analytics. It frees up resource as no one is trying to figure out the processes, so can focus on the strategy.
Reducing risk, empowering employees
It’s hard to monitor each employee on social media these days as there are so many platforms.
- Always assume that whatever you do online is public, regardless of your security settings.
- Give employees guidance on what is and isn’t acceptable.
- Have a response strategy – who responds, how, when/how quickly? Will a senior leader apologise asap?
Legal and compliance like to stop exposure to unnecessary risk, but comms departments look for creative ways to get through to people for a commercial imperative. Risks include information leakage, client/competition disparagement, and libel. Other non-direct risks example: Know from Linked someone works in mineral/oil exploration and through geo-tagging you can see where he is.
Just 12% of organisations think they use social media effectively (Harvard Business Review).
Elena Plaiter 
Hi Elena. Thank you so much for attending our BLOOM Social Business Breakfast – we’re glad you found it and our social business maturity framework interesting. At BLOOM, when it comes to social business, our belief is that it’s people first and technology second.