Four Ways for Advanced Companies to Prepare for Social Business Success

As more and more companies have implemented social media marketing and PR, some have been more familiar with the new media tools to reach the audience. Social media can be very effective for a crisis, meanwhile, social media crises are also on the rise - yet most companies are ill-prepared.

Companies are often quick to deploy Facebook pages and Twitter account, but the complexities of social media business are often ignored, long-term success in social media requires adequate preparation. For the corporation, this involves a realignment of roles, policies, processes, and a transformation of the enterprise into a social business.

There are four ways for advanced companies or companies which want to be advanced to follow internally:
(1) Business Governance and Reinforcement: establish and reinforce a corporate social media policy that allows employees to participate professionally. This require a company to establish a baseline process to reinforce and update the policy, as well as train incoming hires.
(2) Enterprise-wide response processes enables rapid customer engagement. A common fact that most companies are facing across the enterprise social media is that workflow becomes more complicated, consistency and efficiency decrease, while risks increase. Often the social media accounts managers find it hard to keep up with the growing volume of conversations. Therefore,  a social media triage and workflow process should be distributed across the company. Also, there should be a social media crisis response plan. Most of the existed crisis plan a company has does not include social media part. A social media crisis plan can help to diminish or avert the crisis.
(3) Ongoing education program and best practice sharing fosters continued learning. Even seasoned practitioners require continuous social media training. And best practice sharing among practitioners supplement social media education.
(4) A dedicated and shared central hub, often named the "Center of Excellence," provides leadership. Increased consumer adoption and low technological barriers encourage corporate stakeholders to deploy social media on their own, with or without approval. the widespread adoption, if without proper coordination, can result in a fragmented customer experience, duplication of resources, and increased costs.  So company needs a scalable formation, to organize in a Centralized formation in which a single group leads strategy and deploys efforts on behalf of the entire company. Also, assemble a dedicated, cross-functional group which is responsible for coordinating social business efforts.

Reference: Owyang, Jeremiah. (August 31, 2011). Social Business Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally. Altimeter Group.