12 Symptoms of Social Business Misalignment

Social business misalignment is widespread because most organizations don’t conduct robust due diligence and research before they launch social media, social networking or social business campaigns. They don’t understand what to do and where or how to do it, which introduces unnecessary risk into the equation. Since social business is an emerging set of disciplines, people ask us all the time what organizations sound like when they describe misalignment. Here is a baker’s dozen of symptoms that often indicate the need for strategy. Here is what executives often say:

1. “We have several Facebook Pages/LinkedIn Company Pages/Google+Pages/Communities/blogs/Twitter streams/customer social networks, but we’re tired of paying agency fees to post content because no one’s responding.”
2. “Some of our employees barely use our email system. What do we do about it?”
3. “A competitor has made headlines with Twitter/blog/Facebook. How did they do it?”
4. “One of our employees flamed an irate customer on a message board/made an inebriated Facebook post, and it caused a bit of a stir. What do we do about that?”
5. “We’ve been experimenting with blogs for a while. Should we think about making them work with our other communications? If we do, will that detract from blogs’ credibility? How do we manage that?”
6. “Everybody in our company (or a client’s firm) wants a private Facebook, and employees are doing all kinds of things. Actually, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing.”
7. “Our marketing people keep telling us that we need to be in snapchat, gaming and social mobile campaigns to engage Millennials. But how do these fit with what we’re already doing?”
8. “We’ve had some negative blog/Facebook/Twitter posts about our company/product/policy, and we don’t know what to do about it.”
9. “How do we get our arms around Vine, Snapchat, Instagram, live streaming, gaming, smart devices, and other things we haven’t heard of? Should we be concerned about them?”
10. “We get that Facebook/blogs/YouTube can affect business. How do we figure out how these things are relevant to us? Or what the impact is? Or when they might become relevant?”
11. “Our CTO admitted that he is often more productive working from home since our company policy prevents accessing entertainment and social network sites. He uses them for recruiting.”
12. “We are increasingly cropping up on YouTube and Vine, and that makes us uneasy. How do we prevent people from showing our product (company, policy) in a questionable light?”
13. “An incredible number of our new (website) readers are from Asia. They’ve come out of nowhere. How can we capitalize on this?”

Business-Client/Customer Alignment

CSRA can help you understand your social business opportunities and threats (social networks, social media, Web 3.0). We guide you in creating vision, strategy and practical programs to turn these developments to your advantage using the Social Network Roadmap(SM). Organizations that use strategy often realize gains in accuracy, efficiency and results.

To learn more, contact Christopher Rollyson on +1.312.925.1549 or chris@rollyson.net

Also see The Dirty Dozen Social Business Risks.