Salesforce / Radian 6: Marketing cloud ebook_sm_maturitymodel Dec 2012

www.radian6.com / 1 888 6radian
Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Follow the Social Media
Maturity Model to Become
a Social Business

Follow the Social Media Maturity
Model to Become a Social Business
www.radian6.com
1 888 6RADIAN 1 888 672 3426 / community@radian6.com Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Marketing Cloud [ 2 ]
Best Practice for using this Ebook:
• Answer 10 questions to determine your company’s social media maturity.
• Click below to learn more about each of the categories in the Salesforce
Marketing Cloud Social Media Maturity Model.
• After completing the Social Scorecard, discover what defines each stage
so your company can move to the next one.
Letter from David B. Thomas
Ideology and Leadership
Staffing
Internal Education
Social Listening
Engagement and Community
Social Content
Social Advertising
Measurement and Analytics
Social Media Tools and Systems
Conclusion

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Letter from David B. Thomas,
Senior Director of Content and Community, Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Over the last five years, I’ve met with hundreds of enterprise social media folks, from
CMOs to social media managers to newly-hired communications specialists. They all have
one thing in common: they think their company is way behind when it comes to social
media maturity. I always tell them the same thing: If you’re thinking about, planning for,
and participating in social media, you’re already way ahead. Now there’s a new way for
companies to understand how their social media efforts stack up and help them develop a
path to move forward.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Scorecard is a simple, online tool you can use
to see how social media has impacted your organization to date, and develop a path to
move forward. In less than five minutes you can learn where your company’s social media
maturity ranks against other organizations based on more than a year of data gathered from
social enterprises of every size in every market. (Plus, the dataset grows as more people
participate.) The results are provided in both numeric form and on a grid showing company
results across nine key metrics. We’ll email you your Social Media Maturity Grid, along with
a list of free enterprise social media resources tailored to your needs — a road map for the
journey ahead, if you will.
The Social Scorecard looks at key metrics of a company’s social media maturity, including:
• Ideology and Leadership
• Staffing
• Internal Education
• Social Listening
• Engagement and Community
• Social Content
• Social Advertising
• Measurement and Analytics
• Social Media Tools
The Social Scorecard incorporates the knowledge and expertise of many people. Amber
Naslund laid the groundwork during her tenure as Radian6 Vice President of Social Strategy.
I took it a few steps further and made it the core of our Social Media Needs Assessment, and
Jeff Cohen developed it into what you see today, with the help of Greg Poirier at the helm of
our web team. It was definitely a team effort, and now we want you to take it to your team.
Give it a try. Kick the tires. Let us know if you see anything that surprises you or anything
we can do better. And let’s work together to make the social media world just a little
more... mature.
What follows in the next 9 Chapters are descriptions of the stages of each of the 9
categories of the Marketing Cloud Social Media Maturity Model. If you haven’t already
completed the Social Scorecard, you may wish to do so before you proceed.

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Ideology and Leadership
Senior leaders are responsible for the vision of a company. Their
level of understanding of social media sets the tone for how it will
roll out and scale across an organization. The following four stages
track social media maturity against senior executives’ awareness
and activity. In his Dreamforce conversation, General Colin Powell
stressed the importance of this awareness. “I think any leader has
to have his or her finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the
information revolution.”
Stage 1:
Early Stage
Very often, social media begins at a grassroots level within a company. Someone in marketing,
PR or corporate communications understands the value of social media to the company and
creates a Twitter profile, a Facebook Page or even a blog. Sometimes this may be done under
the radar by focusing on a discrete event or a specific product. Regardless of where it starts,
these pockets of activity are unconnected, and sometimes unauthorized.
Every day your senior leaders can’t pick up a magazine, go to a website or turn on the TV
without someone telling them that social media is changing business (and our society in
general). In this early stage of maturity, they may not even be aware of the company’s social
media activities, or they may begin to show interest in it. Others throughout the company
question the value of social media to the business, and it is your job, if you are the one who
started the efforts, to explain that value if you wish to move beyond this stage.
Stage 2:
Supportive
As companies expand their social media presences, senior leadership becomes more
supportive of these efforts. One of the best ways to bring executives on board is to establish
social media goals that align with business goals. What does your CMO care about? What
are her metrics for success across the marketing organization? Make sure your social media
program aligns with those objectives. Did you get to one million people liking your Facebook
Page? That’s great, but make sure you can show how it provides value to the company.

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It is critical at this stage that the company be able to prove the value of social media. Budget
and resources are provided to expand the program, but it is not an open-ended endeavor. This
is not a blank check category, but one where a bit of skepticism remains. Show your senior
leadership the daily value you get from social media. Are you keeping up with influencers and
competitors? Are you alerted to potential supply problems before your logistics team? Are you
starting to build thought leadership for the company? All of these activities have value that can
be measured in ways your executives can understand.
Stage 3:
Engaged
Senior leaders become more engaged in social media activities when they continue to see
the results. This goes well beyond any single campaign to the level where social media is
spreading beyond marketing, PR and even customer service. Companies like Zappos have
extended their company culture beyond their own walls and have given all employees the
training, guidance and encouragement to connect with customers on social media. This type
of program has to originate from the highest levels of the organization, but it is the responsibility
of the social media leaders to sell this idea up.
While many companies still block social media use at work, mature companies are leveraging
their employees’ social networks for business benefits. If your employees are well-connected in
your industry, and to your customers and future customers, doesn’t it make sense to let them
have relevant and public business conversations about things that are important? This is how
relationships are built. Leaders in this stage understand that employees represent the company
on a daily basis on the phone, through email, and in public at trade shows and conferences.
Social media is just an extension of that. Remember, this is not meant to open the door on
chaos. This is to be managed with proper training, policies, and procedures.

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Stage 4:
Passionate
It is one thing for senior leaders to encourage social media activities, but it is another for
them to be active on social platforms themselves. It really changes how they approach social
media. This doesn’t mean creating a Twitter account for the CEO and having the PR team
Tweet for him, or just asking him to share press releases. It means they are truly part of the
social experience, connecting with other executives, sharing information about the company
and the industry, and expressing their informed opinion. Leaders at your company are leaders
in your industry and social media helps them promote their own thought leadership, and the
company’s as well. Here’s a good guide for preparing your chief executives for Twitter.
Some senior leaders who have embraced social media to share personal and company
updates, as well as interesting articles shared by others, are Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, Beth
Comstock, CMO of GE, and Padmasree Warrior, Chief Technology & Strategy Officer of Cisco.
These are companies that have been incorporating social media across their organizations,
and it would not have happened to the extent that it has without a high level of executive
support.
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Staffing
Staffing sets the tone for how social media is executed in any
company. Many beginning social media programs are not driven
through official channels, but are started by passionate individuals
who make time in their schedules for these activities. Things like
job descriptions, reporting structures, performance reviews and
compensation plans cause others in the company to take these
new roles and activities seriously. As you plan your social media
growth, make sure to meet with the HR department so your social
media skills can be considered in an official capacity.
Every company is different in how they mature with regard to social media, but here are the
stages that generally apply to how companies staff for social media.
Stage 1:
Informal
When a few people, or one person, starts participating in social media on a company’s behalf,
they are doing it at the expense of something else. This is often a tactical decision, rather than
a strategic one. Someone in the marketing department registers a Twitter account to make
sure squatters don’t take the name. Maybe you get approval to set up a social media account
for an event or run an Instagram contest. This is not a bad thing; everyone needs to start
somewhere.
These decentralized efforts should be viewed as building blocks for expanding social media
personnel. Even if no one is using social media for your company, start thinking what social
media responsibilities look like. Keep your higher level business strategies in mind, because
connecting employees’ activities to common goals can help make the case for resources.
Stage 2:
Partial
In this next stage of social media maturity, there is definitely an official social media program
with staff in multiple departments, including many with social media as part of their job
descriptions. Social media may still only be a small part of each employee’s responsibilities,

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but this is progress. Control of social media activities is centralized within one of the leading
departments, usually marketing or communications, as they are responsible for company
messaging.
Your social media leaders are starting to emerge, because someone needs to develop
strategies and policies to move forward. Many companies collaborate with outside resources,
but there is a need for a strong internal presence for social media to grow across your
organization. Look to the VP of Marketing or the CMO for guidance, but these critical steps are
based on strategy and company culture.
Stage 3:
Dedicated
A full-time social media manager is the keystone of reaching this next stage of maturity. Now
that someone is in charge, it is time to move social media to the hub and spoke organizational
model. The hub can be a small team, possibly cross-functional, that is responsible for strategy,
policy and training. The spokes, which can be functional groups, product groups or even
geographical groups, are responsible for execution. This assumes that as your company has
reached a place that it needs a social media manager, it has also scaled up its social media
activities in general.
A social media council can also serve as the hub in this stage. This is a cross-functional group
that includes representatives from departments beyond marketing or communications, like
sales, support, HR, legal, IT, or compliance. This group is led by the social media manager
or director and can also set policy and strategy. This internal group also can help evangelize
social media in other parts of the organization. Learn more about creating a social media
council in the Marketing Cloud Social Media Blueprint ebook.
At the same time that a company develops social media positions, the HR team starts
understanding how social media fits into recruiting new employees and retaining existing ones.
Prospective employees can be discovered and vetted through their social profiles before they
even send in a resume. Recruiters also need to be aware of what job applicants are saying on
social media about the hiring process. This is part of a company’s brand perception. Oh, and
current employees use social media, too. Someone needs to listen to their public comments
or complaints. This one is more than brand perception, because employees are a company’s
most important asset, and someone needs to know what they’re really thinking.

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Stage 4:
Dedicated and Multiple
The fully mature company has reached a state where many people in the company have full-
time social media roles. These are social media managers, community managers and even
social media analysts who make sure all aspects of social media fit the plan and meet the
goals. According to Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group, the average corporate social media
team has 11 members. The social media council is not a distant memory, but an active group
that is interested in continuing to grow and scale social media throughout the organization.
The hub can continue to grow and become a center of excellence, which can provide social
media guidance for multiple hubs across the company. The center of excellence can even
become a company differentiator, as your social media staff shares best practices not just
internally, but also with the external world through blogging and conference speaking.
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Internal Education
Education is an important part of any new company endeavor
and social media education is no exception. Employees want to
know what is going on with social media, what the limitations are,
and how they can participate and help the company. Not only do
companies need to accept and understand that their customers
and prospects are using social media, they also need to accept that
employees are too.
Stage 1:
Basic
The first step in educating your employees is to create a social media policy. Even though
only 24% of Fortune 500 companies have them, you should explore the value for your
company. Many social media policies are negative and focus on what employees cannot do.
Consequently, employees do nothing for fear of making a mistake. Successful social media
policies let employees know what they can do, and provide positive examples of behavior.
Treat your employees like adults and guess what they will act like? Adults.
A social media policy can cover such activities as whether employees can access their
personal social media accounts at work, how to use their personal accounts to benefit
the company, and how to represent the company to customers on social platforms. Many
companies limit who can respond on behalf of the company, to make sure processes and
policies are followed. Learn more about social media policies in detail from the Marketing
Cloud Ebook.
Some companies that do not have specific social media policies or guidelines maintain that
a separate policy is not needed, and their employees are covered by their standard code of
conduct. While this is true in preventing behavior, employees can still benefit from positive
examples of what exactly is expected of them.

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Stage 2:
Training
Once social media policies or guidelines are in place, you have to let employees know
about them. Emailing the policy to all employees or posting it on the intranet is not enough.
Companies need to make sure employees are familiar with the policies. An online review of the
policy can serve that purpose. A short, automated presentation with multiple choice questions
at the end is one way to get material to all employees. This is similar to the security or ethics
training that many companies require.
Informal training also starts happening at this stage. These can be monthly lunch and learns
with members of the internal team, or even outside guests. Depending on the experience level
of your staff, and who attends, these can range from optimizing your LinkedIn profile to sharing
success of the blogging program. A by-product of this training is that it shows employees that
social media is important, and the company cares about using it to make a difference.
Stage 3:
Integrated Training
At some point in the social maturity of a company, training for all employees becomes official.
This is more than a simple online policy review or lunch and learn. This is a training session
for employees that is integrated with other employee training. It is easy to conduct this with
new employees in their orientation session, but that doesn’t cover existing employees. It takes
more work to get others trained on social media best practices, guidelines and company
expectations.
This type of training continues to stress the message to all employees that social media is a
critical part of the company infrastructure, and it is important they learn how the company can
benefit from their participation. Social media policies are more integrated into other HR policies
and no longer feel like standalone documents that can be easily overlooked. Expansion of
social media training at this level cannot happen without the full cooperation of the human
resource team. That’s one reason to consider creating a social media council and bring
together internal stakeholders.

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Stage 4:
Training and Certification
Can you imagine how a company functions if all employees are certified in social media? Dell
and Intel are two companies that have certification programs and are exploring full compliance
of all employees. The certification program is not taken lightly. It is comparable to company
spokesman training, because employees are representing the company in public.
This is not a far-fetched idea because your employees are already on social media and
are associated with your company. Even if they don’t mention their employer on Twitter or
Facebook, their LinkedIn profile tells everyone where they work. It makes sense to train them to
become an additional company asset, rather than focus on telling them what they cannot do.
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Social Listening
For as long as companies have been participating in social media,
the common first practice has been to listen before talking. People
are talking about your company, your competitors, and your
industry. These conversations are happening on the social web
whether you are listening or not, so you may as well tune in. If you
aren’t doing even the most basic level of listening, you really aren’t
grasping how social media has changed business.
“The customer now has a lot more power in shaping and influencing the perceptions of your
brand,” said Marketing Cloud SVP and Chief Product Officer, Marcel LeBrun. Customer-centric
companies are the ones that are thriving, and an easier way to start putting the customer at
the center of your business is to listen to them.
Let’s review the various stages of maturity that companies go through with their social listening
activities.
Stage 1:
Grassroots
In this early stage of social listening companies may not even have an official listening program.
If anyone is listening at all, they might be using something like Google Alerts that notifies
them on a daily basis of any company or keyword mentions on the web. The other thing that
characterizes this grassroots approach is that it’s usually very siloed. The PR team is listening
only to potential reputation and crisis situations. Marketing may be listening only for things
related to their campaigns. And there may even be a rogue product engineer listening for
product ideas. Nothing about this effort is coordinated and these different departments don’t
even know others are listening.
In addition to being separate and distinct, listening at this level is very tactical. There is no
thought about tying these activities to higher level business objectives. Companies are listening
for direct mentions of their company and products, but they are not expanding much beyond
Twitter @ mentions or comments left on a Facebook Page. This is not a tool-based approach.
Most of this listening cannot even be called listening. A low level marketing associate, or intern,
may go to the company Twitter account a couple times a day to see if anyone Tweeted at
them. This barely scratches the surface of what is possible.

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Stage 2:
Basic Brand
When a company advances to this stage of listening they’ve begun to use free or paid tools
to manage this process. This is no longer an ad hoc activity, but one that is trying to get an
accurate picture of conversations online about your company or brand. Even with free tools
you have the ability to consistently listen for variations of your company name. Listen for
common misspellings, no @ sign on Twitter, hashtags, abbreviations, or product names.
This can now be described as listening with intent. You don’t want to report to your CMO
that you have a listening program in place, but aren’t sure what you are hearing. Volume of
mentions is an easy measurement, but that’s not really enough. Can you tie this to company
activities? Did your mentions increase when you launched a new product? If they didn’t, how
can you reduce friction around sharing the news? Do your press releases get picked up by
automated accounts (bots) and nowhere else? Listen to discover where the conversations
are about your brand. Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar discovered that there were
more relevant conversations for their business on blogs and forums, as opposed to Twitter and
Facebook. Basic brand listening is starting to become more strategic, but it can also be used
as the discovery mechanism to create an overarching social strategy.
Stage 3:
Full Brand, Some Competition and Industry
Full brand listening requires the use of paid tools to capture the full conversations around
your company, products, executives, activities, and customer service. Companies that don’t
have a recognized brand name, like many B2B companies, approach full brand listening a
little differently. Rather than focus on company and product names, they listen for common
terms around their industry and product categories. Prospects might not mention the
enterprise software company by name, but they may ask for recommendations for a new HR
performance review tool.
In addition to capturing everything that is going on about your company, listening for
competitors’ activities, comments, complaints and questions is a big part of how this starts
changing. Again, this is not about listening for competitive intel for the sake of doing it. It is
about creating a structured process where you can discover actionable insights from what
you hear. If there is no one on the product team that is interested in learning more about your
competitors’ products, this can be challenging, but there are surely people in areas of your
company that can benefit from that information.

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Industry monitoring is something that is often covered by another group within the company.
Maybe the market research team does that or an outside provider sends over monthly reports.
It is unlikely that they are including more than a cursory glance at the social component in
those industry reports. As companies mature, they start including this industry research in their
listening activities.
Stage 4:
Full Brand, Competition and Industry
The fully mature company has an official listening program that is running on all cylinders. They
have the brand covered. They know their major competitors’ every move on the social web
and every time there is even a whisper about them. And their industry monitoring is second
to none. They are gleaning so much real time information about their industry that they can
publish it to promote their thought leadership.
Customer service and technical support are an important part of the listening environment as
well. And all of this is done with purpose. And process. Cisco is a company that has developed
such a robust listening program to the point that they installed a social media command center
to manage the flow of incoming data.
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Engagement and Community
One of the biggest changes for companies in the social media age
is that customers’ and prospects’ expectations have changed. Every
media outlet encourages feedback over social media. Every retail
establishment wants you to like them on Facebook. This barrage of
social media activity encourages the two-way conversations that
really are the hallmark for this still–new form of communication.
Companies need to understand that customers are now in charge.
A social media profile is an invitation to use that communication
channel, and many companies are not even listening. According
to a study of regular Twitter users who Tweeted complaints to
companies with Twitter accounts, less than one-third of the
companies responded.
Stage 1:
Listening
It may sound obvious, but the first step to engaging is listening. If you don’t even know what
the conversation sounds like, it is impossible to plan how to respond. Whether a company
establishes social profiles first or starts listening first, it is important that preliminary listening
occur. While a social profile is a signal for customers to Tweet rather than call, companies
need to understand the social landscape before jumping in. This early listening can help with
the development of processes required for engaging. This will also help you understand your
staffing needs and the types of tools required.
The best way to understand what to do with what you hear is to create a playbook, which is a
guideline for your social media front line. This is especially important at the beginning, as your
social media responders may just be engaging on a part-time basis, between other tasks.
Having predetermined escalations paths and suggested responses can help simplify this
process as they respond to only the highest profile comments and complaints.

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Stage 2:
Responding
The next stage is where engagement starts getting serious. Responding to customers
and prospects is the official responsibility of one or more people in the organization. For
companies with a smaller volume of social conversations, they may begin trying to respond to
every conversation, although it is primarily reactive. For companies with a larger volume, the
social media playbook is of utmost importance, because they will never be able to respond
to all comments and they need a way to prioritize what they respond to. In an interview with
social media consultant Jay Baer, Rick Wion, Director of Social Media for McDonald’s USA,
describes how the company manages 2.5 million posts per month.
Customer service and tech support begin to get involved in social media engagement at this
point. It is much easier to begin training your customer service reps on how to respond through
social media, rather than continuing to email questions to the customer service team. As you
expand this social function, talk to your customer service team to understand general volume
of phone and email requests, as well as the ten most common questions. This will help expand
the social media playbook to include likely customer service issues and how to respond.
Stage 3:
Participating
Companies that have built communities around their brand have done so through engagement.
Some of the largest brands do naturally attract customers to communicate with them on social
media just by being there, but for most of us, if you build it, they do not come. This level of
engagement requires dedicated community managers who nurture the community by paying
attention to them. This is more than just responding to questions. The social team encourages
the community to share by posing interesting and thought-provoking questions. But it also
means celebrating in their successes, commiserating in their challenges, and becoming a
valuable part of the communities they are striving to build.
A community is a group of people with similar interests, experiences and desires. It is not a
group of people who like a brand. You might think of these people as a community, but unless
your community managers become key members of the community, it is a loose collection of
people. You may even get them to engage with your online activities, but the goal is to develop
advocacy in your community. Not only will advocates recommend your brand on their own,
but they will defend your company when others raise questions or share negative opinions. A
company gets to this place by valuing their customers and making sure the community team
has the authority to truly serve the community.

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Stage 4:
Engaging and Creating
The top stage in engagement and community is indicated by two main activities: broader
adoption and content-based engagement. Broader engagement means that community
managers are the front lines of engaging with customers, prospects, advocates and others on
social channels, but it doesn’t stop there. Other employees, or in some cases, all employees
can engage on behalf of the company. Yes, this requires training. Yes, this requires trust. And it
requires the right employees. Companies like Dell and Intel have certification programs in place
for just this purpose. And Zappos encourages employees to solve customer problems.
The other mark of this stage is the creation of content for the purpose of engagement. This
is content that is interesting, relevant, remarkable, valuable, educational, and shareable. How
can you help your customers and prospects do their jobs better? Provide tips for success.
The first part of this approach is creating this content, which we will look at in more detail in
the next Chapter, but simply publishing it is just the beginning. Rather than responding with
a 140 character Tweet, community managers respond with a link to helpful content as well.
Remember that employees have ingratiated themselves to the community they helped build. If
the community were a small town, it would be one thing to walk your neighbor’s dog, but quite
another thing to share your grandmother’s marble cake recipe.
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Social Content
The social media revolution is driven by content. How many times
do people say “content is king” or the only way to connect with
customers and prospects is with content? Heck, we’ve even said
it ourselves. Plenty of companies, however, don’t understand
what kinds of content to create. While this certainly starts with
the marketing or communications team that knows what kind of
content to publish on social channels. But there is the much larger
question of what does it mean from a social maturity perspective.
You can think of these stages as different positions in a media organization, even though the
expected result is not the same. Media organizations have based their business models on two
main revenue streams: advertising and subscribers. Companies use social media content to
build an online presence, remain relevant to customers and prospects, nurture communities,
drive leads and sales, connect with influencers, and improve search engine optimization.
Traditional marketing copy does not do this. Press releases do not do this. Like everything else
in the social media maturity model, the effectiveness of any social media efforts have to be
measured against business goals. Once you have clarified your company goals, it is easier to
understand what role it needs to play in your organization.
Content is not an optional component of social media. Companies need content to tell their
stories. It is the core of what the outside world sees. How does your content compare to
your competitors? What about within your target industries? Remember that everyone is
bombarded with messages, long and short, written and image-based, audio and video all day
long. So you are not just competing with your traditional competitors to make an impact. You
are fighting the entire world.
Stage 1:
Reporter
The first stage as a content publisher is to think like a reporter. Once social channels are
established, you begin sharing updates or links on these channels. But before you get too far,
you need to remember your traditional marketing training. You must think about your target
audience and what platforms they frequent. Use a social media monitoring tool to discover
this information. What is the message and what action do you want your target to take? If you
are sharing third-party content on your Twitter account, you want your followers to click the

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link and find value in the article. This demonstrates your company’s value as a curator and one
who finds and shares valuable content. Another action is to get followers to retweet the Tweet.
While this doesn’t qualify as an endorsement of what your company shared, it does spread
your company name to their followers as a sharer of quality content.
As you begin looking for content to share, as well as simple status updates, look to your
employees. If some are active on social networks themselves, follow their updates and share
what they share. If you have an internal network, ask employees to share the best content they
find, so the company and others can share it. Curating quality content can and should be a
company effort.
Stage 2:
Producer
Once a company gets comfortable sharing content on social channels, the creation begins.
Everyone is trying to feed the content machine and the importance of visual content continues
to grow. Facebook favors visual content. More brands are ramping up their Instagram efforts
and you can’t ignore Pinterest if your target audience is primarily women.
Companies again need to look inside for stories they can tell with social content. Photos
from trade shows or community activities are easy, but what about photo-based how-tos?
And don’t forget your customers. One of the best ways to tell a company story is through a
customer video. Have connections to thought leaders in your industry? Conduct an interview
with them. Better yet, do it as a Google Hangout so others can join live and participate. They
can also be broadcast live and recorded for YouTube. You’ve just created more shareable
video content for your other channels.
Stage 3:
Editor
Much of the content companies create lives on outside platforms. As companies mature
and create more of their own content, they need to own the platforms that house it. A blog
is that home. When you post content on your company blog you have a greater opportunity
to convert the visitor to a lead or a sale. You can’t exist in the social media world forever
without thinking about conversion paths. Grow and nurture a community all you want but at
some point, you have to determine a measurable outcome. A blog also offers control. Social
platforms are known to change on a regular basis as features come and go. Elements move on
the page. You decide when and how to change your blog.

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A successful blog usually cannot be handled by just one person. Some of the best blogs utilize
people from multiple departments to create content. Customers and prospects have different
interests, so leverage others within your company to appeal to a wider audience. Make it as
easy as possible for people to submit blog posts. Email still works. Reward your bloggers with
gift cards or swag. And be sure to share successful blog posts internally.
Stage 4:
Publisher
A social publisher gets it. This is a company that is curating and sharing great third-party
articles, posting status updates on their social channels, creating visual content with photos
and video. They are creating shareable audio blogging regularly with contributions from across
the company, and, here’s the big and, creating longer form content like Ebooks, white papers,
and even combining content to make “kits” on a topic or idea. High level content companies
also host webinars and build data collection tools for additional information to add to the
content stream. Hubspot is a top company that has a fully functioning content program that
drives conversions. Compare your company to the rest of your industry to see if you can
become the leader in your space.
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Social Advertising
Social media provides a significant marketing opportunity for
brands, and social advertising can support and amplify those
activities. Ads are considered social if they appear on a social
network, but what makes them particularly powerful is using social
recommendations and social actions, along with targeting, to
create highly relevant and engaging messaging.
As more social advertising opportunities arise on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere,
you may find that these social, engaging ads are sharing an ad budget with traditional web
banners or paid search advertising.
There are five drivers of social advertising: action, targeting, metrics, storytelling, and discovery.
For more detail, review the Marketing Cloud Social Advertising Ebook.
Stage 1:
Basic
Companies that start exploring social ads know they can expand the reach of their social
presences with them. While Facebook has the most sophisticated ad platform, and the most
types of ads, Twitter and LinkedIn also have ad platforms. All three platforms give you the
ability to target your ads, although Twitter does it automatically and the other platforms let
you choose your audience. LinkedIn is the most traditional advertising platform, as the social
aspects don’t go much beyond targeting. Both Facebook and Twitter give you the flexibility
to promote content and messages that have already resonated with followers. Both platforms
also let you promote your accounts to bring a larger audience to future posts.
This first stage is about taking the leap to leverage these tools and experiment. You
can better evaluate the success of these efforts if you understand what your costs and
percentages are in other forms of advertising or activities. Driving leads and sales through
social ads generates data to help measure success. For example, how many leads or sales
do you gain from every 100 followers or fans, and what does it cost you to acquire a new
customer by traditional means?

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Stage 2:
Targeted
The next level of social advertising focuses on Facebook because they currently offer the most
advanced targeting of any social media platform. Amplifying your content is about more than
just building your audience; it is about expanding the reach of a message. Companies in this
stage are spending more money on their ads because they understand the value of promoting
their best content to their audience and those similar to their audience. The reason advertising
to friends of your fans works on Facebook is because your next customer will be a lot like your
current customers. Studies have shown that one of the reasons people like Facebook Pages is
because they already do business with them. So this means that advertising to the friends of
people who like your Page is advertising to people who are similar to your customers.
Companies that focus on advanced targeting of their social ads also use A/B testing as a
means to improve their results. The best way to determine the success of something is to
have two small test groups and show them different versions of the same promoted content.
The one that performs better is the one that is used on the balance of the list. Make sure the
variable is limited to one element, like the headline, image or call to action, but not all three.
You can create your groups by targeting, but you need to make sure you have a big enough
audience to make the time and effort worthwhile.
Stage 3:
Automated
Marketers have become comfortable with automated algorithms running many types of online
ads, for example pay-per-click and Google banner ads. The next stage for companies using
social ads is to use a platform that makes optimization decisions based on performance.
If a sponsored story gets a lot of engagement and clicks, the budget can be increased
automatically. An under-performing ad can be turned off the same way. No one has to worry
about a campaign going out of control in the middle of the night. In addition to showing the
right ads at the right time to the right people, automated social ads provide better data and
analytics, so marketers can gain more actionable insights from their campaigns. And this
ultimately improves performance of the social ads.

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Stage 4:
Integrated
The highest stage of social advertising maturity occurs when a company’s paid strategy
is fully integrated with all aspects of the company’s ad spend. Social ads are not siloed
in development, budgeting or reporting. It is part of a coordinated marketing effort
that amplifies content based on other marketing efforts. Paid, owned and earned have
completely merged. Even those managing the company’s social channels are empowered to
adjust the ad spend.
So even though companies may still buy high profile television commercials, they can
use social content and social ads to amplify them to a more targeted audience. TV might
reach the largest audience, but it is not very well targeted to your customers and potential
customers. Support the campaign by posting an extended version of the commercial on
Facebook to reach a targeted customer base. Promote that post with ads to drive even more
engaged fans to view it. The social components help with measurement and optimization of
the overall campaign. These social ads are not bolted-on after thoughts, but a coordinated,
integrated effort.
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Measurement and Analytics
One of the biggest challenges for companies using social media
is understanding what to measure. This has nothing to do with
what tools they are using, or even the size of the organization.
Companies just can’t quite get their heads around determining
their success metrics for social media. One of the problems is that
everything is online and trackable either manually or within a tool.
People can get overwhelmed with all the data that is available to
them and consequently, they can’t separate the signal from the
noise from a measurement perspective.
Many companies focus on the easiest numbers, like followers, likes, comments and shares.
While it is important to keep up with these types of numbers to track growth of platforms, they
should not be a measure of success. You can buy followers or clicks very cheaply. Develop
a measurement framework that relates to business objectives. Your CMO is not interested in
how many likes your Facebook Page has. What is she reporting to the CEO? Align with that.
The big one is return on investment (ROI). According to IBM’s Global CMO Study, 63% of
CMOs view ROI as a measure of success. The challenge is measuring the return. If you are not
looking at leads or sales or something else with a clear monetary value, it can be difficult to
determine those numbers.
Another issue with social media measurement is that there are not yet standard measurements
that everyone agrees show success. Brands publish statistics, marketing executives stand on
stage at conferences and talk about their successes, but nobody says “here are the things to
measure.” Oh, and there aren’t really benchmarks for anything anyone does measure. You can
see how many followers your competitors have but you don’t know how many leads they drive,
and more importantly, how their social media efforts contribute to marketing effectiveness and
reducing cost per lead.
Stage 1:
Not Tracking
Even with all the above in mind, there are companies engaging in social media activities and
they just don’t know where to start measuring. So they wind up doing nothing. This really does
happen. It can also be a symptom of technology. Early stage companies use a variety of tools,

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based on personal preference, and some of the free tools have no metrics associated with
them at all.
A company may track time related to social media so they can address the resource issues,
but there is no connection to the business impact. They may also track volume of how many
posts they shared as a measure of activity. This is not how social businesses operate.
Stage 2:
Tracking the Basics
Once companies start tracking social media metrics, they are usually looking at optimization.
These are the obvious metrics that are easy to compile: followers, likes, shares, comments.
These tell you how your company is doing building reach by growing an audience and how
the content you share is resonating with that audience. These numbers can help you improve
what you are doing. You can think of this as fishing for bait. If you catch a small fish that you
will use for bait, you don’t take a picture holding it. You reserve that for when you land the big
one. These kinds of metrics stay within the team that is doing the work. Share reports with
executives when you have something to share (and have progressed to the next stage). If your
CMO is happy receiving these types of reports, you need to ask her what she really wants.
Because this is not it.
Stage 3:
Tracking and Analyzing
Social media success is determined by how it helps achieve company goals. Alignment here is
very important. Companies that have reached this level of maturity in measurement don’t have
awkward conversations with others in their company where they try to explain how the siloed
social media metrics are relevant. The social media team does not create their own reports,
but the data is integrated into other reports. It’s not about how social media drove web traffic,
but how social media contributed to web traffic along with pay-per-click ads, banner ads
and other marketing tactics. Can social media support improving customer satisfaction and
increasing brand awareness? Of course it can. If these are the goals that are important to the
company, you start by looking at how these are measured in the traditional sense and develop
a methodology from measuring this in social media. These approaches are not common, but
there are companies doing them.

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Stage 4:
Tracking, Analyzing and Integrating
What does social media measurement nirvana look like? The importance of social media has
risen to the highest levels within an organization. It is not just fully incorporated into regular
company reporting, but the information is so valued that it is taken into account for business
planning. The CMO gets the return on investment reporting that is so coveted. Consider one
of the goals of becoming a social business is to put the customer at the center of everything
you do. If you think of social media as one of the best ways to bring together the voice of the
customer with the voice of your company, then this doesn’t sound so unattainable.
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Social Media Tools and Systems
A company’s technology decisions help set them on the path to
meeting their goals and objectives. If multiple systems are cobbled
together and require lots of manual work to create reports, guess
what people will spend their time doing? Creating reports, rather
than analyzing them looking for patterns or ways to improve. What
if there is no standardized tool set? Incompatibility can add another
level of complexity to growing social media across an organization.
Stage 1:
Free Tools or None
When companies start social media accounts they don’t think about technology decisions.
They also don’t usually think about tracking appropriate metrics. This leaves many social
media practitioners choosing their own tools based on their own personal preference. This also
means that people could use no tools at all. If a company posts directly on twitter.com, there
are no additional metrics available besides follower counts without paying to advertise on the
platform. At least the native Facebook platform has some statistics available. If you are tracking
followers and likes, there is no need to use anything beyond these websites. But once you
start trying to look at the impact of your activities, some advanced level of tool is required.
It is easy to see how the choice of tools relates to your measurement needs. You should
determine what types of things you want to measure before picking your social media tool to
make sure it serves those needs.
Stage 2:
Some Free and Some Paid Tools
Many free tools operate on the freemium model. This means you get limited functionality for
free, but you pay to upgrade your features. Team access to accounts is a typical example of
a paid enhancement. Another one is access to data older than three months. There are many
examples of social media measurement websites which offer very basic tracking but if you
want anything more, you have to pay to subscribe.

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Companies in this second stage are starting to standardize their social media tools. While
it may not be one standard, it could be that an official list is provided for departments and
the teams can pick from the list. This at least removes the oddball tools from the mix when it
comes time for reporting. The other thing that starts driving this stage is the expansion of social
media beyond a core team. As business units and other functional departments start planning
their own social media activities, the tool use expands. Companies need to start to rein in the
selection before it gets too far afield.
Stage 3:
Paid Tools, Official
Just like the other stages in this category, companies that have reached this stage in their
maturity have been driven by things other than technology. To get to a place where a
company has standardized its social media programs on one paid tool means it has a clear
understanding of its goals, but it also understand the needs of multiple users. Marketing may
need one thing, while customer service needs another. And the European team has a different
set of needs altogether. It is impossible to come together on a technology solution without this
level of understanding.
Consider what this means in your organization. Does technology drive decisions or do
functional requirements? It is easy for the marketing team or the social media team to
standardize their tools around a paid solution, but what does it take to roll this out across the
organization? Discovery of social media activities even becomes part of this. Who knew this
team of engineers was so active on social media?
Stage 4:
Social Integrated with Other Systems
And finally, the perfect ending for this whole discussion of integrating social media across
an organization wraps up with an understanding of integration across technology systems.
We’ve seen plenty of possible silos within social media efforts and one of the clearest ways
to break those down is to bring social media activity into your other business systems. Want
to start making your sales team social? Bring social media conversations into their house, the
CRM system. You can do this on a Tweet by Tweet basis and open cases or leads with each
post that comes in, or you can connect your customers’ and prospects’ system records to
their social profiles. This will let sales reps see all of their targets’ social activities to warm up
conversations. The same is true for partners, vendors, and even employees. Recruiters can
discover new employees on social media sites long before they ever read a resume.

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Companies that focus on bringing social data into their business systems can respond better,
faster, and with more knowledge for their customers. At the end of the day we serve our
customers, and anything that allows us to do that better is worth exploring. Look at every
system in your organization and determine where and how social media can be added to the
information displayed.
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Conclusion
Social media is not an instant change in any organization, but
a process. Each one of the above categories require different
capabilities, resources, and approvals. That’s why we have broken
this down to these nine categories. Companies will progress on
each of the categories at different rates. While leaders with vision
are needed for a company to achieve the highest levels of social
business, it will be driven by leaders and teams at every level who
can see the future and don’t want to be left behind.

Salesforce / Radian 6: Marketing cloud ebook_sm_maturitymodel Dec 2012

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Salesforce / Radian 6: Marketing cloud ebook_sm_maturitymodel Dec 2012