The document discusses social media maturity and how it can impact businesses. It presents a social media maturity curve that businesses can use to assess their current level of engagement, from listening to optimizing. Higher levels of maturity involve more strategic use of social platforms to engage audiences and incorporate customer insights. The case study of iRobot demonstrates how increasing social maturity helped the company transform by better addressing customer concerns online and developing new products.

1. Social Maturity
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2. Social Business starts
with your strategy.
You first need to know
where you are on the
Social Media Maturity
curve.

3. OPTIMIZE
Change how the
brand/business
Social Maturity ANALYZE
Learn from successes
operates to better
serve customers (true
CRM) and stakeholders;
Curve and failures, begin to
refine new practices
that are delivering
design and execute
strategic programs that
have measurable and
value to the sustained impact.
communities they
serve. Incorporate
new ideas and
ENGAGE strategic use of digital
Apply personal tools more often.
experiences to business
needs; get started with
social networks for
brands, blogging, create
LEARN new forms of content.
Personally start using
LISTEN social media; stay on
Learn about digital top of broader media
media through reading, changes in progress.
seeking opinion,
attending training
sessions.

4. Areas of discovery:
 Monitoring and Measurement.
 Audience Engagement.
 Content, Platforms & Syndication.
 Community Interactions.
 Campaign Execution.
 Organizational Synergy.

5. Social Maturity Insights
• What your company is doing well.
• What you can do better.
• Gap data used to create a strategic
plan for social media.
• Get to ROI.
• Leapfrog your competition.

6. Questions to consider
• What is your brand’s real-time persona?
• How do employees of the brand behave?
• What actions do they take?
• How do they relate and respond to people, news, and its environment?
• How do they engage?
• How does the brand live out its purpose, values, and promise?
• How is the brand engaging your audience to participate, to comment, to
explore?
• Are you telling your brand’s stories the same old way?
• Are you using the same old “voices” to tell the story?
• How are you “showing” vs. “telling” your brand’s story?
• How are your brand’s data streams represented, presented, and interpreted?
• How is your brand capitalizing on interconnectedness of the network of
friends, influencers, advocates, etc.?
• How is your brand of service?
• Is the promise and value of your brand real for customers?
• How transparent are your corporate communications?
• Are your executives comfortable with being genuine, authentic, open, and
direct?
• Does the brand openly solicit and respond to customer questions and
concerns?
• How is your brand advancing, simplifying, and solving customer problems?
6

7. Case study: iRobot
How iRobot used ramped up
social maturity…
Took a complicated
technology and
made it into a
consumer
product…

8. iRobot began listening to what was
being said in social media….
“My Roomba doesn’t pick up pet hair #frustrated”
“My Roomba isn’t working – can’t fix it #fail”
• Heard what customers were
saying
• It was not always positive –
and was stopping sales!
• Gathered screenshots
• Put them in a powerpoint
• Gave them to CEO

9. iRobot took charge of the
social customer interactions.
The CEO
appointed Dir.
Social Customer
Interactions.

10. iRobot used social media maturity to impact
business processes, systems and productivity.
• Reduction in call volume
– Superusers answer customer questions
• Increase positive sentiment
– Increase in positive word of mouth
– Customers become marketers
– Increase in sales
• New product lines
– Specific products based on customer’s wants’

11. And the results were a complete business
transformation…
• Absent of:
– Politics and resistance
– “Not invented here” or “not my
problem”
• Social media lead to
transformation of:
– Engineering, Product
Development, QA
– Fulfillment, Order Management,
– Marketing, Sales and Advertising
Chalk it up to the “Witness” factor

12. Natalie Petouhoff Kathy Herrmann
DoctorNatalie@gmail.com info@kathyherrmann.com
www.DrNatalieNews.com www.kathyherrmann.com
@DrNatalie @KathyHerrmann
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