Jeremiah Owyang: 5 steps to making a predictive, social business

Jeremiah Owyang, a partner in the Altimeter Group, has a question for us: Is your business ready for social business? You wouldn’t trust a pilot, a surgeon or even a member of your shop staff if they didn’t have training. Yet many do with social.

We’re still really early in social – maybe the 1998 equivalent of the web. Companies are rushing to integrating social – but they’re not doing pod job. The Washington Post tried to integrate with Facebook 11 different ways on one page. Why have you spent years getting people to come to your website just to send them straight to Facebook. The mainstream media are upping their coverage of social media crises.

We have a spiral towards social media sanitation. If we respond on social media without a strategy, we can actually make things worse. So… a social business hierarchy of needs. (The slides will be on his blog later)

Foundation

Getting the basics right. Why are we doing this? What education do you need? Educate employees around tools is a basic minimum. Dell use unconference style training. Intel have an internal certification programme.

Safety

Get the right team in place. He’s got five models – he talked about them last year. The average size of a corporate social media team is 11. Weber Shandwick has pretend crises to practice on.

Formation

Looking just at work accounts, owned by the company – many companies have proliferating accounts right now. 1 out of 330 employees are using these tools for business purposes.

Enablement

If you’re running social media in a business – you need to let go and let the running move to the business units. Most companies still have it locked in Marketing. Support is usually next, following by product. This level is rarely reached by most companies. Salesforce rewards their top social media employees – Chatteratti.

Enlightenment

Social, local and mobile enable you to start predicting what your company need to provide. Websites will increasingly be assembled on the fly, based on mobile data. Websites as we know them will change, and conventional advertising will go away – replaced by contextually useful. But we are years away from this.

Most companies have yet to integrate social data into their main customer relationship tool. But to get to that point, you need to climb your way up this hierarchy.

The slides: