How do organizations manage social media effectively? Every organization wants to implement social media, but it is difficult to create processes and mange employees to make this happen. Most social media books focus on strategies for communicating with customers, but they fail to address the internal process that takes place within a business before those strategies can be implemented. This book is geared toward helping you manage every step of the process required to use social media for business. The Social Media Management Handbook provides a complete toolbox for defining and practicing a coherent social media strategy. It is a comprehensive resource for bringing together such disparate areas as IT, customer service, sales, communications, and more to meet social media goals. Wollan and Smith and their Accenture team explain policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities, metrics, strategies, incentives, and legal issues that may arise. You will learn how to: Empower employees and teams to utilize social media effectively throughout the organization Measure the ROI of social media investments and ensure appropriate business value is achieved over time Make smarter decisions, make them more quickly, and make them stick Get the most out of your social media investment and fully leverage its benefits at your company with The Social Media Management Handbook.
Jussila J, Kärkkäinen H and Aramo-Immonen H (2014). Social media utilization in business-to-business relationships of technology industry firms, Computers in Human Behavior , 30 , (606-613), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2014 .
The Social Media Management Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business
Reviewer: Klaus K. Obermeier
Social media-which, according to the book, has enabled "the swift and easy development, creation, dissemination and consumption of information and entertainment by both organizations and individuals"-has proven to be transformative for individuals, enterprises, and society at large. The authors deliver the perfect handbook for the subject at hand. Since all three of the authors work in the Accenture customer relationship management service line, the book is focused on practicality and business orientation when it comes to analyzing the main touch points of a company with social media. These touch points include the core components of an organization and also constitute the five parts of the book (further subdivided into 18 chapters): strategy, marketing and sales, customer service and support, core components of the digital enterprise, and empowerment of employees. The part on strategy starts with a call to arms to enter the social media game to make the company more customer-centric and to prepare for the next wave in customer relationship building. In brief, a fifth "P" (for "people") is added to the common mantra of "promotion, product, place, and price." The composition of the fifth "P" includes "the five Rs: reputation, responsibility, relationship, reward, and rigor." In the second chapter on strategy development, the authors present the social media management framework, which consists of context, culture, process, metrics, people, and policies. Demonstrating a quantifiable return on investment (ROI) based on the "five Rs" makes a statement of the customer health, that is, what customers tell and show the company and what they show and tell other people. The authors conclude that a company should take three steps to managing customer health: define a metric, assign accountability, and create a roadmap. Moreover, for a social media strategy to take hold in an organization, a champion to sell the idea internally is usually required. Part 2 investigates the ramifications of social media on marketing and sales. The huge amount of free real-time data and the level of granularity of customer interaction are contrasted with traditional quantitative methods (for example, surveys) and qualitative methods (for example, focus groups) to capture the "voice of the customer" (VoC). Since the data is free and plentiful, future investment has to apply to mining (as opposed to collecting) the massive amounts of data. To assist companies in using the VoC to their advantage, Accenture developed a SLOPE model, which consists of five basic steps: synchronize, listen and learn, optimize and operationalize, personalize and propagate, and expectations and execution. The nature of the "listening posts," including case studies and hurdles to successful strategy execution, are discussed. An important aspect of social media concerns the volume, topics, and sentiment analysis of customer feedback. Product development and new services benefit significantly from social media feedback. There is an interesting interplay between the shorter product life cycles and the need for more rapid development of new products. Both processes could be viewed as driven-and ultimately accelerated-by social media. More important, social media can drive innovation by bringing together a company's internal resources, trusted networks, and world exposure. The last chapter in this part discusses trends that affect traditional marketing initiatives. The authors discuss three selling strategies involving social media: using social media as a new channel to individuals, getting customers to mobilize their personal network, and appealing to influencers. Use cases illustrate the various strategies. Part 3 covers customer service and support. Two major developments are taking hold: constant, real-time social media monitoring and the formation of forums of like-minded consumers who help each other if a problem arises with a product lending itself to crowdsourcing. The book discusses the importance of the integration of criteria and guidelines to respond to complaints on social media, the establishment of a "complaint handling tree," and priority scenarios. The analysis of these issues from multiple angles makes the book a standout in its genre. Equally significant is the part's last chapter, which concerns complying with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) disclosures. This chapter is a must-read for anyone serious about social media, and makes a complex and boring subject relevant and understandable. Part 4 of the book describes the core components of the agile digital enterprise. As with many state-of-the-art technologies, a social media platform tying together the various enterprise social media touch points is not available out of the box. When a social media platform segues from the experimental phase to genuine business transformation, its purpose is to aggregate, analyze, respond, and promote customer interaction. It ultimately helps to measure social media average response time (SMART). To arrive at SMART and its concomitant benefits, the organization has to carefully stitch together the pieces of technology necessary and viable for such a task. A further, even more significant aspect of such a platform is the mobile aspect of social media, which introduces location and immediacy into customer relationship management. Chapter 13 provides a fundamental discussion on the relevant issues of a mobile social media strategy. Chapter 14 discusses the changing role of the chief information officer (CIO) and how he or she needs not only to learn about the new technology but also to fully embrace it to become effective in his or her role as the proselytizer for social media. Part 5 is titled "Empowering the Employees for Social Media Success." A significant component of a company's social media strategy consists of finding, developing, deploying, and retaining talent. Chapter 15 elaborates on cultural and generational change when it comes to adopting and using new technologies. The chapter stresses the importance of integrating business strategy with human capital strategy, and ultimately human resources strategy. Chapter 16 discusses a host of new roles and job functions being created by social media. Those new job descriptions have to include people capable of managing large customer communities, integrating diverse social media outlets, and managing collaboration within the organization and products designed for viral proliferation. Chapter 17 emphasizes social media policies that balance accountability and empowerment for individuals as part of a larger organization. The final chapter offers insights into collaboration as a process for value creation. Some anecdotal data is presented on a complex subject. The layout of the book is easy to follow; chapter highlights guide the reader, and the different writing styles of the authors help engage the reader's attention. The book covers most of the relevant subjects with some exceptions (for example, social media scoring is not mentioned). The depth and breadth of the discussion varies according to the relevance the authors attribute to the certain topics and their level of expertise. The reader is always able through references to explore individual areas of interest more thoroughly-which is a litmus test for a good handbook. Further information on social media can be found on the Web site accompanying this book (http://www.socialmediamanagementhandbook.accenture.com), which also includes synopses of the chapters, videos and interviews, and some glossy downloads on the subject areas. For anyone serious about social media in business, this is a must-read. Online Computing Reviews Service
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Social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are originally developed as communication tools among individuals for private conversations. Through the platforms, people share photos, stories and news with their social media friends to interact .
