1. Integration. Becoming a "social business" (meaning true participation as opposed to leveraging social media as a new form of marketing) can impact nearly every function of a business. Marketing, PR, communications--even supply chain and any function that deals with employees. So where does it live? Is it a department? Do organizations hire a "Chief Social Officer" much like they would a Chief Technology Officer? All organizations will eventually grapple with integrating social into their entire ecosystem adopting either centralized, distributed or hybrid approaches.

2. Governance. Many organizations now understand that anything that can and will be said about them on the internet will be. The good, the bad, the ugly. And this includes content produced not only from the general public, but also from internal constituents such as employees. Organizations will not only need to begin actively listening so that they are in the know, but they will need rules of engagement for how they deal with multiple types of scenarios from responding to a compliment to dealing with a detractor to following up with an employee who just posted something inappropriate or sensitive.

3. Culture. All organizations fall somewhere on a spectrum of being "open" or "closed" meaning that they are either more transparent with how they operate and collaborative or they hoard knowledge internally. Consider that it's probable that the Zappos purchase by Amazon had a good deal to do with their notoriously open culture. Likewise, even Apple, which can be notoriously secretive, is benefiting by leveraging a strategy that opened up their iPhone application ecosystem. Sure Apple has a great deal of control over it, but for the first time in history, they have legions of people developing applications that run on their hardware. Organizations have the potential to benefit from embracing customers and employees in new ways, but will have to manage it intelligently and with purpose.

4. Human Resources. In order to transform from a business to a social business, companies are going to have to upgrade their HR protocols, as well as legal. And it's likely to be a never-ending process as new technologies continually hit the scene. Before there was Twitter, companies scrambled to publish blogging guidelines for employees, now the wrong tweet or Facebook status can get you fired. Organizations will not only need to update guidelines but actually train their people who may be leveraging social technologies for work. Customer service in particular comes to mind.

5. Measurement & ROI. Every organization will continue to struggle with measuring results and reporting ROI. Philosophically, this question can be answered with another question: "what's the ROI of e-mail"? But it's a question that won't go away. New social constructs will be needed to measure social initiatives such as attention (the size or number of participants actively engaged) or authority (the amount of influence a participant has in the ecosystem). Because social business is enabled by technology, it is by definition measurable. However, tying it to realized revenue or savings becomes more of a challenge.

Creating A Facebook Business Page

1. Visit this URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

2. Decide what the best category is for your business. (Spend a couple of minutes on this as you can't change it later easily).

3. Enter your business/product/brand name and click "Create Page".

4. At a minimum, I'd suggest entering a short description of your business and a website address. This is in the "Add Information To This Page" area. I'd also advise uploading your logo as a photo/image.

5. Click on your business name in the top left corner (it's a hyperlink) and then click "publish this page" (until you do this, nobody but you will be able to see your new Facebook business profile).

6. Finally, and this is important, from your new profile page, click "Add to my products". This way, you become the first "fan" of your business.

 

I set up a couple of groups on Facebook and wanted to invite all my friends, but it would have taken an eternity because for some strange reason Facebook doesn’t allow you to “select all” friends when sending an invite. I mean, they’ll let you do it… but only if you click one at a time! Uugh.

Well anyway I went on a little search and found that you could cheat the system by inserting a little javascript to make it happen! Here is how to do it:

1. Go to your Event, Group or page and click “Invite People”.
2. Once the page has loaded you should see all of your friends, but they are not selected.
3. At this point, copy and paste the javascript code below into your Web browser’s address bar, then hit “Enter”.
4. If all goes well, it selects all of your friends!

javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

I tried it on a Fan Page.  I selected "Suggest To Friends" - and  a popup window appeared and loaded avatars of all my friends.  I just dropped this script into the url address window and hit return and it selected everyone.   It doesnt actually send the invite - you still have to do that.  So I think its safe to try it and back out.

1. Create a mission statement -- What are your top-level objectives for applying social media and Web 2.0? And how will you achieve them? Ideally, this can be boiled down to one statement, articulating both the vision and where you aim to focus in terms of specific strategies. Don’t skip – or skimp on – this one; it’s important.

2. Assign owners – Who will take the mission, build the team, secure the budget, identify the tools needed? And who will own each channel, like LinkedIn, Twitter, your blog, etc., as you scale up the program? In about half of the organizations we have looked at, marketing owns social media, but this is mostly because early social business tended to focus on marketing or online commerce first.

3. Outline employee policies -- Do you have a corporate social media handbook, with policies, style guides and guidance for employees looking to participate (on behalf of the company) in public forums and social sites? And as you roll out new social business tools, beyond creating awareness – see below – how will you encourage new behaviors and even innovative uses for these social tools?

4. Identify existing communities -- Where are discussions taking place now? For consumer products, they may take place on Amazon or Facebook, while business topics may originate on LinkedIn or internal forums. But it’s also likely that most discussions will span multiple social (and traditional) channels and involve both user-generated and enterprise content. Your social business strategy will need to address all of these!

5. Create a marketing plan -- How will you promote and roll out your new (or existing) social capabilities? Will word-of-mouth marketing be sufficient? Also, a training plan, incentives and recognition programs for frequent posters to communities and moderators will be needed.

6. Develop individual channel strategies -- Depending on which channels best fit the goals of your social business strategy, it’s important to look at the “role” and “tone” of each, think about cross-links (e.g., Facebook promotion back to your corporate blog) and leverage monitoring and benchmarking tools for tracking discussions, sentiment and your current “influence.” For example, Twitter Grader is a good way to see how you stack up in the world of Twitter.

7. Develop community strategies and programs – How will you support existing communities via new social business tools and encourage the widest number of users to share, publish and comment on information, whether it exists inside or outside the enterprise? In addition, what is needed to measure reputation and enable a trust model that scales across all communities?

8. Develop your platform strategy -- As companies look to integrate social channels with core business processes, a growing number are turning to social business software (SBS) platforms like those from Jive, OutStart or RightNow via its HiveLive acquisition. In evaluating these options, it is important to outline enterprise requirements (built-in expertise location, mobile access, etc.) and dependencies to help you scale from individual communities to enterprise collaboration and social networking.

9. Create a social business dashboard -- What metrics will you use to show the ROI for your programs? In the customer service arena, reduced costs from avoided calls or email and higher customer satisfaction are two proven measures to start with. For enterprise use of Web 2.0 in other areas, improved information sharing and lower communication costs are additional benefits that could be measured and tracked.

10. Publish an action plan -- What tactics are needed to fulfill your social business vision over the next 12 to 18 months? Typically, these plans start with management activities (steps 1, 2, 3 and 9), marketing-oriented tasks (steps 4, 5 and 6), content and community development (steps 4 and 7) and technology rollout (steps 7 and 8). Ideally, for each tactic, you want to articulate specific skills needed, timeframes and dependencies, and field trials to test assumptions and readiness for proceeding with subsequent phases.