Chess Media Group

As you may have seen from our homepage, we have created a distinct approach to our social business strategy.  In this post I wanted to go into a bit more detail and explain each one of sections on the process diagram.  This is by no means a final process and it will be continuously revised and adapted depending on the needs of the client.

If you’ll notice, we grouped our process into three key areas: Strategy, Creativity, and Results.  In this post we are going to cover the elements in the Strategy section.

Organization discovery

This is the starting point for our entire social business process.  During this phase, we learn as much as we can about the company.  This includes everything from going over the company business/marketing plan to interviewing various employees at the company to get a sense of how they view social media and to understand what they perceive to be the challenges and opportunities in the social media space.  Organization discovery is the foundation from which we build our social business strategy.  It’s crucial for us to understand how the business operates and interacts with customers and with employees.  After the organization discovery process, we have a clear understanding of how and where social business strategies can be integrated within the organization.

Audit and analyze existing data and analytics

This step is oftentimes overlooked by agencies and consultancies.  Before we begin developing any type of strategy for our clients we must understand what data is being collected and how it is being collected.  Here we look at everything from CRM systems and web analytics platforms to traditional customer and market data and sales numbers.  The goal here is to make sure we take a holistic data approach.   Once we audit the existing analytics and data platforms, we will have a solid idea of the data we can work with and what data is missing that we need to collect.  Ultimately, this step is crucial for being able to establish the ROI and impact metrics which we will discuss in the next step.

Define financial (ROI) and non-financial (impact) business objectives and metrics

Once we have a clear understanding of what data we can work with we can begin to define the financial and non-financial business objectives that we are going to go after.  Financial objectives can be things such as increasing the average dollar amount per transaction or increasing the amount of new customers.  Non-financial objectives can include things such as increasing positive brand sentiment or improving customer service.  Once we define both of these objectives we then look at specific metrics we can use to gauge how well we are able to meet those objectives.  We try to place a strong emphasis on being able to increase ROI but also realize that some companies are concerned with non-financial business objective as well, therefore we go after both.  Once the objectives and metrics are established they are constantly referenced and referred to for the remainder of the client engagement.  Ultimately, it is during this section where we decide what we want to achieve and how we are going to measure success.

In the next post in this series we are going to cover Creativity portion of our social business process which includes:

• Identify business and technology barriers and opportunities
• Develop business and technology solutions
• Map and integrate solutions into business functions

Tags: chess media group process, social business process, Social business strategy, social media strategy