A few days ago I talked about the Strategy portion of our process diagram that we have on the homepage. I highly recommend that you take a look a that process diagram and read the previous post to get an understanding of how we are approaching social business strategies. Today I’m going to talk about the second part of our process that is Creativity.
Identify Business and Technology Barriers and Opportunities
This is an in depth portion of our creativity process but in a nutshell what we are trying to do here is to find both the business and technology obstacles that are preventing an organization from engaging in the social space and and analyzing what opportunities we can go after. For example, some of the business barriers revolve around corporate culture or lack of consumer insight data. Technology challenges can include not being able to track customers or being able to sync together multiple data points to accurately interpret information. Oftentimes a company won’t have many social business barriers but instead has a lot of opportunities. Once opportunities are identified the next step is to figure out how to capitalize on those opportunities and how to prioritize which one’s to go after and when.
Develop Business and Technology Solutions
This is where a lot of the creativity comes into play. After we have a solid understanding of what the barriers and opportunities are we then need to craft solutions that either solve the problems or are able to capitalize on the opportunities. Solutions can range from training sessions to technology solutions to software vendor recommendations. Every company is going to have its own set of barriers and opportunities and will thus also have its own unique set of solutions. We work closely with client teams to make sure that the solutions we develop are practical, efficient, and implementable.
Map and Integrate Solutions into Business Functions
Most companies on the planet have multiple departments and business functions i.e. marketing, sales, and product development. Not every department is going to have the same solution so we need to map and integrate specific business solutions with their functions within the organization. The best example I can find from this comes from our colleague Metrics Man aka Don Bart. Don put together an excellent visual that depicts what this mapping and integration should look like at a basic level. Instead of re-creating the whole thing I simply pasted his image below, thanks Don!
In the next post we are going to talk about the final stage in our social business process, the results.
Tags: chess media group process, creativity, social business process
