Page 92 - Social Media Marketing

chapter 3: BUILD A SOCIAL BUSINESS ■
70 First, track the overall accumulation of content and ideas. Then, encourage the com-
also happening. It’s a lot like the general notion that “having momentum” is good. True
enough, but ensuring that it is not primarily the angular variety is also important.
How do we keep from spinning in circles? By tying levels of participation and
collaboration to an ultimate end point: the accumulation of applied knowledge—for
example, a wiki of customer solutions that have been tested and are known to work—
in the context of specific business objectives.
Whether your social business application is internal, external, or a combination
of the two, the ingredients for success are high levels of participation and the realiza-
tion of useful applied knowledge—the “value” component that defines many com-
munities. Platforms like Salesforce.com’s “Ideas” are particularly good in this regard
because they encourage participation and in the process create a useable body of col-
laboratively amassed knowledge that can be directly applied to a business or organiza-
tional challenge or opportunity.
Assessing the sharing of solutions, for example, is surprisingly easy. Combining
two best practices taken from the business uses of social computing points the way.
munity to curate and refine this content, pushing the most valuable content to the top
and improving it over time. Establish a “cutoff” based on the norms of your commu-
nity and measure the applied knowledge or resultant solutions created that are ranked
at or above that threshold.
As a further basis for the evaluation of knowledge and solution transfer, weight
the amount of content produced by the curation scores—in other words, develop a
weighted scoring that emphasizes the value of more useful content—and then track
that over time. Tie the profile data into this, and you’ll spot the sources of high-demand
expertise, both within and external to your organization. You can then study the inter-
nal sources and extract the best practices associated with these relatively higher knowl-
edge sources and apply these resources across other teams. Externally, you can use tools
such as BuzzStream (covered in Chapter 2, “The New Role of the Customer”) to build
relationships with the leading holders of external knowledge.
Frank Leistner
Frank Leistner is SAS Institutes’ Chief Knowledge Officer. Frank’s book, Mastering Organizational
Knowledge Flow, published by Wiley and SAS Business Series, guides you through the process and
considerations useful when developing collaborative teams inside your organization.
You can find the book at leading booksellers, and you can follow Frank (@kmjuggler) on Twitter.