Assessing Corporate Readiness for Social Media

While over 30% of corporate users are using intranets, blogs, wikis, and social networking on a regular basis, corporations themselves are at various stages in their ability to make the most use of social media applications and standard enterprise best practices are still evolving.

What are the questions that can help organizations assess their readiness? Here are some - do you have others?

Political
- Is the CEO is OK with the idea (OK, this is sort of a meatball...but an important one)?
- What percentage of managers have a favorable impression of social media tools?
- What percentage of employees speak directly, unmoderated, to external audiences?
- Does the company have regular open-format discussions with employees?
- How often do employees get updates about corporate performance and events?
- Can management articulate why community is important to the company?

Resources
- Are there identified community managers?
- Is there one executive responsible for community?
- Is there budget for offline community events?
- Has the business modeled out community development and its benefits - i.e. is there a community business plan?
- Are there resources assigned to proactively engage with people discussing its products and services online?

Awareness
- Does the company track the number of online mentions for the company, its products, and its executives?
- Does the company track the number of positive and negative online mentions?

Process
- Is there a articulated process for taking ideas from communities and incorporating back into products, services, or processes?
- Which corporate functions pro-actively solicit feedback from employees, partners, and customers already?

Participation
- What percentage of employees participate in corporate activities not directly related to their work responsibilities?
- What percentage of employees blog - either personally or professionally?
- What percentage of  employees are members of a consumer social network?

Comments

[Amy Sample Ward]

Great list of questions! One thing that I think about that touches on a few of the above questions but goes a bit farther is discovering the number of employees who feel personally comfortable with a number of social media tools (not only blogging) and are ready and willing to be an advocate for implementation. Knowing not just who wouldn't be fighting against you and who has heard of these tools, but also who you can count on in the moment, in random one-on-one conversations around the office, or as a team to speak up and advocate with you will really help cinch the deal!

[Beth Kanter]

This is an excellent list. I've been working nonprofits and tech for the past 15 years - and the questions are the same, it seems like it is the technology tools that change.

for nonprofits, assessing readiness is an important part of the strategic process because they don't always have the capacity.

Last year we got into a cross blog conversation about adoption issues of blogging (web2.0) -

The summary:
Yes2.0
http://tinyurl.com/ypz5nv

No2.0
http://tinyurl.com/2hhf2z

Of course, it isn't alway black and white - there are maybes. The important thing is the internal process that you use to discuss - and drive change internally.

So, once the questions are identified and readiness is accessed, guess the next thing on the list is the ROI gorilla?

http://socialmediametrics.wikispace.com

[Rachel Happe]

Amy - That's a great addition - thank you. This is all about people's readiness to adopt so that question cannot be under-estimated.

Beth - Great slides - thank you! I couldn't access the wiki but yes, the next step is ROI, which can change dramatically by the goal or application..and there is very little consensus on what are the measures but many of us are working on surfacing options...I will post on this in a bit.

[Toby]

Your list reinforces that to adopt a social media strategy is not simply to add a new communication tactic but to change the way an organization does business. Without the back-end and culture aligning a social media strategy has 2 strikes against success. Thanks for the post!

[Toby]

Your list reinforces that to adopt a social media strategy is not simply to add a new communication tactic but to change the way an organization does business. Without the back-end and culture aligning a social media strategy has 2 strikes against success. Thanks for the post!

[Rachel Happe]

Thanks for all the great additions and comments - there are some emergent best practices on calculating return but there is a lot of work to do in this area. Great additions to the conversation!