Originally published on the Digital Strategy Conference blog; republished with permission from dStrategy Media.
The sixth and final dimension of digital maturity is your Social Business Strategy. It is one of Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity™ assessed in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model™, a business planning tool to help organizations improve their digital processes against an established standard.
Social business relates to the ways social media tools and practices have been adopted to support external customer engagement (such as crowdsourcing ideas for product development) and internal employee collaboration.
Evolving into a social business presumes an organization has a foundation in social media participation. With that foundation, the organization can more easily enable employee-to-employee (known as internal or enterprise social media networks) for current, or alumni employees), and finally, customer-to-customer digital interactions.
What is social business?
We have defined social business as the intent to facilitate interaction and collaboration in three directions:
- Externally, with your community;
- Internally, employee to employee; and
- Between customers.
At the highest level of maturity, a social business one is that enables steps out of the equation entirely and enables its customers to support one another without needing to broker the conversation. Essentially, the organization recognizes that its customer base can help each other in a way that no single company could match by itself.
What is your organization’s approach to collaboration?
Think about your organization’s approach to social business:
- How would you characterize your organization’s use of social media (blogs, forums, and or networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn?)
- Which departments or groups are making use of or participating in customer facing social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or YouTube or other social networks?
- To what extent do you use social business tools to support your customers?
Answering these questions is will help your organization determine if it is in the best position to implement your digital initiatives. What do you think? Have you got the right social business strategy in place to ensure your organization’s digital success?
Next: participate in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey
For specific questions that measure the human resources dimension of digital maturity, take the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey. We will share our collective results at the next Digital Strategy Conference.
Learn how to measure your organization’s digital maturity
Or, to measure your organization’s digital maturity across all six dimensions, register for our Mapping Digital Maturity Workshop, a practical, hands-on learning session to help your organization create a road map for digital success.
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