Mikel Madina's List: Master GestCom

Senior managers must hire and foster a Social Strategist's career based on our 10 guidelines, including the following: find a candidate who comes from a strong digital or marketing background, seek those who focus on business objectives over the latest technologies, and give them the opportunity to take on risk safely. Furthermore, because these programs can cause internal strife, executives must provide air cover and clear roadblocks, and then appropriately reward their Strategist with challenges and compensation - or risk losing this key person to companies who can understand and leverage their skills.

This report is intended primarily for business people who are tasked with understanding, interpreting, and acting on social data-executives, strategic planners, social strategists, and marketers. It outlines the key challenges of social data, proposes a value-based framework for social analytics, and recommends clear and pragmatic steps that companies engaged in social media must follow to ensure they are gaining insights, measuring effectively, interpreting accurately, and taking appropriate action-both today and in the longer term.

Customers continue to adopt social technologies at a blinding speed - yet organizations are unable to keep up. Why? Rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect with individuals and communities who share mutual interests, increasingly leaving organizations out of the conversation. Simply hiring more people to keep up with social marketing, sales, and support will not be sufficient, as consumers and their new channels will always outnumber employees. As a result, companies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web - giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.

This report examines four common ways brands are investing in internal readiness. The report looks how they prepared internally to spearhead momentum and makes recommendations on how to dissect business benefits as well as where continued investment is needed.

Altimeter Group surveyed 140 corporate Social Strategists, primary business decision makers at large corporations, and found that social business maturity drives social business spending. In 2011, our data shows that investment in 12 discrete social business categories will vary greatly between three social busienss maturity levels: Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced.

Faced with difficult spending decisions, corporations should heed the benchmarks from our survey - spending on social business should be prioritized on key areas for each maturity level.

Altimeter Group conducted research, and gleaned input from 34 vendors, agencies, and experts, to determine success criteria and develop a roadmap for Facebook page best practices. We found Eight Success Criteria for Facebook page marketing, and then tested the maturity of 30 top brands across six industries.

Our heuristic evaluation revealed that brands fell short - nearly half of the brands we reviewed (14 out of 30) did not fully leveraged social features to activate word of mouth, the hallmark behavior of social networks. Within this immature landscape, a few brands were on the right track to successfully harnessing Facebook page marketing. Brands like Pampers, Macy's, Kohl's, and AXE increased engagement and activated word of mouth through advocacy and peer-to-peer interactions, or solicited business call to actions that result in transactions.

We commonly associate web analytics (including Google Analytics) with web governance and measurement, using it to evaluate content performance and user interaction post website launch. But web analytics can do more than report progress: it can inform process.

A lot of content work happens before we have a governance plan in place, including content research and discovery. We need to understand business objectives and website goals, who our users are and what they need, as well as what content we have and how it measures up in terms of quality.