Imagine that you are charged with launching a social media program for your product group. You ask your agency to develop a campaign. You think through the risks and rewards and go for it. Now, consider your counterparts in the other lines of business (LOB) in your organization who are doing the same thing. At any given point, each LOB may be thinking about or executing:

· Best practices

· Listening tools and campaigns

· Social media guidelines

· Outside and inside resources

· Platforms and social assets

· Research

· Advocate identification and activation

· Measurement

In fact, here’s the scary scenario: each LOB may be going down these paths separately and independently. At ComBlu, we’ve seen this over and over, and this practice is almost as prevalent today as it was during the wild, wild gold rush days of social media. Let’s think about what this really means.

· Scenario One: Group A wants a listening program and goes out and gets a license for a tool and trains some people to use it. At the same time, another group, licenses an entirely different tool and assigns one person to be the “chief listener”. Yet another group hires an agency to listen and respond for them and a fourth LOB contracts for a huge “listening study”. Yikes!

· Scenario Two: Now, these same four groups all decide they need social media guidelines. They each either develop their own or hire someone to do it for them. The result: four separate, sort of similar guidelines across four different LOBs.

· Scenario Three: Three out of these four groups all buy the same study from Forrester or another respected research firm

· Scenario Four: Two of these groups each buy a different community software platform and later decide they want to integrate their community experiences..

You get the picture. No standardization. No governance. No cost sharing. No knowledge sharing. No Center of Excellence (COE).

Many brands have Centers of Excellence for shared services and resources across their organization. A marketing department might have a COE for interactive, research, experiential, etc. And, a few are starting to add social marketing or social media to the COE approach. They are creating and sharing guidelines for listening and social media interaction, standardizing to a single community platform and listening tools, buying research once, and so on. Some are even meeting regularly to discuss best practices and parse their individual experiences with a vender, campaign or tool. But, here’s an interesting observation: they are not eating the social dog food. For the most part, the COEs are not using social tools to facilitate sharing and conversation about experiences, resources and approaches. They aren’t using rating and ranking systems to review venders or to get a view into planned programs that might provide insights or leverage between divisions, geographies or LOBs. They aren’t creating UGC or aggregating thought leadership information. They aren’t saying: “we’re in the early planning stages of research about XYZ that might benefit others. Let’s form a group and plan and co-fund it.”

One of the missions of ComBlu is to help organizations socialize their business model and supporting operations. We think brands would be better served by taking a COE approach, and using social tools to accelerate and facilitate adoption. The prize? Efficiency, effectiveness, bandwidth, cost savings and

Where performance is measured, performance improves. Where performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.

-Thomas S. Monson (1927 -  )

If you can’t measure something, is it worthwhile? 

What would the NCAA Final Four be if they didn’t keep score (heck, would there even be a Final Four?!)

Would you ever diet if you never weighed yourself and only wore clothes with elastic waist bands?

Does performance matter if no one cares?

Performance is important.  But what is it?  Performance is benchmarking (having something to compare progress against), a method to actually measure or track changes and a desired outcome.  Pretty simple actually.

Think about performance in business terms.  As a customer of some brand, if you have a problem and call their help line, are disconnected twice, on hold for 20 minutes and find out when you reach someone they can’t help you, how do you measure that brand’s performance?  Is this brand experience worth it?

As an employee, what if you were 3 years behind on the development of a new product and didn’t track against any budgets?  What if you didn’t track pricing or quality? How would your company’s performance be measured?  Would you be competitive?  How would you know?

Lots of brands have communities.  Some are better developed than others, but how are these communities performing?  Does it matter?  And to whom?

Well, it does matter.  It should matter to a lot of people…people both directly and indirectly involved in that brands community.  Community can have a HUGE impact on a brand and its underlying operational components by driving results in three categories:

1.  Advocacy (both WOM and product/service consumption)

2.  Feedback 

3.  Support 

The problem is that some businesses don’t seem to understand the importance of community. They treat it like….an after thought.  Outside of three people in the marketing department, community is something that isn’t even on the radar screen. Is community as important as a patent? How about a state of the art distribution center?

For most businesses, who some operational experts call ‘laggards’, community is only viewed as another channel to push branded messaging. Other businesses, which operational experts call ‘innovators’, community is part and parcel to everything they do.

Below are two models. Which one looks like your company? Depending on how you answer (be honest), community is either a ‘thing’…marketing function and provides you limited value but one you can draw a nice neat box around.

Or instead, community in some form or fashion permeates every aspect of your business. You can’t easily define where it starts and where it stops. It just is. It’s organized and it’s everywhere.

If you say, “hey, this sort of looks like what we do”, you work for a leader. An innovator. It doesn’t matter whether you do it perfectly or not (nobody does), your business is a high performer.

The bad news is there are lots of laggards and worse, most of them don’t want to change.  The good news is innovators want to get better and some laggards just need a roadmap and some encouragement. 

So my question in this installment (one of three) is where does community reside in your organization? Are you an innovator or a laggard? In either case do you want to improve your organization’s performance?  Community is a strategic asset if deployed properly. 

In part two of this installment I’ll focus on how to measure community and then what to do with the numbers.