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Q8-5 How Do Organizations Develop an Effective SMIS?

competitive strategies from Chapter 3 (Figure 3-5). Organizations can focus their strategies on
being the cost leader or on differentiating their products from the competition. Organizations
can then employ the chosen strategy across an entire industry or focus on a particular seg-
ment within that industry. Depending on an organization’s strategy, it will use different SM
platforms in different ways. Again, the key is premeditated alignment of the SMIS with the
organization’s strategy.
Organizations know SM is popular and could be strategically beneficial. They hear about it
constantly in the news. It’s not entirely their fault if they want to jump on board. Social media
is a relatively new development with a dizzying array of companies, platforms, and services. It’s
constantly changing, too.
It’s important to understand the development process presented in Figure 8-9 because you
may be the “social media expert” at your future job. You may be called in to help develop the
organization’s SMIS. In order to be successful, take a few minutes to consider the steps in the
process.

Step 1: Define Your Goals
It may sound clichéd, but the first step in developing an SMIS is to clearly define what the organi-
zation wants to achieve with SM. As previously mentioned, your goals must be clear, deliberate,
and aligned with the organization’s competitive strategy. Without clearly defined goals, you won’t
know whether your SM effort was successful.
As you learned in Chapter 3, the goals for each organization are different. For organizations
that choose a differentiation strategy, SM goals could include better employee recruiting, quicker
product development, becoming an industry product leader, or increasing customer loyalty. In
general, most organizations include increased brand awareness, conversion rates, Web site traffic,
or user engagement as goals. Figure 8-10 gives you examples of how these might manifest them-
selves in social media.

Step 2: Identify Success Metrics

After you know what you want to accomplish using SM, you need to identify metrics that will
indicate when you’ve achieved your goals. These are referred to as success metrics or key
performance indicators (KPI). Metrics are simply measurements used to track performance.
Every organization has different metrics for success. For example, a law firm may measure billable
hours, a hospital may measure patients seen or procedures performed, and a manufacturer may
look at units produced or operational efficiency.
The hard part in identifying success metrics is identifying the right ones. The right metrics
help you make better decisions; the wrong metrics are meaningless and don’t positively affect
your decision making. For example, measuring the number of registered users on your site may
be interesting but not really meaningful. What really matters is the number of active users on your

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$TCPF CYCTGPGUU Extent that users recognize a brand Organization’s brand mentioned in a tweet
%QPXGTUKQP TCVGU Measures the frequency that Likes the organization’s Facebook page
someone takes a desired action
9GD UKVG VTCHƂE Quantity, frequency, duration, and Traffic from Google+ post mentioning the
depth of visits to a Web site organization’s site

7UGT GPICIGOGPV Extent to which users interact with User regularly comments on organization’s
Figure 8-10 a site, application, or other media LinkedIn posts
Common SM Strategic Goals