-Michelle

Completely agree, though find it challenging to translate the above (re: the need to identify planners/ad agencies to perform due diligence on assessing target audiences, competitive outliers, etc) when many SMBs rely on a small team and small budget to apply recommended approaches, as laid out in the original post. The exercise with writing Get Scrappy has utterly altered my mindset on how/what we recommend as “big school” marketers if it can't be easily transmitted to organizations of various sizes and shapes. But a convo for another time, offline from here…

And Jacob – look forward to seeing/hearing more from you/team on the subject!

-Michelle

You state that this process has been developed “In order to really be able to create a social business.”

What's a “social business?” I urge caution in developing a strategy that is focused on helping your clients become “a social business.” This sounds similar to a focus that consultants had in the mid- to late-'90s when they sought to help their clients become “e-businesses.” What these consultants ignored or did not realize was the the “e-” (the Internet) was essentially a means to help them achieve their business goals; it was not the end-state. How many e-business strategies do you still hear being talked about today? Likewise, becoming a social or perhaps more appropriately, a collaborative business, is a means to achieving a business' goals.

Is “becoming a social business” really focused on how a business interacts and collaborates with its customers and partners as well as how it communicates within the business? I respectfully submit that that answer to this question is yes. If you and the Chess Media Group concur, are you then looking at how to improve communications and relationship management as enablers to achieving business goals?

It may be embedded in “Organization Discovery” but I recommend that, similar to calling out an external/marketplace focus, your process should also include a specific activity that is focused on identifying what customer relationship communication strategies are currently in place and are those strategies and actions having the desired effect. If not, why not? This analysis should help frame the client's “As Is” environment.

“Develop business and technology solutions,” per your process, can also be thought of as the “To Be” environment. Consider calling attention in your process to the development of a “Transition Plan” to get from the “As Is” to the “To Be” environment. You're likely to find that the “Transition Plan” may involve a number of process, organization (change management and governance), and technology actions. A component of the “Transition Plan” should be a Business Value Assessment (BVA) that's essentially a cost-benefit-risk analysis of the actions needed to get to the “To Be” state. Benefits should be both quantitative and qualitative and measurable.

You've got “Define financial (ROI) and non-financial (impact) business objectives and metrics” and “Calculate ROI and impact” as the third and eighth respective activities in your process. You should consider combining these and making this new combined activity the new 6th activity. This is your BVA. The BVA should be viewed as a life-cycle model that becomes a means of determining if projected benefits are in fact being realized, actual costs are in line with projected costs, and projected risks are being mitigated per identified risk mitigation actions. This is where strategies become meaningful and tangible.

I very much like your “Adapt and Revise” activity. Establishing feedback loops is critical to the success of any strategy. The key enabler here will be the governance model that I referenced in the development of the “Transition Plan.” How is feedback, in terms of data and information, captured and communicated? Who is it communicated to and how is it communicated? How are decisions going to be made based on this feedback?

Best wishes for success as you and the Chess Media Group move forward with this!

Of course, we definitely have to look at external forces such as what is already being said about the brand, the competition, etc. That all comes into play. I'm going to talk a bit more on tool and resources in upcoming posts but it's not really possible to narrow it down into a tool/resource set. I think the best that can be done at this point is create the social business process and then work with companies to drill down from there. Thanks for the comment!