Forget talk of self proclaimed social media ninjas and gurus, Jeremiah and the team at Altimeter are driving real strategic value in understanding the role of applying digital strategy at a corporate level. If you’ve not had a chance to catch up on some of the great presentations Jeremiah and Altimeter have published I would urge you to check out The Career Path of a Corporate Social Strategist and The Social Business Stack for 2011.
Jeremiah and team have just published a new Slideshare Presentation aimed at addressing what is regarded as a shortfall in investing in social media by corporate enterprises.
The tone of the presentation is set with research carried out by altimeter that on average corporations spend just $833,000 of their budget on social business. Jermiah makes the correlation that the higher the spend on investing in social media strategy, the likelihood that that organisation regards its strategy as mature.
This level of maturity is reflected through greater penetration in all levels of the enterprise with a move to a ‘Hub and Spoke’ model and away from a centralised or decentralised approach.
Here’s where I slightly diverge from Jeremiah’s train of thought that the ‘Hub and Spoke’ model is the ideal model for corporations to pursue. My view is that corporate culture will ultimately dictate the social media model to be pursued. It may be the case that a specific corporation’s setup and culture may be ideally suited to a centralised model. So my takeaway is find the model that’s most appropriate for the corporation.
The second key point that jumps out is that corporations are neglecting the social graph (the interconnections between individuals and corporations as part of a social network) in favour of traditional advertising and marketing tactics. This will provide an opportunity where social graph tools and services will prove their value to Corporations in extracting value and in particular determining how ROI is linked to the goals of the board.
Courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang and Altimeter
The table detailed above gives some hard edges to the three maturity levels outlined and what they mean internally within a corporation, externally to customers, and from a technology perspective.
From my professional experience working for a global entertainment group, the ability to implement a mature social CRM where customer data is aggregated continues to be a formidable challenge.
This is another vital contribution from Jeremiah’s influential body of work on applying social media for corporations.
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