Yesterday I wrote about some traps organisations can become ensnared in when attempting to collaborate better.  The gist was that collaborating for the sake of collaborating can often lead to worse results than if you had not bothered in the first place.  As with any social based activity, the key is to have a clear purpose for the work you’re doing, and to subsequently have a clear way of measuring success or not.

Here are three possible outcomes for your collaborative efforts.

Collaborative idea #1 – More sales

This one should be an obvious outcome for any business, but it often flies under the radar when it comes to collaboration.  After all, collaboration is the creation of new ideas and products, right?  Not always.  Think about whether you can collaborate with other departments within your organisation to cross-sell your products to their customers.

When the sales teams across your organisation start to collaborate in this way it can give revenues a real kick.  The problem of course is that many sales people are stuck in siloed thinking, with their commissions linked purely to their own sales.  If managers can overcome this however, it can be very valuable indeed, and of course it’s a pretty easy thing to measure.

Collaborative idea #2 – More innovation

This one is a more common use for collaboration, but it still has the one crucial element for any successful program – an end product.  With innovation in mind, this idea requires that product development teams from across your company work together to see how they can apply their own expertise in new ways.  Remember that most new products aren’t truly revolutionary, but are merely old technologies applied in new ways, so if you can tap into the expertise throughout your organisation, this could give your product development a significant boost.  Once again, measurement is quite straightforward.

Collaborative idea #3 – Better processes

Organisations typically improve by selling more, improving profit margins or reducing costs.  It’s this third purpose that is the aim for this form of collaboration.  It again suggests that greater communication and knowledge sharing can be done across the enterprise, but rather than sharing knowledge to sell more or create new products, we are instead interested in making our processes more efficient, and therefore saving money.  With sound benchmarking of processes this kind of improvement can also be measured reasonably easily.

So three simple ways to collaborate and have some measurable gains (hopefully) at the end of it all.

Earlier this month Altimeter followed in the footsteps of Gartner by releasing a report outlining various stages of social business maturity.

1. Planning – this stage typically sees organisations setting the foundations for what is to come.  It involves listening to stakeholders and formulating strategies based upon this.
2. Presence – next organisations start to take action, creating their presence on social media.
3. Engagement – now social is less of a novelty and more a way of doing business.  Organisations at this stage will have a number of people involved in community building and management.
4. Formalized – three steps are key to this stage.  Firstly a C level sponsor is required.  Secondly a social business hub is developed, and lastly core governance policies are created.
5. Strategic – this stage sees social becoming more and more on the radar of senior executives, and it begins to become an organisation wide thing rather than being stuck within silos.
6. Converged – here is the holy grail, the point where organisations cease to have social policies, and instead social is just how things are.

I wrote in my original post that whilst an interesting overview of the stages organisations go through on their way to becoming a social business, it doesn’t cover the internal obstacles and thought process that are typically gone through as well as the Gartner model.

Dutch social business agency Favela Fabric have released their own model this week, in a whitepaper called Five Steps to Prove Success in Social Business.

The report highlights four stages of success in social business.

Stage 1 – Acceptance

This is very early stage stuff and sees consumers queried as to their happiness via mechanisms such as online questionnaires to determine the success of any initiative.

Stage 2 – Participation

This stage is where many organisations get stuck.  It sees success being measured in terms of the engagement with content.  Think metrics such as how many retweets or the number of comments for a blog.  Whilst involvement in the platforms remains important, it doesn’t get to the meat of what you’re trying to do.

Stage 3 – Conversion

At this stage we actually start to see behaviours being changed by the insight the organisation is gaining from their social business work.  Better on boarding procedures for instance or reduced call-time for customer support queries represent good outcomes at this stage.

Stage 4 – Business success

This is a crucial stage, and one often forgotten by people working in social, as they get bogged down by metrics that matter to them, but not really to the business as a whole.  So at this stage we’re looking in the profit and loss reports to determine how social business has impacted the bottom line.

The report then goes on to outline some strategies you can go through to prove ROI and provide a clear reporting framework for the work you do.  I won’t give the whole game away, but the report is available to download for free from the Favela website.

Overall it’s a nice report that focuses on the measurement of social rather than the implementation or adoption.  It is a little on the short side, but nevertheless provides an interesting framework that’s based upon the Kirkpatrick-Phillips Model for evaluating training, which looks at the ROI of training and development.

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