Here is a link to the social media handbook from Accenture
The 6 platforms of social media they present are also necessary to understand as adding tools and people to your business requires skills and accountability. I would add that beyond the 6 offered, suggest adding content curation,strategies to implement something hyper local via mobile platforms and web self help.
Content Marketing requires the ability to go beyond simple curation but to add the strategic value of EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) to the customer facing content views. This means adding interactive (social API's) context sensitive, surveys, polls and CSERV forms as widgets to the cloud.
This cloud provides CSAT channels, social media monitoring and responding, ability to segment consumers by social profiles (social graphics) and of course custom CSAT insights and analytics most valuable to the entire process. Extending these services to be mobile ready is also imperative. This does not mean develop an iPhone app. Mobile apps should be cloud based and support many devices as there are some sweet open source dev platforms to accomplish this for low cost and quick turnaround that we are using.
Web self help rides between forcing customers to locate and wait through the call centre nightmare and browsing your static FAQ pages trying to find simple, quick answers to real time questions. This is well worth the investment in cloud services as it ties in nicely with social tools like facebook pages, servicing customers where they are searching for help.
Once your cloud architecture is in place, custom profiling and data models can be developed to create a community or a customer/ prospect friendly opt in marketplace. As value is obvious, customers and prospects then can be moved along into retention strategies and social loyalty components can be segmented with agency level creative etc.
As the whitepaper suggests, this type of solution requires insights and skills from a new perspective, ideally with industry marketing ability to make the entire process follow the new drivers. Developing KPI's and workflows, service design etc. to map the process correctly. It's not about searching the market for new technologies and trying to piecemeal it together with existing IT, PR or marketing staffers alone.
Funny enough, we developed such a cloud framework with the tireless efforts of our developer partners. This allows us to take the rote process of discovery, proof of concept and pilot stage thrash cycle out of client's time line thus moving to results with the collective experiences of several large brands.
We will be announcing some exciting new partnerships in a few weeks where you can take a deeper dive into this process, frameworks and deliverables.
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