“I’m particularly intrigued by the competitive differentiation that needs be thought through—strategically—before you can start to think about ‘What am I doing on Twitter?’”
–Jennifer Lavelli, Group Executive, Worldwide Marketing, MasterCard
At MLC’s recent executive retreat in New York, Jennifer Lavelli put her finger on one of the key traits distinguishing social media exemplars (the 10% of large enterprises that are seeing real business results from their social efforts). These exemplars are focusing their efforts on areas that could change the competitive dynamics in their category. By the way, “changing competitive dynamics” is not taking a category by storm with a viral hit. Those results, while good, are fleeting. By competitive dynamics, we’re talking Porter’s 5 Forces here.
And this goes well beyond the typical advice offered by social media pundits. They will tell you to think through the business objective first, before determining which social media to engage with or build. That’s not bad advice—its just that it isn’t enough.
If you follow that advice, you’ll be sure that whatever results you do get from social media will be aligned with your business objectives. But alignment of results does not equal magnitude of results. Exemplars shoot for magnitude, as well.
How are they doing that? There are several important components, which we address in our latest research—Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media. For starters, as the title would suggest, active CMO leadership is required to help the organization elevate its social focus to a strategic level. Beyond that, we’d suggest a simple, but powerful strategic framework that accounts for customer needs, unique strengths, and competitor capabilities.
Moreover, MLC has developed a Building Your Social Media Strategy workshop to take marketers step-by-step through the thinking behind this framework. We like to think that this approach gets you alignment and magnitude of results. Join Jennifer Lavelli and other MLC members at the next workshop session in New York on July 13. Or, join us in Chicago on September 15. Register here.
Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media: If you weren’t able to join us in New York for the executive retreat where we presented this research, good news. We are running the retreat again in Chicago (14 July), Sydney (25 August), London (21 September) and San Francisco (12 October). Register here.
Or, attend the webinar on July 14 with your team, where we’ll share some of the highlights from the research. Webinar registration here.
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