Social Business Governance:A Framework to Execute Social Business Strategy

By Ed Terpening and Charlene Liwith Christine Tran and Brian Solis

Includes input from 20 ecosystem contributors and a survey of 76 strategists and executives who

are responsible for or influence social business governance at their organizations.

A Best Practices Report

November 13, 2014

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................................

The Social Business Governance System: The Four “P”s......................................................................

Best Practices for Developing Governance ...........................................................................................................

Social Business Governance Maturity Map ..........................................................................................................

Appendix .........................................................................................................................................................................................................

Social Business Community of Excellence................................................................................................................The Decision Matrix: A Tool to Align Everyone..........................................................................................................Bank of the West: Getting the Right People a Seat at the SBG Table...................................................................USAA’s Governance Model Aligns Its People and Culture......................................................................................Employee Social Media Policy.....................................................................................................................................Social Business Practitioner Policy............................................................................................................................Social Business Governance Checklist...............................-.....................................................................................

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Table of Contents

Achieving momentum for a social business strategy for many organizations is challenging enough, but execution is often fraught with unanswered questions: Who owns social? How are key decisions made? How do we organize to execute social? Left unanswered, organizations face significant risks, including threats to brand health as the result of inappropriate or disjoint social practices. Hidden between great strategic ideas and business results lies the messy mechanics of governance, which according to our research only 16% of organizations feel is well understood and deployed. Strategy and governance are natural partners: Strategy lays the groundwork for new opportunities while governance ensures safe execution, managing the risk of change. In this report, we define a social business governance system of 4 P’s: people, policies, processes, and practices. We use that framework to provide a maturity model to assess where you are, and we include best practices, policy templates, and a decision-making matrix that you can use to define Social Business Governance (SBG) that will help you both achieve the potential of your strategy and manage risk.

Executive Summary

Social Business Governance: A Framework to Execute Social Business Strategy

INTRODUCTION

In our research, we found that 53% of respondents agree that social business strategy forms the basis for governance; yet only 16% believe that governance is well understood and deployed throughout the organization. Astonishingly, most organizations we surveyed (57%) say they lack confidence that the right governance is in place to succeed. This report seeks to address the disconnect between strategy and governance and to define a framework for developing an effective governance system in support of strategy.

We see organizations struggling to mature from early “test and learn” stages of social business, typified by silos of innovation focused on narrow business objectives, to executing a social business strategy under a shared vision and customer experience1. It’s a big step to take, and critical for organizations to take if they’re to reach the potential of their investment in social. Most organizations develop governance organically as their strategy or other catalysts emerge, but this can result in a fragmented, uneven approach rife with inefficiencies and the inability to scale in support of a broad vision. We believe the relationship between strategy and governance is essential and that social business success is at risk without equal consideration.

In a general sense, we think of strategy as defining what will be done and when, and governance as how it will be done and by whom. Your organization’s mission, risk tolerance, and objectives define the why and act as a common compass that guides and links strategy and governance (see Figure 1). There is a relationship between strategy and governance: You don’t know the full scope of what to govern without strategy, and you need a strategy to design the right supportive governance.

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FIGURE 1 The Strategy — Governance Relationship

STRATEGY GOVERNANCE

WhatWhen

Who HowWhy

Company Mission& Objectives

Source: Altimeter Group

Defining Social Business Governance

In the course of our research, governance was described as everything from social media policies to organizational structure. Moreover, governance can be a loaded word. “The word governance comes across like police,” said Paul Michaud, SVP of social media at Citi: “Rather, you have to approach it as helping: here’s how to approach social and be successful.”

Other leaders, like Wendy Arnott, VP of digital marketing and social media at TD Bank, position governance as a form of empowerment. Said Arnott, “It is a license to operate. Governance is the articulation of all the things we must do, as well as the plan for how we do it, and finally who’s involved in the many pieces of it.”

We found that organizations are not protecting themselves and are not organized to make social media more effective. As social spreads throughout organizations beyond traditional functions like marketing and communications, governance is needed to achieve consistent, safe, aligned, and efficient execution.

In the absence of a common definition, Altimeter studied the key building blocks of social business governance to define it this way:

Social Business Governance (SBG) is an integrated system of people, policies, processes, and practices that defines organizational structure and decision process to ensure effective management of social business at scale.

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FIGURE 2-1 Few Organizations Have Robust Social Business Governance in Place

“Our social business strategy forms the foundation and informs our social media governance.”

“I am confident that our social business governance prevents avoidable incidents and prepares us to deal with any crisis or decision that arises.”

“I am confident that the right people, processes, policies, and platforms are in place to govern social business.”

“Executive leadership at my company are educated and aligned to effectively support social business governance.”

“Social business governance is well understood and deployed throughout all parts of the organization.”

“Below are statements regarding social business governance. Please state how strongly you agree or disagree with each statement (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree).”

53%agree or strongly agree

46%

16%

40%

43%

Source/Base: Altimeter Group’s Survey of Social Business Strategists, December 2014 (n=76)

FIGURE 2-2 Scaling Social Business and Optimizing Customer Experience Drives the Need For Governance

“What is driving your attention to social business governance?”

Source/Base: Altimeter Group’s Survey of Social Business Strategists, December 2014 (n=76)

Overall Rank

1 SCALING SOCIAL BUSINESS: Need to scale use of social media across the company.

2 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: Use of governance to ensure an optimal customer experience across digital/social/mobile.

3 EMPOWER EMPLOYEES: Need employees to use social for sales, advocacy, recruiting or other official business.

4 MANAGE RISK: Use of governance as a risk control,

5 SOCIAL PLATFORM COMPLEXITY: Complexities of social platforms, such as managing user-generated content, community management and 24x7 dialog.

6 EMPLOYEE USE OF SOCIAL: The need to define what employees can and cannot do on their personal social media accounts as it relates to company business.

7 COORDINATE: Need to drive efficiencies between silos using social to reduce redundancies.

8 REGULATIONS: Complying with government rules and regulations.

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The State of SBG Today

Before we explore what good governance looks like, let’s step back to understand what is driving the need for it. The reality is that few organizations take a systematic approach to developing governance; instead it grows organically in an ad hoc fashion. We see this occurring as brands focus on strategy alone as the imperative, without making the connection to governance as a means to execute.

To better understand the state of SBG, we surveyed 76 people familiar with how governance works in their organizations. We found that only 53% use social business strategy as the foundation for governance and that a startlingly 16% of respondents agreed that SBG is “well understood and deployed throughout the organization” (see Figure 2-1). With such low confidence that governance is in place, it’s not surprising that a minority of organizations (46%) are confident that they are prepared to deal with a crisis or that leadership is educated and aligned to support social (40%).

If organizations are not developing governance in sync with strategy, what is driving it? We found that organizations were focused primarily on four drivers: scaling social business, optimizing customer experience, empowering employees, and managing risk (see Figure 2-2).

Let’s take a closer look at a few of the most reported SBG drivers.

1. Scaling Social Business

For this driver, we found the following trends in our research:

• Social strategy needs to be executed across silos. Social as a silo isn’t sustainable and slows broader impact at scale, especially in large organizations that must balance strategy across multiple business lines or business functions for an integrated, interconnected customer experience. Unclear roles, ownership, and decision making can slow down—or even prevent—strategic execution. Scaling social business means working collaboratively across silos effectively. Only 40% of respondents reported that their executive leadership was educated and aligned to support social business. For social business to scale, executive leadership must be engaged to understand and assume risk, approve strategy, allocate resources, and remove roadblocks.

• Accountability must be clear. Creating new teams to manage social puts stress on organizations by introducing power shifts and forcing cross-silo collaboration to address a shared customer journey. Ownership of social inevitably means some loose power, at least in the short term as organizations build social business acumen. New cross-functional departments like social business hubs and communities of excellence (COEs) are not created out of thin air, but they are important. As Virginia Miracle, chief customer officer, at Spredfast told us, “Before, you’d hire one person to drive change. The next wave is a network of people who are holding each other responsible.”

2. Optimizing Customer Experience

The organizations we spoke with are struggling to create a consistent, effective customer experience across a myriad of channels, including social. Our research indicates that reaching this goal is driving the need for focus on SBG.

• Customer experience across digital is disjointed. Lack of standards and incongruence of branding and engagement (different voices, teams, standards, metrics) presents an irregular, disconnected picture for customers engaging with brands in social media. A governance model that recognizes and supports your integrated customer journey will help you realize overall, cross-channel customer experience objectives at scale.

• Social engagement and platforms are complex and always evolving. Organizations are accustomed to one-way communications and having complete technology platform control. Brands are increasing their digital footprint beyond their own websites to a host of social platforms that are continually evolving, adding complexity to customer experience strategy and creating risk. Social platform provider Socialware tracked more than 357 changes in 2013 that had a material impact on governance.2

3. Empowering Employees to Scale Social Business Impact

As organizations realize they can leverage their workforce to scale advocacy, service, and branding, teams outside traditional social hubs (like marketing/communications) are adopting social. Another strong indicator of this trend is where organizations are prioritizing new policy development. According to our research, the most common new policy in development (34%) is employee and customer endorsements and advocacy. We heard the following common pressure points in our research:

• Empower employee advocates. Good governance is not a speed bump that slows down social but a guardrail to keep it moving in the right direction. Just as laws that govern driving keep us safe, laws governing social empower employees individually to get to where they need to go to do their jobs. SBG can support employee enablement, empowerment, collaboration, and advocacy. Vince Golla of Kaiser Permanente described the challenge of doing this, saying, “How do we educate 200,000 people? And should we? How do we make those decisions? If you attempt to educate some people and not others, do we inadvertently leave out great brand ambassadors?” His comments reinforce the need for leadership and key stakeholders to align on the strategy as well as governance.

• Enable the salesforce and customer service to engage directly with customers. Many mature social business organizations empower their salesforce and customer service departments to engage in social channels to grow their business. Even highly regulated industries, such as lending, investments, and real estate, are using social platforms as a direct sales, customer relationship management (CRM), and service channel. For example, Thrivent Financial supports the

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option for financial advisors to set up a branded page and engage with prospects and clients on Facebook.3 It’s important to set clear boundaries to govern sales activity in a profession known for its entrepreneurial spirit, since the risk of violating regulations can damage reputation and result in fines. Some brands we spoke to put governance in place for the salesforce in anticipation of rogue activity to prevent it.

• Meet employees’ expectation of using social as part of their jobs. Employees’ expectations for how to communicate and work are changing. Industry PR leader Shel Holtz said this is particularly true of the next generation of employees. “Recognize the world is changing to one in which social tools are the means by which employees communicate with each other, with customers, and with other stakeholder audiences. Telling a Millennial to use email is like telling someone 10 years ago to type up a memo and drop it off in the mailroom,” he said. Unless they are given clear guidelines, employees will develop their own protocols for using social tools, which may or may not be aligned with the organization’s goals and strategy.

4. Managing Risk

At the heart of governance is balancing autonomy for executing strategy with controlling risk. The history of social media is littered with evidence of poor governance: US Airways posting inappropriate images on Twitter; KitchenAid attacking the president’s grandmother; Chrysler disparaging drivers in the Motor City. 4,5,6 Shall we go on? Errors like these have caused public companies to lose market value and brand equity and caused leadership to lose their jobs. Human error is a fact of life, so having the right governance is an essential risk control. Our research found the following state of risk management at organizations:

• Fewer than half of organizations are ready to manage a social media crisis. One of the biggest fears is being able to manage social when something goes wrong. Our research found that only 46% of respondents believe that their SBG has prepared them to deal with a crisis situation, and only 7% reported that they have all the policies and guidelines in place to manage social. Organizations that aren’t prepared to govern social react more slowly, because they lack the clarity needed about who gets to make decisions or what actions are allowed.

• In social, it’s far too easy to inadvertently publish damaging information. Adding to complexity is the combination of tools, both internal and customer facing, that can create confusion and result in inadvertent postings. One horror story we heard is not that rare: A product manager published a product roadmap that went to an external community, thinking it was an internal community. Sometime after, legal was alerted to the fact that their product strategy was published on a Wall Street Journal blog.

• Organizations risk running afoul of emerging regulations. Emerging social media and online privacy regulations create a legal-risk imperative, as well as the need to retain and manage social data for lawsuits (for discovery and defense). To make things worse, regulators frequently refer to existing precedence for established channels to define their social media guidance. For example, the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) regulator based its rules for advertising disclosures on Twitter on old guidelines that applied to advertising statements on pencils and other promotional items where limited space doesn’t the permit both an advertising message and the standard “FDIC Insured” disclosure statement or logo7,8. When banks started giving away promotional items with limited space, like pencils, they were exempted from some of the FDIC disclosure requirements. One strategy for aligning with the team that ensures regulatory compliance is to embed them inside the social team, as Bank of the West did (see case study in Appendix).

“Telling a Millennial to use email is like telling someone 10 years ago to type up a memo and drop it off in the mailroom.”

— Shel Holtz, Holtz Communications

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1.PEOPLE 2. POLICY 3. PROCESS 4. PRACTICE

GET ALIGNED & ORGANIZED

Governance starts with clear accountability for roles and the organizational structures that support social

CODIFY AGREEMENTS

Agreements among key stakeholders are captured in policy, which reflects the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable

MAKE IT ACTIONABLE

Processes define the steps and roles in support of policy, and ensure consistent execution of strategy

EXECUTE & AUTOMATE

Tools, training, playbooks, and more support the execution of social business processes

THE SBG SYSTEM: THE FOUR P’STo overcome these challenges and avoid the pitfalls of ad hoc governance, Altimeter recommends that organizations adopt a complete SBG system, which consists of what we call the 4 P’s (see Figure 3):

1. PEOPLE are the starting point for any governance system, as leaders and key stakeholders make strategic decisions and set policy and strategy.

2. POLICIES codify decisions and agreements for managing social in the organization.

3. PROCESSES are the steps and procedures that support the execution of policy.

4. PRACTICES support the system, for example, with automating tools, education, and playbooks that manage execution of social business.

The first two components are focused on decision making, the last two on execution and measurement of governance effectiveness throughout the system. As you’ll see in the Best Practices for Developing Governance section later, these components align well with strategy development, giving organizations a new way to think about governance and strategy alignment and to get out of the current ad hoc nature of governance.

FIGURE 3 The Four P’s of Social Business Governance

Source: Altimeter Group

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MARKETING 25%

A STEERING COMMITTEE OR CROSS-FUNCTIONAL GROUP IS ACCOUNTABLE

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

DIGITAL (ONLINE/MOBILE TEAMS)

PR/ COMMUNICATIONS

LEGAL, RISK OR COMPLIANCE

NO ONE DEPARTMENT IS PRIMARILY ACCOUNTABLE

Let’s now look at each component of this system. We’ve provided a checklist of considerations for each component to help you see how each could apply to your organization.

1. PEOPLE

Our governance model starts with people, because no amount of policy, process, or tools can replace the key stakeholders, leaders, and departments who are ultimately accountable for the success or failure of social business. Building trust among these key roles and teams is no different than building trust in other situations: find common ground, align around shared objectives, and agree to roles and responsibilities for working together.

But who takes the lead when it comes to social, in a sense owning and being accountable for social business? The respondents to our survey indicated that marketing is most likely to lead social business efforts (25%), but close behind are cross-functional teams or steering committees (21%) that share responsibility (see Figure 4). The reality is that social business activities are increasingly executed by people throughout the organization; what started in marketing has spread to customer service, product management, and HR. This creates a potentially dangerous lack of accountability for social, as the strategy escapes the bounds of a single department. The people component of an SBG examines the fundamental questions of who gets to call the shots. Below are some best practices for developing the people component of your SBG.

Best Practices for Developing the People Component of Governance

• Get leadership aligned. Change accelerates only once buy-in is earned at the top, yet only 40% of survey respondents felt that their leaders were educated and aligned to effectively support social business. One respondent who works at a bank uses a social media governance council (steering committee) to make decisions that involves all the key stakeholders, such as legal, compliance, social practitioners, and HR. They described the impact, saying, “By having executives involved early and sharing results with them along the way, they’ve developed a greater understanding and enabled them to become great partners.” Since most social business activity starts in marketing/communications, the CMO often takes on the executive sponsor role, which may include areas

outside their normal scope of responsibility, such as use of social for internal collaboration, customer service, employee recruiting, and innovation. Many businesses we spoke to opt for a steering committee, which gives C-suite leaders the opportunity to learn together and collaborate on shared objectives and investments.

• Ensure cross-functional participation. Getting cross-functional participation in SBG can be difficult, particularly if leadership isn’t involved or supportive. A common challenge isn’t so much identifying who should be involved but getting their attention and then commitment to participate. One way to do this is to seek common ground, most often by developing

FIGURE 4 Social Business Governance Typically Lives with Marketing or a Cross-Functional Steering Committee

“What department is primarily responsible for the governance of social media?”

Source/Base: Altimeter Group’s Survey of Social Business Strategists, December 2014 (n=76)

21%

15%

12%

10%

4%

13%

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common business objectives through a formal social business committee or COEs (see the Appendix Social Business Community of Excellence). Citi’s Michaud ensures alignment using cross-functional teams with broad representation that meet monthly. He said, “Broad representation is important. We share through regular meetings, governance documents, and playbooks, so people have the tools they need without reinventing the wheel.”

• Clarify who gets to make which decisions. At the heart of governance is defining what decisions need to be made and who makes those decisions. It’s important to recognize that defining decision making is a precursor to detailed process development. Leaders and key stakeholders will typically not want to be involved at that level. They just want to know that the right people are involved in making key decisions.

A primary barrier to good governance is “getting different parts of the organization to make decisions together,” said Chris Boudreaux, founder of SocialMediaGovernance.com. Organizations can clarify decision making by:

• Getting leaders to agree on principles guiding governance (e.g., “We agree that controlling risk is more important than pursuing new opportunities” or “Our focus is on controlling cost and driving efficiency over growth”)

• Agreeing which decisions need to be governed (e.g., Creating a new social program or managing a shared customer journey)

• Developing a RACI matrix for defining who is responsible for the decision (executes the work), accountable (approves or assigns the work), consulted (consulted before decisions are made), and informed (after decisions are made)9

Refer to the Appendix The Decision Matrix: A Tool to Align Everyone for an approach to clarifying decision making. Use this tool in a working session with your leaders to set the foundation for governance.

• Measure participation and alignment. How will you know this foundational component of governance is ready? One key measure we’ve seen as an early indicator of success is the amount of cross-functional involvement, including by leadership. For cross-functional teams such as COEs, track the number of functions present and whether they continue to commit through participation over time. How many work streams are

led by people outside the core social team? That’s another indicator that the organization is engaged with and trusting of one another. One brand we spoke to requires COE members to attend a minimum threshold of meetings and to volunteer on at least one work stream to continue their membership.

• Have an organizational roadmap that evolves over time. In our work with clients, we’ve seen a common path in how businesses organize for social. What often starts as disconnected silos of social media programs across the organization often evolves into a central social business team taking control as a hub to establish strategy and governance and then eventually ceding control to departments that need to be empowered with autonomy through a hub-and-spoke model (see Figure 5).10

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At the heart of governance is defining what decisions need to be made and who makes those decisions.

FIGURE 5 Sample Organizational Evolution for Social Business

Source: Altimeter Group

1. Decentralized, ad-hoc organization is a common starting point without a coordinated strategy or leadership involvement

2. The organization decides to coordinate strategy, clean up and consolidate redundant pages created while decentralized

3. With governance and strategy in place, he org is ready to empower spokes to participate in social with hub coordination

DECENTRALIZEDSocial is distributed across the org with limited coordination

CENTRALIZEDOne team executes all social efforts, supporting various groups (spokes)

HUB & SPOKEA central team coordinates social, but empowers others to participate (spokes)

PROS• Conversations and programs close to

the customer = authentic

PROS• Ensures consistent user experience• Faster response• Streamlined processes• Integrated, shared resources

PROS• Ensures consistant user experience• Distributed (but coordinated)

decision-making efficient• Shared resources for efficiency and

streamlined ops

CONS• Inconsistent customer experience

across sites• Lacking integration and leverage of

organization’s social assets

CONS• Could appear inauthentic if content

production is centralized outside BU/spoke participation

CONS• Requires leadership support• Could result in complex chargebacks/

SLAs

2.POLICY

Policy is a means of codifying the agreements key stakeholders make to manage the inherent risk and opportunities of business activity and to adhere to laws, rules, and regulations. In social business, policy generally represents this intersection of addressing compliance to the law and supporting the strategy, culture, and strategic direction of the company.

While we found that a majority of businesses either have basic policies in place today or are developing them, only 7% had all key policies in place (see Figure 6). Only 60% of respondents have deployed social platform best practices, a sign that for many organizations in our survey social remains siloed, where the need to share practices to educate others is less important. Organizations that mature in social media beyond silos or a single team quickly realize the need to share common effective approaches. The good news is that another 25% of organizations are developing best practices, so they are likely in the process of maturing to scale social business across functions. A third of respondents have a policy for employee and customer endorsements and advocacy in place, with another third in development, which confirms that social strategists are focused on educating their workforce to advocate for their brands and seek broader participation in social.

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Yes In Development No

Employee Social Media Policy 75% 15% 10%

Launching New Social Pages or programs for business use 66% 16% 16%

Social Platform Best Practices (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) 60% 25% 13%

Internal Social Media Use 55% 21% 20%

Social Media Privacy Policy 47% 24% 27%

Community Guidelines (Public-facing) 46% 20% 31%

Employee/Customer Endorcements/Advocacy 37% 34% 28%

Best Practices for Developing the Policy Component of Governance

Making policy decisions is rarely easy and can be fraught with political infighting without strong leadership support. After all, the organization must agree to a common set of rules that will both restrict autonomy for the greater good and empower activities that introduce risk, such as employee advocacy. In many interviews, we heard that rules governing social start as an extension of existing policies (e.g., the use of email), but eventually these organizations realized they needed a stand-alone social media policy given the unique circumstances that occur in social. For example, the use of location-based check-ins introduces new confidentiality and security concerns. Consider the following best practices as you develop policies:

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Sample social media policies are widely available (see SocialMedaiGovernance.com’s policy database), and many organizations post them publically. Industry groups like SocialMedia.org are also a great source for

sample policies and a place to discuss with your peers policy approaches that are effective and practical.

• Ensure your policy reflects the culture, mission, and vision of your organization. It should be clear to any employee reading social policy that the policy is consistent with the mission of your organization. Include goals the policy is meant to achieve so that readers will understand why policy rules are in place. For example, Coca-Cola’s Social Media Principles leads with the organization’s commitments, by stating key themes that guide its culture, “The Company makes certain commitments concerning how we interact with the public and each other, and these commitments apply to interactions that occur on social media platforms as well.” Coca-Cola’s key commitments include transparency, respect for others, and protection of customer privacy.

• Put your executive sponsor to work. This can be a single person or a team of executives in a steering committee. The role is to guide policy, be the champion for approving and maintaining policy, and

Figure 6 Most Organizations Have Basic Social Media Policies in Place, with a Big Focus on Developing Employee and Customer Endorsements and Advocacy Policies

“Which of the following policies or guidelines are in place?”

Source/Base: Altimeter Group’s Survey of Social Business Strategists, December 2014 (n=76) ); Note: Percentages do not total 100 because “I don’t know” answers are not reported.

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resolve conflicts. You’ll need a leader willing to be accountable for the risks and rewards of social and to be an advocate in the C-suite, which will likely need to approve new company policy.

• Involve the right stakeholders. Ideally, include key people in marketing/communications, legal, compliance, risk, IT, internal audit (to ensure the policy can be verified), and human resources, as well as a policy writer and at least two brand or business unit representatives, to ensure real-world use cases are considered as the policy is drafted. Set clear deadlines and roles for writing the policy.

• Ensure consistency with related polices. Ensure the policy’s rules are consistent with related policies, like information security, harassment, and ethics. Generally, a policy writer in HR works with a subject matter expert on the social team to review language across polices for consistency. One approach is to extend social governance to existing employee policies. Boudreaux advised, “Every brand would do well to take a step back and look at how they already do things and apply some of the lessons, best practices, and processes to employee advocacy. A lot of governance depends on your culture and how your business works in domains outside of social media.”

• Make the policies pragmatic. Wherever possible when writing policy, give clear examples of real-life work situations in which the policy would apply. Clearly define social media terms, which may be unknown to your broad employee base. Business unit representatives are invaluable for providing situations and acting as a sounding board for applicability.

• Think about measurement. Decide early on what measures of success you’ll apply to the policy’s deployment, such as the number of employees trained or certified or the ability of any employee to recite the spirit of the policy.

• Maintain and update on a schedule. Put a process in place for continually monitoring policy adherence and for updating based on violation metrics. For example, if you find that the most frequent policy violation is employees speaking on behalf of the company, correct that behavior by strengthening the policy language or training with more practical examples. Social networking sites’ terms of service change often, as do the culture and behavior of consumers and employees engaged in social. We’ve found that most organizations review their social business policies for updates at least annually.

For sample policy outlines, refer to the Appendix.

3. PROCESS

Process is important because policy decisions need to be supported by actions that support policy goals. For example, if leaders decide that access to social media from within the company should be restricted to certain roles and that managers must approve exceptions, that decision requires a step-by-step process to support it. For the purpose of this report, we define process as the sequence of activities or tasks that support the execution of policy. This is the start of governance execution, beyond the two preparatory stages (people, policy), which are focused on decision making, and the foundation for practice, which supports the execution of governance through training and tools.

Processes tend to be designed with either a market-facing (e.g., social engagement) or an internal focus. Our research found that:

• Social engagement leads, customer support lags. Our research indicates that the processes organizations develop to govern social, such as community management and social content management, are largely focused on engaging with customers safely and effectively (see Figure 7). While organizations have basic engagement covered, only half of the respondents have processes for supporting customers. Our interviews found that one cause of this is the challenge of working with customer service, which lacks an imperative to address customer support outside their traditional service channels.

• Almost half of organizations cannot respond to or prevent a crisis. Risk management processes define the steps and roles required to assess the risk of social business programs and controls to mitigate each risk area, yet only 37% of organizations we surveyed have risk mitigation processes in place. Moreover, when a crisis does hit — and in social media, you never know if or when that is going to happen — only half of organizations have a process in place. That means half of organizations cannot respond quickly and adequately to a social media crisis when speed and clarity is of the essence.12

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• Actionable insights remain undiscovered. A key opportunity area is the development of processes that capture and act on insights. For example, MasterCard leveraged its social media command center to detect issues related to its mobile payments products and was able to route that information to the product team, which used the feedback to simplify the process13. Only 27% of our survey respondents had processes in place to uncover product insights from social, despite the fact that almost two-thirds had listening platforms deployed. So while most organizations may have captured data that could support product innovation, few have the ability to act on it.

Best Practices for Developing the Process Component of Governance

Outcome is only as good as the decisions made within the process. An effective process will yield clear, consistent, and repeatable decision making. Use the Sample Decision Matrix (see the Appendix The Decision Matrix: A Tool to Align Everyone) as a precursor for the development of processes used to govern social. Here are some general best practices to establish processes:

• Leverage your baseline. It may be that the steps and actions already occurring in your organization are effective, just not documented and shared as a process. Begin by capturing what you do today and identify gaps and opportunities, as well as alignment with policy. Or you may have successful, effective processes in place that may be extended to include social, as we heard from Joel Nathanson, head of social media at Bank of the West. “I don’t want to always create a new process just for social. Whenever I can feed into current processes, that’s best,” Nathanson told us.

• Define clear roles and be complete. The best processes are clear who takes which steps and when, defining circumstances that require exceptions and describing those approvals. When defining your process steps, make clear what the inputs, steps, roles, and outputs are for each. Explain the objective of the step, so readers will understand why the step is necessary, so that, if possible, they can help refine and improve the process. Ensure the team developing processes gets broad feedback and consensus, especially for those processes or steps that span departments.

• Design to measure. Try to ensure the process is both measurable and auditable. Over time, you’ll need this information to fine-tune working processes. For example, for a process that defines how customer inquiries are handled on Twitter, ensure that the service-level agreement (SLA) in place is measurable in the process definition. One company measured the quality and fit of candidates that were recruited in social media versus other channels to gauge the effectiveness of both their process and social overall as a channel for recruiting. One bank we spoke to requires a social strategist to review new programs to ensure minimum viable metrics are met in order to avoid an unmanageable spread of pages and programs. Reporting and internal audit processes then confirm that programs meet minimum metrics and that compliance processes are followed.

• Be flexible. If you’re attempting to define a process that will be automated using tools to scale, start with the baseline capabilities and processes of those tools, particularly if you have tools already in widespread use. Why define a complex content approval process if the tools you use or those available on the market can’t support it?

• Make it visual. The vast majority of processes we’ve reviewed are shown in a clean visual style, usually as a flow chart or decision tree. Seeing the process visually is a quick way to detect gaps in flow or hand-offs between steps.

• Test and maintain. Choose common use case scenarios to test the process in a conference room with all the roles represented in the process. What questions come up? How can the process be simplified? Will the result of the process result in the desired outcome? Then ensure the process has a clear owner (for feedback and questions) and procedure for maintaining updates over time.

• Use process to enable innovation. At some point, processes need to move from stopping bad things from happening to enabling and accelerating good behaviors. One organization we spoke with described how it uses process design to move faster, especially when working with small, innovative vendors and service providers. This included streamlining legal contracts like master service agreements (MSAs) and minimizing the number of meetings and decisions makers needed to say yes to working with them.

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Yes In Development No

Community Management (triage & moderation) 70% 22% 8%

Launching New Social Programs 66% 20% 15%

Social Content Management Process 64% 25% 9%

Social Media Crisis Management 53% 24% 22%

Employee Recruiting Process 50% 27% 20%

Customer Service/Support Process (CRM) 49% 19% 31%

Risk Management Process 37% 28% 31%

Product Insights Process 27% 20% 48%

Source/Base: Altimeter Group’s Survey of Social Business Strategists, December 2014 (n=76) ); Note: Percentages do not total 100 because “I don’t know” answers are not reported.

“Which processes does your organization have in place?”

FIGURE 7 Processes for Community Management, Social Content, Customer Service, and Product Insights

4. PRACTICEThe practice component of the SBG system consists of the tools, technology, and practices, such as playbooks and training, that enable the ongoing support of SBG at scale. This is where everything comes together in support of governance execution.

Our research found that the vast majority of organizations use listening tools and content management systems but that only a third of them have invested in tools focused on social CRM (see Figure 8). This lack of customer service focus was consistent with our finding that organizations lack processes to support customers in social. As they start to invest in the integration of customer service and social, we expect that more organizations will leverage these tools to connect customer issues discovered in social with legacy CRM systems to fill gaps in their customers’ digital journey.

Social business training continues to be a significant gap, with only 36% having training in place, but it’s clearly a priority, since

41% reported training as in development. This is consistent with previous research that indicated social business training as a priority among social strategists.14 We found organizations in both highly regulated industries, like banking, and fast-moving industries, like technology, investing in training to the point of making it a requirement for either employment or access to social at work. Investment in training is also an indicator that the practice of social for business is expanding beyond traditional strongholds in marketing/communications.

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Yes In Development No

Social Media Playbook of other best practices written guidelines 70% 22% 13%

Social Media Training Programs for Employees 66% 20% 22%

Enterprise (Internal) Social Media Community Platform 53% 24% 37%

Social Media Internal Audits 49% 19% 28%

Social Business Community of Excellence (cross-dept. sharing and collaboration) 47% 20% 32%

Yes In Development No

Listening Tool (e.g. Radian 6, Brandwatch, etc.) 63% 8% 27%

Social Media Management System (e.g. Sprinklr, Spredfast, etc.) 54% 15% 28%

Social Customer Relationiship Management Tool (e.g. Vitrue, Zendesk, Salesforce Desk) 28% 10% 57%

Regulatory Compliance Management Tool (e.g. Socialware, Actience, Hearsay Social) 17% 7% 67%

FIGURE 8 Status of Listening and Content Management Tools and Training

Source/Base: Altimeter Group’s Survey of Social Business Strategists, December 2014 (n=76) ); Note: Percentages do not total 100 because “I don’t know” answers are not reported.

“Which of the following do you use to support Social Business Governance on an ongoing basis?”

Best Practices for Developing the Practice Component of Governance

As an umbrella, governance practices cover a wide range of approaches. Consider the following best practices:

• Automate to scale through tools and technology. As organizations scale their use of social to more and more departments and people, tools that automate processes are essential. Informed investment in governance tools can be made once people are aligned around policy and processes to govern them are designed or in place.

• Develop playbooks to ensure best practices are followed. Playbooks are a way to share best practices in such a way that approved processes, policy, and strategy are reinforced. One brand told us about a playbook for managing engagement with customers on Twitter that includes a triage process based on green, yellow, and red situations. Its playbooks guide a regular stream of employees who volunteer to engage with customers. With a constant turnover of Twitter community moderators, this company needed well-defined rules and best practice guidance. We’ve seen playbooks vary in scope, such as those for social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, et al); branding, voice, and imagery; social sales; customer service; and employee recruiting.

Technologies

Resources

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• Measure practices for effectiveness. At the heart of good governance is decision making, and that requires data, which is often overlooked. We don’t think twice about using social insights and data to drive investment in social opportunities, but it has an equally important role in discovering and solving for weaknesses and risks in strategy and governance. Many advanced organizations we spoke to, like a large telecommunications carrier, define baseline-required viable metrics up front and have processes in place to monitor adherence. This firm discovered it had 194 social media channels, of which only 10 accounted for 94% of all interactions. Since under-performing social media programs add unnecessary burden to the organization and increase risk, it’s well worth the time to align your key stakeholders on what both success and failure look like.

• Use training to develop the skills of a social business. Social strategists recognize that lack of employee understanding is one of the most important obstacles to achieving their vision. Renee Horne of USAA confirmed this, saying, “The subject itself requires a substantial amount of education. Employees that are less familiar with the proper use or benefits of social tools and technologies may only see it as something for use outside of work for fun, or it’s troublesome, or it creates risk. While we may be ready to run, we have to remember that many

may not know how to crawl just yet. We can’t leave those behind that we’ll need to help you get us there. We have to take the proper time to educate. It will enable greater dividends on adoption longer term.” One technology company we spoke to used e-learning tools like Brainshark to develop training internally and quickly iterate new versions based on the latest best practices and social platform changes.

In previous research, we found social business training occurs in four distinct categories, on a continuum from training to control risk to opportunity capture.15 As was the case with process, training needs to move from mitigating risky employee behavior to enabling the use of good judgment broadly across the organization to scale social business.

BEST PRACTICES FOR DEVELOPING GOVERNANCETo develop governance, let’s dive deeper into the strategy relationship in our connected loop model (see Figure 9). Strategy starts with a vision and objectives for social, which are the key decisions that drive subsequent execution in the form of wide-ranging initiatives and targeted projects or campaigns. The governance cycle starts by deciding who is accountable for social, building an organization to support it (people) and policy

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Source: Altimeter Group

FIGURE 9 Synchronized Strategy and Governance Cycles

Decide

Execute

Decide

Execute

1. Vision 2. Objectives

3. Initiatives4. Projects

1. People 2. Policy

3. Process4. Practice

STRATEGY GOVERNANCE

Measure

to enforce strategic vision. Governance is then executed through the development of processes and practices. It’s easy to see how change in one side of these parallel cycles impacts the other. For example, what happens when a new CMO or CEO joins the organization? New decision makers can mean new vision, objectives, and policy for the social business strategy. Changes at that level impact both cycles.

We’re the first to admit that this is an ideal model, a vision to strive for. The reality of many of the organizations we spoke to is rudimentary governance is often developed prior to strategy to ensure safety and compliance, which makes perfect sense. For example, implementing firewalls to block access and adding social to policies like information security are required regardless of the organization’s social business strategy or engagement.

The job of building governance is never done; it’s a constant evolution, as Virginia Miracle relayed to us. “How do you make sure that governance allows for evolution?” she said. “Education, policy and strategies get stale. As you’re putting into place all these building blocks, make sure they have an expiration date. Otherwise, people will ask, “Why are we adhering to this at all?’”

We’ve identified best practices to consider as you iterate your governance system.

Best Practices for Developing a Holistic SBG Plan

Developing governance is probably among the most collaborative activity you’ll undertake to support social business, because it touches so many parts of the organization. In addition to the many checklists in this report, consider the following best practices to build your SBG system:

• Align strategy and governance. Strategy is what inspires the hard work of governance. Your strategy will give SBG context. Ideally, the governance system is defined in parallel with strategy, but we know that seldom happens. However, if you develop governance at the same time as strategy, you can present to leaders the full picture: the what and when of strategy and the how and who of governance. Develop a high-level, phased plan for SBG that aligns with strategy. If possible, have one roadmap that tracks both strategy and governance to ensure alignment.

• Seek a leadership imperative. Leaders must understand why this is important, how to think about the priority of the work, and what level of investment they can commit to. Of course this imperative will be based on the outcomes expected. For risk-averse organizations, simply controlling risk—whatever the business outcome of social may be—may create the imperative, while other leaders will want to know what overall business results are expected of the social business strategy and the governance system that manages it. In these early stages, it’s important to have a leader ready to own the task of aligning peers across the organization. We also recommend that you identify the budget for strategy and governance at the same time. Governance shouldn’t be thought of as an optional bolt-on later.

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• Assemble a cross-functional working team. You’ll need a cross-functional team to define and manage SBG. If you have an existing cross-functional COE to collaborate with on social business, this governance team can be a work stream of that group, but ultimately your social business strategy will determine who’s on the working team since strategy will be a key driver. The team should have an executive sponsor or cross-functional steering committee to clear roadblocks, allocate budget, and ensure you have a champion prepared to sell your plan throughout your organization.

• Start with decision making. At the heart of governance is the ability for clear decision making at scale. Use your working team to identify which decisions are crucial and must be governed. Remember that these are high-level decisions with broad impact, not detailed processes or procedures steps. For example, you may decide that to manage risk, adding a new social platform to your mix must go through an approval process first. Once you have identified the set of vital decisions to govern, create a decision matrix (see Appendix The Decision Matrix: A Tool to Align Everyone) to flesh out the principles that guide the decision, the high-level steps to make the decision, a RACI that specifies who is accountable, responsible, consulted, and informed for each step.

• Seek leadership support for decision making. Present your decision matrixes to your executive sponsor for feedback and approval. With their guidance, determine which key stakeholders in the organization need to agree to the decisions. Present them with your matrix, adjust as needed, and seek final approval from your executive sponsor. Most of the key stakeholders should have representatives on your working team, so if that team is engaged, this process should be straightforward. Present the full SBS system to leadership and key stakeholders for feedback on and support for your SBG system, including budget and timeline to build.

• Ensure that the governance roadmap reflects your unique organization. There simply is no perfect governance system for every business, just as there’s no social business strategy for everyone. We found that the following areas drive the requirements for SBG systems:

• Social business strategy. The strategic initiatives you’re focusing on will define the types of governance controls needed. For example, if your strategy is to empower your salesforce, each part of the governance system must align to support that objective.

• Risk profile and culture. Your risk profile is where you fit on the continuum of risk. At one extreme, heavily regulated industries consider risk an important part of every decision, whereas organizations without those limitations may have a high tolerance for risk. Company culture and risk profile usually go hand-in-hand: businesses with a high tolerance for risk will have a company culture that reflects that. While “move fast and break things” may work for Facebook, it doesn’t suit a retailor for which a single breach of private customer data could quickly erode trust in the brand and reduce stock price.

• External drivers. These are governance drivers outside your control. For example, financial investment advisors regulated by FINRA in the US are required to follow strict guidelines around reviewing and archiving all customer communications, including those in social media. Another example of an external driver is the difference in governance required by publicly traded versus private businesses, where different corporate governance rules apply.

• Evolve over time. Your SBG system will evolve based on shifting business strategy, ever-changing consumer behavior, and new social platforms and practices. We recommend you regularly review the business imperative, maintain a working team to address change, continually seek alignment and support, confirm decision making is effective through measurement, and update your SBG roadmap at least annually.

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Common Mistakes to Avoid

Our research found that the most common mistakes that derail effective governance are rooted in lack of engagement and alignment.

• Lack of leadership engagement. As you can see from this report, developing good governance can be complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive work. If leaders don’t see the imperative and outcome of your work, they won’t engage and support it. That can result in unpredictable budgets year to year, uneven acceptance of governance (and with that, rogue activity that undermines consistent customer experience efforts), and increased risk, further distancing leaders from the reality of social as a necessary business tool. If you can’t find a C-level leader to support you or if a steering committee of senior leaders isn’t willing to be accountable, it’s unlikely you’ll mature to a scaled or strategic social business program, remaining caught in silos of disjoint social media activity across the organization instead.

• Lack of engagement outside the social team. If you attempt to have your social team do it all, you’re unlikely to reach the kind of consensus needed to scale social. We’ve seen too many social strategy and governance efforts fail for lack of engagement by those outside this team. Other key stakeholders need skin in the game, so the social team needs to be prepared to share decision making and accountability for social, unless you are organized for social in a completely centralized manner, which is rare.16

• Lack of strategy alignment. Organizations that approach social in an opportunistic, reactive, siloed manner will have difficulty governing social business. We worked with one client in a heavily regulated industry that opted to develop governance without a clear, enterprise social business strategy. The result was lack of a driving force for making decisions and defining who and what needed to be governed. Team members and leaders were eager to participate in defining governance but didn’t have the context of a long-term strategy to make decisions with.

SOCIAL BUSINESS GOVERNANCE MATURITY MAPBuilding governance is a journey, and you need to begin your journey with understanding your starting point. How mature is your SBG system now, and what are the gaps? The Social Business Governance Maturity Map shows five stages of maturity within the context of the 4P’s: people, policy, process, and practice (see Figure 10). Altimeter Group offers a service to assess an organization’s SBG maturity, as well as steps and recommendations to improve maturity in line with business goals and strategy.

Just as we have found with our other maturity models, SBG maturity may span stages. You may have parts of your organization in the ad hoc stage, while other teams are further along.

Stage 1: Ad Hoc

In this stage, a company-wide strategy is lacking or nonexistent, and governance is a set of components that are not integrated and are incomplete and inconsistent across the organization. Lack of clear roles, decision making, policies, tools, training, and analytics mean organizations in this stage face risk if they are engaging in social. It’s also typical at this stage for organizations to have a number of duplicative social pages that are not well maintained or managed. Organizations at this stage risk proliferation of too many disjointed social pages that will require cleanup in later stages. More than one organization we spoke to had to go through a process of re-justifying legacy social pages and consolidating duplicative pages as they matured to a planned, strategic social business.

This stage was the starting point for Bank of the West’s Joel Nathanson. While Nathanson is a skilled and enthusiastic change agent, he knew how important it was to engage leadership to mature from a state of uncertainty to a program that is now going strong with leadership support (see the Bank of the West case study in the Appendix).

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FIGURE 10 The Social Business Governance Maturity Map

Source: Altimeter Group

1. AD-HOCInconsistant or no governance across

the organization

2. PLANNINGOrganization

begins planning for governance

3. FORMALIZEDGovernance is

formalized in parts of the organization

4. STRATEGICThe organization has consistant, measured

governance

5. HOLISTICSocial and broader Digital Governance

are the same

PEOPLEGet leaders aligned and determine structure

No formal organizational

model or leadership

engagement. Lack of accountability

for social

Social teams operate in silos,

no org design with sporadic leadership

engagement

Formal social org design in place with leadership

commitment in key groups

Leadership takes a strategic view of social and support organization-wide

aligned teams

Leadership alignement extends

to integrated digital and socail

governance

POLICY Codify leader agreements and decisions in policy

Inadequate policies result in ad-hoc decision-

making and controls

Policies and decision-making

consistent in only parts of the

organization

Policies are formal at the group level with some shared organization-wide

Social policies are complete and

integrated with related policies

acress the organization

Social and digital policies and

decision-making complete and the

same

PROCESSMake policy actionable with clear steps and roles

Few, if any, processes in

place to support exectution of

social business practices

Some emerging processes exist, but

only at the group level

Processes in place at the group level,

and some common processes in place organization-wide

Processes are consistent and

complete across the organization

and integrated with related processes

The organization has a single set

of processes that span all of digital, including social

PRACTICETraining, playbooks and tools in place to execute

Practices are disjoined, ad-hoc and not measured

Practices are evolving, and tools

that span social platforms are

sought to scale governance

Practices formal at the group-level;

metrics play a role in ongoing refinement,

but inconsistent adoption across the

organization

Practices consistent across the organization, with a focus on advanced skills

development and measurement

Practices in common for both digital and social

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Stage 2: Planning

In this stage, some governance exists in the organization, but it’s not orchestrated as part of an enterprise approach. The organization isn’t working together as a social business, but there may be pockets of governance in departments further along. Local or business unit leaders may be engaged, but, again, only in pockets of the organization where social operates in silos. Decision making, policy, and other key elements of social may be designed, but only within parts of the organization.

USAA’s Renee Horne tackled this stage expertly by building leadership steering committees that spanned the organization and unified it. She was keenly aware of the cultural change inherent in embracing social business and is focusing on education at all levels to help USAA leverage social to meet the needs of the organization (refer to our USAA case study in the Appendix).

Stage 3: Formalized

By this stage, SBG is managed and measured consistently with well-defined roles, policy, and processes for at least parts of

the organization engaged most in social business. Leadership is engaged at the C-suite level and working across business functions and lines of business to coordinate social business strategy and execution. Parts of the business are organized for social, and some roles are shared or coordinated across the company, but not completely. The organization is working towards strategic integration.

Stage 4: Strategic

In this stage, the organization has consistent, integrated, and measured governance. Leaders are aligned across business units and functions and are engaged in both strategy and governance. The company as a whole has an organizational plan for social and shared roles are clear. Company-wide policies that touch on social are consistent and complete. The organization has a shared view of practices, such as training, processes, and tools automating governance. Social business governance is complete, but it may not be completely integrated with related governance areas, such as digital.

Stage 5: HolisticIn this stage, SBG isn’t a silo but integrated into the fabric of company-wide governance, especially digital (both internally and externally). Leaders view social business through a broader digital lens and engage in strategy and governance as part of that bigger picture. The roadmap for social strategy is now integrated with the organization’s overall digital strategy. Roles and organizational design for social are defined in the context of broader digital governance and strategy.

ConclusionAs businesses expand their use of social media beyond traditional marketing/communications functions, the need for governance to align and safely scale use across the organization is more of an imperative. Developing holistic governance is a key step for those businesses that wish to move beyond isolated social media engagement to engagement that leverages social broadly, across all functions. In other words, a social business.

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i. Appendix

Social Business Community of Excellence

1. Seek at least one executive sponsor. The executive will give the COE credibility and act as a bridge between disparate social business efforts and executive leadership. Driving change from the bottom up has severe limitations, especially as you move from engagement to formalized and strategic levels of social media maturity.17 If the COE is to build and sustain shared core functions (e.g., listening, unified customer experience, analytics, and content strategy), you must have predictable budgets and leadership that can help remove obstacles.

2. Build on past successes. Consider how your company addressed recent technology disruptions and the kind of cross-functional groups formed to address them. For example, how did your organization come to alignment around mobile? Going back further, how did it align around the web? Model your cross-functional COE on previous successes.

3. Put it in writing. Have a written charter for the COE that your executive sponsor approves of. Ensure the charter reflects a COE’s typical role:

a. Share bests practices and learning.

b. Identify opportunities to collaborate on shared objectives.

c. Act as the starting point for designing a long-term organizational and customer strategy.

d. Gain alignment through consensus to move the social business challenges up to the executive team, at the right time.

e. Act as the creator and sounding board for policy and other governance tools.

4. Share the joy. Don’t plan on your social team doing all the organizing and presentation—your members will lose interest. Plan on creating work streams within the COE, and recruit leaders both inside and outside of the social team to lead them. Nothing is better than seeing a COE where different parts of the organization participate equally and where involvement and shared leadership of COE work streams not only occurs but is required as a condition of membership. Typical COE work streams include governance, strategy, education, internal/employee engagement, content strategy, vendor/partner management, consumer segments/customer experience, and insights/analytics.

Many of the brands we spoke to created a community of excellence (COE) to guide both strategy and governance. A COE is generally a cross-functional team that meets regularly to collaborate on shared social business objectives. It normally includes business line representatives, legal, compliance, human resources, customer service, e-commerce, marketing, communications, and information technology. The key is to develop a network of people who have a stake in the success of the social business strategy and who will hold each other responsible and accountable.

If you think forming a COE makes sense for your organization, keep the following in mind:

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To keep things simple, we’ve frequently used this template with clients to align leaders. It focuses on decision making only and can be used to develop detailed processes at the next stage. Common decision areas in the SBG include:

• New social business vendors

• New social platform participation

• New branded pages (on approved platforms)

• Social policy (including parts of existing policies that touch on social, such as information security ethics)

• Enterprise social business strategy

• Enterprise social jobs (titles, job ladders, compensation ranges, etc.)

The components of this model include:

• Decision area. Name the decision area that must be governed. In this sample, it’s the decision to create a new consumer-facing social page.

• Guiding principles. Leaders should define principles that guide both the decision and resulting detailed processes. These are often tied directly to high-level business objectives, which allow policies and processes to evolve while remaining true to the original intent and spirit.

• Decision steps. Outline the sequence of decisions that must be made for this overall governance area and create a RACI matrix for identifying roles and responsibilities for each decision. It can be tempting to define detailed process at this point, but don’t. Stick to defining the key decision steps that support making the decision. These then can form the basis for detailed policy and process steps to come.

DECISION Create a new consumer-facing social media presence or page.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

1) To scale and drive efficiency, existing pages should be leveraged before building new; 2) New pages must have minimum KPIs defined that are reviewed annually; 3) New pages must have both an Exit Strategy and a Risk Assessment; and 4) New pages must be budgeted for a minimum of 6 months.

DECISION STEPSBU /

FunctionSocial

Media HubSteering

Committee Notes

1. DEFINE ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA: The Social Media/Hub/CoE and Steering Committee agree to a specific list of criteria for which new page requests will be approved or denied.

C R A

Acceptance Criteria can typically include: risk v. reward assessment or ROI; consistency with enterprise social strategy; etc. Acceptance Criteria is updated as needed, typically annually.

2. ASSESS REQUESTS: The Social Media Hub confirms that the request for a new page meets Acceptance Criteria and approves or denies the request.

I R, A

As the owner for overall social experience, the Social Business Hub determines whether the page is aligned with overall strategy.

3. APPEAL: Requestor may appeal request decision if denied.

R C A

Criteria defined in Step 1 may not be complete, or the requester may disagree with the Hub’s decision. The requestor can make their case to the Steering Committee for consideration.

Key: R: responsible A: accountable C: consulted I: informed

Sample Decison Matrix

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ii. Appendix

The Decision Matrix: A Tool to Align Everyone

Executive Leadership and Why Marketing Doesn’t Own BOTW’s Social Program

When Nathanson joined BOTW, the social program was nascent, so getting the right stakeholders at the table was imperative. The bank’s social media steering committee was launched with senior executives, including the company’s CMO in order to execute the new social program’s charter. “I was hired to build things that didn’t exist,” said Nathanson. “Having senior executives involved adds efficiency and helps remove obstacles.”

While marketing is an important stakeholder, the social program doesn’t report to it. BOTW didn’t want social to be solely aligned to marketing, as responsibilities also impacted infrastructure, customer service, and public relations. Instead, BOTW’s social program reports into its administration function, which includes enterprise groups such as HR, corporate real estate, procurement, technology, and corporate communications.

For a Regulated Company, a Dedicated Compliance Resource Reduces Social Risk and Increases Publishing Efficiency

Another important stakeholder for BOTW’s social program is legal and compliance. While it’s not represented on the steering committee, this function is consulted often and helps Nathanson’s team build out new social channels and programs, ensuring compliance and avoiding potential litigation, risk, and infringement of the many regulations that govern financial institutions.

BOTW also hired a compliance resource dedicated to social. As the social program matures, Nathanson’s team plans to “take on the characteristics of a newsroom,” with more writers who will increase the pace, volume, and quality of content. Waiting for a two-week review cycle from legal was not going to work. Thus, this dedicated compliance resource liaises with the company’s

various business line compliance and legal teams, getting content approved more quickly. “Adding resources like this is part of the commitment to being in social, identifying needs and resources and getting them funded,” said Nathanson.

BOTW Gets Continued Buy-In and Commitment Through Ongoing Roadshows and a Menu of à la Carte Services

While Nathanson’s team has dedicated resources and the support of senior executives, its social business journey is ongoing. The team is constantly evolving a menu of à la carte social services and programs that stakeholders and business leaders can choose to implement based on alignment to their strategic goals. These choices are backed up with a pledge of financial and/or resource support, which further reinforces the partnership, commitment, and success of the program.

Bank of the West is over 135 years old, with more than 700 banking locations in 19 states in the United States. Joel Nathanson joined Bank of the West (BOTW) as head of social media in 2010 to establish the bank’s social media program.

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iii. AppendixBank of the West: Getting the Right People a Seat at the Social Business Governance Table

USAA Embeds Cross-Functional Social Roles Across the Enterprise

At the heart of this vision and strategy is USAA’s social business governance committee, led by the company’s executive team, with representatives from key lines of business, including marketing, customer service, and IT. In USAA parlance, these roles are “embedded” across the organization, emphasizing the distributed nature of its social business efforts.

According to Horne, the governance committee enables faster and more efficient decision making across the enterprise. Further, formalized RACI models articulate where ownership and accountability between the committee and lines of businesses lie.

As with Any Major Business Initiative, Cultural Alignment Is an Imperative

One important mandate for the governance committee is to get the company up to speed on social business, a critical success factor for executing USAA’s social business strategy. As with any major business initiative, according to Horne, the hardest part is the amount of focus, persistence, and socialization required to mobilize change. “It’s as much a cultural evolution as it is about the tools and platforms,” she said.

In one example, a business leader pulled Horne aside and told her that her team was “talking Social Business 301 and 401, but we need 101.” While this can be deflating for those who are acting as change agents, according to Horne, USAA understood that a lack of proper understanding and alignment across employees, stakeholders, and executives eventually catches up. “Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. You can’t leave those behind that you’ll need to help you get there,” she said.

In response, Horne’s team is partnering with HR to develop curricula for employees and executives, much of it based on the team’s original strategy development and business case.

Governance Is Seen as a Positive Investment for a Long-Term Social Business Strategy

For USAA, the investment on the front end is worth the time and investment to avoid roadblocks later in the journey. According to Horne, USAA’s governance model has broadened visibility and education of the importance of social business at USAA, resulting in shared accountability of social adoption across the organization.

USAA is a 90-year-old institution that provides financial products and services to the military community and its families. Renee Horne assumed the role of USAA’s VP of social business nearly two years ago, responsible for the enterprise vision and strategy for social business.

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iv. Appendix

USAA’s Governance Model Aligns Its People and Culture

This policy is designed to protect organizations from their employees’ personal and business use of social media, as such use could adversely impact their brand and reputation. A majority of brands we interviewed required employees to pass a social media policy course as part of their employment with the company, and some required it to access social tools from within the firewall at work and monitored posts. At the same time, the policy can also be empowering: it can clarify, enable, and encourage the use of social media. At Kaiser Permanente, the employee social media policy is designed to empower with information. Vince Golla, director of social media at Kaiser Permanente explained, “Our policy talks about what you can do as much as what you can’t do.”

How might brands be affected by their employee’s personal use of social media? Common issues that an employee policy should address include employees posts about work conditions and complaints, company confidentiality, employee and customer privacy, harassment, product complaints, improper solicitation of prospects by employees, and posts by unsanctioned spokespersons.

We’ve found this employee policy checklist to fit a wide range of businesses. Use this to check your current policy or to develop your first.

Employee Social Media Policy Checklist

v. Appendix

Define social business and social media ensure your definition matches those of regulators focused on your industry)

Identify related existing policies (ethics, harassment, information security, privacy, etc.)

Define improper employee behavior (e.g., going against company culture or being disrespectful; posting about competitors or fellow employees/managers; selling; posting photos, videos, or recordings)

Define confidential information (including “checking in” to locations, employment information, hiring)

Define allowable endorsements (LinkedIn, ratings/reviews sites)

Understand how/when to represent the company (customer service, crisis management, speaking on behalf, use of trademarks/logos, who to work with to engage officially)

Explain when/how to disclose the employment relationship (why, when, and how this may be done); if you’re a global organization, be sure to align policy with local laws

Explain when it’s OK to participate in your branded sites (advocacy, overtime guidance)

Identify company resource restrictions (use of company equipment, email addresses for social profiles)

Lay out handling and ownership of social data (customer lists, social insight data)

Identify how company monitors social media (employee privacy expectations, deleting posts)

Provide contacts for further guidance (HR, IT, customer service, marketing, communications)

Identify business-line or role-specific differences in policy (e.g., leadership or other roles or business lines that may have additional rules based on how they’re regulated or their strategy)

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Employee Social Media Policy

This policy is created for those whose official role includes social business activity. Many organizations either neglect this aspect of policy or try to cover this topic in the general employee policy. Here’s the issue: if you don’t have a policy to prevent business lines or functional groups from creating their own strategy and social business programs, you risk silos of social strategy and governance across the organization. One bank we spoke to has a social media marketing policy that requires business lines to follow specific steps to do social media. To support that policy, it has a process where any individual or business unit that wants to do something must go through a social strategist first. The strategist guides the requestor’s thinking and develop strategy.

Consider the following components for your Social Business Practitioner Policy:.

Social Business Practitioner Policy Checklist

vi. Appendix

Provide an overview of your social business governance system (approval processes, roles/responsibilities, organization, related governing guidelines and policies)

Lay out the organization’s high-level social business strategy (vision, strategy owner/contacts, connection to company culture/mission)

List approved platforms, technology and service providers (social platforms; official pages, owners, and purpose; management tools; monitoring; etc.)

Explain how new social platforms are approved (process for getting new social platforms approved)

Explain how new social business programs are approved (governance steps, approvals, strategy, budget, etc.)

Define core community management processes (baseline rules for social media use across platforms, including post removal/logging, archiving/retention, crisis management, avoiding conflict, legal/compliance rules, etc.)

Explain how and when to make disclosures in social (required page disclosures, terms, contests, offers, links, testimonials, etc.)

Provide branding guidance (voice, tone, audience, imagery, content, library of reusable or standard brand components, etc.)

Define social media escalation processes (e.g., routing engagement, such as hiring inquiries, service/complaints, sales opportunities, investor relations, etc.)

Identify information security considerations (passwords, use of company systems/resources, external links, enclosures/files, proper use/protection of social data, etc.)

Explain how to get a new vendor approved (approved vendor list and process for getting new vendors approved)

Give guidance for making a business case (standard process for assessing new social media programs risks and rewards)

Identify how to obtain/manage access to social networks at work or from company devices (process, training and accreditation, monitoring and privacy, personal equipment, productivity)

Define content management policy (approval process, retention, editorial calendar process, prioritization, etc.)

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Social Business Practitioner Policy

LEADERSHIP Are leaders aligned around your strategy as the foundation for governance? Ensure they agree to your high-level strategy vision and objectives, with each leader defining initiatives and programs specific to their area of responsibility.

Is a structure in place (e.g., a steering committee) to keep people working together?

Do leaders agree on how your company will invest in and track the success of your efforts?

Do you have leadership commitment to remain engaged through social business strategy execution? Eventually, the organization will reach a level of maturity where leadership is comfortable that risk is under control and investments are paying off. Until then, they’ll typically want regular checks on the progress of strategy execution.

DECISION MAKING For key decisions that need to be governed, have you clearly defined roles and responsibilities and principles that guide those decisions? Does leadership agree?

ORGANIZATION Do you have a multi-year view of how social business organizational structures will evolve to support strategy over time? For example, a common approach for organizations with disjointed social activity is to first centralize, then gain control, and finally distribute execution and autonomy back into the spokes over time by giving them increasing control.

For your current organization, have you defined roles and responsibilities for the central hub (social team) and the spokes (e.g., customer service, PR, product teams, etc.) it supports?

DECISION IDENTIFICATION

Have you determined which decisions need to be governed in policy to execute strategy and manage risk? We’ve found some key decisions include creating new social programs; launching your brand on a new social platform; and giving employees access to social tools at work. Ensure key decisions are reflected in polices and guidelines. .

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Have you clearly defined guiding principles based on company culture, strategy, risk tolerance, etc.? For example, you may have a strong digital customer journey focus and so have governance in place that ensures programs support it. Or you may have a strong cost-control focus and so put into place controls in policy for onboarding new vendors or restricting new programs.

ORGANIZATIONAL ALIGNMENT

Do you have well-documented social business policies and guidelines that reflect your organization’s agreed-to governance drivers, decision making, and roles/responsibilities?

Do other policies related to social include consistent guidance? Related policies typically include business ethics, information security, privacy, branding, and workplace harassment.

vii. Appendix

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Social Business Governance Checklist

PEOPLE

POLICY

vii. Appendix

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PROCESS AND Is it clear what steps are taken to support each governance area in the policy?POLICY Are processes aligned with company culture, governance catalysts, and existing company policies and

processes?

NEW PROGRAMS AND BUDGETING

Is the process for launching new social programs or adopting new social tools or platforms clear, especially around roles and decision making?

Is there a process for prioritizing and allocating budget, especially for shared social business infrastructure?

Are agreements in place to commit (and revoke) budgets in such a way that ensures continuity across the business? Do you have the discipline to invest in social over a multi-year period, or is your investment haphazard?

Do you have a process for assessing the collection and handling of Personally Identifiable Information in your possession as part of new programs? Does your privacy policy disclosure accurately reflect this?

REPORTING AND AUDIT

Is operational reporting and auditing in place to track the effectiveness and efficiency of your processes? For example, do you audit random samples of social posts and confirm compliance to policy? Do you audit compliance with agreed to SLAs, such as for customer service response time?

Is there a reporting process to ensure required minimum metrics are in place and to correct or manage out under-performing programs?

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Is a process in place to identify and triage crisis situations? Key components include clear roles, a calling tree or notification process, crisis detection tied to listening and influence, severity scoring/assessment, and conducting fire drills to test the process.

Is a process in place to manage and triage everyday situations, such as responding to comments, removing posts, escalating non-typical engagement scenarios to parts of the company that need it (e.g., investor questions, employee candidate/employment questions, etc.)?

Are processes detailing how customer social data and social interactions will be integrated into existing support systems (e.g., CRM) and shared with customer support teams?

Are processes in place to handle employee engagement in social, such as handling policy violations, harassment, use of company logos or trademarks, or posting on the company’s branded pages?

Are process detailing how customer social data and social interactions will be integrated into existing marketing systems such as email marketing, marketing automation, and web analytics?

RISK MANAGEMENT Is a process in place to identify, document, assign responsibility for, and manage risk? Risk assessment processes are typically cyclic: identify the risk; assess (likelihood and severity); mitigate (with controls, such as policy, process, tools, audits, etc.); and evaluate (continual re-assessment risk management effectiveness).

PROCESS

Social Business Governance Checklist (cont.)

vii. Appendix

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TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY

Have you identified the tools/technology that enable efficient governance at scale? These typically include content management and archiving, community moderation, monitoring, managing disclosures, compliance, etc.

Have you assessed your social media management vendors for their privacy capabilities (e.g., privacy impact assessment)?

Do you use an active directory to grant and deny access to social media management tools to ensure employee access is controlled based on current employment status and role?

METRICS AND ANALYTICS

Is your budget for social business governed by metrics that tie your efforts back to business outcomes? To reduce risk of having too many social programs, use metrics to steer budgets, rewarding programs that succeed and sun-setting nonperforming programs.

Is reporting in place to track trends in policy/procedure violations for fine-tuning governance over time?

Do you maintain an official list of branded social media properties?

Do you manage a list of approved social media vendors?

PLAYBOOKS AND TRAINING

Are your social business practitioners supported with overall social business, strategy, and governance education programs? To match your strategy, curriculum could include a wide range of roles and cover the continuum, from risk mitigation (e.g., policy) to proactive, empowered uses (e.g., employee advocacy, salesforce training, etc.)

Are consistent and widely adopted playbooks that demonstrate best practices through the lens of your social business strategy in place? Many varieties of playbooks exist, such as community management that document common use cases, roles/responsibilities, and decision trees; social technology platform best practices; strategic planning approaches; and branding.

Is there training in place to support adherence to employee social media policy?

PRACTICE

Social Business Governance Checklist (cont.)

ENDNOTES1 To learn more about how we define levels of social business maturity, refer to our report The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation by Charlene Li and Brian Solis, with Alan Webber and Jaimy Szymanski.

2 Bruce Milne, “Socialware Customer Advisory Council: Common Themes from Enterprise Deployments,” Socialware.com, September 10, 2014, https://socialware.com/2014/09/10/socialware-customer-advisory-council-common-themes-enterprise-deployments.

3 Clara Shih, “How Sales Reps Can Succeed in the Social Era,” Harvard Business Review, April 10, 2013, http://hearsaysocial.com/assets/2012/02/0513_PRESS_HBR.pdf.

4 Ryan Broderick, “US Airways Just Tweeted out One of the Most Graphic Things You’ve Ever Seen a Brand Tweet,” BuzzFeed, April 14, 2014, http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/us-airways-just-tweeted-out-one-of-the-most-graphic-things-y.

5 Frederick E. Allen, “KitchenAid Attacks Obama’s Grandmother, Then Apologizes,” Forbes, October 4, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/10/04/kitchenaid-attacks-obamas-grandmother-then-apologizes.

6 Tim Nudd, “Chrysler Throws Down an F-bomb on Twitter,” Adweek, March 9, 2011, http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/chrysler-throws-down-f-bomb-twitter-126967.

7 “Financial Marketers Slam Proposed Social Media Regs,” The Financial Brand, April 1, 2013, http://thefinancialbrand.com/28524/ffiec-social-media-guidelines-regulations-comments-feedback/.

8 “FDIC Law, Regulations, Related Acts,” FDIC, last updated April 20, 2014, https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/2000-5200.html.

9 “Responsibility Assignment Matrix,” Wikipedia, accessed November 6, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix.

10 Webber, Alan, Charlene Li, and Jaimy Szymanski, Guarding the Social Gates: The Imperative for Social Media Risk Management, Altimeter Group, August 9, 2012. https://mouriz.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/guarding-the-social-gates-the-imperative-for-social-media-risk-management.pdf.

11 “Social Media Principles,” Coca-Cola website, accessed November 7, 2014, http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/online-social-media-principles.

12 Webber, Alan, Guarding the Social Gates: The Imperative for Social Media Risk Management.

13 Etlinger, Susan, Andrew Jones, and Charlene Li. Shiny Object or Digital Intelligence Hub? Evolution of the Enterprise Social Media Command Center, Altimeter Group, March 2014, http://www.altimetergroup.com/2014/03/commandcenter.

15 Li, Charlene, Ed Terpening, and Christine Tran, Social Media Education for Employees: Reduce Social Media Risk and Activate Employee Advocacy for Scale — How Leading Companies Prepare Employees for Social Media Success, Altimeter Group, December 5, 2013, http://www.altimetergroup.com/2013/12/new-research-how-companies-reduce-social-media-risk-and-activate-employee-advocacy-for-scale.

16 Li, Charlene, Social Media Education for Employees.

17 For more about social organizational models, including hub and spoke, refer to “Framework and Matrix: The Five Ways Companies Organize for Social Business” by Jeremiah Owyang.

18 Webber, Alan, Guarding the Social Gates: The Imperative for Social Media Risk Management.

METHODOLOGYAltimeter Group conducted a quantitative survey of strategists and executives who are responsible for or influence their organization’s social business governance. Altimeter Group fielded the survey in June–July 2014 (n=76). This report includes input from brands, technology vendors, and domain experts who were interviewed or briefed by Altimeter Group for the purposes of this research. Input into this document does not represent a complete endorsement of the report by the individuals or the companies listed below.

BRANDS (11) AT&T Bank of the West Citibank Citrix Kaiser Permanente Liberty Mutual McDonald’s Sanofi TD Bank U.S. Bank USAA

INDUSTRY THOUGHT LEADERS (2) Shel Holtz, Communications and Technology Strategist Chris Boudreaux, Founder of SocialMediaGovernance.com

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TECHNOLOGY VENDORS (7) Actiance Brandle Hearsay Social Nexgate Socialware.com Spredfast Sprinklr

About Us

How to Work with Us Altimeter Group research is put to use in our client engagements, which help organizations succeed through disruptions, such as social business governance (SBG).

• SBG Audit. This research-based, quantitative assessment of your social business governance includes a scorecard and best practice recommendations to move to the next level.

• SBG Roadmap. After a discovery/audit process, we help you create a high-level roadmap for building a SBG system specific to your organization, aligned with strategy for the next three to five years.

• SBG Advisory. This hourly advisory service addresses your specific governance questions.

• Social Business Strategy. Because governance follows strategy, Altimeter also helps organizations develop a cohesive social business strategy that evolves over time.

• Speeches. We will present internally or externally facing webinars or speeches on SBG for both brands and governance industry vendors.

To learn more about Altimeter’s offerings, contact sales@altimetergroup.com.

Ed Terpening, Senior Consultant

Ed Terpening (@EdTerpening) is a Senior Consultant at Altimeter Group and leads advisory projects on social business education and governance at Altimeter. To date, he has trained more than 300 professionals in social media for business, and while at Apple he was awarded “Teacher of the Year” for his work at Apple University. As VP of Social Media at Wells Fargo, Ed led the charge to develop the first blog by any major US bank and led the first dedicated social media team at a major financial institution. He led social media strategy at Wells Fargo for seven years. While at CNET, Ed created the company’s first community team in 1999 and launched user ratings and reviews on CNET.com and “Talkback” on NEWS.com. He is a founding member of SocialMedia.org.

Charlene Li, Founder and Principal Analyst

Charlene Li (@charleneli) is Founder of Altimeter Group and author of the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership. She is also the co-author of the critically acclaimed bestselling book, Groundswell, which was named one of the best business books in 2008. She is one of the foremost experts on social media and technologies and a consultant and independent thought leader on leadership, strategies, social technology, interactive media, and marketing.

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Altimeter is a research and consulting firm that helps companies understand and act on technology disruption. We give business leaders the insight and confidence to help their companies thrive in the face of disruption. In addition to publishing research, Altimeter Group analysts speak and provide strategy consulting on trends in leadership, digital transformation, social business, data disruption and content marketing strategy.

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