Infographic: State of Social Business 2013 and Outlook for 2014

This past year has been a busy one for me and Brian Solis on the research front. We’ve published the following:

Report on the six stages of social business evolution
Report on the true state of social business in 2013,
An ebook on seven success factors of social business strategy
An image-rich slide deck complete with all the graphs and charts you need to benchmark where you are compared to other social businesses.


Brian and I recently introduced an infographic that summarizes high level findings across all of our work in 2013 (scroll down to see it below). And the key finding is that while organizers are making significant headway in terms of building out their social efforts, they are far from realizing real business value.


My outook for 2014 is that many more organizations will overcome the stigma of “social” and seek ways to articulate connections with customers and employees into their business. In just the last half of the year, we’ve worked with several organizations that are doing the hard work of connecting their social efforts to business value — it sounds easy to connect the dots but actually building the organization, governance, and process to do this will be most of the focus in 2014.


It isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t have the appeal of new consumer bright shiny objects or excite of a tech IPO. But this is where the real value will be created, real benefits will be built. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, a bit of gut-wrenching leaps of faith as employees and customers are empowered, but hopefully in a year we’ll have seen key numbers like the percent of companies associating social with business value increase from today.


Highlights from the State of Social Business Infographic


Companies are organizing and formalizing social media strategies into social business strategies…
78% of companies have a dedicated social media team. This is up from 67% two years ago.
Social media teams have grown from 11 people in 2010 to almost 16 in 2013.


Social business strategies are spreading across the enterprise…
Social media headcount across the enterprise has more than doubled at the largest companies from 20 in 2010 to 49 in 2012.
According to our research, there are 13 different departments across the enterprise with at least one person dedicated to social media.
The majority of resources are allocated to marketing at 73%, but as you can see, social media covers almost every major function. Now, whether or not social media is organized and integrated, well, we know that it’s not really.


Marketing = 73%

Corporate communications = 66%

Customer support = 40%

Digital = 37%

Social media = 35%

HR = 29%

Product/R&D = 16%

Advertising = 16%

Customer/User experience = 15%

IT = 14%

Legal = 9%


Companies are trying social business to positive business outcomes…
About 50% of companies say social business has improved marketing optimization, customer experience and brand health.
Nearly one in four have actually seen an increase in revenue.


Companies though have a long way to go…
Many social business programs lack a strong foundation.
Only 17% of companies identify their social strategy as mature.
52% of companies say that executives are aligned with the overall social strategy.
Just 26% of companies approach social media holistically (operating against a cross-enterprise level strategy.)


To succeed, build a foundation for social business…
Benchmark you program with Altimeter’s Social Business reports (see below…underneath the infographic).
Document existing challenges and opportunities to address in 2014 and 2015 (we don’t move as fast as we’d like).
Align all social business efforts with business objectives and priorities.

Managing the Social Media Mix

The following is an excerpt from “Managing the Social Media Mix” an exclusive whitepaper brought to you by Oracle. Download the exclusive whitepaper now! This white paper provides a step-by-step guide for determining your strategy—and the proper mix of marketing channels—in social media. With it, you can use the time you have to efficiently define a balanced social media mix.

Eight Steps to a Better Social Media Mix

Social media is a continually evolving realm with amazing potential for business communications, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By following the eight steps outlined in this white paper, you can clearly make decisions about your social media mix and online communications strategy.

1. Gather Your Portfolio

Start by doing a quick inventory of the social media channels that you already use. If you are like most businesses, you will find that you already have different channels set up and managed by different people. Write each channel name on a Sticky Note: one for Twitter, Facebook, the company blog, e-mail, and any other online communications channel you use. (For the moment, don’t worry about social media channels you want to use in the future. Those will be covered in a later step.) Having this data in front of you can help you organize your channels by overall reach.

Figure 1. Gather your portfolio.

2. List Your Content

Inventory the kinds of information that you distribute through your social media channels, such as white papers, status updates, case studies, event information, customer service, and industry discussions. List each content type to make the first column of a table. As you make your list, keep in mind that—beyond different information—there are also different types of conversations you’re trying to foster with each piece of informational material.

Figure 2. List your content

3. Look Through Four Social Media Lenses

Four lenses—frequency and formality, the condensing funnel, the waterfall, and subscription size—offer different ways for you to look at your communications to generate new ideas and understanding about how social marketing works.

Figure 3. Look through four social media lenses. Lens 1: Frequency and Formality

On the content list from Step 2, add two columns, “Frequency” and “Formality.”

Frequency means how often you send a communication. Formality means the general level of resource investment the communication requires, how conventional it is, or perhaps how geared toward a strategic audience, response, or result. Frequency and formality tend to be inverse: formal messages go out less often; informal messages, more often.

Rank all your content by frequency and formality. For example, if you have 10 content types, rank each from 1 to 10. Your most frequent communication—say Twitter posts—ranks a 1, second-most frequent ranks a 2, and so on.

Now, rank the formality of each channel 1 through 10, as well. Formality is perhaps tougher to gauge than frequency, but remember, it’s a relative scale. Deciding whether e-mails are more formal than blog posts can start a good, strategic discussion with your team.

Lens 2: The Condensing Funnel

Consider whether or not your content funnels through your communication channels. For example, your organization might tweet everything, blog about industry trends, and use a newsletter mostly for promotions. Thinking of that content in a funnel that leads toward a business goal will highlight how and where content gets redistributed.

Overall, where does your funnel lead readers?

Lens 3: The Waterfall

As you think about the funnel, begin to think of content as a waterfall that runs through it. For example, some tweets may lead to blog posts, and some blog posts may lead to white papers. You want to highlight this flow, because it leads to better content development once you have an online communications strategy in place, as shown in Step 8.

As this relates to the first lens, you’ll see that formality often increases as you move down the waterfall.

Lens 4: Subscription Size

Ranking social media channels in terms of subscribers has a huge impact on your communications strategy, too. It takes time and effort to transition communities across social media, and attrition happens all the time.

Rank your channels by number of subscribers. Write the rankings on the Sticky Notes you made for each channel in Step 1.

Vine Vanity URLs: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

Twitter Launches Vanity URLs for Vine Users: “A profile URL is a unique Vine profile address accessible from the web. Once you select an available URL, you will be able to access your profile by visiting vine.co/[yourURL].”

“Selecting a custom URL allows you to share your profile easily and makes it easier for others to find and watch the videos you’ve created.”

Twitter Adds New Features to Twitter Alerts: Twitter has “added some new features to make Twitter alerts even more accessible to you. Now, on your iOS or Android app, you can go to a participating organization’s profile and easily subscribe to their alerts as push notifications by tapping on the bell icon.”

Twitter has “also added in-app notifications for iOS: when you’re browsing on Twitter, you’ll now receive a notification at the bottom of your screen when an alert is sent by an organization whose alerts you subscribe to.”

Windows Phone Releases Update to Facebook App: “The team behind the official Facebook app for Windows Phone” has released an update ”that significantly evolves the app’s notification capabilities, making it easier than ever to stay plugged in.”

“Now you can see what your friends have posted on your wall right from your Start screen. “

Here’s a cool social media tool worth noting:

Storytellit: a tool to make it easy to get customized suggestions for highly engaging posts; automate and schedule your posts; connect Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr; and reach your audience on multiple networks at once.

Check out Storytellit to grow your business or personal brand via social media.

Other Mentions

Introducing Social Media Marketing World: 60+ pros help you master social media marketing! Join Chris Brogan (co-author of The Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Michael Hyatt (author ofPlatform), Jay Baer (author of Youtility), John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies), Mark Schaefer (author of Tao of Twitter), Michael Stelzner (author ofLaunch) and experts from more than a dozen brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2014—Social Media Examiner’s mega-conference in beautiful San Diego, California.

Check out this overview of the conference or click here for more details.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.