EACH Strategy for Social Software

Forrester Research, Inc. uses a methodology they call POST to help clients properly formulate their social media strategy. Briefly summarized on the Forrester site:

Forrester's POST methodology enables you to make smarter marketing decisions with social technologies. POST is a four-step process:

• People. Review your target customer's social behaviors and attitudes.
• Objectives. Decide on your social technology goals.
• Strategy. Determine how your objectives will change your relationship with customers.
• Technology. Choose the appropriate technologies to deploy.

For social media at work we can borrow the methodology and adapt it to quickly work through most of the steps.

Employees

Internal use of social media is focused on the enterprise. This solution is not intended for customers or even partners. The people in this solution are employees.

Accomplish

The purpose of enterprise social software is to improve your organization’s performance. Performance improvement may be realized as increased efficiency and/or higher quality. The objective is what the company wants to accomplish. This is one of the more difficult parts of the EACH strategy.

Collaboration

To work together. Don’t mistake this for what you want to accomplish. Collaboration is not your goal, it is how you will accomplish your goal. The strategy the enterprise will use is employee collaboration. There was some internal debate that this step should be communication. I got tired of arguing with myself and decided that even if it were communication, in order to be social it would have to be collaborative. For instance, I communicate with you by writing this blog. Once you comment, it turns into collaboration.

How?

This step remains the most similar to the POST methodology. Once you have properly determined the first three steps, you are ready to analyze the tools that can be used to implement your strategy. If you want the VP of Sales to communicate with the sales force have her blog. If you want to capture the institutional knowledge of your organization set up a wiki.