Chapter 2
Toward a Comprehensive Digital Business Strategy
Imagine having the ability to have real-time information feeds flowing throughout your organization about everything that matters to it. What are your customers talking about today? What concerns are your employees expressing? What factors seem most important to potential hires this week? What new research is on the horizon that will impact your industry? And then imagine employees throughout your organization taking this data and asking themselves, “How does this new knowledge fit into our strategic direction and planning? What needs to be changed and how quickly can we do so?” Seem like science fiction? Actually, it can happen—and is happening—here and now.
To get there, companies are developing a comprehensive digital strategy that informs and builds the kind of community engagement that makes this feedback possible. Although a comprehensive digital business strategy may evoke an image of a several hundred–page document that is bound and updated periodically, it is actually a verb, the nuts and bolts of what it will take to keep a company's multiple social networks humming. And even though the word comprehensive makes it sounds like it is a top-down plan that reaches into the cobwebbed corners of an organization, it is actually the inverse. A comprehensive digital strategy is derived in the trenches.
At the risk of being redundant, let me restate these ideas because they run so counter to how strategy has been created ...
