Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization

1. Creating the Social Company

Building a social media program for an organization is hard. I won’t try to convince you otherwise. The truth of it is that it takes patience, long hours of intricate planning, and a razor-sharp focus on getting things right. When you look at the companies that first started to successfully integrate the social web into their business models—companies such as Ford, Starbucks, Virgin Airlines, Dell, IBM, and Best Buy—what you often don’t see is the mountain of diligent planning it took for them to get there: the research, the team work, the block-by-block building that went on behind the scenes. What those friendly Twitter interactions and expertly managed Facebook walls don’t tell you is that behind every corporate ...