As enterprises try to catch up with the social media buzz, many companies are starting to realize that it is difficult to define tangible business outcomes around social media investments. Social intelligence and social analytics are new con- cepts which have the potential to help enterprises move beyond basic marketing and define a goal-oriented strategy around social media. The next wave of social media investments will be in enterprise programs that are designed to facilitate participation in social media interactions, analyzing the data generated and taking real time actions that govern product, marketing, distribu- tion and pricing processes. The larger ecosystem of any enterprise includes business partners, employees and customers. Each of these constituents plays an important role in processes that govern innovation, customer experience, collaboration, supply chain, talent management and overall business growth. Social media is emerging as the glue that binds these groups and creates tidal waves that can make or break the fu- ture of any company. The only way organizations can ride this wave successfully is to track the social interactions, derive events and patterns that can lead to business process improvements across different functional areas. Another aspect of social media which is internal to an enterprise is in terms of collaborative busi- ness processes where collective knowledge sharing and decision-making is greatly enhanced through social tools. Certain emerging trends in technology such as the collaboration between social media and mobile technology providers have created a revolution in the adoption rate of social media. The confluence of social media and mobile technologies is creating upheaval not just in competitive dynamics but also across social and po- litical spheres. The focus of this paper is to enable organizations to define a strategy around Social Media and tie it to measurable outcomes as defined by core processes that are critical to the survival and growth of any enterprise.

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Next Generation Social Media:
Alignment of Business Processes and
Social Intelligence
Vinaykumar. S. Mummigatti, Virtusa, USA
INTRODUCTION
As enterprises try to catch up with the social media buzz, many companies are
starting to realize that it is difficult to define tangible business outcomes around
social media investments. Social intelligence and social analytics are new con-
cepts which have the potential to help enterprises move beyond basic marketing
and define a goal-oriented strategy around social media.
The next wave of social media investments will be in enterprise programs that are
designed to facilitate participation in social media interactions, analyzing the data
generated and taking real time actions that govern product, marketing, distribu-
tion and pricing processes.
The larger ecosystem of any enterprise includes business partners, employees
and customers. Each of these constituents plays an important role in processes
that govern innovation, customer experience, collaboration, supply chain, talent
management and overall business growth. Social media is emerging as the glue
that binds these groups and creates tidal waves that can make or break the fu-
ture of any company. The only way organizations can ride this wave successfully
is to track the social interactions, derive events and patterns that can lead to
business process improvements across different functional areas. Another aspect
of social media which is internal to an enterprise is in terms of collaborative busi-
ness processes where collective knowledge sharing and decision-making is greatly
enhanced through social tools.
Certain emerging trends in technology such as the collaboration between social
media and mobile technology providers have created a revolution in the adoption
rate of social media. The confluence of social media and mobile technologies is
creating upheaval not just in competitive dynamics but also across social and po-
litical spheres.
The focus of this paper is to enable organizations to define a strategy around So-
cial Media and tie it to measurable outcomes as defined by core processes that
are critical to the survival and growth of any enterprise.
THE POWER OFSOCIALWEB
Social Media is characterized by the use of various kinds of tools including blogs,
microblogs, social networks, location based networks, collaboration tools, multi-
media, professional networking, social games and many others that are still evolv-
ing.

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“The popularity of social media is undeniable—three of the world’s most popular
brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and
the world now spends over 22 percent of all time online on these brands. For the
first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global
consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites in-
creased by 24 percent over last year. The average visitor spends 66 percent more
time on these sites than a year ago. (Source: Nielsen.com)
The latest statistics published by Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook on demograph-
ics and usage patterns are:
• 200 million registered accounts on Twitter as of January 2011 (Source:
Twitter)
• Twitter users send a billion tweets each week.
• Facebook has more than 600 million users with 42 percent in the Ameri-
can continent, 27 percent in Asia and 25 percent in Europe (Source:
Facebook).
• Linkedin has over 100 million users with more than 50 percent users
outside the USA.
• Linkedin is used by 69 of the Fortune100 companies and Linkedin oper-
ates in 200 countries. (Source: Linkedin )
• 152 million—The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by Blog-
Pulse by 2010 end).
Nearly 10 percent of the global population uses Facebook and the count is in-
creasing by the day. While this fact signifies the reach and influence of just one
social tool, the usage and reach is by no means homogeneous across social tools.
Different target segments subscribe to different social networks and use tools that
best suit their needs and preferences.
A recent article by Nielsen on “Introducing Generation C: The Connected Collec-
tive Consumer” from Nielsen’s Consumer 360 Indonesia conference, is very in-
sightful. Key excerpts from this presentation are “Gen C is not a target audience
but a community of digital natives that will partner with brands. To successfully
market to Gen C consumers, brands must create fresh, cultural capital for Gen C
to talk about—a process which also gives them “status” within their cohorts or
tribes and social networks. According to Nielsen, Gen C is characterized by the
following traits:
1. Tribal behavior—form their identities by belonging and expressing them-
selves within “tribes”
2. Social status derived by what you share—gain credibility by expressing
opinions, sharing ideas, observations and thoughts
3. Bee-like swarm behavior—mobilize as one with their tribes like bees
around topics that interest them
4. Social oxygen—Mobile devices have become “social oxygen”, enabling
them to connect, create and share opinions and thoughts with their tribes
5. Continuous partial attention—As experts at managing content and infor-
mation, they engage in never-ending conversations, constantly “live-
streaming” their experiences to the world
6. Chameleons –constantly changing and morphing their identities to simul-
taneously belong to as many different tribes as possible
7. Co-creators—The social web has brought out “democratization of creativi-
ty”

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What does this volume of traffic and information exchange on social media mean
to corporate enterprises? We have enough data and information around how to
leverage social media for marketing and branding.
The focus of this paper is not on marketing or the analytics around branding
such as awareness, brand attributes, purchase intent, lead generation or around
web presence such as number of clicks or response to trials and surveys. Instead,
this paper focuses on tracking the huge volumes of data exchanged via social
tools and filtering this information to generate patterns, events and intelligence
that can trigger critical processes for an organization around all departments.
Enterprise use of social media needs to focus on deriving tangible business out-
comes, directing consumer behavior or tracking customer response in real time
that can trigger processes around:
• Innovation and crowd sourcing
• Tracking customer perceptions and feedback on products leading to pro-
active customer service and support
• Proactive tracking of queries from potential customers- Lead generation
• Word-of-mouth advertising by peers and social groups
• Attracting talent through interest groups and professional networks
• Micro campaigns through regional communities, channel networks and
interest groups
SOCIAL ANALYTICS &SOCIALINTELLIGENCE
What is social web analytics? Philip Sheldrake in his ebook on social web-
analytics, describes Social Web Analytics as the application of search, indexing,
semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying,
tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a
particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in
each conversation's sentiment and influence.
An article published in Business Week (“Wanted: Social Media Sifters”—25 Octo-
ber 2010) covers this topic in some detail. Companies such as Coca Cola, Kraft
Foods and Procter and Gamble are now employing social media analytics firms to
sift through all the chatter and derive meaningful information that can help them
define their strategies. Organizations such as Dell have set up listening platforms
and listening posts which can track key digital metrics on public social media
sites like Twitter and YouTube.
If we can tie the business processes that govern marketing, product engineering,
customer service and innovation to the data that gets generated through social
networks, we can start getting a better handle on the social media investments
through the returns measured in terms of Key performance Indicators (KPI’s).
A recent blog post by Anne Stuart titled “Getting started with Social BPM”1 touch-
es on the topic of Social BPM and how collaborative processes can be influenced
through social media. Why is it so difficult to connect the two worlds of social me-
dia and BPM? One simple reason is that social media and related information is
so dynamic that it is very difficult to derive a pattern out of it, whereas BPM initia-
tives are built around repetitive processes that have a finite start and end point
resulting in a business outcome.
Social intelligence deals with how we use the data and information gathered
through social web analytics to define patterns and predictive analyses and gen-
1 http://www.ebizq.net/topics/social_bpm/features/13159.html]

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erate real time operational insights that can feed into organizational processes
and/or enable strategic decisions.
The social intelligence paradigm starts with our ability to track information that is
exchanged through social media. If we are able to derive a meaningful insight into
the information thread, then we can start engaging the participants at a next lev-
el. The conversations can open up new product ideas, customer service or prod-
uct issues or even uncover potential disputes and legal cases. Over a period of
time we will be able to create customer profiles and segmentation that can be le-
veraged to direct proactive information, products and services to the target seg-
ments.
Social media listening platforms are emerging as key components of social analyt-
ics and social intelligence strategy. As stated in the recent Forrester “Magic Wave
for Listening Platforms”, listening platforms enable many tasks across the enter-
prise, including marketing measurement, market research, customer support,
crisis identification, and more.
Social intelligence can help control, respond to and influence the factors that
drive a company’s reputation and competitive positioning. It is important to track
what consumers are saying about the brand, products, services or channels. Au-
tomated sentiment analysis, sentiment scores, tracking of chatter on
blogs/articles/videos can be tied to benchmark metrics and automatic actions
triggered in real time.
SOCIAL MEDIA VALUE CHAIN ACROSS AN ENTERPRISE
A great validation of the importance of mobile devices is the fact that 60 percent of
subscribers access Facebook through mobile browsers and most active mobile
users are in Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Canada and the US, where at least
60 percent of Facebook users spend just as much time on a mobile device as on
the desktop. The collaboration between social media tools and mobile operators
and app developers has created a revolution in the adoption rate of social media
across the developing and developed worlds alike.
When we combine the business logic, social intelligence and events that have sig-
nificant impacts on business, the ability to respond to the external events in real
time increases dramatically. These triggers and data can feed into the business
processes within an enterprise thereby completing a logical value chain.

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Figure 1: Social Media Value Chain
The above diagram gives a logical representation of the integrated value chain and
data flow. Let us look at what kinds of business processes are influenced by each
of the constituents vis-à-vis the larger external population, partner community
and employees.
The larger population can consist of existing customers, influencers, potential
customers and competitors’ customers. This group can influence product deci-
sions, pricing decisions, product comparisons, brand perceptions, customer ex-
pectations, grievances and product dissatisfactions. The data related to these top-
ics—when filtered correctly—and the intelligence gathered can feed into or trigger
the processes around new products, innovation, customer service, advertisement,
marketing and logistics.
The second group consists of partners, strategic alliances and suppliers. Partners
can be dealers, agents, brokers who will not only use social media to voice their
opinions and track a community but also wish to understand how they can leve-
rage the larger consumer behavior to sell a company’s products and services.
Suppliers can leverage social tools for real-time collaboration and content ex-
change that can greatly enhance the B2B process efficiencies and supplier rela-
tionship management. Alliances can be of varied nature and social media can be
a great way to keep them in loop for sharing various developments and initiatives.
Development of social communities helps foster greater depth of alliance and in-
novation.
The employees, alumni and job aspirants groups are quite different in their social
interactions but interconnected in many ways. How we design our social strategy
for each of these groups can yield far-reaching benefits in terms of employee mo-
tivation, retention, alumni connections, attracting job aspirants and possible re-
turning employees. Creating a community through groups and blogs can keep the
potential employees and job aspirants in a closed loop enabling them to tap job
openings.
The list of possibilities is immense and we have not even scraped the surface.
Every passing day is opening up new ways of social media adoption and creative

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possibilities. It will not be long before social media tools will be an integral part of
an organization's value chain.
INNOVATION DRIVEN BY SOCIAL MEDIA
The latest generation of consumers as defined by Nielsen as Generation “C” is
characterized by their addiction to social media and thrives on the social tools for
their social and professional networking, idea and knowledge sharing. This social-
media-savvy group of customers is also the most educated segment forming
about 20 percent of the worlds’ population. This is also the group that is targeted
by top consumer goods and services companies. This group is now being engaged
by firms not just for brand awareness and marketing but also as co-creators of
new concepts, ideas and products. Recently Baskin-Robbins (ice-cream chain)
launched an online competition to create a new ice cream flavor which was won
by a 62-year old lady from 40,000 entrants.
We have seen similar sourcing of ideas from consumers by Doritos and Mountain
Dew. Recently Toyota launched a competition around how its technologies can be
used beyond automobiles. Why are companies doing this?
The answer is simple. The new generation of consumers wants to participate, opi-
nionate on and influence the development of products they are going to use. They
will not accept something that is not liked by themselves or their peers. This was
clearly visible when GAP retail chain changed their logo. The backlash from the
social crowd was so severe that within days of launching the new logo, GAP re-
ceived a large number of comments on Facebook, Twitter and blogs which forced
it to revert back to the old logo. Starbucks has about 20 million fans on Facebook
in the USA, 1.3 million Twitter followers and about 4.5 million check-ins on
Foursquare (a location-based social tool).
Most global consumer goods and services companies would be missing out on
huge market opportunities by not leveraging this social fan following.
Let us look at some ways in which the process of innovation can leverage social
media. At a high level, any innovation process will include following steps:
1. Idea Generation: Idea generation can happen through communities, fo-
cus groups, blogs and social networks, wikis, product forums or chat
rooms. We can leverage social listening platforms and analytic tools to
gather the larger trends, consumer preferences and arrive at SWOT
analysis.
2. Idea Screening: This is an internal activity and needs internal process
orchestration to enable collaboration between the right groups and deci-
sion making by the right stakeholders. This stage would also encompass
technical and business feasibility analysis, market potential evaluation
and overall New Product Development (NPD) planning.
3. Concept development and testing: This stage can have a limited expo-
sure and sharing with target influencers and followers. This stage needs
to tie back into the internal processes to track feedback and ensure that
the product or concept is refined to suit the test group feedback
4. Test Launch and Commercialization: This is a crucial phase of the
NPD and the innovation process where the feedback loop needs to be
monitored through social media listening posts to ensure that corrective
actions across product, service, channels or pricing are immediately ad-
dressed.

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SOCIAL MEDIA AS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TRANSFORMATION ENABLER
Customer experience can be defined as the sum total of customer perception
about a company and its offerings, based on multiple touch points that a custom-
er faces such as:
• Branding & marketing
• Presales and post sales support
• Merchandising
• Services delivery
• Websites, call centres and social media.
Customer experience is measured by how customers translate this experience
through:
• Buying behaviour
• Purchase patterns
• Maintaining relationship
• Voicing their perceptions
Why does it seem like customer experience management is suddenly getting a lot
of attention? External forces such as reduced entry barriers, globalization and
deregulation are opening up the competition. Technology innovations such as so-
cial media and mobile technology have created disruptive forces in spawning a
new generation of demanding and discerning customers. We are seeing a con-
stant change in customer demand for innovation in products and services.
Internally we are challenged by siloed operations, systems and processes which
are inhibiting us from getting a unified view of customer touch points and under-
standing our own abilities to control how our customers see our offerings and us.
Typical challenges that enterprises must contend with before they can claim con-
trol over customer experience management include:
• Most customer centric organizations have multiple social and traditional
channels spanning from the front office to the back office and each of
these channels have different ways of interacting with customers.
• Each of these channels typically operate as distinct silos, each operating
off of their own set of policies and procedures rather than operating as a
cohesive service chain…thus delivering entirely different experiences as
customers traverse from one channel to another
• To compound matters, social channels have no linkage with back end
systems and hence the interactions are all disjointed and have no bearing
on the follow-ups.
The percolation of social media has complicated the matters as customer expe-
rience is no longer the domain of individual experience but a collective perception
of a new generation of customers which is hooked on to social media.
A next generation social CEM solution calls for a fundamental change in the way
organizations handle customers—hence they need to approach it as a transfor-
mation. It must include:
1. Visibility of KPIs around customer experience such as customer reten-
tion/acquisition rate, effectiveness of campaigns, customer satisfaction,
product and service feedback, ideation etc.
2. Real time benchmark analysis—establish internal and external metrics ,
track the metrics in real time, analyze gaps with competitive benchmarks
3. Actionable metrics: Capture and convert customer feedback, events and
metrics into meaningful actions and align to business processes

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4. Ensure cross channel uniformity of metrics on customer experience
ALIGNING BUSINESS PROCESSES TO SOCIALMEDIA
Every organization is governed by an average of 8-10 mission critical processes
which dictate the revenues, profitability, competitive differentiation and customer
service. We can categorize these processes under one of the following process
groups:
• Lead-to-order,
• Order-to-cash and
• Trouble-to-resolve.
Each of these processes are impacted and influenced by social media to varying
degrees. It depends on an organization’s strategy on how it ties social media data
to these processes.
Figure 2: Industry processes with high social media touch points
Also we can categorize these processes under the B2B and B2C categories de-
pending on whether the social media participants would be channel partners and
suppliers or the end consumers. What makes this integrated approach highly
valuable to an enterprise is our ability to tie in social intelligence and metrics to
the KPI’s in real time and take actions through these processes.
The below diagram helps describe this concept.

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Figure 3: Alignment of Business Strategy to Social media investments
The business process management layer within an organization becomes the con-
fluence of organizational strategy, KPIs and real time actions based on social in-
telligence. It also ties into breaking the silos behind each channel by ensuring
that irrespective of the source of an event/transaction/intelligence, we are able to
apply the same policies and procedures and bring the same roles into accounta-
bility. Also, the feedback loop and continuous optimization is ensured where the
Business activity monitoring feeds the actual metrics into comparison with
benchmark KPIs.
SOCIAL MEDIA ENABLED CONVERGENCE SOLUTION FOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TRANSFORMATION
Earlier in this paper, we identified the challenges around customer experience
management. We now address this topic in terms of a potential solution that can
bring various technologies together and help in offering a unified data, process,
content and user experience across all channels.
There are various technologies and platforms in which an organization will have
invested over many years which may include multiple channels for customer inte-
ractions, customer relationship management, process management, content
management, business intelligence, search and collaboration, complex events
processing, integration and SOA, in addition to an array of system of records. As
we embark on social media investments, we need to tie in the legacy investments
with the social data and intelligence coming from the vast array of social plat-
forms.
A suggested approach will be to go with a convergence solution that is leveraging
existing investments as well as new tools around social media. The below diagram
provides a schema for such a solution:

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Figure 4: BPM-enabled convergence solution for social media
The key components of this convergence solution will be as below:
1. Listening Platform and Social Analytics: Listening platforms are
emerging tools in the social marketing and social commerce space, which
are helping social strategists to tie real time events to actions and alerts.
Forrester has released a report on listening platforms and Nielsen, Ra-
dian6 and Converseon have been rated as the leading tools in this space.
Listening tools are great when we want to track vast amounts of data
across regions, markets and segments and use the output to monitor
brand reputation, safety and security issues, labor issues, employee
chatter, competitive intelligence, innovation trends and news.
2. These tools analyze the conversations, buzz and any kind of information
exchange that happens in the social media in real time and produce out-
put in terms of trends, influencers, audience, participation level etc.
3. Multi—Channel Integration Strategy and Tools: An important element
of this solution is the ability to integrate all channels of customer interac-
tions and provide uniformity around business processes, policies and
procedures, data access, knowledge and content access and user expe-
rience.
4. Business intelligence and complex events processing: The data gen-
erated through traditional channels and social media can be better leve-
raged when we apply BI and CEP technologies to go deeper into analyz-
ing events and patterns that are impacting the corporate goals and strat-
egies.
5. Business Process Management: The BPM layer is a crucial orchestra-
tion layer that brings the ability to take real time actions and trigger or-
ganizational processes. The BPM layer when accompanied by a strong
rules engine can enforce compliance checks, straight through processing
and exceptions handling.
6. Enterprise integration / ESB: Finally we need a seamless integration to
transaction systems and systems of records so that the data that is gen-

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erated through analytics, processes and multiple channels is captured
and used for further mining or made actionable.
CONCLUSION
The social media revolution is just taking shape and will only expand to include
every aspect of an organization’s touch points with its external and internal
stakeholders. Hence the earlier an organization embraces social media and aligns
its social media goals to its overall strategy, the better for its competitive differen-
tiation and sustained growth in customer base and revenues. The challenge will
be to realign its systems, processes and even organizational roles to suit the new
approach. The next generation social media programs will be not so much about
innovation in the tools themselves, but in how we bring these tools into organiza-
tional strategy and define our processes around social media. Also this won’t be a
onetime effort or investment. We will need to make a beginning somewhere and
continue in small steps and optimize as we go. Most companies are still exploring
the best ways to leverage the power of social media and hence there is no perfect
recipe for success in the social media world today. Aligning business processes to
social media outcomes is one sure-shot way of measuring how well we are aligned
in terms of our social media and corporate strategies.
REFERENCES:
1. (Nielsen) http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire
2. (Forrester Research) February 22, 2011: Social Media Marketing Metrics
That Matter: Communicating The Right Data To Different Internal Stake-
holders by Nate Elliott with Emily Riley, Sarah Glass, and James McDavid
3. Philip Sheldrake: ebook on social web analytics (2008)
4. (Crowd factory, digital influence group, Racepoint group) Measuring Social
Media ROI—march 2010
5. July 12, 2010: The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 by
Zach Hofer-Shall.