A big part of the social enterprise transformation is aligning internal roles, processes, policies, and stakeholders. Where you are in that journey is a difficult thing to measure, and therefore, it often gets overlooked.

To make sure we are leading by example, we engaged the Altimeter Group to conduct an internal audit of our social media practices.

We want to share our lessons learned, so that they may provide ideas on how to transform your company into a fully engaged enterprise. 

To kick things off we engaged Jeremiah (Pictured Left) from the Altimeter Group to conduct interviews with stakeholders from across our organization and score us against a 45 point checklist. The topics he drilled into included; customer profile, market analysis, audit, organizational model, process, policies, roadmap, education, communication, roles, stakeholders, monitoring, and reporting.

While you could conduct a similar audit on your own, having a 3rd party lends unbiased credibility to the findings.

The first time we did the audit in the summer of 2010 we scored a 3.5 out of 5. It wasn’t too bad for our first time through, but it uncovered many ways for us to improve. Within the recommendations we found a number of things that we could do immediately — things like documenting processes and raising the visibility of our key metrics. It also highlighted places where we needed real investment if we wanted to raise our score and scale engagement. One such program which was directly attributed to this report was our MVP Program. 

With a benchmark in place we were able to set clear goals for the year. In October, which was about a year after our first audit, we engaged the Altimeter Group again to do a re-score. We wanted to show our executive team where we've made progress and where we need additional investment. 

In this year's audit, we scored a 4.08 out of 5. While there is plenty of still room for improvement, we were told this was highest score the Altimeter Group has given out to date. 

Here are the 3 key areas where we really wanted to improve. 

1. Double Down on Advocacy Programs: 

• The MVP program has been a huge win in its first year with over 60 MVPs inducted. We need to make sure we staff it with 1 relationship manager per 80 MVPs to ensure its continued success. 
• Ideas and Answers have had proven to be incredibly scalable forums for shaping the product development roadmap and answering questions from the community. We don't want to take these communities for granted and under invest in moderation and engagement.  
• And finally, how do we create a truly social website which is dynamically assembled around the individual? One that connects prospects and customers to real people within the community who can provide inspiration, answer questions, and help them become heroes within their organization. 

2. Bolster the Center of Excellence: 

• Create a comprehensive playbook for our organization to drive best practices, expertise and alignment across the organization. Define the stakeholders and what educational resources are required to enable those groups to grow their social presence.   
• Define the operating model. As the demands on this group grow exponentially we need to spell out what services the CoE provides, to which group, and what the resource model looks like if we need to expand our services. 

3. Live and breathe Social CRM, proving it to the market: 

• Use Chatter to tie our websites together and foster private communities around special interests.
• Define Social CRM best practices by tying activity back to the 62 org to create visibility for customer-facing employees. 
• Define our Social CMS used to manage content, assets, conversations, and pages across our channels.  

With any project like this, our goal is to delegate assignments and show as much progress as we can in the first 30 days. It is critical to capitalize on the momentum. 

We hope that by sharing this experience we can provide ideas for how to transform your organization into a social enterprise. If you have questions or additional ideas, let's spark a conversation in the comments below.