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National governments represent a special category of large organizations: they're far larger than any company, and they're in a funny kind of business. But their talent for generating documents occasionally leads to something of value in the business world. Would you believe a strategy document that frames the relationship between social media and Enterprise 2.0 in a sidebar?

Though it's not what most people will be looking for, the new 2009 [US] National Intelligence Strategy (PDF) neatly categorizes two types of objectives for the intelligence community (IC). If you squint a little, I think you'll see how these categories could be repurposed for the 2.0 crowd:

Mission Objectives

• MO1: Combat Violent Extremism
  
• MO2: Counter WMD Proliferation
  
• MO3: Provide Strategic Intelligence and Warning
  
• MO4: Integrate Counterintelligence
  
• MO5: Enhance Cybersecurity
  
• MO6: Support Current Operations
  

Enterprise Objectives

• EO1: Enhance Community Mission Management
  
• EO2: Strengthen Partnerships
  
• EO3: Streamline Business Processes
  
• EO4: Improve Information Integration & Sharing
  
• EO5: Advance S&T/R&D
  
• EO6: Develop the Workforce
  
• EO7: Improve Acquisition

Identifying external and internal objectives
Obviously, I'm not suggesting that national security and social technologies are the same thing. If you're not in the national security business, then "combat violent extremism" isn't your first objective. Instead, look at the framework. I think that the distinction between mission objectives and enterprise objectives might just clarify the relationship between externally-focused social media and internally-focused Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

• Social Media for Mission Objectives
  Mission objectives are closely linked to the overall objectives of an organization. At the enterprise level, these are measured in terms of financial success; in marketing, they're the familiar product- and customer-oriented objectives that lead to financial success. These are the kinds of objectives we see in social media discussions (especially when social media for business is interpreted as social media marketing):
  
  • Combat negative impressions of the company
    
  • Improve customer communication and responsiveness
    
  • Increase brand visibility
    
  • Enhance customer loyalty
    
  • Integrate market intelligence
    
  ...add your favorite social media objective here. The social media focus on connecting with the worldwide conversation in support of the business reflects an emphasis on mission objectives.

• Enterprise 2.0 for Enterprise Objectives
  The E 2.0 case is even easier to make—look at E04 on the NIS list (improve information integration & sharing). Look at the list through your new technologies lens, and you'll hardly need to edit to start applying it. Enterprise objectives are about making the operation work better, so the prescriptions are generic, not specific to the organization's mission. Despite the idealistic rhetoric, improving the operation is the argument for E 2.0.

Aligning social media and Enterprise 2.0
I don't think the internal/external view of social media and E 2.0 is all that new, but I do think it's instructive to see the two types of objectives neatly linked in one document. If the evangelists of social business strategy succeed, I think we'll see more explicit alignment of these high-level categories.

Thanks to Andrew McAfee for pointing out the new document.

If we haven't talked lately, you might not have heard about the theme I've been developing. Last year, I was calling it "the management layer of social media," but I knew that was too geeky. So I refined it to "managing social media." While so much of the talk is about the big ideas and cultural changes surrounding social media adoption, this is all about how to make it work in large organizations. I expect to spend a major piece of the next few years on managing social media.

You can't manage social media!
If this were another post on how companies should listen and participate in social media, I'd be prepared to agree with the standard objection about loss of control. But I'm not talking about control. This is about what companies do internally to manage their social media activities. Just Do It is a great ad campaign, but it's not how things happen in medium or large companies.

Today, I'm sharing the general framework. It doesn't spell anything, but it can be fun to pronounce—especially if you pronounce both Ps...

Organization
Policy
Process
Technology

For the Groundswell fans, this doesn't replace POST—it addresses a separate set of issues that come up inside the company. Issues that we'll get into in the coming months.

Connecting listening to business processes
The first topic is something from the process column, which I've heard as an issue from multiple sources: how to connect social media listening and engagement to business processes. I've encountered at least four different organizational approaches so far, all of which seem to work. I'm lining up the case studies for a report; if you know of a good example of a company that's doing it well, I'd like to know about it. (Yes, I know about Dell. We all know about Dell.)

This will probably be one of the most-forwarded items on the Net today. If you're managing a business, read it for suggestions on how to get through. If you sell to business, read it to understand your customers' new priorities. If you work for a business, read it for what to expect (and read between the lines for how you can protect yourself). If you don't fit it one of those categories, read it anyway. It has a lot of good information about how we got here and what to expect.

A study published by the (US) National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that email, at least, follows a meandering path to large audiences, rather than a short path via online influencers. Tracing information flow on a global scale using Internet chain-letter data, by David Liben-Nowell and Jon Kleinberg (via IntelFusion). The choice of email as the channel guarantees the deep and narrow result.

Although information, news, and opinions continuously circulate in the worldwide social network, the actual mechanics of how any single piece of information spreads on a global scale have been a mystery. Here, we trace such information-spreading processes at a person-by-person level using methods to reconstruct the propagation of massively circulated Internet chain letters. We find that rather than fanning out widely, reaching many people in very few steps according to "small-world" principles, the progress of these chain letters proceeds in a narrow but very deep tree-like pattern, continuing for several hundred steps. This suggests a new and more complex picture for the spread of information through a social network. We describe a probabilistic model based on network clustering and asynchronous response times that produces trees with this characteristic structure on social-network data.

For anyone who's received chain email from family and friends, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Many of those who forward chain letters don't know to prune email headers, so the path taken by incoming chain letters is frequently plain to see. Somebody's friend's cousin's neighbor's daughter received this and thought a few close people really should know about it, and before you know it, I get a copy in my inbox.

Deep and Wide
The more interesting question—and the more challenging—is to track the spread of information and opinions across the many channels people use, both online and offline. If you think about the interaction between mass media and offline word of mouth, it's clear that dissemination can alternate between wide (mass media) and narrow (interpersonal). Online media work the same way, with some sources reaching large audiences while other channels move information among friends.

The transition from wide to narrow can happen at any time in the process and can go in either direction:

• Narrow –> Wide
  Email to blogger, low readership blog to A-list blog, blog post picked up by mass media, interpersonal to media (conversation with a reporter)

• Wide –> Narrow
  Mass media to blogs, online media to email, media to interpersonal

Picture water flowing downhill. If there's a wide channel available, water will use it. If there's a narrow channel, it will use that. Where both are available, it uses both. Information works the same way. The key is that water wants to flow downhill. To make this work with ideas, you need ideas that people want to communicate.

Suddenly, I want to go play in the creek. I'll call it work-related.

"Listen" is a cliché of social media—perhaps the cliché of social media. If you've been exposed to any Social Media 101 discussion, you've heard about listening. There's a reason for that: everyone who's thought about it concluded that listening is fundamental to success in social media. But what does it mean? More than you probably think.

First, listen.
Listening is a metaphor, of course. We're usually talking about reading, along with watching a little video and—maybe—some actual listening. But listen goes along with the Cluetrain-inspired conversation metaphor that's also ubiquitous in the field, so listen it is. But what do you listen for?

The obvious answer is that you listen for discussion of your company and its markets. You pay attention in case someone says something that's relevant to your business, and then you can act on it. That's where a lot of talk about listening ends.

There's more.
But listening is more than the simple gathering of facts from online sources. Listening is the beginning of social media strategy, because it's how you learn—not just facts, but the landscape. It's the continuing foundation of strategy, because it's how you detect changes in the environment. Listening is learning from the market. If you do it right, you can learn a lot.

Listen to your market
Following conversations about your market—what people are saying about your company, its products and its people—should be your first step in social media. Before you try to engage your market in social media, find out what is already happening. Then, don't stop. You need to know...

• Who is talking about you, and who is paying attention to them? You must understand the people.

• What are they saying (You knew this one)? Individually and collectively, what are they talking about?

• Where do the conversations happen? Is it in blogs? Communities or social networks? Product reviews? Which sites, specifically? What are the norms on those sites? What else is happening there?

• How do they talk about you? What's the tone of the conversation?

• Why are they talking? Based on what you learn about the people, what motivates them? If there's a complaint, is it someone looking for help, or is it just a rant from a critic who will not be satisfied? Can you tell the difference?

These are basic questions you should be able to answer for your company. But don't stop with your company. Think about competitors, partners and customers the same way. You're listening to a vocal segment of the market; what do you want to know?

Learn the environment
Listening before speaking gives you time to learn the social media environment before you begin to participate in visible ways. During the initial information-gathering phase, take the time to develop the skills and understanding that will serve you later.

• Learn the tools. Social media is not primarily about technology, but there are some required tools. You wouldn't expect to monitor television without a TV, and you need a basic skill level to participate online. Fortunately, it's not that hard to figure out—all you need at the beginning is your web browser.

• Learn the rules, written and unwritten. They vary by online neighborhood, and if you want to participate, it helps to know them. Online communities can be rough on newcomers who barge in to sell; it's better to join in on their terms. Focus on the specific environments you discover when you ask where relevant conversations are happening.

• Find the experts in your own function, and read what they say. Whether it's marketing, PR or something else, someone has put real effort into figuring out useful lessons for you.

• Learn from the experience of others, both positive and negative. Pioneers have already tried things that might work for you, and they've certainly discovered some that won't. There's no excuse for repeating well-publicized blunders in an environment where everything is saved, discussed and searchable. If you're going to fail, at least have the creativity to discover a new way.

Rinse, repeat
I suggest a simple, Listen - Engage - Speak framework for companies getting started in social media. The steps are in chronological order, but it's not a linear progression. Once you start listening, you never stop. Everything changes, from the topic of the day to who's talking where. Even the rules change, and the only way to keep up is to pay attention.

When you think about it, that's not so different from what you've always known. It's just that so much of the activity is on the Internet, and everyone in the world can share their opinions with everyone in the world now.

And that's my version of Listening 101. From there, it gets into the management layer of social media—organization, processes, tools and practices.

CK digs into listening processes, adding some depth to the what to do where so much discussion is on how. It's a fun read for me, because it's similar to the listening talk I give clients. We're good at that in the echosphere, agreeing on principles that most people in the real world don't know about yet. Here's another: forget what it says on the org chart; customer service is a marketing discipline. If your customer service is handing out bad experiences, you won't be able to fix it with spin.

The easy pitch for listening to social media—monitoring blogs and communities, measuring trends—plays on the fear motivation. Someone may write something negative about your company, and it might get picked up by mainstream media. But take a step back. Have you noticed how many "social media crises" started as customer service issues?

Here's Josh Hallett on how Spirit Airlines could resolve negative buzz by fixing the underlying problem:

What they should do.....It seems that the majority of their issues are related to their customer support line, they should fix that problem first.

It's simple cause and effect: do you treat the symptom (reputation) or the underlying condition (service)? At the Conference Board's corporate reputation and communications conference in New York a couple of weeks ago, we heard repeatedly that substance, not spin, leads to a strong reputation. Isn't that obvious?

Applied listening tactics
If you're not in crisis-management mode, you can use listening tactics to identify issues before they get out of hand (What's the ROI on a crisis prevented?). Deal with the problems you find, whether they affect one customer or many, and you may keep your challenges from becoming the focus of attention.

If you're already in a crisis situation, use listening tactics to identify underlying causes and possible solutions, as well as to measure progress (in either direction). Remember, not every critic is an opponent. Pay attention to constructive criticism.

Customer service priorities
It's easy to say the right things about customers and service, but how's your reality? If you're not sure where your customer service is focused, ask yourself some of John Dodds's questions about your customer service approach:

• Do you focus on fulfilling all your customers’ actual needs or do you have one eye on cross-selling opportunities?

• Do you acknowledge and listen to your customers or do you harass and broadcast to them?

See John's post for the other 8. I'll add one:

• Do you hide your policies in the fine print, or are they front and center? (Customer-friendly policies don't need to hide.)

Substance first, image follows. My guess is that none of this is very controversial inside the echo chamber. I think it makes sense in the real world, too. The question is, how many businesses are ready to operate this way?

Tags: customer service social media listening>