The Social Media Maturity Matrix 2016

A path to the comprehensive and effective organisational use of Social Media - Updated from 2012 to 2016

The Social Media Maturity Matrix 2016 from Hayden Sutherland

The Future of Digital - thoughts Part 2

Further thoughts on the future of Digital, inspired by the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2015.

Q: How have digital channels evolved and what will be the next big digital trend to capitalise on?

The speed of digital change is getting quicker, learn to deal with it. Focus less on the next technology, device or trend and far more on making sure your organisation can complete (this means being innovative, agile and ready to learn from its mistakes). Apple's slogan at its recent product launch was "the only thing that's changed is everything" and this is right.  5 years ago the iPad launched, now I am seeing tablet numbers decline across a lot of client websites compared to mobile traffic.
More shocking is the fact that 52% of all the companies from the Fortune500 in 2000 now don't exist!


Q: Which new technologies are passing fads and which are game changers for their business?
Over time every technology will eventually become obsolete. NFC, wearables, home thermostats (The Internet of Things) connected to your app, etc. will all one day be the equivalent of the fax machine or the telex. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t investigate some and adopt different ones that either take your on your journey of digital maturity or that meet the needs of your customers.


This is the second post on the Future of Digital, the first can be found here.

Improving Scottish eCommerce

As some readers of this blog will know, I've recently been asked to present on the opportunity for eCommerce across Scotland.  But what value do these events have in the context of encouraging Scottish companies to engage in eCommerce and to do it better?

Well the feedback I have had via face-to-face, email & social channels so far has been very positive. One example that really got a great response was... during my presentation I had a quick interactive session where I got everyone with a website to stand up. They then gradually sat down as I increased the level of sophistication in the use of eCommerce Analytics.

This not only showed people that they weren't alone in not fully utilising one of the most useful digital tools out there, but also demonstrated the next few steps they could take to online maturity.

However... this is just the start of things. As Scotland's only dedicated eCommerce consultancy (I did ask a year ago where all the Scottish Digital Consultants are, and nobody responded), we see a huge opportunity for companies and organisations to not just do things better (improving what they have) but to do better things (innovate, take opportunities, etc).

It is this mix that I believe should help take Scottish eCommerce forward!

Ecommerce maturity is an opportunity

The UK leads the way in eCommerce and we are one of the most mature markets for online retailing.

Therefore, as the whole world shifts more and more towards the use of digital channels for marketing,  engagement and buying, we have an opportunity to lead the way and make the most of this opportunity.

In short, the tools, technologies and communications we use to trade online are not going away any time soon. We therefore need to embrace this chance, utilise the online skills & experience we have, share best practice, build up more talent & skills and then sell to the world.

Building your corporate digital analytics capability

As an organisation develops its digital understanding, you see certain trends and processes emerging. One of those is the increasing usage of digital analytics and increasing business reliance on the figures produced.

Digital analytics is now taken seriously as a business tool. From what was once a mainly geek-ish domain has emerged a significant service that can empower the business to make more rational or efficient decisions.  But just as other digital resources have grown (and grown-up) over time, the analytics resource in your organisation may well have grown too. If fact, making the point a bit stronger, if your web analytics team has not grown in size or depth in their understanding as the rest of your online capability has matured, you are probably missing something.

However… creating, scaling and keeping your web insight team is not an easy task.
Firstly positioning the team as just another marketing service is not the right approach. Having them regarded in the same light as a search engine optimisation or pay-per-click resource misses the point. This is not to take anything away from the SEO or PPC staff you might employ but the online analytics function is not just there to inform and maintain the current activity… but can also be used to feed insight back into your organisation too.

Creating the right online customer analysis and insight team structure depends a lot on the size & scale of your company. Most small companies do not have someone dedicated to this role (unless they are a digitally-focused business such as an eCommerce site) and even a lot of bigger companies combine the work of a web analytics function with other disciplines, and in a lot of cases this is digital marketing. It is therefore typically only much larger enterprises that can usually afford or utilise a dedicated person or persons in a digital analysis capacity.

Structuring this multi-person team can then be a little different from the way you might structure another digital functions. Although a lot depends on the types and quality of the individuals you hire. Just having a bunch of people who can all do the same things might not provide enough specialisation or focus… and analytics can quickly get into specifics. Some larger teams can range in skill-sets from more technical-orientated people through to business-based modellers who can pull trends and opportunities from complex data structures.

Keeping the team (aside from the effects of your own management style) can be the hardest thing to achieve. From my own experience there is currently a lack of decent experience digital analytics professionals out in the market right now. Quite frankly, we need more digital analytics experts. People with the right skills and experience are given far more choice about who and where they work, with many choosing a more lucrative career as a freelancer or consultant. Therefore holding on to good digital insight staff is crucial if your organisation is to you want to grow your capability and retain best practice knowledge.

Organisational eBusiness Maturity

Thankfully, a growing number of organisations are looking to improve their digital channels. Consequently they are looking around for others who have already made a step forward and to learn from their innovations (without hopefully copying their mistakes).  Consequently I have seen certain trends appear over the years that may act as a model of not only where companies have come from, but also where they can grow and develop in the future.

Note: Like most of my work on this blog, this model is a ‘work in progress’ where I post my thoughts before they are completely refined and documented. It is therefore submitted with the aim that it will not only be refined by my own further understanding and application, but by wider feedback (either via comments on this blog or by other means).

 

Here’s how I see the organisational maturity of a company progressing (typically in the retail, financial services and travel markets, but potentially in others where this model can be applied):

Individual
Online initiatives originally sprung up thanks to the innovation and inspiration of specific people. Historically this may well have been a young-ish or passionate person who saw the opportunity to utilise some form of digital technology to improve something or interest to them.  Based in the IT, Marketing or other part of the company, they would initially have had very little influence, but potentially the opportunity to create and learn by themselves.

Department
As the individual has grown in their knowledge, they may well have caught the eye of senior individuals. Aligned with a growing understanding of the possible benefits of digital channels for communication, acquisition, commerce and engagement…  this one-man initiative may have grown into a team of people who have specialist knowledge of digital (marketing, eCommerce, User Experience, Analytics, etc.). From experience this has usually been the ‘land grab’ stage, with different high-powered players staking their claim to know all about modern technologies and taking this department under their wing.

Enterprise
Eventually the rest of the company wakes up and realises it is not just the digital team that either needs to understand and use digital tech, but that the whole organisation has become an e-ebusiness, with a digital eco-system around it… enabling everything from new customer influence and marketing through to existing customer self-service and HR connectivity (e.g. automatic postings to job sites, etc.)

Extended
For a company to truly ‘live’ digital however, it needs to move beyond the connected state (e.g. creating a bunch of fixed  digital connections with its customers and suppliers) it needs to extend some of its functions outside the organisation and embrace co-creation as a way to generate a flow of sustainable new ideas and talent.  API’s and XML interfaces enable these companies to allow 3^rd parties (individual developers, agencies and sometimes even entire industries) to build upon their data and functionality, to reach a new audience or to connect to other web services in ‘mash-ups’. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy stuff and very few companies have the will, ability and braveness to venture into this territory. But for those who do (e.g. Amazon, Google, etc.) the rewards are obvious.

Social Media Maturity

Companies of all shapes and sizes have been venturing into Social Media for a few years now and the case studies from their agencies are coming thick & fast. The leaders in each of their respective markets have been continually breaking new ground online and laying the path for others to follow. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to not see Social Media on the communication and/or technology agenda of most decent sized companies, with some displaying a fair degree of advanced implementation and feedback.

But as I've posted about before, Social Media maturity isn't equal in all companies and I even developed the social media maturity matrix last year as a way of benchmarking a company's evoloution and adoption.

So it was good to see Forrester research releasing this post earlier this month as asking "Where is your company on the social maturity scale?"
http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell/2011/06/where-is-your-company-on-the-social-maturity-scale.html

This piece, a mere taster of the huge research that Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler have done as part of their analysis into the social media maturity of organizations also forms an additional chapter to the incredibly popular Groundswell book.

The diagram they have provided shows a four point scale progressing from early adopters through to laggards and describes the various stages along the way of:

• Dormant stage (laggards)
• Testing (late majority).
• Coordinating (early majority).
• Scaling and Optimizing (early adopters).

I've not read the full report that Bernoff and Schadler have done, but I'm sure there is far more depth and evolution of this diagram in their work.

I guess I'd also like to see how my model of social media maturity stacks up against theirs.

Large organisations are adopting Social Media

According to Social Media Influence,

more than 65 percent of the largest 100 international companies now have active accounts on Twitter, at least 54 percent have a Facebook fan page, 50 percent have a YouTube channel, and one-third (33 percent) have corporate blogs

These are quite impressive statistics and show that large organisations are now embracing the different social media channels.

This now puts the lions share of companies at least at Phase 2 (The 'Participating' stage) in the Social Media Maturity Matrix.