With the new year, you might find yourself cleaning up from 2011. Have you ever cleaned up your processes? Do you find that you have a lot of processes that were necessary at one time and now are abandoned? What happened? Did the need for the process expire?
Too often the process is still needed, but the energy behind the adoption and adherence of the process has relaxed. Usually the energy of the process shows up in the form of a individual who is very passionate about the process or more importantly the outcome. When this person relaxes, others tend to relax too.
How many times have you known that you have an expense report to submit, but delay in getting it done. Why? Ignorance? Probably not. No one is harassing you to get the expense report submitted. Bingo (no one is watching)! Some tension is necessary until processes are second nature. Often the tension is governance. Governance is a critical element of managing processes to ensure compliance.
At Ant’s Eye View, we work with top brands moving across the Social Engagement Journey. In the journey, there is process design and process implementation. After some period of continued activity in stages 2 and 3, process atrophy can settle in if you don’t have the right governance in place. Hoping for process outcomes is not enough. Audit and frequent review of operational metrics ensure that process (and more importantly the outcomes) don’t suffer from Social Process Atrophy (getting lax on social outreach service levels, infrequent content generation). Governance is a necessary audit function. Your governance model might be in need of a tune-up.
At stage 3, your needs are a more for a coordinated measurement framework to respond to the needs of multiple social strategies and outcomes. A holistic measurement framework is necessary to coordinate and communicate across business units and disciplines. Measurement is the stitching that can bring together siloed social media activities across the enterprise. If your culture that looks for measurement to validate, then you will need to update or align your current measurement framework to be inclusive of social media metrics (that signal business outcomes). If your culture is lacking a measurement discipline, then a social media measurement framework can be built.