Who leads the Social Media Programs in the Enterprise: IT or Business?

To preface this post, be very clear that the participants are the owners of the community. I write this in context of who within an organization is spearheading and leading the community business program. This post is really aimed at those in the corporations who are leading the social media program from within and have to wrestle with confused management, doubtful colleagues, and the majority who want to keep status quo.

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I’ve served in web teams in both IT and on the Business side, so I find this topic interesting.

IT or Business
Yesterday I had a call with a client who was leading the social media/community charge at his IT related company. Nothing unusual for me, but in this case, he was in IT. Most of the time, when we hear of customer facing community programs or social media programs they are being lead by Marketing. In any case, I’ve got to applaud him for taking the challenge, as for customer facing community programs they usually require a business sponsor.

Business Sponsors help things go smoother
Why is a business sponsor needed for community program today? At least two reasons:

1) A business champion makes it easier: Evangelizing a community program and launching it within an enterprise requires interface with many business units. Marketing, Product Development, Product Support, Communications, PR, and other client groups are often impacted. Having a business champion (that will convince each of these groups) that will address the business objectives, mitigate risks, and define how it’s aligning with the corporate objectives are key.

2) They often control a bucket of money: Most of the time, business units have the budget issued to them from the budget committee, which will fuel the spend for development with either a vendor or with IT. This is not to suggest that IT departments don’t have budget, but when dealing with a customer program like community, the plan will need to gather requirements from the business who understands customers.

The ‘relationship ownership’ plague
Everyone wants to feel protected and safe, and in many corporations, the ‘ownership of relationships’ are present to keep things organized and also to assert some control. PR ‘owns’ the relationship with the influencers like press, media, and analysts, support ‘owns’ the relationship with customers, and sales ‘owns’ the relationship with prospects. So who ‘owns’ the relationship of a community that consists of all of the above constituents?

What really matters
In the end, it doesn’t matter who runs the social media program (IT or a Business unit) what really matters is that the program is customer centric and designed around delivering an experience that lets customers self-support each other, or communicate with the company and other members. Not to forget to mention that the most sophisticated IT departments have become business units, not ‘technology support’.

When these tools normalize, the walls drop
Looking to the future, the argument of ‘community ownership’ will be moot, just as email has normalized as a communication tool present everywhere in the enterprise, the same will be true of the social media tools. just take a look at the youngest graduating class to see how ubiquitous these tools already are.

10 Considerations for the Startup planning to offer to the Enterprise (and why many will fail)

Lately, I’ve been hearing from more startups that they want to get into the enterprise space. These consumer focused web startups are the ones we know and love with the clever non-sensical names, rounded corners, and domains missing the “e”.

For many startups, having enterprise customers is a great proposition, as it gives the opportunity for repeat revenue from a stable source, partnership opportunities, and maybe even chances for acquisition.

[While many startups are interested to offer their services to Enterprise companies, they underestimate the complexity. There are many overlooked requirements from culture to support that startups just don’t get]

Sadly, while we love these tools on the free open web for our personal uses, many of them aren’t ready for a smooth transition into an enterprise web teams and by serious business folks and executives. A new set of rigorous feature requirements need to be met, including disposing of the ‘fun brand’ and getting ready to support demanding corporate clients.

10 Considerations for the Startup planning to offer to the Enterprise

1) Most importantly, find a business opportunity or pain that you plan on fixing.

2) Re skinning: In many cases, offer a white label tool so it can be rebranded by the consumer.

3) Offer an ASP version as business units will want to adopt without the IT department. (Update: ASP as in Application Service Provider, so a web-version hosted on your servers, so they customer doesn’t have to download any software, or have to rely on IT to do this. Typepad, SalesForce, and SurveyMonkey are examples of this)

4) Later, evaluated offering a software version that IT and Engineering can download and use on internal or secured severs behind the firewall,

5) Build a robust system that won’t fail from heavy enterprise use, sadly, Twitter would never make it.

6) Develop login and permission systems that work with a variety of identity systems, ensure data can be easily transferred to clients, use industry standards.

7) Provide a healthy dashboard and metrics for the clients administrative team

8 ) Hire sales and account teams that have backgrounds in corporate. For initial sales with a business unit, expect to sail through, but expect rigorous testing, negotiations, and detailed contracts when dealing with corporate purchasing departments.

9) On demand support: Dealing with enterprise clients requires a higher degree of support, expect to jump, leap, and spring into action at the request of your corporate clients.

10) Get serious: consider rebranding and refocusing the tool. Refine or create a separate marketing effort to aim for the enterprise space, consider creating a sub-brand.

While it’s sure attractive for startups to want to offer their products to corporations, many have not thought through the implications and requirements to be enterprise class. Quite frankly, many won’t have the aptitude, resources, or time to do this right.

[Many startups will offer to the enterprise, but most will fail. Successful startups offering to the enterprise need to have maturity, and it’s not something that can be masked]

If I’ve missed any considerations, please extend the list, by leaving a comment or sharing from your own blog

A special note about terms: While it would have been so easy for me to use the term Enterprise 2.0 I used every precaution to actually describe and explain the concepts rather than just using that term. I hope that you too become mindful before using that term, as well as Web 2.0. Show your mastery: focus on descriptions and outcomes rather than buzzwords.

Social Network Stats: Facebook, MySpace, Reunion (Jan, 2008)

Sources
The ones from MySpace are handed to me from a member of the press, someone I have no reason not to trust, and the Facebook stats are from their own site.

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Facebook

Quick Analysis: The hot talked company Facebook has the highest growth rate, and at Forrester we predict it to achieve the same number of registered users as MySpace in Q4 of 2008, or early 2009 given the current growth rates. The widget platform, which launched summer 2007 has had strong growth as more than 13,000 applications have been launched. Please don’t call this the MySpace killer as each of these sites serves a different demographic, with a different purpose, and different tools. Facebook is more of a ‘lifestyle’ play that allows members to connect to each other.

General Growth
* More than 60 million active users
* An average of 250,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
* An average of 3% weekly growth since Jan. 2007
* Active users doubling every 6 months

User Demographics
* Over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
* More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
* The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
* Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities

User Engagement
* Sixth-most trafficked site in the United States (comScore)
* More than 65 billion page views per month
* More than half of active users return daily
* People spend an average of 20 minutes on the site daily (comScore)

Applications
* No. 1 photo sharing application on the Web (comScore)
* Photo application draws more than twice as much traffic as the next three sites combined (comScore)
* More than 14 million photos uploaded daily
* More than 6 million active user groups on the site

International Growth
* Canada has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 7 million active users
* The U.K. is the third largest country with more than 7 million active users
* Remaining top 10 countries in order of active users (outside of the U.S., Canada and UK): Australia, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, France, Hong Kong

Platform
* Over 7,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform
* 100 new applications added per day
* More than 80% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

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MySpace

Quick Analysis: MySpace the largest Social Network in North America maintains a dominant position as media site, primarily aimed at youth, giving them the opportunity to relate to brands and bands, as well as self-express. This site will continue to do with advertisers and marketers. Expect to see more TV and video networks to integrate and work with MySpace, who has the new generation that Generation X was to MTV.

Metrics
· MySpace has more than 110 million monthly active users
around the globe
· We are the country’s trafficked site on the Internet
· 85% of MySpace users are of voting age (18 or older)
· 1 in 4 Americans is on MySpace, in the UK it’s as common to
have a MySpace as it is to own a dog

·On average 300,000 new people sign up to MySpace every day,
this month we broke a record and had 4.5 billion page views to the
site in one day.

We are localized and translated in more than 20 international
territories: U.S., UK, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy,
Spain, Mexico, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, MySpace en
Espanol, Latin America, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and
Finland.

·MySpace is one of the fastest growing websites of all time,
we have:
·100 Billion rows of data
·14 Billion comments on the site
·20 Billion mails on the site total
·50 Million mails per day (more than Yahoo, Hotmail,
or Google)
·10 Billion friend relationships
·1.5 Billion images
·8 Million images being uploaded per day
·60,000 new videos being upload to MySpaceTV each day
·More than 8 million artists and bands on MySpace Music
Acts including Lily Allen, Sean Kingston, Arctic
Monkeys, Dane Cook discovered on the site by users

Company Details
·Launched in January 2004
·Acquired by Fox Interactive Media in October 2005
·Los Angeles-based
·Founded by Chris DeWolfe, CEO and Tom Anderson, President

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Reunion

Quick Analysis: This quiet company is profitable already, and is making some strong growth with repeat users that are buying services from the company, as well as advertising. Reunion caters to an older crowd that is seeking to connect with each other from school, childhood, work, or locations. It’s surprising that this company has 32 million registered and is already profitable.

Highlights
·Over 32 Million Registered Members, and Growing
·70+ Million Site People Searches Actively Tracked
·7+ Million Avg. Unique Visitors Monthly
·700,000+ Paying Subscribers

Competitive Detail
·Critical Mass of Post-Facebook Members, with 90% Over 25 Years Old
·Patented Technology to Keep Address Book Updated
·Proven, Balanced Revenue Model: Higher Value/Member With Subscription Model

Financial Summary
·Profitable Revenue Growth of over 100% every year without any external capital
·Ranked #664 in Inc. 5000 Top Companies
·4th Fastest-Growing Company in Los Angeles (LA Business Journal)
·Recently took 1st outside investment of $25M from Oak to accelerate growth