The seismic success of Facebook, Twitter, and other social marketing tools often creates soaring expectations for viral adoption in business settings. While the just-build-it-and-they-will-come strategy can succeed in the consumer world, it’s a dangerous approach for business: users may never come, or they may come and waste their time.

To that end, NewsGator, a social marketing company, released a six-step roadmap for successful enterprise social marketing. It’s a systematic analysis to help ensure that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives — an umbrella category describing tools and processes that facilitate the sharing of information online — make sense to users and improve business performance as intended. Here are the six steps:

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1. Identify business problems and goals. First, define problems and proposed solutions using quantifiable key performance indicators. Instead of shooting for a general improvement in customer relationship management, for example, define the problems and realistic targets.
2. Define “use cases” to help solve business problems. Determine the events and actions in each business process. To resolve a customer problem, for example, the use case goes like this: Customer asks a challenging product question. Account manager presents question to internal customer and product experts. Some members respond; others rate, critique, and tag the responses. Account manager filters responses, answers the customer, reports the problem is solved, and updates the customer support knowledge base.
3. Select the correct technologies. Blogs? Wikis? Profiles? As the account manager in our example above presents her customer question to colleagues, she may use a discussion forum, a people tag search, a content tag search, or a combination of the three. Experiment during the pilot phase and choose the best toolset for you.
4. Publish best practices for use. While some believe enterprise social marketing should be free of any rules, setting some guidelines can enhance results. Examples of best practice guidelines include:

• Prior to creating a community, clearly explain its purpose and ground rules.
• Tag articles with terms that are meaningful to the group, not simply reflective of the content — e.g., use “financial services sales leads” vs. “banking.”
• Encourage discussion participants to stay on topic.

5. Identify obstacles to participation. Users may resist enterprise social marketing for any number of reasons: they’re already on Facebook, they fear publicizing their ideas, or management is stuck in old-fashioned, hierarchical thinking. If you take a minute to anticipate and plan for obstacles, they become much easier to overcome.
6. Identify desired cultural transformations. As obstacles are overcome and employees fully engage in enterprise social marketing, Enterprise 2.0 can dramatically transform a company’s culture. It can improve transparency, information distribution, democratization, and knowledge creation. These transformations require a true willingness to change, and some support. Consider working with a cross-section of employees to: prepare a mission statement for your desired cultural transformation; identify examples of activities that illustrate the transformation in action; and name good role models for the transformation, and their traits. Identify stakeholders who may resist change, and understand why.

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