Driving Social Maturity: Getting the most of our Maturity Model

A few weeks ago, Jessie Liu from Forrester joined me to talk about social intelligence maturity.

In the webinar, we discussed how important a sophisticated social intelligence strategy is to every part of your business, and I dove into how Brandwatch measures social intelligence maturity.

The webinar was fascinating (I’m not just saying that, watch for yourself on demand here).

But we got so many great audience questions, that we couldn’t get to all of them in our webinar.

Last week I answered some questions about proving the value of social intelligence, and how to get buy-in from clients, executives, and one’s own team.

This week I tackle questions many of you had about our state of the art social intelligence maturity model. All the answers are entirely Brandwatch’s.

 

1. Is social intelligence maturity the same as the marketing funnel?

Not quite. The marketing funnel refers to the flow of leads as they progress through qualification stages, ultimately landing in a sales-ready form.

Our Social Intelligence Maturity Model gives you perspective as to how effective your organization is in using the massive amount of unfiltered data that is available online.

While both are useful tools to help ensure your marketing team brings value to your organization, think of this tool as a way to internally benchmark your social strategy.

2.  Is the maturity assessment a consultation service or a specific tool? How can I leverage this within my own team?

For us at Brandwatch, it is absolutely both.

The assessment is a tool that our customers can use independently to quickly gauge where their program or strategy currently stands.

Additionally, our customer success team uses our maturity model to actively consult with our customers and make sure they’re getting the most out of their relationship with us.

But more interestingly, the assessment has been successful in providing “ah-hah!” moments, where our customers identify an opportunity they want to jump on themselves, or clarify a gap in their strategy they couldn’t pinpoint before.

More often than not, our maturity model has encouraged our customers to come to us with ideas and use-cases they’d like to implement.

Non-customers should see the maturity model the same way.

Your social intelligence maturity recommendation is tailored to your specific program.

So rather than using it as a benchmarking tool, use the recommendation as a jumping off point for developing your social strategy or assessing the value of your current social media investment.

3. How could an agency leverage this maturity scoring to attract new business or grow existing business?

One important way is through competitive benchmarking. There is no more powerful call to action than the fear of falling behind the competition.

As agencies, there is always the need to help drive innovation and cutting-edge strategy for clients, so getting current customers to assess their maturity is powerful to identify ways they can get one-up on the competition.

For pitching new business, using social intelligence maturity as a benchmark can help you build out a business proposal, potentially one that is more comprehensive than originally thought.

4. Can the maturity model also be applied to B2B companies? How would a b2b company use the social maturity model?

Yes, our maturity model can be used to assess and guide B2B companies!

Brandwatch is a B2B company, and we continuously try to make our social strategy more sophisticated, looking to B2C companies for innovative new ways to use social.

For instance, we use social data to get insights and news surrounding our and our clients’ industries, and social intelligence supports our social selling, content and PR management teams.

To get the most out of our tool assessing social intelligence maturity, all companies- both B2B and B2C- should first have their own goals and KPIs in mind.

How you take our model to mature your program should align with the objectives and problems you currently hope to solve. Our assessment is meant to help identify where the opportunities lie and the most appropriate first steps.

 

 

Do you have any more questions about our maturity model or the value social intelligence can bring to your business? Feel free to email us at [email protected].

Also, If you haven’t already had a chance, watch our joint webinar with Forrester now and take our social intelligence maturity assessment.