Social Media Strategy Map: How To Find Your Way

Calling all Balanced Scorecard practitioners and strategy executives, here is a Strategy Map to guide the Social Media / Social Business initiatives within your organizations. After Leader Networks developed the strategic frameworks for social media at more than 40 companies, including many large enterprises, we sat down with pen and paper (literally!) and pulled our approach and methodology into a Strategy Map.

(double click image to download)

This is, of course, a generalized Social Media Strategy Map that will need to be adapted to your company’s goals and objectives. However, it is a great starting point for applying the Balanced Scorecard approach to Social Media and Social Business.

For those who are curious, a Strategy Map is “a diagram that is used to document the primary strategic goals being pursued by an organization or management team. It is an element of the documentation associated with the Balanced Scorecard, and in particular, is characteristic of the second generation of Balanced Scorecard designs. … The first diagrams of this type appeared in the early 1990s, and the idea of using this type of diagram to help document Balanced Scorecard was discussed in a paper by Kaplan & Norton in 1995 ^[1].” See the rest of the Wikipedia entry for more information.

There are many strategic tools and frameworks available for describing and optimizing business processes, such as The Lean Enterprise Institute , Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering and many others. Each takes a different approach. Over time, Leader Networks will be developing social business tools in support of other premiere management systems. We began with the Strategy Map because of our work with Palladium Group — run by Drs. Kaplan & Norton, the fathers of the Balanced Scorecard — which helped us become well-versed in this particular methodology.

No matter what management system your organization embraces, the important task is to develop the strategic intentions for social business and social media, and align this strategy with your operations. It is time to expand our understanding and use of social media from marketing tactics into a higher, broader strategic initiative. What other efforts in your organization have the potential to transform customer relationships, product or service innovations, reduce costs and increase shareholder value? Isn’t it time to start thinking strategically about Social?

Please take this Strategy Map and share it across the C-Suite; improve upon it, adapt it, exercise it and put it to good use. As you do, please be sure to share yours with us. You can post it here or share it with us privately (partners at leadernetworks dot com). Either way, we will be happy to give you feedback.

9/2010