The Social Scorecard
Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by Jason Chan in Measurement, Social Media
A few days ago, Interbrand released its latest it’s 2009 Best Global Brands report. It’s a way to assess how pervasive and valuable the brand is to a particular company. They take an interesting approach with their research methodology, which has pretty broad industry acceptance. As usual, Coca-Cola takes top honors, followed by perennials IBM, Microsoft and GE.
The concept of alternative measures isn’t new. Back in b-school, we learned about something called the Balanced Scorecard, a way to determine whether a company’s activities were aligned with its strategic goals. By examining non-financial metrics of business such as operational efficiency, marketing and other components, it brought to light factors that contributed to the bottom line of the company. Ultimately, it helps managers make decisions on what to fix, where to invest and what to do next.
Businesses now live in a hyper-exposed world that demands a new level of transparency and open organizational design. It used to be that companies could force customers to jump through myriad hoops to return a product or get support. Today, that isn’t good enough when a negative experience can be propagated through Facebook, Yelp, YouTube or Twitter within minutes. Some people have been calling social media a fad, but clearly it isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, it is exposing companies’ shortcomings in customer experience and expectations.
What to do? I propose using something I’ll call the Social Scorecard. It’s a way of indexing how engaged, open and transparent a corporation truly is. It would examine online & offline customer engagement points and assess how well customers are integrated into the company culture. Ultimately, it would include measures that align customer needs into business goals. It can be used as a touchstone for designing customer experiences or even a manifesto for rallying the troops. There would be a whole host of other measures too, such as a company’s adoption of social tools, such as how it uses social networks to find talent or how it uses crowdsourcing to generate product concepts or gather feedback. We could also look at the level of transparency in terms of how it treats its employees, vendors and suppliers and factor in what it’s doing to create a sustainably profitable operation. Collectively, these measures provide added perspective on how to run your business, perspective that can bring value in ways you didn’t realize.
