Attaining Social Maturity: The Challenges Your Company Will Face on the Path to Empowerment Through Social Technology

By: Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li

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Synopsis: In this chapter, social media strategy leaders Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff describe the stages companies pass through as they adopt more and more groundswell applications-the social technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, online communities, and blogs, that people are using to get the information they want and need from each other. For business leaders, managing multiple social media applications creates complexity in everything from organization to measurement, but the authors present compelling examples from Home Depot, travel company IHG, and financial services company USAA that demonstrate how these companies and others are managing to tame that complexity and institutionalize best practices. Li and Bernoff also define five stages of corporate social maturity: dormant, testing, coordinating, scaling and optimizing, and empowering. No matter which stage your company is in, there's no question that the social technologies of the groundswell are transforming the way people work together and do business. The only question is, how fast will you get there? This chapter was originally published as Chapter 13 of "Groundswell, Expanded and Revised Edition: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies."