The strategy competency of the Community Maturity Model tracks the way business goals and community goals align.
A community strategy balances the business need to drive revenue or cost savings with the needs of community members, the need to see short-term wins with the required investment to sustain deep and lasting community engagement as well as balancing the purpose of the community with the direction members may want to take it.
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More about the Strategy Competency
Stage 1: Hierarchy - Familiarize & Listen
This competency tracks the integration of social tools and methods into existing business goals and processes.
Organizations that are just becoming aware of social media and online communities are primarily in a familiarization and listening mode. These organizations should be cautious about how they start to experiment and engage because it can set expectations with their constituents for how they participate in the future.
Often in this stage, ad hoc/informal initiatives are distributed around the organization with little coordination in terms of communication, processes, or tools.
Stage 2: Emergent Community - Participate
In Stage 2, organizations often have more defined strategies, but those strategies are typically limited to experimentation or pilot initiatives. Early in this stage there are often many initiatives going on with little coordination or rationalization at the enterprise level. As organizations mature through Stage 2 they start to communicate across groups to share lessons learned and to coordinate efforts (even if that coordination is relatively informal).
Mature Stage 2 organizations have built social strategies, prioritized business use cases, and have allocated budgets and resources to operationalize those initiatives. While social initiatives may not be returning desired business outcomes at scale, organizations have a firm grasp on their potential and have seen early successes.
Required artifacts
☐ A documented active listening strategy
Likely artifacts
☐ A documented social strategy
Stage 3: Community - Build
Organizations in Stage 3 recognize that their ecosystem is made up of a variety of communities. Managing and cultivating these allows better value transfer into, around, and out of the formal boundaries of the organization. Stage 3 organizations have formal strategies for engaging their highest priority communities with explicit goals, governance, resources, and infrastructure..
By Stage 3, an organization’s defined strategy should result in successful business outcomes, and internal stakeholders should recognize the value of communities. Additionally, Stage 3 organizations typically have some centralized governance structure to coordinate social initiatives and resources/budgets in the business units involved.
Required artifacts
☐ A documented social strategy
☐ Documented competitive social media status readiness
Likely artifacts
☐ Partners enabled to do business within external communities
☐ Monetized products and services unique to corporate communities
Stage 4: Networked - Integrate
In Stage 4, organizations view their market as an ecosystem of communities and have pursued a market-maker community strategy by aggregating customers, employees, partners, influencers, suppliers, and other interested parties (often competitors) into their network. By hosting the ‘marketplace’ they have both opportunities to monetize data, access, and distribution. They also have the opportunity to integrate real-time market data into their internal operational processes – whether that is market forecasting, new product innovation, hiring, or supply chain demand planning.
Required artifacts
☐ A documented social strategy that includes engagement with customers, partners, employees, influencers, and competitors
Likely artifacts
☐ Monetized products and services unique to corporate communities
