Four Steps to Becoming a Social Business

Edelman's David Armano, an expert in idea conceptualization, has put together a chart that lets you graph your progress as a social media high-flyer in four steps: crawling, walking, running and flying. At which point might you find yourself? If you feel you're still in the crawling stage, never fear: We all know learning to fly doesn't happen overnight!

Let's break Armano's themes down, and consider some hints for moving up to the next stage:

Crawling: People, Process, Procedure. The first stage of evolution is admitting you have a problem, and acknowledging that it can't be solved by plugging "social media" into one function (marketing). Crawling involves producing infrastructure in preparation for an organizational redesign. Educating your teams, standardizing procedures and active listening are crucial at this stage.

Walking: Managing Your Properties. Define your engagement strategy across multiple departments, from customer care to outbound marketing. Assets such as meaningful content become especially important because they're less risky than over-engaging too quickly.

Running: Ecosystem Engagement at Scale. By now you should have external and internal designs in place, with multiple social initiatives running (fairly smoothly). "At the running stage, multiple ecosystems are also connected," Armano writes—"for example, the process and tools for managing scores of social networks have been formalized."

Flying: Social Innovation and Organizational Integration. Although many companies want to get to this stage, few actually do. Here, "social" is integrated in everything the organization does: Intelligence gathered through social media is improving business, resulting in new products and services, and improving the company's ability to predict potential outcomes in the market. "Flying" organizations have a social mindset reflected at all touchpoints and business functions.

The Po!nt: Going social doesn't happen overnight, so don't expect it to. Gauge where you are and take the necessary steps to solidify your current position—or advance it.