Chapter 1 - Setting Social Tech Goals

Social technology is not a magic wand. You will not mysteriously begin to prosper once you start using it. If you are in business, you want to make profits, and there are two simple ways to do so: You must either increase sales, which can be done by leveraging social campaigns, or lower back-office costs, which can be accomplished by improving collaboration and communication and by leveraging concepts such as crowdsourcing to find new ways to achieve tasks for less money.

Even if you are part of a nonprofit or public entity (and thus driving profits may not be your objective), there will be specific goals you want to realize, and in most cases social tech tools can help you get there. That’s what this first step is about—identifying where “there” is. The key to creating order out of chaos is to clarify what your organization wants to accomplish through social technology. That means setting clear and measurable goals. This sounds like a basic concept, yet it seems that most organizations do not have a concise list of what they hope to achieve through the use of social tech; all they have is a fuzzy sense that they want to learn how to use it.