Do you know the ‘old’ strategic models can be used to design and monitor your social media strategy?

There are other newer models that could be used, as well; for instance, here I propose you use the Business Model Canvas.

However, in this post I am going to focus on an ‘oldie’: the Balanced Scorecard.

Balanced Scorecard

More than twenty years ago, Kaplan and Norton _two professors_ led a research project that aimed at finding new ways of measuring and monitoring the results of the strategy deployment in the company from a multidimensional perspective. They were looking to escape the at the time practice of focusing too much on just financial indicators.

The Balanced Scorecard (BSc) is a tool for deploying and monitoring the strategy. It takes into account four different types of indicators:

1. Financial
2. Customers
3. Internal processes
4. Learning and growth

These four perspectives or groups of indicators are filled with contents by means of the definition of key performance indicators (KPIs), which are a translation of the the vision and mission of the company. Further, there must be a cause-effect relationships structure that links all the KPIs along the four different perspectives.

To integrate social media into the company strategy you can use the BSc as a design tool. First, you should start from the Social Media Plan, which is the document that summarises the strategic behavior of the company in the social channels; it should be aligned with the general strategy of the company. If both the Social Media Plan and the general strategy share the same general goals, both are already integrated: well done, this is how it should be. If they are not aligned we are facing what it is called strategic dissonance, and you have to aim for sorting that problem out.

How could you integrate social media within your corporate strategy in an efficient way? We recommend creating a new perspective: Internet. Then, by applying the BSc tool with the four plus one perspective, you will be able to map your strategy linking the different KPIs for customers, financial, internal and learning, to those from the internet perspective. Do you want to know more? Ask us a question!

* A version of this post was first published on Socialancer.com, 4th April 2013. Original in Spanish.