Jeremiah Owyang has a good post up titled How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business Maturity. Please read it for all the specific explanation of these ten criteria, but the super abridged version is this:
1. Clear understanding of customers' socialgraphics.
2. Your organization is in Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic formation. ["Social technologies enable all employees that want to talk to customers to do so" "[...] and all employees clearly know their role, process, and contact points."]
3. Corporate website integration: Social sign on.
4. Personalized corporate website based on social data.
5. Thriving advocacy program: customers are actively selling on your behalf.
6. A community of customers supports each other, reducing support center calls.
7. Anticipation of prospects and customers using Social CRM technology.
8. Innovation of new products with customers using web collaboration.
9. Supply chain is influenced by social data in real time.
10. Real time reporting of revenues, costs and efficiency. [You know and track ROI]
(We've also mentioned the Community Roundtable's Community Maturity Model before, which has some similar elements and might be a little easier to relate to from an association perspective.) Anyway, you can read Jeremiah's post for his analysis of what these criteria are, and I find this very interesting even if it's written for the corporate world. But the MOST telling thing to me is that nobody has achieved this yet. Not even the most advanced social companies in the for-profit world have achieved more than 4-5 of these.
It reminds me of Olivier Blanchard telling us stories at the last Buzz executive breakfast about how wherever he goes, everyone thinks they are behind the curve. People in South Carolina, where he lives, think that they are behind the Northeast, where people think they are behind the West Coast. Every company he meets with thinks they are playing catch-up. Many Europeans think they are behind the US in terms of social technologies - and a lot of people in the US think we're behind Japan. And definitely, association execs always tend to start any conversation about social media by saying that their organization is conservative and slow and they're worried about being behind on this stuff. (Of course, he had us all in stitches since everyone introduced themselves with some variation of that, with the notable exception of a colleague from the Consumer Electronics Association...)
But NO-ONE IS AHEAD in this.
Everyone's working on it. Everyone's trying things. The companies that are the most ahead have probably failed the most and the most publicly. Everyone is trying to figure out how to manage the risks of being more human, more open, more collaborative. Everyone's trying to figure out how to manage internal process and organizational changes. Everyone's trying to figure out how to measure the ROI. Everyone's trying to figure out how to staff their social media management efforts.
So the point is this - check out Jeremiah's post on the ten criteria of social business maturity. Think about them in terms of what's relevant and within the realm of possibility for your organization. Pick a couple to focus on - just so you can keep an end goal in mind. And if you disagree with any of these? Make your own list. Stick it to your office bulletin board and give yourself something to aim for.