Social Gastronomy

Print PDF

Several of you have shared with me this week that you have a meeting with your CEO in the next couple of weeks, next month, etc. The topic is “social”, what you are doing today and what you are recommending the company do next.

In this meeting you need to be able to articulate a business case of why you should be investing in this and how will it impact your business.

The top 5 questions CEOs ask in these meetings…

1) How are we going to make money at this?

By being strategic in our approach and aligning to our core business objectives. We can no longer be just tactical. Having said that, having just a strategy is not enough. We need a clear operational plan to make sure that we execute on our strategy. Otherwise it’s only theoretical and we’ll be standing here a year from now having the same conversation.

2) What are our competitors doing and how do we make sure we do it better?

We need to do much more extensive market research to make sure we have a good handle on the current state of the market.

3) Do we have a plan and how much is this going to cost us?

We’re at the beginning of this. We will build a deliberate and staged plan which will allow us to pay for our incremental investments from the returns we realize as we go.

4) Do we have the all of the right people on the bus?

Not yet. As we build this as a core competency we will need to shift some people around, hire some more specialists, and then train everyone.

5) Do we have to rip out all of the technology that we invested in the last 5 year?

No, we can leverage what we have and then layer in the social, collaboration, and other technologies as needed. We will replace as we go, but we can start simple. These technologies are designed to be modular and scalable.

The point of this meeting isn’t for you to have all the answers, but to show through these questions that you understand why this is critical to the business, what you need to do, that you have a plan and can take command of this process, so that your CEO can stand in front of the “board” with confidence knowing that the team has it covered.

From there, you will need to make sure that you can discuss the operational aspects of a business case:

• Benchmarking – The shift in the market and its effect on the competitive landscape and your market leadership position
• Value – The change in buyer behavior and the economic impact on how you market/sell
• ROI – Define how you will make money (top line) and reduce cost (bottom line)
• Application – The operationalization within your organization
• Roadmap – Organizational impact (people, process, technology, change management, adoption)