What is the “Social Journey” and why is it important to integrate community and web together? I realized that some of you may be asking that question why would I put my team and community through this process and spend the level of effort to make it happen. Well, the answer is 48% and that is justification enough but I feel like I need to explain this concept of “The Social Journey” first before I get into the details of why 48% is the answer.

The social journey came about as a discussion between myself and a few peers two years ago. The conversation kind of started around the importance of social to the business and how we could better engage our customers, prospects, and identify specific user behavior to provide some type of predictive analytics to improve their user experience. Help our users find the information being searched quicker and then suggest other related products or solutions that may be complimentary to the initial inquiry. Then measure, wash, rinse and repeat. This was the original concept of “The Social Journey” and our conversation soon turned to how Amazon provides the “more like this” function and how peer reviews help the buyer make a quicker decision.

This is the social journey. It is how you help guide your digital visitors through research, prospecting, defining and architecting a solution, validating that the solution will solve the problem and then assist with the buying process. This is the first step of the social journey, the journey of the prospect through customer. The second leg of the social journey is nurturing the customer through their implementation experience to ensure solution exceeds their expectations and help them become a loyal customer. The third part of the social journey is engaging the loyal customer to continue to build the personal relationship and uplift the customers stats to a brand advocate. The difference between the two is: a loyal customer likes your product and will buy your product again. A Brand Advocate will defend and advocate for your brand as a respected peer in the industry.  I think I have to credit my good friend Nicolas for coming up with the title “Social Journey” as it make sense when explaining this process of digital engagement. Once one has reached the level of social brand advocate they then enter into a new phase of the social journey which essentially begins again. Only this time the brand advocates are the ones providing the peer reference to help validate ones research that they are selecting the right solution to solve their challenge.

Now, I bet you are asking “So, what does 48% have to do with this?” Welcome to the wonderful world of big data analytics. I am nothing if not a data and number geek but knowing my facts and having the information to back up my strategy has worked well to secure support and funding for my initiatives with executives. I’ll get into depth about the 48% in my next post as it worth taking the time to understand and leverage the exercise.