Social Business Strategy Step 1: Considering Your People

Without an understanding of the expectations and experience of your employees, customers and suppliers, developing an effective strategy is difficult.

Start by assessing how creative your employees are. In using technologies such as Facebook or iPhones, do they imagine how they could be used to help customers? Is your company set up in such a way that employees feel free to act on creative impulses? This will help determine how far along your workforce is in social technology adoption, the report says.

Next, think about how social your customers are. Between 2007 and 2010, social networking usage more than doubled, according to Forrester, with 62 million U.S. adults visiting a social networking site at least monthy. "A clear understanding of your customers' use of social technologies yields potential insights into how to engage with them to create value," Fenwick writes.

Social Business Strategy Step 2: Listing Your Objectives