<p>I think a lot of executives struggle with social business, because it doesn't follow simple, regular business patterns. There's no obvious strategy, process or ROI. A tweet or a blog post just can't compete with a lead or an order in the CXO mind. Social business is uncertain and ephemeral. Outside the firm, customers make choices based on conversations. Inside the firm, CXO's drive profit through policies and procedures. It's a fundamentally different dynamic. For many CXO's, it's much more comfortable to sit snugly behind the corporate firewall surrounded by obedient hierarchies, simple processes and sanitized information, than it is to venture out into the chaotic world of social business. The Social CXO Challenge</p><p>While clean, systematic internal processes provide the control CXO's need to manage efficiently, they are not the real world. The real world outside the corporate firewall where customers, partners and investors live is a messy, personal one. Harnessing the chaotic power of the organic conversations and processes that criss-cross the company social network and directing it toward a relevant business goal is the fundamental Social CXO challenge. Social CXO's uncover insights in social conversations to inform business strategy. They demonstrate industry leadership through social media and build business relationships through social networking. Social CXO's cultivate social communities that connect employees, customers, partners and investors to reengineer business processes across the corporate firewall for dramatic service and productivity improvements. The Social CXO Has A High Online IQ</p><p>CXO's love data. Most CXO's are surrounded by more data than they can possibly digest. However, the vast majority of that data consists of internal metrics: revenue and costs, leads and conversions, cycle times and defects. A few valuable internal metrics monitor key touch points where internal processes intersect with external ones, such as revenue, leads and support issues. However, all these metrics suffer from internal biases, because they are defined internally. Moreover, the external processes they sample are not nearly as structured as their internal counterparts. For example, every CMO knows that lead conversions and sales funnels are extremely loose approximations of a customer's true random walk to purchase.</p><p>Tweet</p><p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelyork/2013/01/08/the-social-cxo-an-executives-guide-to-social-business/">Keep reading...</a></p>