Judging from the number of social media consultants that follow me on Twitter, the number of blogs on social media optimization, the number of Social Media Tweetups in my town, and the number of new Social Media software startups, you’d get the impression that Social Media marketing is the answer to every growing company’s prayers, virtually guaranteeing success.

I don’t have to tell you, because it’s been repeated countless of times before, that Social Media is NOT the magic antidote if you don’t have a solid marketing strategy, you don’t know your market, and your product is a dog.

But even more fundamental than this is: do you know your company’s key success factors and the metrics behind them? More importantly, are you challenging your current assumptions about what is a key success factor to discover new ones?

Different Key Success Factors

Here are a few examples of key success factors:

1. Store clustering

In the book “From Good to Great,” author Jim Collins profiles Walgreen’s breakthrough strategy: the best, most convenient drugstores with high profit per customer. They implemented a clustering strategy, where stores were clustered in certain urban areas, like San Francisco, New York City, etc. to make it convenient for people to shop often.

They also tried a very simple financial measure to determine their profitability: profit per customer visit.

By providing many convenient services, such one-hour photo developing, and increased shopping frequency due to  many convenient locations, profit and cash flow went through the roof.

2. Brand development

Intelligent Mexican Marketing (IMM), an ethnic snack foods distribution company out of Dallas that delivers consumer goods to the Hispanic market via small supermarkets, convenience stores and gas stations, develops brands.

They only built a distribution network because none existed for their brand category.

IMM has introduced several brands from manufacturers in Mexico into the Texas and Oklahoma markets. They play an active role in generating demand, creating brand awareness, and helping their small retail customers become brand ambassadors.

It’s success factors are based on how each one of their brands are doing, and utilizes cost-effective technology solutions to share sales and inventory data on each of the brands with their manufacturers, retail customers, and sales people. They have grown from only 4 delivery routes in 2007 to 64 delivery routes today.

3. On time deliveries

If your business relies on deliveries of any sort, your success factor might be on time delivery of your services. Domino’s or FedEx are the most famous examples.

But what if your company serves legal papers?

Professional Civil Process, an attorney services firm from Texas, prides itself on deliving legal papers on time, and makes sure it’s process servers are es efficient as possible: taking the most efficient routes to deliver papers, ensuring they maximize the number of deliveries, and ensuring papers get delivered on time.

Vice President Michael Shapiro follows process delivery metrics on a daily basis to ensure the company keeps up with it’s prime success factors.

What are your success factors?

These are just a few success metrics that companies have determined ensure their success.

What are your prime success metrics? Do you have an efficient measurement, analysis and tracking system to make sure you are meeting your success factors on a quarterly, monthly, weekly or even daily basis?

Additionally, are you willing to challenge what your real success factors are? Dean Spitzer, author the book “Transforming Performance Measurement,” said that you might be diligently measuring and keeping track of your key performance indicators, but are they the right key performance indicators?

Spitzer says that most companies rely on a “single-loop learning” process, where they track their key success factors, and continue to improve on them over time. However, in the fast-moving, social media influenced business environment of today, we must challenge these assumptions and look at things through new eyes if we want to continue to stay competitive.

As Spitzer says:

That’s why organizations everywhere are wasting some of their most important sources of value creation – customer relationships, supply chain partners, employees, and knowledge and intellectual capital that is not captured, enhanced, or exploited.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Social Media and think anybody not using it is missing the boat. But if you don’t know what your success factors are, or challenge what they are to discover new ones, and if you don’t track data on your success factors in real time, then no Social Media Strategy can help you except to probably drive your business into the ground faster than you could 5 years ago.

To find out more about how to implement a successful performance measurement system to measure your key success factors, join our free webinar with Dean Spitzer on Transforming Performance Measurement.

And if you’d like a demo on how to implement a cost-effective online software solution to help you track your key success factors in real-time, sign up for our free weekly demos, or see some of our videos.

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