For organizations serious about leading their teams into the future, the effective use of digital communications and social media to effect business results has become an essential professional skill.

7 Questions to Gauge the Health of Your Social Business Program

1. Have you moved beyond the social business pilot program and developed a program to re/upskill your entire team? Find a standard and system of measurement to assess the velocity and modernization of your organization's social business communications. Develop a maturity index based in hard numbers. Maintain consistency of standards across the organization.

2. Are you focused on owned and earned media? Make your organization is consistently visible and engaged in the right conversations across the right contexts. Your customers may be active or passive consumers of your content; they will engage with you when they are ready. Ensure that you remain consistent and top of mind.

3. Is your corporate LinkedIn page optimized? Ensure that you are growing the interest and awareness in your corporate LinkedIn presence and that of your employee ambassadors/advocates. Embrace video and the employee, partner and customer voice in your content, and focus on creating interactions that address real customer questions and challenges to achieve engagement.

4. Have you created a true corporate culture of content? Successful organizations are getting back to basics and grounding their content marketing goals and strategy in marketing approaches and tactics that tell the brand story along the buyer journey in the right context. Experiment with the format and placement of your content until you get it right and find your audience - then amplify your activity and stay true to your audience's needs and goals.

5. Does your organization have social business discipline, and do you reward true innovation and leadership? Find the social business intensity triggers of your employees and incentivize the right actions and behavior. Consider a rewards program based on customer engagement, earned media, and owned content success.

6. Are you transparently sharing your social business challenges? Social business is not a perfect science, and sharing genuine successes and failures demonstrates authenticity and transparency, and garners trust. The notion of the social business bloopers reel is as effective as a high quality piece of content directly aligned with your customers' needs.

7. Have you truly become the narrator of your organizational story? Insource the narrative in the voice of your employees to instill authenticity and transparency in your messaging. Being genuine will take you to places you haven't been before, and your front line employees are the stars of the show.

The pace of change is only going to hasten, and leading in social business will set the tone in your market segment. Provide an example for others to emulate and embrace change as a constant.