As social behaviors and technologies become more embedded into all aspects of business, smart companies are looking as far up the adoption curve as possible. This means getting beyond what often passes for social media marketing to a more holistically social way of thinking about marketing, customer service, stakeholder management, employee engagement, product innovation, risk management and much more. That’s a lot to chew on, so for simplicity, here’s how I see the journey, broken down into three rough stages of maturity (though actual adoption cycles of the elements of social media will differ for everyone).

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