Archive for the ‘Enterprise Social’ category

Social Target Marketing for Complex Sales – Evangelism, Advocacy, Justification

September 26th, 2011

As part of our process, we have built a three-part conceptual framework for social target marketing and the business impact that we believe is critical for managing the complexity of the buying process in today’s market.  The first, “Open Letter to CMO’s” focuses on the impact that social is already having on the purchase behaviors in your industry and established the foundation for the criticality of the business case. The second, “Social Target Marketing for Complex Sales” focuses on the right approach for your organization to take and that the timing is more critical than ever.

The third is understanding how to apply that process to internally developing the consensus around the business case for social target marketing.  Our recommended approach is to focus on building the business case as part of the evangelism and then allow the internal team to build the business justification based upon the available resources, budgets, market priorities, and timing factors. We schedule one-on-one meetings with each of the critical stakeholders to build consensus prior to a formal meeting. At the meeting, we then provide external social market research as validation and a checkpoint for the internal team to evaluate your organization’s readiness.  Our commitment is to manage the business case and evangelism processes, but transition the actual decision making process to the internal sponsor.

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Open Letter to CMO’s – Social Target Marketing for Complex Sales

September 26th, 2011

I’m not sure if you saw the “Open Letter to CMO’s” in the Social Executive Council.  The feedback we’ve received is that the post is helping to build your own business case to address the impact that social is having on the purchase behaviors in your industry, in particular those with a very complex buying/selling process.

With that in hand, many of you have now asked me to share our approach, to arm you, as the internal advocate, for the conversations you need to have within your organizations as to why social target marketing is more critical than ever.

At a high level, social target marketing is about how we can build better relationships with likely buyers to create new opportunities for our business that we’re missing out on today.

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Recent Social Executive Council Post: Open Letter to CMO’s

September 9th, 2011

It has been awhile since I wrote my last open letter to the SEC, but my goal with these is to summarize important trends that I see consistently across the executive members within the group in a way that helps highlight major strategic challenges. Continue reading “Recent Social Executive Council Post: Open Letter to CMO’s” »

Social Business Fades Away

January 25th, 2011

For those of us who lived through the web evolution remember the disruption on business status quo quite well…

5 Stages of Web Development

  1. Websites and Webmasters – tactical and basic
  2. Web Groups – tactical and advanced
  3. Web Strategy – Strategic and Advanced
  4. Web Functional – Every Dept. and Application had a web function
  5. Business Strategy – Web no longer became an issue, everything was web enabled – assumed

In Social Business, we are seeing the same thing….

  1. Social Media Presence on Public Social Networking Sites and Social Media Managers – Assumed
  2. Social Media Groups – Maturing – Team to manage the social function
  3. Social Strategy – Evolving – Strategic and Coordinated Across Enterprise
  4. Social Function – Emerging
  5. Business Strategy – TBD – social becomes part of the enterprise DNA

If social business strategies and functions are still evolving yet, that means that there doesn’t currently exist an industry standard for developing a social business structure. This translates into a greater risk either of failure or inability to justify investment; inconsistent performance; or a lack of measurability. In short, business impact will be continue to be ad hoc until a standardized set of industry methodologies emerge. Mature organizations need risk management and defined ROI for major investments which will drive the development.

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Social Media is Raising the Bar on Enterprise Relationships

January 4th, 2011

I admit it. I have used the phrase “Relationship with the Brand” at one point in my career. I am now officially classified as a recovering “brand” guy.

 But, then again I have also used Customer Relationship Management to describe a customer relationship with the same seriousness. I have also come to the revelation that CRM really stands for customer record management.  I am also now officially classified as a recovering “CRM” guy too.

 If I keep this up, I won’t have many corporate friends left.

 In all seriousness, the state of the technology is improving and we are seeing the impact of social media on the corporate view of “customer relationships”. If you ask almost any senior executive about the importance of customer relationships, or any enterprise relationships, you will get an absolute affirmative. All of them would agree that relationships make the difference in business, but they would be challenged to express how relationships have a direct tangible benefit.

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