Archive for the ‘Marketing Strategy’ category

Do You Use Lagging or Future Performance Indicators When Leading Your Organization?

January 27th, 2010
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We’ve said it to countless marketing executives nationwide —traditional market research is a lagging indicator of past performance and social market research is a leading indicator of future performance. A bold statement, I know, but one that we truly believe in because, as we prepare social market audits for our corporate clients, we see evidence of it each and every day. What exactly do I mean and what specifically do we find during our process?

When conducting these social audits, we initially look at the traditional market research relevant to our client’s industry, and then we see how effective their marketing efforts are compared to their competitors. While that data does help us learn more about the space our client navigates in, we also know that the information is only representative of previous investments made by our client (and their competitors). It doesn’t give us a snapshot of what is going on now, what happened two weeks, or two months ago for that matter. More specifically, it doesn’t tell us if our client’s competitors have, for example, launched a new campaign that is swaying chatter in their direction and taking 1Q or 2Q market share away from our client. In a time when even the largest of organizations need to be nimble and neutralize all lead generation obstacles, lagging data doesn’t help our client lead tomorrow —and lead competitively.

Today’s market share is reflective of a company’s ability to retain customers, expand their revenue relationship with existing customers and their ability to acquire new customers which for many years has been based upon traditional buying processes. Given the changes in communications over recent years, it is clear that tomorrow’s market share is now dependent on the social customer life cycle.

The buying process, or the social customer life cycle, in most cases now begins online. As an example, when speaking with a CIO recently, their company was looking to make an investment in a business intelligence (BI) solution. The first step in the process was to reach out to peer-to-peer networks to learn about what other CIOs were using, why they selected the product/solution they did, why they eliminated others, and what impact did these products/solutions have on their business. In parallel with that research, the members of their own IT organization, with specific roles as it applies to their BI program, have also been reaching out to their own peer-to-peer networks to learn from others just like them. Often they are conducting online searches and/or reading and engaging with key bloggers and thought leaders to get a sense of which companies are the visionaries and are most likely to be of assistance. They are also looking to see which BI vendors are engaged online. Are they listening? Participating? Driving? Leading? Are they a player? Are they dominant? This is how companies get on the short list.

You see, this is just the beginning of the social buying cycle. At this point they have not yet reached out to the vendors directly. They are narrowing the field and will only contact the vendors they are most interested in, when they are ready. What about the other vendors? They don’t even know that they missed an opportunity.

What many don’t realize is that customers are now creating their own, customized, personalized buying process. The companies that understand and embrace this and build their strategies around this new reality in order to maintain market share, become thought leaders, and establish a corporate image that makes them the easiest vendor to find (and of choice) within their key market.

Markets today are more fluid and dynamic in nature than ever before.

In our opinion, traditional market research is a static snapshot and is as accurate as the information that was available at the point that the report was published. For example if, according to Wikipedia, the Gartner Magic Quadrant is published every 1-2 years, can it truly represent the current state of the market?

Social market research, when done correctly, on an on-going basis, provides a more real time, dynamic understanding of the market conditions, the competitive landscape and the social footprint of individual companies.

Companies can now learn with greater granularity what impact their thought leadership, products, services, solutions, and so forth have on the market. An indication of the important of this are investment firms who are now seeking the social market analysis on companies in order to make decisions about which companies and markets to invest in, whether angel fund, venture capital or corporate.

Fluid markets provide the ability for small companies to capture market leadership position based upon their ability to embrace the social technology disruption. What does this mean? A small company, responding to the realities in the marketplace, can actually tap into market share a large organization earned over many years. We’ve seen this type of disruption before with the web, when over a 10 year span there were 62 new companies that jumped onto the Fortune 100. We believe social media is creating another disruption in the marketplace —do you have the right data in your hands to lead your organization effectively during this important change?

Just to be clear, you might think that we are not advocates for traditional market research, and that’s simply not the case. All we’re suggesting is that companies should keenly be aware of their current social market position and gather timely data to help them put forth strategies that will ensure they continue to be the leaders within their industry in the new social marketplace.

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Posted in Enterprise Social, General Marketing, Marketing for CEOs, Marketing Strategy, Social Leadership, Social Market Research, social marketing, Social Media

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10 Recommendations for Socially Enabling the Customer Lifecycle

January 27th, 2010
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We have had a lot of discussions as of late around how to socially enable the customer lifecyle. Also, begs the question “What does that mean?”

First, we are talking about how you manage customers from awareness, through interest, purchase, delivery, support, repeat, and referral. Depending upon your market, how complicated your sales process, channels, etc. this will vary to a degree, but we are talking about managing a customer from cradle to grave ( hopefully “not” grave). Companies are paying a lot of money for business intelligence systems, CRM systems, contact center, marketing and sales technologies to try and address the challenges around the heightened customer expectations.

Customers do not want the disjointed, endless closed loop frustrations of trying to manage a relationship with a company who doesn’t understand that customers choose from whom they receive “service”. This customer experience is bleeding through into marketing and sales with the ability to mass distribute customer complaints. We have all seen the blogs, tweets, viral videos, etc.

The company that can enable a sustained and coherent engaged relationship with a customer from introduction through purchase and repeat purchases will see a decline in customer churn, increase in referrals, and a decrease in the cost of customer acquisition. Bottom line is that better engagement with your customers leads to a better bottom line. The “means to an end” in this is through social media, online communities, collaboration, web 2.0, etc. type technologies that enable individuals to engage and interact online. Huge wins in terms of brand equity, customer satisfaction, and understanding of buyer behavior, beyond streamlining the service and support processes.

To that end, we spend a lot of time working with companies to design this roadmap since many are still trying to figure out how to get started, let alone walk or run. As we do a good number of presentations on what a roadmap looks like, we thought that we would share the high-level framework in the spirit of ”give to get”; which is the basis of social marketing. Here is our recommendations:

  1. Find out what your market is saying. If you aren’t, you have no idea literally.
  2. Have a plan to engage with them on social networks, blogs, video, etc
  3. Build a good “fishing program” for lead generation
  4. Identify the top places, people, and discussions that your market is engaging
  5. Build relationships online as you would a good PR or business development program
  6. Build engaging content that will educate, entertain, or influence your market
  7. Build an online community for your customers, prospects,  and partners
  8. Listen to what they have to say, measure it, and respond to it
  9. Build an online community for your organization to collaborate and to engage employees
  10. Integrate your applications, corporate content, processes, and data into the community

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Posted in CRM, General Marketing, Marketing for CEOs, Marketing Strategy, Online Communities, Social Media

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10 Top Questions for Contemplating Social Media Monitoring

January 25th, 2010
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For companies contemplating social media monitoring, this post analysis is meant as a starting point for integrating such an offer with Social Gastronomy’s Enterprise Social Management consulting services.

The Social media monitoring technologies are not sufficiently mature to be “install and go”; especially if the provider is looking to integrate multiple tools. This will require additional selling, implementing, customizing, and executing to manage the integration of the multiple data stream; which are exponentially more complex beyond single tool selection. Some large brands use up to 16 different tools in its social media monitoring program, we use 10+ for just our social market audit. Adding to the complexity in tool selection is the fact that a strategic snapshot that shows the relevance to the brand and business is different than the tactical dashboard and may require a completely different tools set.

Additionally, the competitive tool landscape becomes more complicated as provider moves up the “food chain” to sell to new levels. The expectations as to how extensive the monitoring program will become will be dictated by the CMO’s desire to consolidate efforts; ie. Across monitoring for brand, reputation management, customer contact, etc. the provider could find itself competing for a broader base of business against PR, Marketing Communications, and Contact Center firms for the Social Media business. We suspect that this will naturally (already) occur as CMO’s will come to the conclusion that the monitoring and listening capabilities should be centralized and feed data for multi-purposes.

Recommended Planning Steps

Area of Planning Key Issues Impact
Business Planning
  • Expected return
  • Ownership within Organization
  • Measure success
  • What are you really buying
  • Investment required over time
  • Resources
  • Business case
  • Technology investment to support offering
 Roadmap will dictate the business and investment requirements. If requirements are more extensive than expected, will cause perception issues as to quality and ability to execute.
Program Management
  • Pricing
  • Packaging
  • Target customers within organization
  • Tool selection now and future
  • Duplication of data
  • Data cleansing process
  • Start with a core application and add other offerings
 Expectations around the offering will dictate whether one tool or many will be required. We are seeing client have more mature requirements in terms of comprehensive information collection and synthesis.
Operation Execution
  • People Requirements
  • Process Requirements
  • Technology Requirements
 How far along the business requirements have gone in preparing to scale the a program
Solution Customization
  • Add’l types of listening tools
  • Process
  • Training
  • Dashboard
  • Addl tools
  • Packages?
  • Pricing
 If you trend as other enterprise social media clients that we have seen, then the customization requirements eventually will be extensive. Preparing for scenarios may allow for better initial package and accelerated scalability
Integration
  • Process
  • Requirements
  • Customer training
  • Project set-up
  • Policies and procedures setup
  • Roadmap for clients
 The enterprise customers seem to be more mature in expectations around integrating offering into their environments and not as tolerant for siloed management. Has impact on operations and customization.

10 Top Takeaway Questions to Answer

  1. What is the expected hand-off when Social Gastronomy does strategy?
  2. What if organization wants other tools to include into the mix?
  3. What if monitors in other areas and wants to combine – call center, pr or marcom firm?
  4. Reputation monitoring, brand reach, complaints, categories, competitive intelligence, and qualitative analysis – what are you monitoring and why?
  5. Sentiment analysis – how leverage, how integrate with other data, how overcome shortcomings?
  6. Sentiment analysis challenges and manual review, omissions, volumes, discrepancies
  7. What does the integrated tool dashboard look like? Is there a different dashboard for the daily user, weekly manager, and monthly/quarterly executive?
  8. Integration into CRM – process, results, so what?
  9. How integrate into broader programs, how to use as door-opener for new expanded social media presence management?

10.  Where does this go? Roadmap?

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Posted in CRM, Marketing Strategy, Social Media

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What We Know About the Social Enterprise for 2010

December 17th, 2009
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As we wind down 2009, I have had a few moments to think about where we are going with this whole enterprise social media, online communities, social marketing, etc. So, here are my “true-isms” for 2010:

1. Marketing via Social Media is becoming mainstream. Most of it is ad hoc  and mediocre, but there are some notable exceptions and that list is growing. Finding less people saying “why” and more people saying “how”.

2. Innovators are starting to change the rules. When you see a market disruption, the early indicators are the ability to gain market share at low cost by disrupting the status quo. Doesn’t mean that twitter is your end all strategy, but you are finding companies that are leveraging multiple web 2.0, social, community applications to streamline the way they do business; either gaining new customers or efficiencies in servicing the ones that they have.

3. Customer Experience is becoming transparent – if your service sux or is barely mediocre, you need to be concerned. Social media is optimized better that static websites. This means the ANGRY blogger who writes a scathing review of their poor customer experience will get ranked higher than all of the money you just spent on broadcasting to the market.

4. Social Marketing is a “downhill” spend versus some alternative marketing channels that are “uphill” – Means that you get the snowball effect from a $1 spent in social marketing because you get the target audience, influencers, and search benefits. Alternatively, if you are having to spend dollars at trade shows, etc. you have to spend to counter the social marketing of your competitors, it is to a limited audience, and it is gone once you spend it.

5. Social Marketing doesn’t work if you apply a traditional marketing approach to the social networks. You cannot just message and broadcast your advertising or PR messaging on social networks and expect people to engage. The analogy is word-of-mouth marketing in the offline world. Do you hire a street team and then have them drive up and down the block with speakers blanketing the neighborhood with a speech? You laugh at the analogy, but that is exactly what many “interactive” major brands are doing online.

6. Social Media, Marketing, etc will extend from the public networks into the enterprise. We are having conversations with partners and CIOs around business intelligence, lead generation and tracking, customer experience management, enterprise application integration into internal communities, information architecture, employee engagement, organizational productivity gains, integration of external and internal communities, contact center integration, supply chain enabled applications, business process integration, corporate governance and compliance, MBOs, cross-functional alignment, ROI, etc.

7. Social Media is following the same path into the organization that the original “website” did… in the process became web applications, processes, ecommerce, etc. The original web solved a problem for people in aggregating and distributing information. Social Media solves the opposite problem in that it helps people with context and filtering.

8. The “Social Enterprise” is growing up. The last three years have seen pockets of cottage industry level “consultants”… but, everyone claimed to be a social media consultant. Saw the same thing in mid-90′s as everyone was a web consultant, but the difference by the end of the decade was that the real consultants figured out how to map back to business strategy and tie the web to business objectives, ROI, and core business issues. The real consultants figured out that they needed standardized, repeatable methodologies that were scalable across the enterprise (and enterprises) and transferable to their clients. The applications they developed focused on “big” problems and the size required sophistication and strategic understanding. 2010 will be the breakout year for many consulting organizations as they move from tactical point applications to enterprise solutions.

9. Organizations that have embraced the new collaborative economy and all of the challenges and opportunities in 2010 will face hurdles in converting to the social enterprise, but the smart ones will understand that the risks are too high. Smaller companies, non market leaders are looking for an edge or opening to exploit and grab market share or enter new markets. In a down economy, you have to leverage what you have better. The larger companies that cannot adjust can find that market share is a trailing indicator of performance (how we did) versus social media which is a leading indicator (what people think).

10. From 1989 to 1999, 62 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 100 list changed. 62 came off and 62 new ones entered the list. If you think about it, 62 of the top, most respected market leaders got caught from behind and eclipsed in one decade with the selective use of a new technology and widespread business process reengineering. 62 of those CEOs and other executives probably said, “web?”, not going to affect our business. I wonder how many of them retired early…. I wonder how many of the top companies and executives will still be on the list in 2020…

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Posted in Marketing for CEOs, Marketing Strategy, Social Media

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A Tale of 2 Marketing Programs: Social Media Versus Search Engines

November 24th, 2009
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Social media is going to take budget dollars away from search engine marketing. Already is in many major brands. Simple economics are driving this transition.

If a major ecommerce player is spending 50% of their budget on search engine marketing, website optimization, and link optimization programs, but is losing the war to bloggers in organic search. Why would the ecommerce player continue to spend massive amounts of money on advertising when they can focus on blogger outreach (ethical, not paid) for far less money. Better yet, fix their customer experience and get customers to evangelize on their behalf. this slide says it all….

Click Picture to Expand

Additionally, as we analyze the various social media monitoring and metrics tools, the challenge is pretty evident. Search engines work off of structured data. I can run an advanced search and build filters for my search results. The challenge with social search is that the taxonomy isn’t defined. How you talk about a problem can be completely different than I talk about it. Potential buyers may not even recognize that the problem they are discussing on social media is even in the market. How do you build an automated tracking of taxonomy around unstructured data?

Effective lead generation program within social marketing require human knowledge of your solutions and also the ability to follow discussion threads to identify contextual relavence. Over time, you should be able to fine tune the algorithms for your social monitoring programs to become 80% accurate, but the most successful programs are leveraging human knowledge to make social marketing engagement programs to become discoverable, impactful, and actionable.

Otherwise, you get the the large number of costly “unqualified” leads that flood into websites similar to the search engine marketing programs. These programs either make it up in volume or work the “long tail” of key words to reach better qualified buyers. Social marketing can get you to the “long tail” faster as most buyers start with questions in the long tail when they do not know what they are looking for and leverage the expertise of others to become more specific as they learn what they don’t know.

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Posted in Marketing Strategy, Social Media

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