PDF We have had a series of meetings that highlight the need for those of us in the industry to provide context as to where companies are in the social maturity curve. For companies that are on the cutting edge, this is an easy conversation as they are comfortable with ambiguity and the speed of change. For others, the experience is different. Through our conversations, we’ve identified the Three Stages of Social Maturity:
Posts Tagged ‘CRM’
SEC Social Business Framework
October 21st, 2010Beyond social media and marketing, Social Business is really about internal and external customer experience –a cross-functional responsibility of the entire organization. To help executives wrap their arms around the key pieces that can be augmented through social efforts, the Social Executive Council (SEC) created the Social Business Framework. This framework is designed to help organizations understand how to align, manage, and bring cohesion to business objectives, company activities, and social solutions. In essence, this framework “operationalizes” social business in a manner that modularizes its components into company-relevant pieces that can then be utilized to build a social roadmap of strategic and tactical steps that facilitate implementation.
This framework also helps executives visually understand the complexities associated with a successful social program, as well as gain clarity on the:
- Multidimensional benefits of an enterprise-wide social enablement program.
- The structured business gains when implementing a social communication layer that allows free flow of ideas and reporting.
- Limiting results gained when assigning social activities to one silo-ed department and/or junior marketing/public relations associate.
- Opportunity costs of not participating in this program from a financial, efficiency and productivity perspective.
The SEC is an active forum for senior executives to collaborate and adapt the Social Business Framework to their own organization. The impact is too large and too overwhelming to do it alone —the SEC and this framework are here to facilitate the process and help our members gain social market leadership.
State of Maturity in the Enterprise Social Media Market
July 29th, 2010Last December, we wrote about where we thought the Social Media market would be for 2010. Now that 2010 is more than half over, I thought I would share my thoughts on the state of the market. In short, we are seeing an acceleration of the market factors; adoption, participation, application sophistication, business integration, and saturation. Yes, I said saturation.
In addition to our social strategy and marketing consulting, we have done probably 30-40 social market audits over the last 6 months and we have seen some key trends emerge:
- Public Social Networks – As the mega social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) continue to grow, we also see signs of saturation and even fatigue. Last year, we found that at least half of the larger companies were conducting pilots, but now we are finding almost 60-70% of all mid and large companies are experimenting. In many markets, first mover advantage is no longer applicable. Social participation has reached a critical point in the market that new entrants will have a hard time getting through to the target market. There are so many other competitors, complimentary, and even irrelevant providers vying for attention that buyers are shutting down to broadcast messaging. “How many thought leadership links can I click on from Twitter?” As decision makers are tuning out the SPAM messaging, the requirements for relevancy is becoming the “new norm”; which is a sign that social media is maturing. Websites followed the same path; once the hype of having a website passed, the requirement became to have a “good” website. Guess what, social media is following the same path. Not about how many spam messages or friends, but relevant interactions that assist buyers in making decisions relevant to them. Quality is starting to emerge as a stronger criteria versus quantity. Thankfully.
- Enterprise Social Media – We are seeing an interesting trend within larger enterprises desiring to implement their own communities for customers, employees, partners, etc.; 6 months ago, we found that ~20% of company executives “got it” at some level about applicability for social interactions; hence why we started the Social Executive Council. But, lately we are seeing a significant uptake in interest and much greater external validation for the recommendations that we are making for organizations. The value of the “collaboration” capabilities and the “customer experience” support that these platforms provide is being recognized. Even more encouraging, we are seeing a much greater recognition from the enterprise platform vendors that they must mature their platforms to enable a more flexible social experience. No longer can organizations just drop in a social “box” application and expect adoption. Now, organizations expect integration into their existing information architecture, flexibility in the ability to deploy components of functionality, move beyond “reports” to business intelligence and data warehousing. In short, enterprise social media platforms are “growing up”. Even Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 is starting to evolve in the right direction.
- Software Vendors – A year ago, we still had to do some education and justification on why software vendors need social engagement built into their applications. Collaboration with peers is the fundamental requirement for working as a team. Many business application providers were trying to figure out if they really needed to make the investment in the applications. No longer as we are finding every vendor that we speak with discussing their collaboration and social media capabilities in some form. Next challenge for them all – how do you play together? As a user, I do not want to have 6 different “social” applications with separate logins and separate discussion threads, bookmarks, calendars, etc. Open APIs to enable the import/export of these capabilities so you can fit into the larger enterprise information architecture which will already have a “social framework”. Better yet, enable the ability to link my social framework to your workflow within your applications to enable more modularized functionality. Allow me to pull in “widgets” of your functionality into sections of my community, allow me to model and then map your application into my business process.
- Social Data – This is the area that I have seen the most growth this year. CIOs, Business Intelligence, Marketing, Customer Care, Product Management and even Sales organizations are really waking up to how valuable, critical, and potentially overwhelming all this social data can be for organizations. If you are a multi-contact center with 1000 contacts a day, but you get 5000 mentions that need processing; you cannot manage the social contacts (most of which are not relavent) in the same way. I have written about how the semantic tools are still not mature enough for filtering these automatically, you need a triage workflow. Otherwise, if you manually touched even 30% of those mentions for review; you might find your contact center growing 2-3 times in size to manage the volume. On the other side, this social data may be worth more than the transactions themselves for some companies. Recommendation engines for ecommerce will improve dramatically if you can include psychographic information beyond mere transactional and demographics. Lead scoring becomes more accurate and far more valuable if you can determine a shopper from a browser. All of which is just in its infancy, but we are seeing savvy business leaders waking up to the potential. Vendors are rapidly improving their analytics and algorithms. Look for huge advances in the technologies within the next 6-12 months. Look for major pilots across most of the major enterprises.
- Customer Expectations – We have probably done at least 30-40 social market audits over the last 6 months and we have seen consistently across markets:
- Buyers are valuing peer influence over vendor marketing
- Most sellers sell the way they want to, but not the way buyers need
- The noise is so overwhelming that buyers are moving to a “trusted” management model to evaluate who they believe, who is externally credentialed, and validate market statements
- Social market research can provide as much or more market insight than traditional market research or analyst reports
- Customers are increasingly becoming savvy and cynical about self-serving market messaging and communications
- Customers are experiencing more SPAM and tuning out more
- Customers expect real-time customer experiences; information, response, service, and value
A good measure of how the “enterprise social” market and adoption is picking up is to look at the gap this summer between posts. We have been busy and as a result, I have spent more time in client engagements rather than evangelizing the market. Additionally, we launched the Social Executive Council (SEC) for senior executives. This is a closed Linkedin Group for senior executives to share best practices and collaborate. We already have 25% of the Fortune 100 represented in the first 5 months. Our focus is increasingly in working with these senior executives to incorporate Enterprise Social Strategy to socially enable their enterprises.
We are working with the board of the SEC to incorporate the group into a non-profit industry association, develop a national local chapter footprint, and begin to build the SEC as a framework for executives to vet all of the technology and miscellaneous vendors that will be required to support the adoption of a social enterprise framework. We are practicing what we preach in leveraging social technologies to transform the way our market engages to better support our customers buying processes. In short, this is the true potential for the state of the enterprise social market in that we are seeing the first signs that this will have transformative impact on enterprise markets.
Defining the Social CIO
April 30th, 2010I spoke at SIM Atlanta last week on behalf of the Social Executive Council (SEC) with Dan Webber, CIO at Avery Partners and VP of the SEC. I was the stand in for Judy, who is the President of the SEC. Our discussion was on the difference between Social Media Policies and Social Governance. This was a first part in a series on the Social CIO. It has been amazing to me how receptive CIOs are to the idea of socially enabling the enterprise. As much as I speak and write to the Social CMOs, approximately 1/3 of the SEC members are CIOs. CIOs are an important part of the social enablement movement. I believe a critical one as I do not believe organizations can do this without cross-functional coordination.
For SIM Atlanta, we started the presentation last week with a strong statement about what is a Social CIO:
If you believe that the social disruption will impact the enterprise:
- Role of CIO and IT must evolve
- Information management will now encompass the adoption, motivation, and collaboration around the distribution of information.
- IT Architectures will need to take into account for the fluid nature of social interactions (unstructured) and the overwhelming amount of information (contextualization and filtering) to handle the real-time needs of their organizations
- The IT organization that can absorb this and lead the transformation will be strengthened within the organization.
- The IT organizations that cannot keep up will be marginalized.
- The Social CIO is architect for the social enablement of the enterprise
What we didn’t do last week was outline the areas that will be impacted by the Social CIO, here are the 5 areas that we believe are the starting point:
- Social Architecture – defining the next generation of information architecture to support the fluid information needs of the socially enabled enterprise
- Social Experience – building the platform to support the socially enabled customer lifecycle; includes CRM, contact centers, sales and marketing support
- Social Intelligence – integrating the wealth of behavioral information that is generated within online communities and social interactions. Think the ability to differentiate between browsers and shoppers or better qualify leads.
- Enterprise Social Search – Defining the ability to find information or expertise across the enterprise. Now add the complexity that the organization may or may not own the information, it may be in the “cloud” and it may be unstructured. How do you build a roadmap to manage the ability for your organization to find stuff in a socially enabled enterprise?
- Social Governance – It governance is about protecting the information and intellectual property assets of the organization, about bringing a systematic approach to leverage and consuming technology resources, and planning IT initiatives in a structured way. Social governance takes that to the next level in how do you manage structure in an unstructured environment. How do you define IP when the content is user generated? Who owns a relationship when it is done under the corporate aegis, but is done through a personal Linkedin account? Where does personal end and professional begin? You can’t answer these questions till you have a Social Governance plan to map your corporate assets, understand what will be socially enabled, how you will manage the distribution process, measure and monitor it, and make sure that you can effectively communicate responsibilities to it.
Social CIOs are figuring out that they are just at the crawl stage in terms of socially enabling the organization. The good news is that they don’t have to do it alone, as a matter of fact, they aren’t alone, and they are in good company as most companies are still crawling. The real problem for Social CIOs is that many of their companies are starting to walk and run in social marketing. If they don’t get their social architectural planning established quickly, they may find the resulting unstructured chaos may become permanent.
Social is the “New” Customer Experience
April 1st, 2010A friend of mine and I have been emailing about the value of “social media”. Like most skeptics, the conversation is that social media is just a marketing channel. From the skeptic’s perspective, social media is about twitter, linkedin, facebook, youtube, etc. If viewed from that perspective, he is right. Social media doesn’t rise to the top of the priority list. Although consumer products’ budgets are migrating to social media, most of those budgets are creative advertising, games, promotions, etc. Directors of Marketing Communications worry about those budgets, CMOs worry about market share, valuation, new product innovation, sales and channels, etc.
Well and good, but there is a “but”…
In my opinion, CMOs need to “get the impact of social on the enterprise” as it is one of the most critical disruptions that we have seen in the last 15 years. We lived through the web disruption, this will be equally as disruptive. My friend is right that CMO’s don’t get fired or hired for “social media”, but they will get fired or hired for performance; which is going to be impacted on their ability to leverage “social” in their customer lifecycles.
Our consulting business is about socially enabling the enterprise, in particular, the end-to-end customer lifecycle. Lead generation over public social networks is only a small part of it. Customer retention rates, churn rates, customer satisfaction, referrals, etc. are all a part of the customer experience. We are seeing a fundamental change in the way customers (B-to-B, B-to-C, Channels) expect to interact. Social CRM is the first step, but it needs to be more strategic, cross-functional and impactful to reach its full potential.
We are seeing the set plays that Marketing used to call FAIL faster because they aren’t fluid enough to react to the dynamic flow of information. By the way, it isn’t only CMOs… CIOs are hungry for how to manage, VPs of HR, VPs of Sales, Channels, etc. Yes, I see CMOs getting churned much faster if they don’t perform, but because they can’t figure out how to leverage social strategy to compete. Social Market Leaders will become Market Share leaders.
As an example, we gone into several large companies recently and recommended in the initial meeting that they change their sales and marketing strategy based upon the social market research that we then present to them. All outside, public information.
We are not playing “gotcha” with them, we are showing how Social is the “New” Customer Experience. Buyers are approaching the buying research, selection, and validation process is now very different because of social media. Not about the technology or “chatting with friends”, but about business impact.
Not only did they listen to us, but it validated their perceptions in the market as to the challenges they were seeing. By the way, these aren’t leading edge, consumer internet software companies, but ”Old School” brick and mortar B-to-B companies…
Interestingly enough, we started with a good number of skeptics at the start of the meetings. We were brought in by executive sponsors; who wanted to get the rest of their executive teams around the need for a “social media” plan, but their teams didn’t realize how strategic this could become.
You know that you are in a disruption when the pace of change feels overwhelming. Information is just pouring over the wall and you are trying to keep up. We were there with the last major disruption with the world wide web in the mid-90′s. Small companies were figuring out how to leverage the web to drive massive growth, much of it at the expense of larger companies that were caught looking at the web with distain or disbelief.
Don’t be THAT person!!!! if you don’t understand, there are many free and/or paid resources to get educated. Doesn’t mean that you throw out your existing business model and “kamikaze” your marketing resources into social media, but at least have a social marketing plan with a roadmap, milestones, budget, and performance measurement.
