Posts Tagged ‘social networks’

Social is the “New” Customer Experience

April 1st, 2010
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A 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.

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

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Social Media Policies Are Not So Simple

March 17th, 2010
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Hot topic of late is the need for social media policies. I have heard it from CMOs, CIOs, and even CEOs. VPs of HR are definitely there along with Legal. I think that there are really four camps in terms of approach…

Camp 1 -Just give me someone else’s that I can find/replace their company name with mine. For you who want to use this approach, I recommend going to http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php which currently as of this posting has 119 different organizations to choose from. Kinda like taking someone else’s marketing and inserting your own name, but expediency does have its virtue, I get it…

Camp 2 - We need to wordsmith this document as it is part of our policies. Bureaucracy has its place. from my perspective, this is kinda like the “Mission Statements” of the 90′s. Everyone had to have one. You would lock your whole team in a room for 6 hours debating the nuances of the words; and or maybe…. then they would have you memorize it like the greek alphabet during pledging.

I had a guy at my last company suggest that we needed a retreat to discuss our mission statement. The rest of us almost chucked him out the 28th floor office. My suggestion is focus on the intent and let legal wordsmith it. You pay your corporate attorney a lot of money to protect you, let them. There are actually now whole legal practices springing up to focus on social media law. If you are that worried about it, then I suggest you engage an expert once you have a direction.

Camp 3- Those of us who realize that is opens a whole new can of worms for our organizations. We need a strategic approach to developing our social media engagement programs because of the very “squishy” nature of social engagement lends itself to potential judgement calls on behalf of our organizations. Not saying that 20 something’s are not responsible, but how many beer drinking and partial nudity facebook pages do you have to go through before you start thinking that maybe this isn’t the corporate image of trust and responsibility that we want to project to our customers to reassure them that their money is well spent. Could just be me…

I have framed 10 questions to open the dialogue for your organization:

1. What level of Corporate Transparency do we want to have? It is a spectrum and you need to figure how open do you really want to be. It ain’t a democracy, but the world is changing so worth thinking about.

2. What is our definition of Intellectual Property? Your corporate IP is a corporate asset; think copyrights, patents, trademarks; but also corporate proprietary information, customer information, etc. How do you define what is yours, your employees, your partners, your customers, and what do you share with the market?

3. What is the customer’s level of expectations around the customer experience? Do they expect to be engaged? Do they expect real time feedback and response? Do they expect your people to be empowered to participate in social engagement? Knowing how much will also drive the organization’s view of how you should participate.

4. What is our employee’s level of expectation around employee engagement? Do they expect a wide open policy for everyone? Is there industry regulations regarding participation? How is management participating?

5. Is there internal vehicles to vent for employees? Are you giving them an outlet for voicing feedback? How is morale? Most I hate… sites are actually from ex-employees. Did you just go through a round of lay-offs? You may want to think about how your employee base will react.

6. How do you describe our corporate culture? Do you have a clear idea of your culture? Do your employees? It will come out so be prepared. If your management team is more paranoid than North Korea, well, don’t expect to see a rosy picture put forth to potential customers. Corporate culture is one area that definitely shows up on social media. Good cultures show through, bad cultures also…

7. What is the line between personal and professional? If an employee posts information on our company on their page, who owns the content? Can we influence what someone posts in their spare time about themselves? Short answer is that if they put out to the world that they are an employee of the company, then they are responsible to the company to protect the brand image.

8. What do we want the world to know about us as a company? Our employees are ambassadors for our company, for good or bad. For many prospective buyers, there first point of introduction may be through the social interactions of an employee; whether professional or personal. If we don’t have a clear message, what do you think will happen in the market?

9. What are our expectations around professionalism for our employees? If you have a dress code, code of conduct, etc. then it would be logical to have a more restrictive code of social media conduct. If you have a more loose expectation around how employees are expected to engage, then you probably don’t expect to have a corporate image projected from your employees.

10. Who owns the relationship /account?If your junior account team person connects to one of your customer employees, what happens when that employee leaves your employ? Who owns the customer when a sales rep leaves who is directly connected to the customer on linkedin? How about when they have build their pipeline over social media? What happens when your customer service people build a following on twitter over a personal/ named account? What if your employee starts an account on behalf of the company?

Tough questions, but also leads to..

Camp 4- The Ostrich effect is alive and well within corporate America. How many IT groups really think they have really locked down the network from social media? I have heard bandwidth, viruses, time wasting, etc. As Dan Webber, who is a CIO, put it as he whips out his smart phone…. “Do you think I can’t use this?” Also, just because they can’t use it on your network, doesn’t mean that they can’t use it at coffee shops around the corner, at home, or even at the airport.

If you are locking it down because you don’t want your employees to participate because you are worried about the effect on your brand marketing; you are right. It is working…. but probably not like you intended when your biggest competitor is allowing their employees to engage with the market and is using social media to lower their cost of customer acquisition.

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Posted in Marketing for CEOs, Marketing Strategy, Social Leadership, social marketing, Uncategorized

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Not So Simple Definition of Social Market Leadership

March 1st, 2010
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As we have gone around the country speaking on Enterprise Social Strategy, we have struck upon a simple concept that seems to resonate with senior executives; social market leadership.

On the surface, it seems simple:

  • Thought Leadership – Stepping into the vacancy in the market
  • Market Offense – demonstrating market leadership via social media
  • Brand Defense - protecting brand reputation on social media
  • Associations – creating the forum for market best practices
  • Social Influence – building relationships with key market influencers
  • Social Marketing – influencing the market’s requirements for competitive products

However, ask we dig deeper, we realize that how you measure or even how you define what you measure is critical. We have been asking industry leaders “Who is the Social Market Leader in Your Industry?”. We get a lot of “We are…” then after we ask them “how do you know?”, we get “What do you mean?”. Then when we explain what social market leadership means to us, we get “We’re not sure…”

Our definition of Social Market Leadership… defining the thought leader in the social market with influence over public social networks like Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, etc, as well as, industry communities, groups, forums, blogs hosted by vendors, associations, publications, enthusiasts, etc. In some industries, we do an audit and find over 100 unique platforms excluding the blogs.

How do you define thought leadership? Are you sharing your information with others? It isn’t what you say, it is what other say about you. How frequently do they interact with your information? Do they react positively? Do they tell everyone about what you say?

How do you define influence? Do you have credibility and reach? it isn’t about reaching everyone n the market. It would be nice, but for most businesses, that isn’t realistic. The brand icons already have a well established brand reach and they are considered a market “brand name” that define a standard. For the rest of the companies, there is a trade off between reaching everyone and reaching the right market cost effectively. Influencers are really about prioritization. Do the influencers have the “mojo”? Do they have the reach AND credibility? Can we hit the top 10% of the market and get them to evangelize on our behalf.

Market Leadership is not just Branding – There are algorithmic formulas out there that try to measure brand strength over social media. But, I think true long term social market leadership is really about creating a better customer experience through better engagement and interaction. With the transparancy that social media provides, companies are more and more realizing that architecting a better, holistic experience is critical to leveraging and maintaining brand equity and market share. If your social market share doesn’t represent your market share, might that be an indication of a problem in the market. If they don’t feel the same way about your company as you advertise, does that negate your market investment? Does your cost of customer acquisition go up because you don’t have brand evangelists and satisfied customers?

How do you measure Social Market Leadership? I think that this is the reason most organizations are struggling. There are simple measures from: simple Facebook fans, twitter followers, retweets, etc. To a little more sophisticated; social mention frequency benchmarking, sentiment scoring, number of influencer relationships, online community membership. To more complicated; taxonomy ownership, multi-criteria customer satisfaction, reputation management dashboarding, social lead scoring, share of customer voice, sentiment analysis benchmarking.

For those really pushing the limits of unstructured data analytics – the tools are rapidly moving towards ability to build a comparable, multi-dimensional dashboard to measure market perception differences between public social networks, online community members, and customer satisfaction surveying. Social media give such a dimensionality into buyer behavior, we think that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of behavior analysis leveraging structured data analysis to build deeper analysis of unstructured social interactions.

No so simple an answer, but potentially worth a market.

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Posted in Enterprise Social, General Marketing, Marketing for CEOs, Marketing Strategy, Social Leadership

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Wish List for Social Marketing Metrics

August 4th, 2009
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I get requests to review social media related platforms all the time; functionality, metrics, and integration. Some of these platforms are really good and some of them will die a quiet death. I make it a point to not discuss any specific platforms just because I want to stay strategic in this blog. But, I think there is value in outlining what I am looking for in the way of platform measurement capabilities that will support my social marketing strategy. Here is my wish list of activities that I want to measure and for which I am trying to collect tools; some of which is available and some is still not ready for primetime…

  1. Automatic Chatter Analysis – who, what, where, when, why, and how with comparisons, triggers, analysis, and a dashboard.
  2. Synchronization of My Social Networking Contacts – cross platform and multiple networks with the ability to start with one and find someone on another; i.e. uploading a twitter contact and have the ability to synch with LinkedIn or Facebook or email.
  3. Social CRM – then do that for all of my company’s contacts, dropped into a CRM system which I can then manage multiple contacts, campaigns, and relationships
  4. Online Community Lead Scoring – apply lead scoring to my own hosted community. I want to be able to identify when activities in the community indicated greater interest and send that into my CRM or multi-channel marketing system for follow up.
  5. Multi-Channel Reach Measurement – include social networking channels, twitter, blogs, back links, SEO, & SEM. Not just email and web analytics.
  6. Social Influencer Scoring – compare the various potential lead influencers to compare; blogs, communities, social networks, twitter, forums, sites, etc.
  7. Lead Source Analysis – Need a better way of being able to identify and track indirect sources for leads. I can use the latest web analytic tools to identify pages, but I need a way to elevate that to identify the sources of leads to compare and contract; i.e.  2nd generation re-tweet triggers a wave of people to our website. I want to be able to match the tweet to the twitter user to the lead. This would require some serious integration between social media and web analytics with a healthy dose of marketing legwork.
  8. Strength of Social Marketing Channels – Once you can track, then you can evaluate.
  9. Cost of Lead Acquisition by Social Marketing Channel – This is the Holy Grail; to measure the cost of lead generation by channel. Cross match it to revenue from leads and lead source and you have ROI.
  10. Social Marketing Brand Strength – Measurement of reach, calls to action, and actual action. There are some metrics out there with proprietary formulas, but this is still nascent.

If automatic ROI calculations are still some point off into the future, then what can we measure today and how can we justify our expenditures on Social Marketing? My answer is that it depends on the “how’s”; how big, how complex, how sophisticated, how much is your budget, and how much time? You can track a great deal with the tools currently available which is more sophisticated than much of the traditional brand-oriented mass communications channels that exist today. So, the good news is that we are moving in the right direction, but it is still more art than science. Well, at least until the platform vendors provide the above capabilities.

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

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If Content is King, What Does that Make My Writer's Block?

June 24th, 2009
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I have been suffering from writer’s block for about a week on my blog. I even had an editorial calendar and the blog titles written. I got busy in meetings and I couldn’t concentrate on writing. Although, I actually have some really cool perspectives on social marketing and CRM that I have been developing, but nothing that was ready for prime time. It was interesting to watch my blog traffic to see how it would hold up without my daily posts.

As I only posted one time last week, my traffic dropped slightly, but actually held for most of the week and spiked on the day that I posted. Now, I was looking for how close the relationship between the activities that I do to promote my blog (and myself) are tied to my traffic. I am doing a guerrilla level marketing program leveraging my blog, my social networks, and a $50/mo email marketing program. Essentially, the tools available to every small business without a budget. I don’t expect to become the next Seth Godin, famous marketing blogger, but I do expect that I can build an audience with very little resources. My results tell me that I have gotten outside of my own direct marketing efforts and I am now getting residual traffic from my prior marketing activities.

In addition to assisting me in finding my next opportunity(s), I am using my blog to provide a tangible case study of what can be done on a very little budget as representation of what the strategy could accomplish with a much larger budget. I am also using the concept of the blog as a repesentation of a corporate website. In my new social marketing model, the website is becoming the focal point of all the marketing activities. Prospective customers do not really care where the interaction is, they just want to get the information they need where and when they want it. I call this post-digital because when everything is digital; then digital doesn’t matter.

To that end, you have heard the phrase “publish or perish?” That describes blogging. Also, is an apt expression for creating fresh, compelling content with strong emotional hooks into your website.

So, back to my writer’s block. If content is king, then there are a few lessons that can be applied for companies looking at building content to help drive interest in their company:

1. Editorial Calendar – You need one for your content. It saved me last week in that it still kept me on pace to do at least one post. It also will help a team of people on track.

2. Be Consistent – I was getting great traffic when I was writing every daily, sometimes twice daily; even to a simple wordpress blog.

3. Be Relevant – I write for my audience, which is my contacts, who are business executives. I try not to write for techo-wonks about the infinite depths of a technical topic. My audience is also whom I partner, work, and sell so I want to be as approachable; to appeal to the “decision maker.” I can get more technical about software and infrastucture when talking with a CTO or CIO, but I save that for particular face-to-face meetings. I find technical specs hard to swallow as “easy reading.”

4. Content by Committee – Realize that it is almost impossible to sustain a huge torrent of content by yourself; let alone make it relevant, compelling, and fresh. That is why communities are so appealing with different voices, perspectives, interaction, and ideas. It doesn’t hurt that it drives SEO through the roof, provides a larger pool of contributors, and allows for different audiences.

5. Get it Viral – Keep in mind that you already have a relationship with your network, but you need to reach a broader group of contacts that don’t know you to drive more business. Sherry Heyl, Atlanta-based social media goddess and friend, talks about building consumble bites of content that can be distributed easily. The key to success is to get your morsels of content, “sound bites”, into circulation and distributed beyond your first and second degree contacts to go viral.

To that end, I am working on creating a social marketing planning framework that I will share over the next few weeks. The social marketing plan will assist companies in building online relationships, leveraging integrated website communities, building compelling calls to action to generate website traffic, managing effective customer experiences, and developing effective measurement systems for the above activities.

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Posted in General Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Online Communities

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