Social Marketing - Does it matter?

It seems as if a lot of companies are, whether internally or externally, starting to embrace this new paradigm of "social" communications and networks within their communications and PR networks.  You may have seen a few signs of these, such as:

• Companies are becoming more and more engaged on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter
• Internal social networking platforms like Yammer and Chatter are being experimented with, and being adopted with a good deal of success
• Corporate executives (especially at forward-thinking technology companies) are tweeting their thoughts, visions, and expectations
• Your marketing team has used the term "fan," "like," "follower," or "engagement" in any context regularly in the last year

I believe "social" is here to stay.  The fact that Facebook's ad impressions are set to (if they haven't already) exceed Google's is a decent sign of this new reality.  Now, the question is as brand-stewards, "what do we do with this?" and "Does our engagement in social media networks really matter?"  In the B2B marketing world, in particular, this can be a quandary because much of the emphasis here is on demand generation and "leads," which social sites may be able to create in the B2C world but if we are strictly measuring the value of social in this way in B2B, can the ROI be justified?  

Perhaps leads can be uncovered through social sites, but the danger is that if your behavior is dictated by this mandate that you could either or both a.) sabotage your potential success in social, and b.) underestimate the value of engaging in this world and thus never invest the time or resource required to be successful.  

However, I believe the the key is moving the perception of social from being a thermostat to being a thermometer.  

Social is a very poor thermostat, because with the instantaneous feedback of the social world (especially with external messenging) any messaging that you present to change perceptions can potentially be, if it is contradictory with the experiences of your customers, challenged immediately by those with different experiences.  In a world where over 40% of people trust "someone they know" versus corporate advertising, who do you think they will listen to:  The brand message or their "friend" that discounts the brand message?  This interaction puts you potentially in a difficult circumstance when you are at "odds" with your audience.  The thermostat "broke" if you will, because you intended to change the environment but the environment did not change.  

It is however a very good thermometer.  Do you want to know what your customers are truly interested in learning from you?  Do you want to know what the real perception of your brand and your products are?  Are you humble enough to listen, incorporate the feedback, and change if the feedback you are receiving and your brand are not in alignment?  If they are not, it is a powerful thing to tell your customers (who are committed to you with their dollars), that we are in this together and we are going to change for your benefit.  And if they are, how can you leverage the crowd that is surrounding and loves your brand?  When the love for your brand within and without is high, this is when great marketing goes viral.  This is when friends will recommend you.  

At the end of the day, social media is not just a "marketing" tool, it is really a community-building tool that can revolutionize how you learn about, communicate with, and create value for your customers and fans.  When we see it in this multi-dimensional way, we can truly leverage its power and see the results.   

I have data, but I need information

I have a confession:  I am a statistics and data junkie.  I’m not sure where it came from… perhaps it’s from my love of baseball growing up, from playing Fantasy Football (in which I never missed a Fantasy playoff in a league I’ve played in), or tracking the Rivals star status of Texas A&M’s football and basketball recruits to assess whether I should get excited about the upcoming seasons or start blogging in support of a coaching change.  Regardless of where it came from, I have built my post-MBA career on an ability to leverage data to decipher insights and recommend future strategy.  Especially working in the BI space, I have found that organizations that understand the importance of leveraging data for competitive advantage tend to be more successful than others.

This is a good time to be an analytics professional.  Today, like no other time in history, there is a plethora of data in the world.  From organizations siphoning terabytes (and even pedabytes) of operational business data into massive data warehouses, to all of the information you can search for on Google, to the clickstreams of your website visitors, to the massive amount of data aggregators providing syndicated lists & analyst reports, to all of the chatter on the blogosphere and Twitterverse, we are swimming in an ocean of data and organizations have an endless appetite for it. 

In fact, every company can probably say these two things:  1.) We have too much data and 2.) We don’t have enough data. 

Or perhaps this is what they are saying:

• “We have too much data”  We are having a difficult time getting value out of the data we have. 
• “We don’t have enough data”  We don’t know what we don’t know or need to know.

Both of these statements/issues are related.  I have heard multiple times, especially on consulting engagements, this term:  “We are data rich, but information poor.”  This is a good statement, because it recognizes the reality that a company has a lot of data at its disposal (like most organizations) but that’s all it is… data.  It means that the organization is spending a lot of energy collecting and delivering data but what it really needs is information… insights that can drive actions that get results. 

How do I do it?  How do I take all of the data I have, or better said want to collect, which has limited value and transform it into information and insights which are extremely valuable? 

At a high level, here’s how you make it happen

1.  Follow Steven Covey’s rule from “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and start with the end in mind.  In order for your data to be effectively leveraged, you must first ask the question:  “What do I want to learn?” and evaluate the questions that you will answer through your data.  
2. Pre-define your data to support the questions you want to answer and develop systems to ensure that it is consistently collected and codified according to this definition.  Your data must support your analysis, rather than your analysis support your data if the quality of your information will drive the maximum value you want to achieve.  This is the hardest work, because in many cases you may not know what you don’t know yet.  As a result, this is fluid process.
3. Collect data consistently, accurately, and with proper governance.  This is especially important when your analytical data is coming from many sources in your organization.  If your organization is truly going to be data and insights driven, then data governance and data quality must be a high priority and governed at a high level in the organization. 
4. Review, analyze, and refine often.  Once you start gaining insights, you will start to ask deeper questions and create a market for intelligence in your company.  At this point, we would start over at #1 and once again ask the question:  “What do I want to learn and how do I need to collect and define my data to get me the answer I need?” 

This is key to truly becoming data-driven.  Good data is intelligently conceived and is supported by good processes.  You can’t have good processes without good data and you can’t have good data without good processes.  The two work hand-in-hand.  It is hard work, but the value that insights can give over mere data is well worth the effort to align an organization from being a data consumer to an insights creator.  

"So much cooler online"

The other day, I saw a tweet come across my feed that made me laugh out loud.  It stated:

"I still hate Comcast, but @ComcastMarc_NE makes me hate them less. Good customer service guy." (from @617patrick)

This tweet illustrates that importance of authenticity and ensuring that the interactions that you have online and in social networking as a company align with the reality of your brand.  Comcast has been very successful with using social networking, and specifically Twitter, to improve their customer service.

A banner at Dreamforce evangelized their success story with social media, claiming a 46% increase in their net promoter score as a result of using SalesForce for Twitter to engage with their consumers.  They have a team of customer service reps (like @ComcastMarc_NE) that strictly look for complaints on Twitter (which I can imagine based on the staffing in this organization and my own personal experience that there are many) and start conversations in the attempt to resolve their cable, internet, or phone issues.

However, as we can see (and a lot of us that use Comcast can attest), the offline interactions many of us have with Comcast haven't changed much.  They are giving us one image online with their "Twitter Ninja" team and another one with the contracted technician that visits our home and does very little to meet our expectations.  Are they like the guy in the Brad Paisley song "Online" who works at the Pizza Pit, drives an old jalopy, and lives with his parents yet portrays himself as a hot model from Malibu with extraordinary tastes?



At the end of the day, being successful with marketing in social media requires authenticity, and is not a highly-effective image management mechanism.  Customers today are very savvy and can tell, and in many cases will call us out if we are "so much cooler online."  News does travel fast in the social networking world.  The good news is, if we are authentic online and offline,  serve our followers, customers, and fans well, and deliver on our brand promise in every channel it will do wonders for our brand.  Good news also travels fast.

Salesforce Chatter

Attending Dreamforce 2009, as with every one of Salesforce.com's conferences you know that an exciting game-changing announcement is in the works.  This year provided one that I believe could be monumental.

Chatter.

"Chatter" is Salesforce's new "Facebook for the enterprise."  It essentially takes the "feed, follow, and profile" features and best practices of Facebook and Twitter, and applies them to the CRM cloud model that is currently in place.  What it creates is an tool where anything that is worked within Salesforce.com or communicates with Salesforce.com can "talk" to you through a live feed that is similar to the one that you see when you log into Facebook and view the news feed.

In Mark Benioff's keynote, he made this statement that I believe is the core reason why this may really take off (especially in younger companies but is not limited to).  He asked "Why is it that I know when one of my 5,000 Facebook 'friends' have gone to a certain movie but I don't know when my VP of Sales has visited a key client?"  The point is this:  social networking has greatly enhanced our abilities to organize our social lives and disseminate information in our personal lives, so why can't we have these same abilities in our businesses?   Why can't the same automatic notification I get when a picture of me from a party has been tagged come when a creative brief that I'm collaborating on has just had a key revision?

In business today, I have to either be proactive, I have to get alerted through my dedicated communications system (Outlook or IM... all disparate) or someone has to take the initiative to push the information I need out to me.  In social networking, I get all of my information socially from the feed.  Essentially, "Chatter" is their attempt to bring this metaphor and this "integration of people, applications, and data" into a single collaboration engine that is familiar to those of us that use tools like Facebook, which statistically is most, if not all of us.

Time will tell whether this bet will pay off... and if business will indeed transform based on this new metaphor.  However, considering that SalesForce.com's initial inspiration for SaaS was Amazon.com (another highly successful consumer web application), they may be on to something.

According to the folks I talked to at Dreamforce, expect Chatter to hit your Cloud in Summer '10.  However, their Safe Harbor statements indicate that we shouldn't put all our chips on this quite yet, but it will be exciting to see what it brings to the table when it is generally available.

Self-Service and Real-Time Analytics

As I had written before, the consumer-facing market is migrating into more and more of a self-service model with the prevelent use of ATMs in banking, self-checkout and self-ordering devices in Retail and Hospitality, and the growth of eCommerce online merchants. This channel obviously provides the consumer and the merchant with some advantages (convienence, efficiency, etc.) but it has one notable disadvantage. This disadvantage is obviously the lack of person-to-person interaction in these exchanges. In such an environment, how does the consumer feel that she is "known" and the merchant able to conversely "know" the consumer?

In businesses where self-service works well, the merchant has to "know" the consumer based on her previous interactions with the company. What are her tendancies, history, affinities, etc? Based on the occasion that she is shopping within, what type of merchant offers will be relevant to her? This type of knowledge requires "real time analytics" in the sense that the shopper's behavior is analyzed and her tendancies are known... and then based on the predicted shopping occasion (fill-in, splurge, pantry filling, convienence trip, etc.) can the merchant offer her an incentive to make that visit more profitable for the merchant and more valuable for the consumer?

Obviously, in the eCommerce world the merchant will know through the contents of the consumers' shopping basket and her session clickstream behavior. Is this possible in a brick and mortar world? Is it possible without real-time basket information? Possibly... but this would require that the shopping and occasion data is available and the patterns are analyzed on every customer... something that requires sophisticated analytical CRM tools and an active data warehouse environment with the horsepower to support it (obviously the merchant needs to know in some way when the consumer is interacting with them). In the banking world, this can effectively be handled through the ATM device similarly to the way Amazon would offer a next best offer from a purchase.

However, what would the ROI on consumer marketing efforts be if, like eCommerce, you could analyze and dynamically offer value-added services in the midst of the shopping occassion... at the point of purchase instead of the point of sale? There are some mechanisms for doing that today, but they are by no means segemented. There is one retailer that is experimenting with self-scanning technology within the store... if this could be married to the offer and relationship management technology it could be a huge win for them, both in terms of understanding their shoppers but also in marketing effectively to them on their terms.

The growth of self-service

Time Article Link: Time Self Service Article

I thought that it was very interesting back in 2007 when NCR and Teradata split off that the young, aspirational, motivating CEO of NCR Bill Nuti was chosen to head up the new NCR versus move over to the Teradata division spin-off to drive the growth of enterprise intelligence. Seeing where he is now and the aggressive repositioning of the "National Cash Register" company into the self-service juggernaut, the move is making sense. Especially as this market is poised, based on most analyst reports, for incredible growth which NCR can take advantage of if it's positioned to uniquely meet the market needs.

Self-Service in commerce is prevalent and hits all aspects of our daily lives. Obviously, the first mainstream application was the ATM machine back in the '80's but with the growth of the Internet and Web 2.0, consumers are becoming much more comfortable with shopping and selecting services without the in-person assistance of a human being on the other side. This phenomenon is moving into the brick and mortar world as well as electronic kiosks and self-service checkout devices are becoming more common, with the trade off being between that personal service we love and convenience.

It's not always successful, but when it is (as companies like NCR, IBM, eBay, and Amazon.com would like it to be) the following criteria is usually met:
- Customer convenience is delivered
- The consumer trusts in the outcome of the transaction
- The consumer continues to feel an affinity to the merchant's brand
- The merchant is able to use the channel to offer value-added services that consumers value
- ... and even more interesting, if the devices include personalization, then companies can deliver unique offers through Relationship Management technology at a key selling opportunity

For instance, my favorite self-service application may be the Papa John's online ordering tool. Through it, I find out about specials without having to sift through my mail, order quickly, and usually get the pizza at my house quickly. It's worth checking out.

What is CRM?

This has been a buzzword in technology and business for quite a while now. While everyone agrees that it's an important aspect that should be incorporated into a company's strategy, there are several definitions for it...

So I'll pose the question to you, my readers:

Is CRM...

a.) Contact management software that allows a company's sales force to better track customers and prospects?

b.) Offer delivery software that intelligently delivers the "right offer" to the "right customer" at the "right moment?"

c.) Analytical software that enables large companies with thousands or millions of consumers to determine how to market and sell to individual consumers or pockets of consumers (through segmentation) and determine best offers to deliver or actions to be taken by marketing?

d.) A way of business thinking that seeks to understand consumer interactions with your company at the individual or the segment level and tailor your brand to strategies to best maximize your relationship with each person/group that does business with you?

-or- A combination of the above?

-or- None of the above?

What are your thoughts?

My thought. Yes.