Posts Tagged “Analysis”

Sam Fiorella, writing in The Social CMO, put together some fresh thinking on how to disrupt publishing, drawing some parallels with the music business in Open Letter to Media Publishers. Since their comments are turned off, I’ll offer some additional thoughts here.

Sam, thanks for one of the most intelligent posts I’ve read on the disruption of print I’ve seen in ages. Reading between the lines, I’ll offer this iteration.

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Customers Are Smarter and Want A New Relationship | The New Economics of Business Reputation

While preparing to launch Social Business Services for B2B Sales in January 2012, I have been engaged in its Ecosystem Audit. I have plumbed online conversations about B2B Sales and Marketing adoption of social business (erstwhile social media). I have been struck by a recurring realization: a large part of Marketing and Sales as we know them is significantly out of alignment with B2B customers. Social business is permeating customer networks throughout the economy and changing customer behavior and expectations. This has created a rare opportunity for B2B marketing and sales people who understand and respond ahead of the market. If I’m right, this could be one of the most important posts you read this year.

Two quick examples of misalignment: one of Marketing’s underlying assumptions is that it is not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one customer conversations, so marketing must achieve scale through secondary research (and remain isolated from the customer). One of Sales’ key assumptions is that it must rely on primary one-on-one prospect/customer communications to drive value. Both of these are increasingly false, so I’ll drill down on them before offering practical recommendations for how Marketing and Sales can explore social business at a new level. Read the rest of this entry »

The Maple Leaf Digital Lounge has selected the Social Network Roadmap(SM) to build the social presence behind its launch, and CSRA has been working with their team for a few weeks. The Maple Leaf Digital Lounge (“MLDLCA”) is a virtual ecosystem that promotes discovery and collaboration among Canadian digital startups, foreign and Canadian investors and other enablers. Their mission is to facilitate cross-border high tech deals. “The Lounge” has two incarnations: several online venues combined with periodic physical events. Their launch event will happen on March 12 at the South by Southwest Interactive (“SxSW”) conference.

Read on for my insights from working with them so far: it’s interesting because their use-case for the SNR is quite different from that most of CSRA’s clients.

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2011 will be remembered as the year “social media” fell by the wayside, strategy became a recognized prerequisite for serious efforts, and “social business” began displacing it in boardrooms’ mindshare. “Social media,” which usually tries to use social technologies to talk at people, has been the predominant “first use” of socialtech because marketing drives most social initiatives, and marketers “communicate,” i.e. push content, to their targets. When they “listen,” they use limited legacy processes such as focus groups, email marketing, data mining and online surveys. However, none of these scratch the real itch because they emphasize the company asking individuals structured questions; they don’t allow customer to customer interaction, which is ten times more illuminating because it is spontaneous and customer-centric.

Socialtech gets there, but marketers are ambivalent about it because it means a loss of control. And more profits and career growth for marketers, but they have to let go first. It’s a leap of faith, but imminently doable.

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Continuing the Alterian 2010 series, this discussion featured: Michael Harrison, Chief Strategy Officer, Razor; Taleen Ghazarian, SVP Strategy, Epsilon; Cristene Gonzalez-Wertz, Chief Strategist, Covalent Marketing; Don Peppers, Co-Founder, Peppers & Rogers; Jennifer DeMarco Herskind, AVP Marketing, Dave & Buster’s.

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If your business involves physical locations, geosocial applications represent a tantalizing possibility: people can talk about their presence and experience at one of your locations and, potentially, friends of their friends that have the same interest (or thirst). It adds long tail digital grease to conditions on the ground at a retail location.

Social networks change the economics of relationships because finding, developing and maintaining relationships is far less costly… Watch the migration from Friendster=>MySpace=>Facebook=>? It was relatively fast, people are mobile… Don’t think you are getting anything for free. Even if you are not paying cash, your interactions and position are building a rich data repository for Google or whoever else is providing “free” services

The use of social networking sites will increase; people will shift to a strong family focus because they will be poorer. Older workers will get computer literate due to going back to work and working longer.

Pithy insights on major Web 2.0 transformation driver: reflecting on the significance of Facebook Connect and Google Friendconnect, which offer Web 2.0 single signon services

The Social Network Roadmap’s Web 2.0 Readiness Assessment is a service offering that gives the enterprise a firm understanding of how its “traditional” USPs translate to serving stakeholders in the Web 2.0 world. The Web 2.0 Ecosystem Audit has pinpointed what venues and activities are relevant to stakeholders, so the company is now set to create programs to engage stakeholders.