Posts Tagged “Client”

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 »

“Social media monitoring” is one of the trappings of social business, and most organizations are bewildered by the various approaches they could use to “listen to the ecosystem.” No one argues that a key part of social business governance is determining meaningful metrics to measure the impact of interacting in social venues, but how you use metrics to listen and measure is far from obvious, so here I’ll share some insights I’ve developed based on helping clients through the process of selecting a “listening solution” as well as the process that we have used. Based on these experiences, I have developed an offering by templating the processes, but I won’t go into detail about that here.

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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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This evening, I responded to a question in one of my LinkedIn executive groups in which another member asked whether social media consulting was a “real business” for which market demand was real. I always appreciate these questions when they reflect a sincere desire to get a feeling for an emerging market space. Here is how I responded, plus additional details.

A Market for Social Media Services?

Depending on how one defines “social media,” it is already a multimillion dollar consulting and services industry. Most of the players have a marketing approach in which they help their clients to create content and interact with people in major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, blogs and specialized social networks. Most firms focus on consumer-facing (“B2C”) scenarios because the market for business to business use of social technologies significantly lags consumer uses. The three main types of social media services providers are: Read the rest of this entry »

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 example was IBM’s corporate social responsibility and green initiative. They realized it would be incongruent or unsavory to have a (physical) conference for green initiatives in which people would burn tons of CO2 getting there, so they held it in Second Life. The sales conversion ratio was equal to physical conferences.

Drive customer engagement and brand value by focusing on the experience of using your product or service. This is the manna of word of mouth and social computing conversations.

Web 2.0 investment strategy uses a new adoption model to prepare for the Web 2.0 boom and bust by understanding and managing risks of applying social networks to business and government

Strategy and plans behind the Social Network Roadmap’s Facebook Page, which Facebook members should benefit the most from the Roadmap and how it can drive their business