Posts Tagged “Customer”

In this second installment of the Midyear Update, I’ll outline three social technologies that are potential game-changers, and give general guidance for what you can do to evaluate their relevance to your business this year. I’ll decipher them and explain why you need to care about how Geosocial applications are transforming retail, how “federated identity” enables customers to log in to Web 2.0 sites with their Google, Facebook or Twitter credentials and how Web 3.0 slipped in the back door while most executives weren’t looking. [update: the third installment gets personal]
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Executives from Deutsche Telekom and Concord Music will highlight the morning session of pre-conference led by Christopher S. Rollyson at the Social Networking Conference June 16 in L.A. The pre-conference is a bootcamp for directors of social networking initiatives who want to understand and practice emerging best practices for strategy, tactics and project management.

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.

The Pre-Conference morning session is an intensive onramp to planning, launching and managing effective B2B and B2C enterprise social network initiatives involving any combination of internal (private, white label) and external (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube…) platforms.

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.

It’s more obvious than ever that the same crimes are committed (think “calamity,” not “Katrina”), but perpetrators switch interfaces. For example, my experience of the London scam happened via Facebook chat. Abstract up from the communications process or the subject and you’ll be more aware of the patterns.

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.

Highlights of Alcatel-Lucent’s recent marketing study of 1,000 social networkers, presented by CMO Allison Cerra at #snc2010: Social networkers are not very social; Heavy users of Web 2.0 will pay for value-added services; Privacy is murky

CDC’s social media experience shows how powerful social business can be when the organization is aligned with peer-to-peer sharing (word of mouth). Moreover, budget limits and their public focus compel them to rely people to educate each other with CDC information.