Archive for the ‘Social networking’ Category
Apple does not care about fund-raising, disrupts online donation processes
April 19th, 2012
Apple, the richest company in the world – at the last count, it’s worth $600bn (£379bn). Yet it sells devices, specifically the iPad2, that users cannot connect with online fund-raising processes to give their money to make children’s lives better.
Is this an iPad2 feature, function or FAIL? My bet is on the latter. You know how much I respect Apple; I’ve written about the company and its strategies on this blog many times.
But this Apple FAIL makes me question the values and culture of the company. Why is it that every other device can connect with this donation site (based in the UK) and give their support and money to good causes, but not Apple?
When a friend of mine tried to use her iPAD2 to connect with an African child-charity donation page, she was unable to do so. She did try very hard. In the end, we found a different way outside of Apple culture so that she can donate.
She’s definitely not happy. The young fundraiser is not at all happy (he’s a Mac user). And I’m gutted because I believed Apple, despite its closed-garden approach, was at least open enough to be part of the new fundraising culture. Apparently, it is not.
Even if Apple is responsible for one donation being blocked, that is one too many.
This blocking extends to one of the most important tools in the fundraising armoury – Flash video. Apple believes in something other than Flash as the future of online visual culture. I think it is wrong about that too. And the company knows that I’m one of many millions that do not understand, nor care for, the Apple Video Future Strategy.
While Apple toughs it out with rival video formats, a collateral damage is the fundraising process. And that means lost opportunities that lead to continued poverty and avoidable deaths of children and older people.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has just been named among Time Magazine’s Top 100 People. Right now, he figures top of my FAIL list, and the bewildered lists of millions of Apple believers and consumers. I hope he will get it right sometime soon – the clock is ticking, Tim.
Girls Around Me – a wake-up call
April 5th, 2012
It’s been a week of controversy around cyber-snooping. First the Government announced draft plans to extend its online surveillance powers, and then Russian app developer i-Free was forced to withdraw its Girls Around Me app following a media outcry.
The app, which was downloaded 70,000 times before being voluntarily withdrawn, is a tool which uses Facebook and Foursquare information to track women nearby. With public profiles and check-in information combined, it allows the user to see women’s names, photos, geographical location and much more besides, all without their consent.
The thumbnail images on the site are predictably of women scantily dressed and the app states: “In the mood for love, or just a one night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control!” So far, so offensive.
There has been a landslide of comment about the app, mostly looking at issues around privacy, data, and how much information we should share online. There has also been a lot of comment about why is this a big deal?  What would a person possessing that information actually do? Would they run to the nearest bar and chat-up a girl using their personal details as a start to the conversation? In reality probably not, but we can’t be sure.
As Sarah Jacobsson Purewal at PCWorld says “it’s hard to see this app as a real threat to privacy or women.” Rather, she says, it’s “a wake-up call to those who publicly overshare.”
This seems to be true, but there are deeper issues here than just those around data, privacy and sharing too much information about yourself. Gender politics and old fashioned sexism are also central to this debate.
This article by Nathan Jurgenson brilliantly sums-up the gender and cultural contexts that have been largely ignored. App developers would do well to read this and think twice before their next data mash-up.
A guide to defining and developing Social CRM
April 4th, 2012
We have developed a guide to defining and developing Social CRM which is summarised below. If you would like a copy of the full guide, please send an email to hello@liberatemedia.com titled: ‘request for SCRM guide‘ and we’ll pass it on.
You may also be interested in the Social Customer session summaries that can be found on our blog. These posts detail the key points from each of the sessions at the Social Customer event, which took place on March 29th in London.
Summary
In our experience, the defining characteristic of Social CRM (Social Customer Relationship Management) is the range of misconceptions and misunderstandings about the core elements involved. This guide to Social CRM has been developed with this in mind to help every organisation better understand and engage with the social customer.
We have offered a practical guide to the approach and services required, and a helpful Social CRM audit at the end of the document to help you develop your organisation’s Social CRM capability.
What is a Social Customer?
The social customer is dynamic, hyper-connected and can shape business and brand reputation by defining an organisation’s value, relevance and reputation. As a result, social customers have compelled organisations of all types to be more customer-centric and have transformed the way in which organisations need to communicate with and, most importantly, listen to their customers.
Put simply, the social customer now owns the relationship, and every organisation needs need to earn his/her trust.
The social customer is also a driving force in the development of the online economy, which is rapidly growing and currently contributes 8.3 per cent to the UK economy. This is more than the healthcare, construction or education sectors.
UK consumers also buy far more from online retail sources than any other major economy and this is expected to continue expanding by 11% per year for the next four years, reaching a total value of £221bn by 2016. Compare this to growth rates of 5.4% in the U.S. and 6.9% in China.
What is Social CRM?
A compelling definition of the Social CRM challenge was given by Esteban Kolsky, Founder at ThinkJar at Social CRM 2011 in London: “Companies tend to start using social media to talk at their customers, not to listen to them.”
He then defined CRM as a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology, designed to improve human interactions in a business environment.
This is a good reflection of how many organisations start out on the road to Social CRM, jumping straight into a tactical approach and talking ‘at’ customers but not listening ‘to’ customers. In fact the focus should be on improving real interactions with customers.
In practical terms this means the organisation will need to implement a system and related technologies, built around an overarching ‘business’ strategy. This strategy really needs to be developed with the whole organisation in mind, as well as being understood and executed by the entire organisation, otherwise the social customer will remain elusive.
Additional definition quotes:
Mitch Lieberman: “Social CRM is about bringing “me” (the social customer) into the ecosystem… It is not about the technology, it is about the people, process and cultural shifts necessary to support and grow a business.”
Paul Greenberg: “Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”
Why does Social CRM matter?
The key here is taking CRM beyond a marketing or customer services specialism, and building a philosophy that translates across the organisation. If Social CRM is purely a function of customer services we are missing the point. In today’s socially connected world, customers can intersect and engage with an organisation at many different points, and do not follow traditional channels of communication. Therefore, A Social CRM strategy must be implemented across the business to succeed.
This has been evidenced on many occasions by customers using their networks to discuss organisations, form opinions and influence others through their experiences. This is the heart of social conversation and the essence of a social business. If an organisation’s Social CRM strategy cannot positively impact this process then it is failing, and to succeed it must be implemented across the board. For example, your sales staff may be excellent relationship managers, but if your service staff are rude and unresponsive, the overall impact will be negative.
Furthermore, we now learn from and engage with our customers more than ever before, but we can also learn from the data that social and online activities offer to us. It is important to manage this data and put it to use, as not all of the data will be relevant. In fact much of it will just be noise, but Social CRM offers us the opportunity to learn about customers, process these learnings and engaging accordingly.
How do you develop your Social CRM strategy?
If we consider that Social CRM is a method of blending social activities with the proven fundamentals of CRM, and we understand that Social CRM is part of the evolution towards the development of a more effective social business, then we are half way there.
However, we also need to focus on customer need. This need is not motivated by being a fan or friend of the organisation, but by deriving value from the customer’s engagement with the organisation.
As David Meerman Scott says: ‘Nobody cares about your products, people care about their problems. Customers do not want a relationship with your business, they want the benefits a relationship can offer to them’‘.
With that in mind, we need to translate our strategy into deliverables, and according to Esteban Kolsky, there are four key functions of Social CRM:
1. Community management (listening and engaging usefully)
2. Social analytics engine (gathering and processing data)
3. Actionable layer unit (identifying and actioning learnings)
4. System-of-record integration layer (integrating learning into the business)
Warning
Social CRM means engaging person to person. We know that using machines to “talk” with humans in the CRM context does not work. Therefore, remember it’s not about the technology, it’s about the person using it and the conversation. If we lose sight of the fundamentals and hide behind automated monitoring and response it will be the equivalent of a business leaving an answer machine to deal with customers, it won’t learn or react, it will just repeat.
Developing Social CRM
In this section, we detail the Social CRM deliverables and explain the services and focuses that organisations should be considering. There are four essential action elements and we have offered key service areas under each:
1. Listen – to customers and the wider community to understand issues and identify pain points
2. Capture – actionable and relevant data
3. Learn – develop a Social CRM philosophy across the organisation
4. Engage – using knowledge built through phases 1-3, engage in a relevant and useful manner
Let’s look at each area in more detail:
1. Listen
As with any area of social media, or any conversation for that matter, the best place to start is by listening. In terms of customer relationship management, this is essential. Organisations should only engage and add value when they have listened to and understood the problems, challenges and issues that customers are experiencing.
Listen service focuses
Digital / social infrastructure – A Social CRM campaign cannot be effective without a socially-enabled website, relevant social profiles and the ability to engage.
Before you go any further, you need to build your organisation’s Social CRM tools:
• Audit your website – are you open to customer comment/engagement/response?
• Audit your SEO – are your ‘digital touch points’ visible online?
• Audit/build social channels – are you open and available for customer engagement and listening beyond your website?
Social Media monitoring - Social CRM is often confused with Social Media Monitoring. Let’s be clear, although Social Media Monitoring is a crucial element of your Social CRM armoury, and will form a central part of the campaign, it is not enough to use monitoring alone. You must identify the relevant mentions, use the data and build that into your organisational approach. The data is only relevant if it is acted upon.
Team - Does your Social CRM response team consist of one marketing / customer services junior? This is not acceptable. Consider your customers and consider the amount of conversation about your organisation. Do you have the team to support this volume of data and conversation?
Training – Remember Social CRM is not a marketing or customer services tactic alone, your organisation needs to understand the key elements of Social CRM and act upon them. This means training and understanding needs to be implemented across the organisation.
2. Capture
Once you have the platform, processes and people in place to listen, you need to feed this infrastructure with actionable and relevant data. This is the fuel that drives the Social CRM engine and the quality of the fuel will relate directly to the effectiveness of the Social CRM process.
The first stage is to capture the data and process it into the relevant focuses for your organisation.
You will quickly realise that much of the data is irrelevant. It is crucial you do not waste time by feeding this information into the business – it will induce “analysis paralysis” as your people query and argue about irrelevant information.
Therefore, in this layer the focus is identifying and actioning the useful data that will tell the organisation something about its customers, identify issues to be remedied or help to build interactions by way of market research or insights.
Capture service focuses:
Data Capture – Social Media monitoring plays a key role here but we need to go deeper. Website analytics and data captured from customer communities will be vital, along with metrics from LinkedIn groups, sector networking tools and industry bodies.
Data Analysis – Data analysis is crucial. Do not overlook this phase as you could either strangle the process with too much data, or starve it of any useful information by only feeding it with the basics. Use experience here, make the most of your data and it will drive you to real success. If you don’t have the in-house skills, utilise experienced consultants or agencies. The value you derive from the data can be extremely powerful for the business as a whole.
3. Learn
This third layer is the key to Social CRM success, taking relationship management beyond a marketing or customer-services specialism and building a philosophy that is embedded throughout the organisation. In our experience, this is a challenging area of focus for those responsible for driving the Social CRM process.
However, by highlighting the importance of Social CRM to the management team at the outset, and explaining why organisation-wide action will be needed, this potential obstacle should be removed and a route cleared towards the goal of better customer understanding and improved service.
Learn service focuses:
Internal communication of findings – clarification and information curation is essential. There must be a process through which each piece of customer contact is automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed and influence.
This fluid process will reinforce the transformation of your business into a more open and responsive enterprise that engages successfully with online customers.
Workflow tools – these tools will ensure that information created by online customers is accessible to everyone in the organisation and precisely tuned to their specific needs. This creates a context for each social CRM interaction and will enable the social customer to engage with you in a way that is most relevant.
Business-wide social strategy – a social business strategy is the ultimate goal. Without change on an organisation-wide scale, the Social Customer will continue to be a lost opportunity and a fear factor, rather than a real opportunity to build engagement and ultimately drive value.
4. Engage
Social CRM isn’t just about engaging consistently, within a reasonable timeframe and adhering to corporate guidelines. The engagement needs to be relevant and useful, and not always in the form of a simple text-based response. Content can be used to engage without a complaint and to convey a key part of your offering. So don’t just think of engagement as a response. Think of it as an opportunity to build a conversation.
Let’s also be clear that you should not hold back from engaging until you have completed the three previous phases. Of course you need to engage before you have successfully implemented your social business strategy, otherwise it could take some time before you actually respond to your customers. However, the point remains we should not look at engagement as the quick fix or the first action point. It is important to respond to customer issues, but as we have said previously, engagement is so much more than just responding.
Engage Service focuses:
Social media engagement guidelines – These shouldn’t be an onerous book of dictations. The social media guidelines are important to communicate key aspects of the business dos and don’ts but they are not a script. The key here is ‘guideline’. We are not trying to stop our brand from engaging with humans as humans, and do not be tempted to speak in rigid legalese.
Content development – Online content is extremely powerful, from expressive video to simple slideshares and these “social assets” will make your brand more accessible, better understood, more useful. Think of content as your social currency. Build it up but don’t rely on the irrelevant and the slapdash. Quality beats quantity every time.
Not all content is the same and poor content will encourage a negative response so get the right advice from those who have done it before. Use the information from the listening phase, where you will learn exactly what it is that your online customers want, to develop the right content. You can find a recent case study example of a content community here.
Social tool management – Using social tools to monitor, extract useful information and identify points of engagement and conversation with the social customer on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social spaces is a very simple part of the process, but very easy to get wrong. Tone, frequency and subtle understanding of the organisation, underpinned by effective guidelines, will make all the difference.
Invest in experience and training and heed the many case study examples of success and failure. Allocate resource relevant to your social/digital footprint and customer base. Look outside of the business if the skills are not in-house, do not give this job to the intern, because if/when something goes wrong, blaming an intern is not a plausible excuse.
Conclusion
If you’ve reviewed this paper and ticked off the elements you want to take with you for your business or reconfirmed focuses that you have already got in place, I hope the information was useful and best of luck.
However, if you have written off Social CRM because your customers don’t act ‘that way’ – think again. Your customer is no different, you are now dealing with the social customer who doesn’t play by traditional rules and does not accept that your organisation is in charge. The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn his/her trust.
Social CRM audit
1. Listen
- Website – are you open to customer listening/engagement?
- SEO – can your digital touch points be found online?
- Social channels – are you available for customer engagement and listening outside of your direct website?
- Social Media monitoring – data is only relevant if it is acted upon.
- Team - Consider your customers and the amount of conversation about your brand. Do you have the team to support this volume of data and conversation?
- Training – Your business needs to understand the key elements of Social CRM and act upon them.
2. Capture
- Data Capture – Website analytics and data captured from every customer, and relevant community will be vital.
- Data Analysis – Understanding and knowing how to use this data is essential, otherwise you could either strangle the process with too much data, or starve it of any useful information by only feeding it with the basics.
3. Learn
- Internal communication of findings - each message should be automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type, content, sentiment, action needed and influence.
- Workflow tools – these tools will ensure that all social information created is accessible to everyone in the organisation in the same way.
- Business-wide social strategy – A social business strategy is the ultimate goal.
4. Engage
- Social media guidelines – These shouldn’t be an onerous book of dictations. The key here is ‘guideline’. Five clear points is enough.
- Content development – Think of content as your social currency and remember that quality wins over quantity every time.
- Social tool management - Tone, frequency and unwritten rules are subtleties that can make all the difference.Defining and developing Social CRM Liberate Media
March 23rd, 2012
This post has been written as a follow up to our ‘Defining Social CRM‘ post, which was developed to overview the basics of what is often a confusing but essential function for any brand that wishes to engage with the social customer.
In this post we want to look beyond defining Social CRM and offer a brief guide to developing Social CRM, identifying relevant focuses to allow you to get to grips with your brand’s requirements. But first, let’s remind ourselves of exactly what Social CRM is:
Mitch Lieberman defined it thus: “Social CRM is about bringing “me” [the social customer] into the ecosystem… It is not about the technology, it is about the people, process and cultural shifts necessary to support and grow a business.”
Or as Paul Greenberg put it: “Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”
Needless to say there has been a major shift in the way we communicate with our customers and we want to use this post to explore the technologies, people, processes and cultural shifts a little further.
In our last post, we referenced Esteban Kolsky’s four key areas of Social CRM as follows
1. Community management
2. Social analytics engine
3. Actionable layer unit
4. System-of-record integration layer
In this post we will break down each area and look at the relevant services/focuses that brands should be considering. Therefore we’ve re-developed the four key areas into the following action points, and offered key service areas under each:
1. Listen (to our customers and wider community to understand issues and identify pain points)
2. Capture (actionable and relevant data)
3. Learn (develop a Social CRM philosophy across the organisation.)
4. Engage (using knowledge built through phases 1-3, engage in a relevant and useful manner)
Let’s look at each area in more detail:
1. Listen
As with any area of social media, or any conversation for that matter, the best place to start is by listening. In terms of customer relationship management, the importance of listening cannot be over-exaggerated. We should only engage and add value when we have listened to and understood the issues that our customers are experiencing.
Services focuses/audit areas:
Digital / social infrastructure – Trying to run a Social CRM campaign without a socially-enabled website, relevant social profiles and the ability to engage is very difficult.
Before you go any further you need to build your brand’s Social CRM tools:
• Audit your website – are you open to customer listening/engagement?
• Audit your SEO – can your digital touch points be found online?
• Audit/build social channels – are you open and available for customer engagement and listening outside of your direct website?
Social Media monitoring – Social CRM is often confused with Social Media Monitoring. Let’s be clear, although Social Media Monitoring is a crucial element of your Social CRM armoury, and will form a central part of the campaign, it is not enough to use monitoring alone. You must identify the relevant mentions, use the data and build that into your organisational approach. The data is only relevant if it is acted upon.
Team - Does your Social CRM response team consist of one marketing / customer services junior? This is not acceptable. Consider your customers, consider the amount of conversation about your brand, do you have the team to support this volume of data and conversation?
Training – Remember Social CRM is not a marketing or customer services tactic alone, your business needs to understand the key elements of Social CRM and act upon them. This means training and understanding needs to be organisational.
2. Capture
Once you have the platform, processes and people in place to listen, you need to feed this infrastructure with actionable and relevant data. This is the fuel that drives the Social CRM engine and the quality of the fuel will relate directly to the effectiveness of the Social CRM process.
The first stage is to capture the data and process it into the relevant focuses for your business.
Once you have the data you will quickly realise that much of it is irrelevant. It is crucial that time is not wasted feeding this information through the business and bringing on analysis paralysis.
Therefore in this layer the focus is identifying and actioning the useful data that will tell the business something about its customers, identify issues to be remedied or help to build the business by way of market research or insights.
Services focuses/audit areas:
Data Capture - Social Media monitoring will play a key role here, but we need to go deeper. Website analytics and data captured from any customer communities will be vital along with metrics available through LinkedIn groups and associated networking tools/ industry bodies.
Data Analysis – Data analysis is crucial. Do not overlook this phase as you could either strangle the process with too much data, or starve is of any useful information by only feeding it with the basics. Use experience here, make the most of your data and it will drive you to real success. If you don’t have the in-house skills utilise experienced consultants or agencies. The value you derive from the data can be extremely powerful for the business as a whole.
3. Learn
The third layer is the key to Social CRM success, which is taking Social CRM beyond a marketing or customer services specialism, and building a philosophy that translates across the organisation. If Social CRM is purely a function of customer services we are missing the point and will ultimately fail to achieve the brand’s CRM potential.
In today’s socially connected world, customers can intersect and engage with an organisation at many different points, and social customers do not follow traditional channels of communication. Therefore, the Social CRM strategy must be implemented across the business to succeed.
Service focuses/audit areas:
Internal communications of findings – There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps to smooth the process, as you push your business towards a more open and responsive way of thinking about your customers.
Workflow tools – these tools will ensure that information created is accessible to everyone in the organisation in the same way. This creates a context for each interaction and will enable the social customer to engage with you in way that he/she finds most relevant.
Business-wide social strategy – A social business strategy is the ultimate goal. This is the heart of social conversation and the essence of a social business. If an organisation’s Social CRM strategy cannot positively impact this process then it is failing, and to succeed it must be implemented across the board.
We now learn from and engage with our customers more than ever before, but if these learnings are not translated throughout the business, we fail.
4. Engage
Social CRM isn’t just about engaging consistently, within a reasonable timeframe and adhering to corporate guidelines. The engagement needs to be relevant and useful, and not always in the form of a simple text-based response. Content can be used to engage without a complaint and to convey a key part of your offering. So don’t just think of engagement as a response. Think of it as an opportunity to build a conversation.
Let’s also be clear that you should not hold back from engaging until you have completed the three previous phases. Of course you need to engage before you have successfully implemented your social business strategy, otherwise it could take some time before we actually respond to our customers. However, the point remains we should not look at engagement as the quick fix or the first action point. It is important to respond to customer issues, but as we have said above, engagement is so much more than just responding.
Social media guidelines – These shouldn’t be an onerous book of dictations. The social media guidelines are important to communicate key aspects of the business dos and don’ts but they are not a script. The key here is ‘guideline’ we are not trying to stop our brand from engaging with humans as humans. Do not be tempted to speak in rigid legalese.
Content development – Content can be extremely powerful, from expressive video to simple slideshares, your content will make your brand more accessible, better understood and more useful. Think of content as your social currency, build it up, but don’t rely on irrelevant and slapdash content. Take quality over quantity every time. Not all content is the same, poor content will encourage a negative response, so get the right advice from those that have done it before and take the lead from the listening phase where you should understand exactly what it is that your customers want. You can find a recent case study example of a content community here.
Social tool management – this is very simple part of the process, but again it is very easy to mess up. Tone, frequency and unwritten rules are subtleties that can make all the difference. Just because someone in your team understands Facebook, it does not qualify them for the role. Invest in experience and training and heed the many case study examples of success and failure. Allocate resource relevant to your social/digital footprint and customer base. Look outside of the business if the skills are not in-house, do not give this job to the intern, because if/when something goes wrong, blaming an intern will only make the situation worse.
A thought to leave you with
If you’ve reviewed this post and ticked off the elements you want to take with you for your business or reconfirmed elements that you have already got in place, I hope the information was useful and best of luck. However, if you have written off Social CRM because your customers don’t act ‘that way’ think again. Your customer is no different, you are now dealing with the social customer who doesn’t play by traditional rules and does not accept that your brand is in charge. The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn his/her trust.
This post was not been designed as the definitive guide to each service area of Social CRM, but offers an introduction to reflect the activity required to build successful Social CRM.
To learn more about Social CRM, or if you would be interested in discussing any of the areas raised in this series of posts please get in touch.
We will also be taking part in the upcoming ‘Social Customer‘ event in London on March 29th, where we will be live blogging, so if you’re unable to attend please keep an eye on our blog for updates on the sessions and learnings.
The Fifth Wave: mobile revolution and mobile futures
March 9th, 2012
The Fifth Wave: A Strategic Vision for Mobile Internet Innovation, Investment and Return caught my attention last week and I blogged briefly on it.
The book, by Robert Marcus and Collins Hemingway, deserved a more detailed read – there were enough hooks to warrant it and I’ve spent some time this week working out the weight of the ideas they put forward.
The Fifth Wave is written for anyone who wants to know where we are going online: mobile network operators, mobile companies, entrepreneurs, governments, media companies, content owners and distributors, mobile evangelists, mobile experts… the list goes on.
But the book, to my mind, is much more than a rapid excursion around the mobile terrain. We’ve seen more than enough tomes that promise more than they deliver, rehashing old ideas in new clothes.
Robert Marcus and Collins Hemingway (who, with Bill Gates, co-authored Business @ the Speed of Thought) have written a volume that I think is rare – because it picks up on a defining moment that is obscured for most people, explains this in detail and then draws lessons from which it then lays out a path and process for the future.
The authors call this defining moment and what will follow the Fifth Wave. They use an ancient Greek concept, kiaros, to explain the idea. I urge you to read the book if only for this, because their explanation of a convergence of rapidly evolving but disparate forces – technical, cultural and economic – to form a revolutionary time is exceptional.
The Fifth Wave is, of course, mobile in every sense. Robert Marcus and Collins Hemingway run fluidly through the first half of the book, setting the scene and explaining the revolutionary conditions that we live with right now.
The second half of the book is if anything better than the first because for the first time it offers a clear exposition of what is needed and an astute strategy for everyone touched by mobile internet, from the biggest mobile operator to mobile manufacturers from Apple to Microsoft and from Samsung to HTC, to the mobile apps makers and the movers and shakers in the global market and to every mobile handset user (around 2 billion now – 6 billion soon).
I am old enough to have read Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, published in 1995. That book changed the weltanshauung of an entire generation with its definitional, cultural view of technological developments led by the Web/Internet.
The Fifth Wave: A Strategic Vision for Mobile Internet Innovation, Investment and Return is a book from the same cast and should be required reading in schools, colleges and universities. While the book should stand on its own merits, Robert Marcus was the architect of Microsoft’s early mobile internet strategy and solutions and was a director on the M&A team and now leads QuantumWave Capital, which means he’s qualified.
If you want to know where we’re at and where we’re going, then read The Fifth Wave. You could even do as I did, download it and read it on your iPhone (.. or Kindle, Android, laptop, notebook…). If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would be reading books on my mobile, I would have laughed out loud. How times change.
You can follow Robert Marcus on Twitter @RobertMarcus5W
March 7th, 2012
Social CRM is a topic that we have covered at length on this blog in the past, looking at definitions, case study examples and feedback from Social CRM events that we attend and speak at.
In our experience, the one defining characteristic of Social CRM is the range of misconceptions and misunderstandings about the core elements involved. Therefore, we have decided to pull together this post to cover off three of the key questions that we come up against when discussing Social CRM, and then build on the focus over the coming weeks.
1. What is Social CRM?:
Perhaps one of the best definitions that I’ve come across on Social CRM was from Esteban Kolsky – Founder at ThinkJar, who spoke at Social CRM 2011, London, which I attended last year. He stated: “Companies tend to start using social media to talk at their customers not to listen to them” he then defined CRM as a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology, designed to improve human interactions in a business environment.
This is a good reflection of how many organisations start out on the road to Social CRM (jumping straight into a tactical approach and talking ‘at’ customers but not listening ‘to’ customers), in comparison to where they really need to be, which is simply to focus on improving real interactions with customers.
In practical terms this means the organisation will need to implement a system and related technologies, built around an overarching ‘business’ strategy. And by business strategy, I mean a strategy that is developed with the whole business in mind, understood by the business and executed by the business.
2. Why does Social CRM matter?
The key here is taking CRM beyond a marketing or customer services specialism, and building a philosophy that translates across the organisation. If Social CRM is purely a function of customer services we are missing the point. In today’s socially connected world, customers can intersect and engage with an organisation at many different points, and do not follow traditional channels of communication. Therefore, the Social CRM strategy must be implemented across the business to succeed.
This has been evidenced on many occasions by customers discussing organisations with their networks, forming opinions and influencing others through their experiences. This is the heart of social conversation and the essence of a social business. If an organisation’s Social CRM strategy cannot positively impact this process then it is failing, and to succeed it must be implemented across the board. For example, your sales staff maybe excellent relationship managers, but if your service staff are rude and unresponsive, the overall impact will be negative.
Furthermore, we now learn from and engage with our customers more than ever before, but we can also learn from the data that social and online activities offer to us. It is important however to manage this data and put it to use, not all of the data will be useful, in fact much of it will just be noise, but social CRM offers us the opportunity to learn about customers, process these learnings and engaging accordingly.
3. How do you develop your Social CRM strategy?
If we consider that Social CRM is a method of translating social activities into the fundamentals of CRM, and in turn we understand that Social CRM is part of the evolution towards the development of a wider social business then we are half way there. However, we also need to focus on the customer need, which is not to be a fan or friend of the organisation, but to derive value from his/her engagement with the organisation. As David Meerman Scott said: ‘Nobody cares about your products, people care about their problems. Customers do not want a relationship with your business, they want the benefits a relationship can offer to them’‘.
With that in mind, we need to translate our strategy into deliverables, and according to Kolsky, there are four key functions of Social CRM:
1. Community management (listening and engaging usefully)
2. Social analytics engine (gathering and processing data)
3. Actionable layer unit (identifying and actioning learnings)
4. System-of-record integration layer (Integrating learnings into the business)
It is also important to note that a key part of Social CRM is engaging with humans as humans. Machines talking to humans rarely works, especially in terms of a meaningful conversation. Therefore, remember it’s not about the technology, it’s about the person using it and the conversation. If we lose sight of the fundamentals and hide behind automated monitoring and response it will be the equivalent of a business leaving an answer machine to deal with customers, it won’t learn or react, it will just repeat.
Further reading
You can review our previous Social CRM posts on Social CRM 2011 London here, and Vikki Chowney at eConsultancy also recently did an excellent checklist on social customer service.
If you want to learn more on the subject, and speak to those organisations and agencies involved in Social CRM, I would also recommend The Social Customer event in London on March 29th, run by Our Social Times.
The balance of power in social media relations
February 6th, 2012
The recent move to force TripAdvisor to change its marketing messages was interesting and a friend’s experience with user reviews has added to that in the past week.
My friend has an on-line passport photo business, Paspic, and he found a review that was damaging. It appeared second in the search results. The review made accusations that were, to his mind, wrong and untruthful but he was unsure of what to do.
The review site was not immediately responsive to his appeals for discussion and removal of the offending text and he had justifiable concerns that his business could be badly damaged by the continued presence of the remarks.
It was a classic case of the “little guy” against the bigger power.
In this case, the little guy won and I hope it shows some rebalancing of social media relations. The big fish can easily bully and ignore the little ones.
My friend emailed and called Google, explained his problem and his view of the legal situation. Within 24 hours the offending post had gone from the search rankings – and the offending text had been deleted from the reviews site.
Tweet limit impacts Social CRM effectiveness – just ask O2
February 1st, 2012
The development of Social CRM has been well documented over the last few years, and we have written a number of posts on the subject, sharing Liberate Media’s experiences of Social CRM campaigns.
However, a very real issue in the development of Social CRM, at least in terms of Twitter usage, was highlighted last week by O2 who exceeded their daily limit while attempting to respond to a breaking communications crisis. O2 asked Twitter for an extension on the amount of tweets it could send, (Twitter’s daily limit is 250 direct messages a day, and 1,000 tweets) but this was refused.
O2′s PR and social media campaigns manager, James Paterson, confirmed the issue at last week’s 1-2-1 Digital Strategy Summit, run by Marketing Week. In fact, he confirmed that O2 actually accrued the same amount of ‘mentions’ in one day as it does in a normal week.
If you are not familiar with the issue, O2 was attempting to respond to the news that user’s mobile phone numbers were being leaked to websites that they visited.
In the Marketing Week piece, Paterson said it was important that O2 did “not stay quietly in [its] shell” as news circulated about the data leaks and that the company employed a strategy immediately to respond to user questions and communicate that it was investigating the issue.
The mobile operator did utilise other tactics as part of its Social CRM response, i.e. preparing a “Q&A” blog post to explain the technical reasons behind the data leak and to apologise for the concern caused.
Paterson said: “We wanted to respond to as many people as possible with fair answers. In the past we may have just given a Q&A to the well-known media outlets, but our people understand that if you answer queries and communicate to people on social media straight away, problems tend to be resolved more quickly.”
However, although O2 followed a clear strategy for its response, it was hindered by Twitter’s account limit.
Twitter has commented on the limit issue: “Limits alleviate some of the strain on the behind-the-scenes part of Twitter, and reduce downtime and error pages. For the sake of reliability, we’ve placed some limits on account actions like following, API requests, direct messages, and updates.”
“The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.”
These rules obviously reduce the effectiveness of Social CRM response mechanisms for large brands, although in fairness Twitter was not designed as a CRM channel, therefore it has no responsibility to look out for such problems.
However, as Twitter continually looks towards brands to bolster its revenue strategy, it’s likely that it will not only expand this function, but also charge for it, a charge that i’m sure the majority of brands would be willing to pay.
In this instance O2 responded to a breaking issue well, and tried to be open by answering as many of its customer tweets as possible, but this was quickly curtailed when Twitter would not allow any further tweets that day.
This issue, and the others that are sure to follow, further highlight a real flaw in many social CRM strategies, while also drawing attention to a revenue opportunity for Twitter. If Twitter is not already working on a paid response they are likely to be jumping on it rapidly in the near future.
Google changes the rules and upsets Twitter, among others
January 12th, 2012
Earlier this week Google announced a number of changes, which apply to the U.S. only at this stage, and are designed to accelerate personal search, and move towards social search.
The three changes fall under the following categories:
First: Personal results, aimed at helping you to find more relevant to…well…you.
Second: Profiles in search, meaning you can more easily identify people you’re close to or want to follow.
Third: People and pages, which focuses on helping you to find profiles and Google+ pages related to memes or topics of interest.
The additions offer more meaningful ways to connect with people around you, straight from the search results.
This all sounds well and good, and personalising and or customising results to be more relevant can only be more positive, can’t it?
Many commentators such as the Guardian and BBC have picked up on the other side effect of these changes which is to make Google+ much more relevant. For example, when you search for information, particularly about individuals, results from the social network will be prominently displayed on the first page of results, assuming you are a member.
That makes Google+ a much more attractive social network, as users will see fewer results from outside it when they search for information.
As you might expect, Twitter has offered its opinion on the issue, as it has perhaps the most to lose. Twitter’s lead lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, called it a “bad day for the internet“, and suggested – as a former Google employee – that there would have been dissent internally “at search being warped this way“.
Twitter later made a formal statement: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet.
“As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users.”
Others have also criticised the change, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land commented: “Search engines are supposed to send you away to the best information, even if they don’t have their own in stock. Google has previously been excellent at providing links to the most suitable information.
“Today’s change is one of the few times where I’m thinking ‘What the hell are you doing, Google?’”
Getting to the heart of the matter, Google was always going to find a way to move its social network, which is so far behind the game, to the front. Its best strategy to achieve this is to link its social network more closely to its search engine, which is after all the most popular in the U.S and Europe. But is that fair?
Google’s decision to favour Google+ posts which would not rank highly by its normal criteria (defined by the number of “authoritative” pages on the web linking to it) could suggest that it is favouring its own product in order to grow it more quickly. That in turn could breach antitrust (or competition) laws.
Twitter and Facebook content does not generally appear in Google search results because neither site provides Google with unlimited access to their content.
Twitter formerly had an agreement in which Google paid for access to index its database directly, but Twitter chose not to renew the agreement, according to a statement placed on Google+ by an official Google account, which said it was “a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments” because “they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer“.
Although these changes are likely to head to Europe eventually, the Guardian piece suggests Google may have to think twice about introducing the changes over here because it has a greater share of search in European countries, meaning a ruling on it affecting the market is more likely, and also if the changes extend to results on Android phones, then it may face more urgent calls for an antitrust investigation.
This wouldn’t be the first time that there has been a call for Google to be investigated on such grounds, but if these changes do come to Europe as expected, we could be on the verge of a few interesting legal actions.
Do you own your social profile?
January 5th, 2012
Recently the issue of social profile ownership has come to the fore with the very public case
of Noah Kravitz, a blogger based in California who is being sued by his former employer, PhoneDog, which is seeking damages because he failed to relinquish his Twitter account when he left the company to work for a rival.
This probably sounds ridiculous, but we have already experienced a similar case in the UK as far back as 2008, when a recruitment consultant working for Hays, Mark Ions, was ordered to give the rights to his LinkedIn account to his former employer. The court ruled that information of a confidential nature was collected during his work and that the company deserved to have full access to his account. Conversely, last year the BBC’s chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg moved from the BBC to ITV and took her Twitter account, which had 58,000 followers with her. The BBC did not seek legal ownership of her account, although there was discussion of the issue elsewhere.
You may think this is a crazy conversation considering the social profiles were in the individual’s name, but the employers have a good argument if the profiles were used solely, or at least for the majority of time, for work purposes, contain work-based contacts and in effect represent the individual’s record of work-based conversations.
That’s not to say I agree with the ruling, far from it, but we need to be aware of the slow moving legal response to fast moving technologies. In other words, the law doesn’t move as quickly as social media, so expect rulings to be based on the most sensible work-based comparison, which generally would have remained the property of the employer after the employee left, e.g. customer files and or contact books. That being said, one would hope that in most cases our social profiles represent a mixture of personal and work-based discussion, so we should not see ownership battles ongoing between employers and employees, and of course this issue could have been avoided if relevant social media guidelines were in place.
It would be interesting to see the outcome of a similar case in a PR, digital or social agency, and how that might affect future norms between employers and employees across the sector. However, so far it seems common sense has prevailed, or perhaps policy has won the day.
In the current PhoneDog case, the company has said that it is taking the action because it had invested in growing the number of followers that Mr Kravitz had on Twitter and the account was its property, alleging that those followers are, in effect, a customer list and PhoneDog’s property. The company wants Kravitz to pay $340,000: $2.50 per follower per month for 18 months.
PhoneDog was quoted in the New York Times saying: “We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands.”
Jon Rettinger, President, TechnoBuffalo (Noah’s current employer) responded with the following statement: “I have remained silent on the issue, privately supporting Noah, hoping that this issue would be resolved. However, further reflection and consultation has made me realize the time for silence is over. TechnoBuffalo is a news outlet, and this situation quite clearly has become news. We stand firmly behind Noah, disagree with the frivolous suit PhoneDog has filed, and hope swift justice will be served. This equates to school yard bullying, and should be met with disgust by the world. We stand behind our employees as we would family. Noah has the full support of the Herd. I urge you all to speak up!”
A hearing in the case, PhoneDog LLC v. Kravitz, is scheduled for January 26 in San Francisco and I expect some interesting responses from organisations across the world, in terms of tightening up policies, whatever the outcome.