The Jury Is In – CEO Choose Big Data Over Social Media

A new study by McKinsey & Company reveals that less risky and potentially more beneficial realm of Big Data software is a higher priority today than social media integration. The study consisted of 1,500 surveyed CEOs, CFOs and CIOs between April 3 and April 12, 2012.

Almost 50% of respondents stated that they are currently using Big Data to “understand their customers better”, whereas 32% stated they are using social media for “interaction and promotion purposes.” The survey also found:

— 13% did not consider Big Data a priority, so far as stating it was “not on the agenda”
— Over 50% state that flexible delivery platforms are a priority for the next 1-2 business years
— 19% of respondents have deployed digital marketing practices across the enterprise
— 4% used location-based software to target customer promotions

The study also found:

— 52% believe that organizational structures not designed to take advantage of either Big Data or social media priorities 
— 51% say that lack of technology infrastructure and IT systems are a significant challenge
— 43% and 31% are having difficulty in finding functional and IT talent, respectively 

Big Data and social media do not ave to be mutually exclusive. A number of businesses are beginning to integrate the two, using Big Data solutions to analyze business content based on their social media activity.

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Social Media – Math and Science Are Trumping Art

Curtis Hougland, the CEO of Attention (PR firm), spoke at Wire’s Disruptive By Design Conference about social media strategies being used by marketers (see video of speech here). He has an outstanding understanding of what social media is and isn’t, but more importantly how it is reshaping advertising and marketing industry. 

Beth Carter also covered the session and noted these take aways: 

1. Social media is technology: “We argue the opposite,” said Hougland. Instead, “social media is biology and consumer behavior.” He cited the addictive qualities that we display when we check our e-mail and our texts: “Dopamine is being released in our brain, which is the same process an addict goes through. Without this, we feel lonely.” His advice, then, for marketers, is to relate to consumers at a really personal level.

 This is a key observation that biology and sociology are at the core of social media. 

2. Social media is a bubble: Hougland would argue that it is “absolutely” a bubble, and that social media is going to alter the marketing landscape for years. Media behavior doesn’t drive consumer behavior, it is reflective of consumer behavior.

Advertiser and marketers need to better appreciate that they can only add to a community, but not shape it. 

3. Brand matters more: Social media is actually largely dilutive of brand. When we share a brand to our friends, it’s our brand — people matters more than a corporate brand. Your brand is nine times more important than the opinion of a stranger. Brands see erosion if they don’t adhere to this. Brands needs to create a one-to-one relationship with everyone in the world.

 Again, this goes back to understanding the fundamental of influencing people through psychology and sociology.

4. The web site is the center of the customer journey: The customer journey is alinear, and we don’t know the zero moment. The world is social, and we must socialize every step of the customer journey, leaving no dead ends. The average attention span has shrunk in 10 years from 14 minutes to four, which should change everything we do in marketing. “Influence is Money Ball for marketers,” said Hougland. “We can measure campaigns in real-time through social data.”

With attention span exponentially decreasing, no single event will effectively shape an individual opinion. As such, one needs to think about the complete social value chain in terms of multiple points of contact.

5. Great creative drives disruption: Science and math are trumping art, and social media is the world’s biggest focus group — data will decide creative decisions. Your marketing organization may be digital but not social. The best model we found is to organize your brand like a social network, and the companies who use social data in real time for feedback are running better businesses.

This is so true, math and science are now trumping art, and is why big data is becoming the primary delivery means through which social media will be valued.

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5 Levels of Social Media Maturity

If you have an interest in creating a social enterprise based on social media and network capabilities, the you should checkout this Oldie but Goldie article 2011 article “Accelerating Your Social Maturity,” by Sean Corcoran and Christine Spivey Overby.” In it they describe 5 maturity levels of social media adoption that every enterprise to be aware of: 

Where

>> Experience. If your company isn’t using any social applications, then you can’t even reach an early stage of maturity. But it’s not just implementing technologies; it’s also documenting and sharing learnings across the organization

>> Resources. Social maturity requires new responsibilities and skills. Not only are new people needed to manage technologies and the conversation created, but many current employees will need training and guidelines.

>> Process. You can plan and organize for social applications, but if you haven’t created the workflow for how to manage them, then you cannot advance.

>> Measurement. Valuing social tools and contributions is critical.

>> Commitment. To mature, management must commit by creating a companywide vision and developing a long-term plan for empowering employees and customers.6.

>> Culture. A socially empowered culture is both top-down and bottom-up. Senior management sets the social priorities relative to other strategic programs. At the same time, the groundswell must also take hold organically with more employees buying into the benefi

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Special Report: Future Customer Service – The Rise of the Social Customer

Dr. Andrew Currah, Social Media Leadership Forum, in conjunction with Natalie Cowen, Head of Brand and Communications at first direct, has just release a excellent report, “Future Customer Service: The Rise of the Social Customer.” The report looks into the role playedby social media within the evolving landscape of customer service.While commissioned by first direct, it is based on the insights of executives, technologists and theoretical experts across the fields of customer service and social media.

The report recommends that leaders in companies need to support the move to social business

• Make themselves more visible, especially when public crises occur.
• Provide all employees with the training, tools and authority to engage with customers.
• Look beyond standard metrics to the value of brand loyalty, advocacy and a sense of community.

Currah explains that building the social enterprise will rely on a combination of cultural, functional and technical changes. He uses the graphic below as a visual framework, which identifies the key components of the social enterprise with respect to customer service.

The key point is that social CRM technologies are integral to every level of the customer service model in a social enterprise. However, the key is the “realtime flowof information between the customer service operation and the rest of the social enterprise.” In doing so, service organizations are equipped with the right information, at the right time, that is necessary to sustain the customer relationship.

The report also emphasizes the importance of CRM software as a means to harness the collective knowledge within the company.

• The customer service operation is equipped to monitor and engage with a targeted spectrum of media.
• Companies fully understand where, why and how their customers are using social media before making any changes
• A balance is struck across different types of media – telephone, email, web, social and mobile.
• The power of online communities is recognised, and customers are encouraged to help each other.
• Relationships are nurtured with advocates who wield particular influence on the Internet.
• Specialist tools are used to measure the impact of customers’ online activity

The report concludes with a belief that the social media will become the center piece of modern customer service activities. Currah say that the “rise of the social customer has powered a broader transition to the social enterprise, which is seeking to emulate the speed and simplicity of the social web.”

 

 

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Social Media Finally Gets Paying Customers

While these are powerful statistics that speak for themselves, Alexia Nielsen, Social Media, has written a great article that briefly highlights there meaning of this Pew Internet study. The bottom line is:

– 65% of online adults use social networking sites, and most describe their experiences in positive terms.

– Two-thirds of adult internet users (65%) now say they use a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn, up from 61% one year ago. That’s more than double the percentage that reported social networking site usage in 2008 (29%).

– More half of all adults (50%) use social networking sites.

So, what does this mean to the average company? A lot. For the first time, the majority of people who are using social media have money. That’s right – they HAVE MONEY.

We are no longer talking about kids and young adults chatting away with their friend (AKA FaceBook). You can social market to them all day long, but capturing 100% of a market that has $0, still gives you Zero Revenue.

We now have a opportunity to help mature communities solve their needs and potentially make money at it. This is a good position to be in, if you are listening to your communities, have a great product/service, and are in a position to deliver it at an acceptable price.

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Social Media: Emergence of Real Value

Social media adoption has seen an exponential growth over the past few years.  YouTube is now the second-largest search engine on the Web; 50 percent of its 300 million users visit the site at least once a week.  Facebook usage is up 40 percent over 2010, with 65 million users accessing their pages through mobile devices and 2.5 billion photos being uploaded to Facebook each month.  Nearly 96 percent of 18- to 35-year-olds in the U.S. participate in some form of social network, with one in five Americans in that age bracket using Twitter.  Finally, 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations, driving user-generated content accounting for 25 percent of search results for the world’s 20 largest brands.

These impressive, as well as amazing, statistics are now driving the way businesses are looking at social media.  Two years ago, you would have been hard pressed to find any large-scale corporate implementation of social media.  Today, companies like Best Buy and Jet Blue are more than leading the way; they have clearly defined how to perform at scale through transforming customer sentiment into profitable top-line revenue.

Social media is now turning into social business.  Through geographically-based push technology, businesses are looking over the next 12-18 months to Foursquare for their consumer-oriented products/services, proactively pushing real-time, instant-access sales.  With 70 percent of organizations banning access to outside social media networks, in 2012 we will see the mobile platform (smart phone, tablet) establishing its dominance as the connected mesh that keeps the social/business network together.

Social Media is more than just a trend.  What we are seeing is the emergence of stable and mature capabilities (business process and supporting technology) that are driving real, measurable business value.  It is an ideal time to start looking into social media strategies and policies, and to take advantage of the innovation and early adopter efforts that laid the ground work for Social Media 3.0.

Please check out other blog articles at LiquidHub.

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The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing

Aliza Sherman has an excellent new book on the dynamics of crowdsourcing, The Complete Idot’s GUide to Crowding. While I have never been crazy about “Idiot” guides to anything, this book is far from a guide on an idiot would use. As Sherman points out, crowdsourcing leverages social networking ecosystems and tools, as Facebook and Twitter, in order to tap into the power of many people. In this guide, Sherman explains not only the the theory, but athed practice of crowdsourcing and actually shows readers how to use it. 
• A practical, prescriptive guide for those who want to put the ideas in such books as The Wisdom of Crowds and Here Comes Everybody into action.
• Step-by-step instructions. 
• Insightful anecdotes from the world of crowdsourcing.

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FIELD NOTE: The Enterprise Social Media Adoption Path – The Missing Phase

Just reviewing John Bells article “The Enterprise Social Media Adoption Path” with a client. While mostly correct (Phase 1 -4), I noted that he was missing the last, possibly most important phase. That phase is the Optimization Phase.

While I will be writing on this, and the other phases, in more detail over the next couple of weeks, it is important to note a few characteristics now.

The Optimization Phase (Phase 5) is where value realization (e.g., revenue, margin, customer sat, survival, etc.) is achieved and is based on the data collections and analytics of Phase 4. In this phase, the enterprise social media platform, levering solutions like ListenLogic and Radian6, is now connected with customer facing mobility capabilities that offer solutions/products/services based on location, mobility, and context-aware delivery capabilities (e.g., Foursquare).

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How to be successful with Social Media – Preliminary Findings

By their nature, social media programs do not achieve the business result expected from other IT and marketing programs. The primary reason is because we lack the ability to control the social network (customers, partners, doctors, lawyers, etc.) and have limited meaningful social media metrics. Significant research has been conducted in this area (see Social Media ROI: Socialnomics) and we, as a community, have begun to identify those necessary (without them you fail) and sufficient (with enough you might succeed) characteristics for effective social media programs.

While still preliminary, three of the many necessary characteristics needed to achieve expected business results for most social media implementations are: implementable enterprise social media architecture (about the what), executable social media maturity model (the who and when), and driving everything through a coherent IT strategy (how). In some form or fashion, these three capabilities need to be addressed in the beginning in order to prevent the failure of most enterprise social media programs.

Once established, a social media platform implementation needs to be based on sufficient characteristics like tools-agnostic enterprise grade platforms that are scalable (maintain their performance as more media is consumed), extensible (does not require re-architecting as new social computing and networks are added),  sustainable (not dependent on people) strategies and implementations that are designed for both internal and external value return (revenue growth, sentiment management, message awareness, presence development, etc.). The good news is there are many path to success at this level, affording a staged TCO-based implementation that reduces any single onetime investment.

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Drive Revenue Through Social Media – Show Me the Money!

 

I was working with a colleague this week, helping them think through their social media strategy. While you can never truly capture the entire context of the discussion, here are a few points I thought where notable enough to share:

1. A social media strategy needs to have a purpose and, for me, that is to generate revenue. I think there are two kinds of social media constructs, personal and corporate. You see the personal stuff everyday, this is the “Just had breakfast” tweets or the “Reading Data Structures and Algorithms text” status update in Facebook. Interesting, has its place, but doesn’t play the electric bill or send the kids to college.

2. Corporate social media constructs, the second type, are often designed to engage a community in order to drive revenue. Or so the theory goes. After studying the contents of different types of social media, I have must stay that most lack any real cause and effect relationship between the media and the revenue. Translated, seems to be a lot of effort, without showing a lot of results.

3. Create Content. As they say, content is king, but it should be the Money King. There are at least three important content areas: physical stuff you sell (e.g., DVDs, Cloths, Books, etc.), rich media content about the stuff you sell (Youtube spots), and blog articles that connect the stuff you sell with other important stuff. While blogs usually are textual in nature, we eventually want to add lots of other rich media content to them as well (e.g., audio, video, pictures). Key things:

— Be consistent in your blogging and writing something new at LEAST once per week . Read the notes and watch the Science of Blogging webinar I reviewed.

— Make sure the content is readable in 2-3 mins (no more than 3-4 paragraphs). People get boarded too quick these days and if they want to read a book, they will buy one.

— Make the content INTERESTING. People want the inside scope, something they can’t get by just doing a Google search, so give it to them.

— link, Link, LINK to the other websites, especially other real people.

— Make sure to add “Subscribe by email” functionality the blog so that you can communicate with directly.

4. Tweet: Once you have ample blog articles, one need to begin tweeting.

— Tell people what you are up to and create an element of expectation. You can also include events that are important to the industry and your company in particular. If it is about an event, then blog about it so you can link to it.

— Tell people some new about your company’s area of interest. For example, if you company sells jazz music, then it could focus on the jazz industry. Any communication that references a musician, for example, should include their tweet address. For example, a tweet from studiojams could look like:

“Awesome inside discussion with @brianculbertson during #jazz session. Make sure to check it out http://tinyurl.com/shorturl”

— Coordinate your tweets with other third party material referenced in the blog. For example, for the music company, the artists cited in the blog so they make sure to retweet. For example, Brian Culbertson would retweet:

“Great Job!. RT @mycompany Awesome inside discussion with @brianculbertson during #jazz session. Make sure to check it out http://tinyurl.com/shorturl”

5. REMEMBER: The goal in tweeting is to drive people to either the blog (#1) or the website (#2). The goal of the blog is to eventually drive the reader to the website (#1). Finally, the goal of the website is to, that’s right – lets say it together, MAKE MONEY!!

 

 

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