Once upon a time (about a year ago), a client declared that their new focus would be improving the consumer experience. One executive wanted to know how to use social media to achieve this goal, although they sold through a global distributor network and did not deal directly with the consumer.
So we scoured discussion forums and blogs and other social media sites to learn what consumers liked, didn't like and wanted. Then we asked the distributors what they thought. How could the manufacturer better support them so that they could better support the consumer? Consumers, we discovered, wanted shorter repair time; they wanted repairs done right the first time, and they wanted leading edge information about the newest features and upgrades. Delivering those benefits correlated with higher consumer satisfaction and lower churn. Dealers wanted help.
We created a social media strategy and a new operating model that promised to give the dealers the tools to fuel their passion and to provide the experience the consumer wanted.
But the systems in place weren't "broken." Why "fix" them? How could we convince the majority of the executive team that the best approach was using social media platforms rather than call centers or road shows? We developed a business case.
We told stories.
With clip art and enthusiasm, we wrote and illustrated a series of vignettes. Carey and Caroline Consumer went through each stage of the customer lifecycle -- from becoming interested in the product through to purchasing, warranty repair issues, and ultimately deciding whether to upgrade, stay with the status quo, or move to a competitor. At each point in the customer lifecycle, we illustrated how the proposed social media would affect the process; how it helped to shape the consumer experience, and how it influenced measurable outcomes.
We presented the stories to the C-suite. No power point decks with bulleted lists, we used one-act plays and dramatic readings. We employed imagination plus some prototypes and mock-ups. It was fun; it was often times funny, and it drove home the value of the proposed social media strategy.
We hear a good deal about telling stories in social media. But the stories are usually about how other companies are succeeding, not visionary tales about the impact of social media inside our own organization.
Be creative. Show and tell. The inside story can be powerful.
What stories have you told?
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Forget the 4 Ps of Marketing; Think the 3 Cs of Social Business
How can a traditional marketing culture cope in the new social world of business? It can't.
Classical marketing, still taught at most business schools, misses the point. The 4 Ps that have defined marketing activity for so long - Product, Price, Place, Promotion - work when companies and customers participate in binary communications: company to customers, customer to company. But in a multi-channel world, inbound and outbound conversations exist for everyone, at any time, to anyone.
The 3 Cs of Social Business: Content, Customer, Channel
Social media is about engagement and relationships, two inherently unmanageable activities. Product, price, place and promotion might drive short-term results, but long-term relationships evolve from communities of interest, from respectful discussions, and from connections that cross and take unexpected paths. Those relationships create self-regenerating marketing engines, whether the core business is B2B, B2C or B2B2C. The basic building blocks are no longer the 4 Ps of marketing, but the 3 Cs of social business.
Content - is both the message and the words, pictures, sounds and context that convey your message. In a social relationship, content is the driver of engagement and often involves multiple messages, messages that get passed along (remember the old game of telephone?), and messages that are either much shorter or much longer than the traditional marketing message. Your content imparts not only information, but also the culture of your organization. As in any relationship, the customer needs to like you, or at least respect you, before engaging. Consistency in messaging over time and across business units and corporate silos is critical and impossible to manage. Content creation expands way beyond the old world Marketing Department.
Customer - Who is your target customer??? The holy grail of marketing used to be to identify your target customer segments, then align the 4 Ps around them. But customers have become peripatetic; they roam from one community of interest to another - both personal and professional; they surf blogs and tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube; they share what they find interesting with individuals outside your target segments. And then one of these people you hadn't targeted is suddenly a fan and pushing you into segments even further afield from your "target." In The Domino Project (see http://bit.ly/pEu1ta), Seth Godin suggests that publishers stop publishing books with a target audience in mind, "...the glory days of publishing to fill a niche are gone...The new frontier is to publish books that spread." Today, Marketing needs to let customers declare themselves first, then service those customers as effectively as possible.
Channel - Social media channels present a spaghetti web of connections. While advanced analytics are enabling more personalization, serving up ads for instance only to individuals who meet certain criteria, social media can also make it more difficult to engage. In the old B2B world, for example, personal knowledge of customers was a sales role, not a marketing perspective. Yet, effective use of social media channels requires knowing your customers. Where do they hang out on-line? In what social media communities? What Twitter hashtags do they follow? How do you humanize your organization to become part of the customer's personal network? Does your culture mesh with your customer's personal and professional cultures? Where you socialize is itself a message and a determinant of the customers likely to find you. Who within your organization can comfortably participate in these communities?
The 3 Cs of Social Media reflect the basic change demanded of Marketing and the role of Marketing in your organization.
How is your Marketing Department changing? Does it still exist?
Classical marketing, still taught at most business schools, misses the point. The 4 Ps that have defined marketing activity for so long - Product, Price, Place, Promotion - work when companies and customers participate in binary communications: company to customers, customer to company. But in a multi-channel world, inbound and outbound conversations exist for everyone, at any time, to anyone.
The 3 Cs of Social Business: Content, Customer, Channel
Social media is about engagement and relationships, two inherently unmanageable activities. Product, price, place and promotion might drive short-term results, but long-term relationships evolve from communities of interest, from respectful discussions, and from connections that cross and take unexpected paths. Those relationships create self-regenerating marketing engines, whether the core business is B2B, B2C or B2B2C. The basic building blocks are no longer the 4 Ps of marketing, but the 3 Cs of social business.
Content - is both the message and the words, pictures, sounds and context that convey your message. In a social relationship, content is the driver of engagement and often involves multiple messages, messages that get passed along (remember the old game of telephone?), and messages that are either much shorter or much longer than the traditional marketing message. Your content imparts not only information, but also the culture of your organization. As in any relationship, the customer needs to like you, or at least respect you, before engaging. Consistency in messaging over time and across business units and corporate silos is critical and impossible to manage. Content creation expands way beyond the old world Marketing Department.
Customer - Who is your target customer??? The holy grail of marketing used to be to identify your target customer segments, then align the 4 Ps around them. But customers have become peripatetic; they roam from one community of interest to another - both personal and professional; they surf blogs and tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube; they share what they find interesting with individuals outside your target segments. And then one of these people you hadn't targeted is suddenly a fan and pushing you into segments even further afield from your "target." In The Domino Project (see http://bit.ly/pEu1ta), Seth Godin suggests that publishers stop publishing books with a target audience in mind, "...the glory days of publishing to fill a niche are gone...The new frontier is to publish books that spread." Today, Marketing needs to let customers declare themselves first, then service those customers as effectively as possible.
Channel - Social media channels present a spaghetti web of connections. While advanced analytics are enabling more personalization, serving up ads for instance only to individuals who meet certain criteria, social media can also make it more difficult to engage. In the old B2B world, for example, personal knowledge of customers was a sales role, not a marketing perspective. Yet, effective use of social media channels requires knowing your customers. Where do they hang out on-line? In what social media communities? What Twitter hashtags do they follow? How do you humanize your organization to become part of the customer's personal network? Does your culture mesh with your customer's personal and professional cultures? Where you socialize is itself a message and a determinant of the customers likely to find you. Who within your organization can comfortably participate in these communities?
The 3 Cs of Social Media reflect the basic change demanded of Marketing and the role of Marketing in your organization.
How is your Marketing Department changing? Does it still exist?
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Internal Social Networs - Behavioral Change Before ROI
Intranets are everywhere, and companies are rapidly adding social networking features - wikis, blogs, tagging... Yet satisfaction with these tools is stunningly low. Prescient Digital reports that only 23% of executives rate 2.0 tools as good or very good, and 38% rate them as poor or very poor. (http://ww.prescientdigital.com/articles/intranet-articles/intranet-2-0-becomes-mainstream)
Technically, a LOT of good tools are out there. So what's going on???
Maybe in a few cases. But overall it's not execution or the lack of a plan or business case that is the problem. The problem is the core need to justify internal networks with business cases. ROI is critical, and I have written about it many times (see, for instance, http://bit.ly/internalROI), but the anticipated ROI will not be realized if the social network does not reflect fundamental shifts in organizational and interpersonal behavior.
The objective of social media is lifestyle, not initiatives (http://bit.ly/kYsQ6u). And lifestyle within the corporate walls needs to change before internal or external social media strategies have lasting and measurable value.
When Starbuck's introduced MyStarbucksIdea.com, the driver was CEO Howard Shultz's belief that the company needed to reconnect with its customers. Look at the site (really, even for non-coffee drinkers, it is a great site). Yes, Starbuck's is engaging its customers. It is also engaging its baristas, those rarely listened-to front-line employees who see it all, who talk to and listen to customers, who execute the policies and operational procedures and know what works and what doesn't. Effective social media ignores hierarchy and organizational silos. The results probably do drive greater employee efficiency, but that is a by-product of the new social lifestyle.
One of my favorite corporate activities was the "feel good" campaign by Canadian credit union Servus. Servus gave 20,000 people $10 CDN and asked them to create a "Feel Good Ripple" by giving the money to someone else. Buy flowers for the grocery store cashier; buy coffee for the person behind you in line at the drive-thru; give $10 for a lunch to a homeless shelter. (http://www.springwise.com/financial_services/feelgoodripple/)
To have a positive impact, internal social network initiatives similarly have to change the interpersonal dynamic.
What has your organization done to make the intranet a lifestyle change agent?
Technically, a LOT of good tools are out there. So what's going on???
- Tools increase efficiency
- Tools improve productivity
- Tools make it easier for employees to find information and the experts they need
- Tools alone don't work
Maybe in a few cases. But overall it's not execution or the lack of a plan or business case that is the problem. The problem is the core need to justify internal networks with business cases. ROI is critical, and I have written about it many times (see, for instance, http://bit.ly/internalROI), but the anticipated ROI will not be realized if the social network does not reflect fundamental shifts in organizational and interpersonal behavior.
The objective of social media is lifestyle, not initiatives (http://bit.ly/kYsQ6u). And lifestyle within the corporate walls needs to change before internal or external social media strategies have lasting and measurable value.
When Starbuck's introduced MyStarbucksIdea.com, the driver was CEO Howard Shultz's belief that the company needed to reconnect with its customers. Look at the site (really, even for non-coffee drinkers, it is a great site). Yes, Starbuck's is engaging its customers. It is also engaging its baristas, those rarely listened-to front-line employees who see it all, who talk to and listen to customers, who execute the policies and operational procedures and know what works and what doesn't. Effective social media ignores hierarchy and organizational silos. The results probably do drive greater employee efficiency, but that is a by-product of the new social lifestyle.
One of my favorite corporate activities was the "feel good" campaign by Canadian credit union Servus. Servus gave 20,000 people $10 CDN and asked them to create a "Feel Good Ripple" by giving the money to someone else. Buy flowers for the grocery store cashier; buy coffee for the person behind you in line at the drive-thru; give $10 for a lunch to a homeless shelter. (http://www.springwise.com/financial_services/feelgoodripple/)
To have a positive impact, internal social network initiatives similarly have to change the interpersonal dynamic.
- Reward employees for sharing what went wrong so that others can learn.
- Reward people for helping others when it didn't affect their own jobs.
- Have people track how much time the intranet saved them, and allow them to donate that time to help someone else.
What has your organization done to make the intranet a lifestyle change agent?
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
How Social Networks Redefine Distributor-Manufacturer Relationships
Many years ago, P&G brought consumers into the conversation through the use of coupons. Then Intel, a high-tech engineering company, pushed this idea further and created a consumer image. Intel didn’t sell directly to consumers, but it created consumer loyalty and demand for its products. From far down the traditional supply chain, Intel reached around to the other end – the consumer.
Social media networks are now redefining the manufacturer-distributor-retailer-consumer chain from a series of sequential links to a circle of collaboration. Distributors are still critical; they still provide primary sales and support to consumers. Manufacturers, however, can use social networks to provide a great deal more assistance to distributors while creating stronger recognition and greater customer loyalty for their brands.
The top 5 opportunities are business-based, not channel- or tool-based. New apps and new channels can slide into execution plans to help meet business goals. And that is critical, because you don’t need a Facebook strategy; you need a business strategy. So how can social networks help manufacturers who rely on distributors?
v Locate parts and products – When customers contact a distributor for a part, they often need it now (or an hour ago). Few distributors, however, keep a full-line of parts in stock, and manufacturers might be OOS as well, particularly for older models. Of the several ways that manufacturers can address this issue, two stand out for me.
o Manufacturer-hosted forums for distributors provide a central location and parts exchange opportunity. Especially when distributors are geographically dispersed, they welcome the opportunity to reach out on a one-to-many rather than one-to-one basis. It’s more efficient; it creates new distributor-to-distributor relationships and greater engagement, and it solves problems.
o Pro-active notifications help avoid crisis situations. Wholesale Pallet Rack Products acquired some Prest Lock 1 frames and beams after Excel Storage Products went out of business. Joshua Smith, director of sales and operations at Wholesale Pallet’s sister company AK Material Handling Systems, tweeted to WPRP’s dealers that they had the Prest Rack beams. As Smith tells it, “it turns out one of our dealers had a customer that had recently damaged its uprights with a forklift. We were able to provide the dealer with the product in less than 48 hours.” Happy dealer. Happy customer. Sale made. (For more, see www.themhedajournal.org)
v Provide point-of-purchase customer assistance – Social media is mobile, which means that consumers can – and do – access information at the time of purchase. Flurry Analytics recently reported that people spend more time on mobile applications than on the web each day, 81 minutes vs. 74 minutes. According to LightSpeed Research (http://bit.ly/bizreport) almost 2/3 of consumers put heavy emphasis on product reviews, and over 2/3 say that 2 negative reviews would deter them from purchasing. Jordan Winery is taking advantage of these trends. The winery has built custom videos for digital wine menus, most prevalent at high-end restaurants. In about 2-minutes, Jordan’s winemaker describes his wine’s profile just when a customer is preparing to choose a bottle to order. Chicago Cut Steakhouse uses iPad menus loaded with a Jordan video, and Jordan reports that “within 45 days, our sales at the restaurant increased 17 percent.”
Dry Creek Vineyard is putting QR codes on its wine bottles, enabling customers in the wine aisle of a grocery to scan the code and be brought to a Dry Creek Vineyard webpage. (For more on wine industry social innovations, http://bit.ly/pressdemocrat)
Just-in-time information can be used in many situations – from car dealerships to electronics purchases. The information gives consumers confidence, gives the manufacturer a competitive edge, and makes it easier for dealers to close a sale.
v Spotlight the experts – You don’t have to know everything, but being the go-to location for expertise keeps customers and dealers engaged, and ultimately buying and selling. Manufacturer-hosted forums and blogs provide a unique opportunity to create communities that actively involve a range of stakeholders.
o In-house experts – Your engineers and back-office experts provide humanity and a face for your organization. Allowing them to have individual blogs on the corporate website also helps the employees establish their professional brands.
o Hobbyists and enthusiasts – Bring the most knowledgeable of these folks onto your site. Let them share their knowledge, answer questions, and raise ideas. Raise their profile and your own.
o Dealers – Front-line dealers have tremendous vision into the market, competitors, and product. Give them a voice. As smaller businesses, dealers often lack the time or resources to set up their own digital and social networks, but they welcome the venue that manufacturers can offer.
element14 (www.element14.com), built for electronic design engineers, brings together all of these various stakeholders. One of my favorite aspects is the use of YouTube, allowing people to showcase skills and techniques. The Ben Heck Show (http://bit.ly/e14benheck) is part of the element 14 community, yet it’s unique and fun and often fascinating. Take a look at Ben Heck’s Remote Expedition Camera Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coMZY5FNado). It’s the type of exchange that simply wouldn’t happen without element14 and social media.
v Improve dealer “help desk” functions – Forums that allow questions and answers to be easily searched, that put internal experts in touch with dealers, and that enable dealers to help one another drive down call center costs and improve the information flow. I addressed this in a previous post, http://bit.ly/welcomingdistributorsontonetworks .
Establishing vibrant social networks creates greater engagement between manufacturer and dealer, helps dealers close sales, and forges greater bonds among the dealer, consumer, and manufacturer. B2B companies have been edging into social media reluctantly but steadily. The opportunity exists NOW to realize significant competitive advantage by establishing a social dealer network. It’s not the old supply chain any more.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Internal Knowledge Sharing and ROI - It's Personal
Why would you give away your knowledge, not to a competitor, but to an internal colleague? Team work is great, but in the end one person gets primary credit for the sale; one engineer is the lead developer; one customer service manager drives the highest customer satisfaction scores. And that person gets the promotion, the biggest bonus, and the greatest ego boost.
Yet organizations are adopting internal social networks with the hope of improving productivity and innovation through greater knowledge sharing. Prescient Digital (www.prescientdigital.com) reported in their Intranet 2.0 Global Study 2010 that the main reasons that companies invest in intranet 2.0 tools are employee collaboration (76%) and knowledge management (71%). Does knowledge sharing naturally follow?
Knowledge is far more than data; it includes the analysis and experiential wisdom that we bring to information. Understanding when we need to share true knowledge and when we need to facilitate the transfer of information helps organizations build effective internal social media networks. It is critical to driving the ROI of internal social media.
Knowledge versus Information Sharing
Two of the three factors that drive ROI for internal social media depend on knowledge sharing. Only one factor is primarily data or information driven. (see http://goo.gl/fb/pdpSI 3 Benefit Measures - The ROI of Internal Social Media Networks) Recognizing the distinction helps the change management process; employees can share at the level that benefits both themselves and the organization.
v Enhanced Employee Engagement depends on the give-and-take of knowledge sharing. Numerous studies have linked higher levels of employee engagement to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, lower turnover and higher sales. By facilitating greater sharing of both personal and professional knowledge, internal social media networks boost employee engagement. Within about 3 weeks of launching its new social networking site, The Hub, SAS had almost 50% of its employees using the site and 425 groups established. The Hub intentionally blurs the line between the professional and personal, creating stronger, more multi-faceted ties between employees and the company. Becky Graebe, internal communications manager at SAS, describes the site as “kind of like a Facebook/LinkedIn behind the SAS firewall.” Sharing knowledge creates friendships and connections, across and up-and-down the organization, which drives employee engagement and positive ROI. (For more information, see http://www.ragan.com/InternalCommunications/Articles/SAS_internal_social_network_attracts_5000_users_in_42751.aspx)
v Better, faster innovation requires more structured knowledge sharing. Success depends on governance structures that facilitate and reward cross-silo and cross-functional work - while continuing to recognize the primary sources of both inspiration and execution. A key is bringing together individuals with complementary skills and reducing redundancy. Merely sharing data is insufficient for innovation; sharing must involve insight, analysis and creativity. $21.8 billion pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly implemented an internal social networking solution to enable more efficient and cost-effective processes for new drug development. R&D scientists and subject matter experts are now in touch throughout the product development process, across multiple divisions and around the globe. Increased knowledge sharing has helped reduce costs and accelerate innovation. Personal brands are enhanced not threatened.
v Streamlining operations depends on information sharing, not knowledge sharing. Many tools enable employees to find data and experts more quickly, and allow executives to ensure that activities are focused on the key strategic initiatives.
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