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Part 3: Engagement Breaks Silos

Michael Gale
August 19th, 2011

Why one + one is not proper integrated sales and marketing

Today I will discuss four commons silos that if not handled, will perpetuate the glass ceiling that often impedes true integration.

1. Failure to Embrace the Full Values of Social and Digital as a Means to Learn and Adjust

Integration through the customer’s journey requires more listening and adjusting than action. There is no one perfect path, but the most successful brands are highly engaged in digital and social communications so that they can adjust at all stages. Embracing engagement (listening, dialoguing and reacting) is the driving factor of effective integration, as it allows companies to course-correct in real-time.

2. Fear that Engagement with Customers Through the Journey Delivers More Problems than Advantages

We should embrace engagement as a unique opportunity to learn and relate to customers. Often a lack of openness makes integrated sets of activities difficult. Thus, what might be one degree off target at the start is at least 30 degrees off at the end. A philosophy of engagement through digital and social mechanisms, allows for constant small adjustments.

3. Anxiety About Not Getting Credit Where Credit is Due

Productivity with marketing and sales functions is normally determined by a standard metric. For example, lead-to-close ratios multiplied by total margin. For marketing it is determined by the ratio of verified suspects to suspects-to-lead. Integration invariably creates a smoother transition for the customer instead of specific and isolated activities. Allocating resources based on effectively transitioning customers from one phase in the customer’s journey to the next can be tough. B2B and B2C brands alike need to build integration metrics in order to loosen up the anxieties in each of the integrated areas. Instituting a more engaged digital and social approach encourages more feedback from the customer.

4. Lack of Realization that Engaged Social and Digital Sales and Marketing Creates a New Idea for Customers

The upper level of the value of engaged social and digital integration offers incredible insight from the customer about potential product needs that are not being met. Imagine being able to out maneuver a competitor by 10–20% just based on the quality of your integration and a philosophy of highly engaged digital and social activities with customers through their journey.

Social and digital engagement is the key for world-class integration. Looking at the framework below (please feel free to use it so long as the source is acknowledged) it is obvious that the more mature the engagement is the greater the differentiated value is for the brand. At the very top of the frame is a brand that can co-develop products and solutions with its customers. At the bottom of the framework we see a useful listen and partial response capability. Many brands feel comfortable in that lower left box.

The remaining posts will cover how to ensure your organization is a digitally and socially engaged entity.

A basic scorecard for engaged social and digital brands.
What to listen for and react to as you build your engaged digital and social integrated journey.
The right skills and plays to help bond all our integrated activities through the customer journey.
Some best practices and examples we have seen for the future of integrated and engaged customer journey programs.

Tags: Digital Media, Integration, media, Organizational Design, Social Media
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The Role of “Corporate” in a Comms Organization

Bob Feldman
August 16th, 2011

Originally Published PR Week, August 12, 2011 (subscription access only)

The old adage, “I’m from Corporate and I’m here to help” is well understood for what it implies: Corporate help is an oxymoron.

It doesn’t have to be.

But research indicates that a sizable gap remains between the value Corporate practitioners believe they deliver to their companies and the perception of those practitioners who reside in business units.

Why?

The principal driver of this disconnect is the certainty with which Corporate practitioners believe it is of strategic importance that all employees know of and appreciate the work of the total enterprise, and the equally certain perspective that business unit practitioners believe the overwhelming focus must be on what is most relevant and actionable and, therefore, must be about their business unit.

What to do?

Let me preface five tips I have to share with an acknowledgment of a bias: I believe there is a strong role for Corporate. But executing it successfully takes equal measures substance and style.

Here are five ways in which Corporate can succeed:

Define your role and earn grassroots support... What’s your purpose as it relates to the businesses? Strategic guidance? Talent management? Leveraging scale to achieve optimal cost efficiencies? Driving big enterprise-wide ideas? What are the needs in the units in which Corporate can make a meaningful difference?

Be high value...Corporate practitioners usually play two roles: one is executing purely corporate activities (e.g. investor relations; executive communications; etc.) and the other requires some level of inter-dependency with business units (e.g. reputation initiatives; CSR; digital strategies; marketing support; etc.). In this latter category, Corporate ideally is an advisor and co-strategist. To earn its place comfortably alongside the business units, Corporate practitioners must be the best, most qualified practitioners in the company for the niches in which they advise.

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Tags: Internal Communcations, PRWeek, Reputation, Social Media
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Part 1: Integration Matters

Michael Gale
August 10th, 2011

Why one + one is not proper integrated sales and marketing

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

“Integration” is a hot term driven by a combination of seven environmental factors. I contend that “integration” means creating a consistent experience across the customer’s interaction with the brand. The challenge is that it is often siloed into one-on-one situations that aren’t tracked. For example, a customer service agent on the phone might not know that a customer has tried to return an item to the store three times.

The true catalyst of integration evolves around understanding and embracing the value of a customer’s engagement. Experience and evidence shows us that the fully engaged digital and social B2B and B2C brands are the only ones that can fully deliver the promise of integration. Without embracing this philosophy, organizations appear somewhat doomed to poke around the promise of integration.

Digital and social brands that embrace integration reap far more benefits from customer journey-based integration because they get the double-edged opportunity to react faster to market changes, and gain insights ahead of the competition. This is based on managing the customer’s journey and leveraging social and digital as the engagement mechanism.

A Set of POVs to Drive Your Future

In a series of points of views over the next few months we are going to walk through what it takes to be truly integrated, and not just with one or two functions, but across a wide range. We have seen evidence in best practices that the pressure to do social and digital “right” is even greater than before. A limited perspective (one + one) will miss the wider and more effective opportunity.

One + One is Not Really Integration

Integrated online and offline, integrated online and social, integrated sales and channel, integrated media and marketing, integrated communications and brand: These are the marketing (and sometimes sales-based) marriages, especially inside B2B, we increasingly hear about. We call this integration, the integration of one + one. One function plus another bonding together at some point in the customer’s journey. This is a start, but it really is an old world way of thinking and taking advantage of integration.

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Tags: Commentary, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Tips
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Brands Can Experiment On Google Plus, But Don’t Go Overboard

Paul Walker
July 25th, 2011

Google+ is addictive, engaging and at 20 million users (in less than a month) and growing. It’s the “real deal.”

Last week Google let a handful of brands use Google Plus on a test basis and reportedly kicked a few off.

Ford Motor Company has a test brand profile.

Then a Google Plus product manager Christian Oestlien posted a video message saying they are accelerating their roadmap to bring business profiles sooner than anticipated. He encouraged companies to find “a real person who is willing to represent your organization as him or herself on Google Plus using our consumer profiles as was originally intended.”

That’s a slightly convoluted way to say: It’s okay for businesses to get moving on Google Plus as long they have the authority to represent the company. At least that’s my interpretation.

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Tags: Communications, Google, Influencer relations, Marketing, Social Media
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The Evolution of Social Media Monitoring: A Vertical Approach to Listening

Jesse Jacks
July 19th, 2011

We’ve had a number of posts on our blog speak to the importance of social media monitoring in strategy creation, including a recent addition that highlights the need for improvements to technological platforms to better inform those strategies. Now, it appears as if some of those much-needed improvements are making their way into the world of social media monitoring tools, and via the wine industry no less.

Mashable writes about the rising success of Cruvee, a social media monitoring platform that specializes in identifying, decoding, and understanding online interactions in the wine industry. Currently, about 27% of all wineries in the US are using the service to inform them of their brand’s conversations online, among other cool features the program has incorporated into their service such as monetizing Facebook pages by giving the user the ability to turn their page into a virtual storefront, complete with a “buy now” button.

But the most interesting aspect of Cruvee’s service is that it addresses a number of issues currently facing users of other social media monitoring platforms. Cruvee has built-in solutions that aim to minimize the “clutter” associated with finding where your brand lives in online conversations. Think of it as a platform that allows your brand to focus on the strategy that results from conversation analysis, rather than the time-consuming process of receiving those results. Here are a few of the things the Cruvee model offers that should be incorporated into other platforms:

1. Comprehension of industry “jargon”. By focusing on one industry, the platform has built-in identifiers for language that other platforms often do not pick up. For example, someone tweeting the about the great “cab sauv” they enjoyed is picked up by the platform and shows up in the conversation dashboard results, where in many instances they may not. By searching for language that influencers within industry actually use (including shorthand, as in the above reference), the result is a clearer picture of what is actually being said.

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Tags: Leadership, Social Media
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Three Ways to Speed Your Company’s Embrace of Social Media

Bob Feldman
July 6th, 2011

Originally Published PR Week, June 30, 2011 (subscription access only)

I’ve noticed that many companies that instinctively know they should be active in social media are moving forward tentatively and would like to move faster.

These organizations have grasped the importance of social media to their communications strategy. But whether it’s because they’re nervous about diving into the online conversation, or caught up in internal bickering over who “owns” it, or lack confidence in their strategy, their tentative pace is denying them the benefits of a more robust online engagement. They know they should be moving faster, but they’re not sure how to do it.

Last week, while I was participating in an excellent Arthur W. Page Society “Future Leaders Experience,” the group addressed this problem. Three success factors for accelerating successful online engagement emerged from the discussion:

1. Pique their competitive nature with a “best practices” assessment

Companies are often risk averse and don’t like to be too far out front in using new technologies. Reviews of “best practices” often provide a level of comfort that comes from knowing what their peers are doing, learning from the mistakes of others, and benchmarking their own progress against leaders both outside and from within their own industries.

But “best practices” reviews have another motivating effect: they fire up people’s competitive instincts. Nothing concentrates management’s attention so much, or motivates them to action, as learning that a competitor is stealing the lead on them, and the race to benefit from engagement in social media is no exception.

2. Identify the key digital influencers in your space, and the hidden successes in your company

Sometimes, organizations don’t move forward because they don’t know where to start. In social media, management may be aware of platforms like Twitter and Facebook as factors in their personal lives, yet have no idea how those two platforms - and the much larger online ecosystem - influences their customers, employees and other stakeholders. Without knowing where to target their attention or their resources, they end up doing nothing.

They may also be relatively unaware of the small, experimental efforts already underway within their organization.

The fix? Do a thorough audit of the “digital ecosystem” in which your company operates, together with a careful look inside the company to see where social media activity already is (or isn’t) underway. Find opportunities to create small success stories, and make the people who have achieved them champions (and trainers) who can help bring other, less adventurous, units up to speed.

Don’t be surprised if some of your best success stories come from tired, mainstay brands that are willing to take some risks to rejuvenate their image. Think about how P&G stalwart “Old Spice” shook up its category with the “I’m on a horse” video that went viral.

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Tags: Arthur W. Page Society, Commentary, PRWeek, Social Media
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“Listening” Is An Area Ripe For Innovation

Paul Walker
May 31st, 2011

We recently took on a unique assignment: 24/7, global monitoring and reporting for 10 days around a mega announcement in the mobile industry.

We had developed the social media game plan for the announcement, and the CEO and our client believed effective listening was critical to success. Of course, they were right. Since the assignment was coming from the corner office, we didn’t hesitate to say “yes.”

We set up a Listening Command Center in Austin for the global announcement to deliver two reports daily and alerts, as appropriate. We submitted our first report to the CEO and his team and the response was immediate and positive and contained a new request: “We need this every three hours for the next ten days.” After our team leader picked herself off the floor, we reorganized ourselves and delivered a flash report every three hours. The CEO used our insights masterfully, adapting his messages and presentations in near real-time based on the hot topics, questions and sentiment of the online conversation.

The project gave us a good taste of the future: 24/7, real-time listening to inform dynamic strategies. A few leading companies like Dell and Pepsi set-up command centers to manage listening for customer service and early warning on emerging online issues, but few companies are using real-time insights to rapidly adjust marketing and communications strategies.

Our process was solid. We had four top-notch analysts working around the clock - so our people were solid. Our technology? Not so much. Radian 6 worked well. We had to complement the tool with Google Reader to get the job done. The project proved once again to us that today effective listening is about having the right people and process in place. Current monitoring tools are secondary and often have to be second-guessed or double-checked for accuracy.

In the next 12 months technology is positioned to do more of the heavy lifting. There are some products in academic labs and start-ups utilizing approaches like Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), an advanced form of statistical language modeling, to data mine large amounts of data for “diamonds.” Future tools also will be intelligent and learn about the problems they are being used to solve.

In short, we want to push a button and have technology tell us in near real-time and more accurately what people are talking about online surrounding an announcement or new product or disease or issue. We want a clearer indication of what’s new or different about the conversation.

Then smart analysts can spend their time drilling down on new insights that might make a difference to marketing, communications, product development and other areas of enterprise.

Tags: Commentary, Listening Center, mobile, Social Media
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Converting Mobile Location Services into Crowdsourced Value for Businesses

Jesse Jacks
May 24th, 2011

Imagine that you are a global apparel company and you want to know how your new line of shirts are being displayed in department stores across the country. Now, imagine you have your very own nationwide force of “mystery shoppers” that could almost instantly and credibly report back to you. Even include photos. Anywhere. Anytime. Well, that’s exactly what businesses are now able to tap into through a promising new mobile app called Gigwalk.

Gigwalk acts as the middleman for businesses interested in gathering data on everything: prime real-estate locations, the layout of retail store floors, the efficacy of store managers, and the cleanliness of restaurant bathrooms. Anything and everything is a possibility. If you want to know more about how your business is, will, or can fare in a particular space, Gigwalk now makes it possible for you to do so for little cost.

It works like this: imagine your company is looking to gather some information about how your product is being presented in a retail store in relation to your competitors. Gigwalk allows you to post a task requesting answers to questions about the placement of the product, photos of its layout in relation to competitors, and offers a monetary reward for the tasks’ successful completion (typically between $3 to $90, depending on the location and difficulty of the task). An algorithm connects users in the area who might be able to successfully complete the task for the business through a combination of variables such as previously successfully completed tasks (earning you “streetcred”), education level, occupation, age, among others. Users can still explore any task and attempt to complete it, so long as they meet the “streetcred” requirement (have enough experience completing relevant tasks) and any other requirement such as an age limit (typically in place for bars or market research requirements).

Gigwalk’s initial success (it has just announced seed financing of $1.7 million from several VCs) can be chalked up to its unique combination of a number of collaborative and social tools, including mobile location services and crowdsourced collaboration, which in turn lead the app into the gamification realm, effectively allowing users to explore their city and earn real money while doing so. Just signing in and opening the app provides the user with a sense of excitement as they peruse the opportunities to explore and earn in their very own backyard. It’s for this reason its almost impossible to refer to Gigwalk as simply a business helping solve real business problems, though it clearly is, it has the potential to be so much more than that.

The opportunity for a business model such as Gigwalk’s to disrupt several industries clearly exists. The company has just started to scratch the surface of the possible business problems, no matter what size, that can be outsourced and crowdsourced through the use of novel location services and gamification. The most immediate opportunity for corporate offices to utilize the consumer as watchdogs, transmitting instantaneous feedback to HQ to ensure that stores and franchises are in compliance with corporate, but also that consumer brands that pay for product placement in shops are receiving the visibility they pay good money for. The app also promises to cut costs down for civic services such as road repairs, collecting data at intersections and public parks, and surveying land. A quick run through of the “gigs” available in major cities leads one to believe that health and liquor inspectors have already gravitated towards the service.

Gigwalk is onto something that appeals to both users and businesses, where everyone comes out feeling as if they have received something of value having participated directly in the outcome. The potential of the combination of geo-location, gamification, and crowdsourced data collection will surely lead to a plethora of business solutions that we are only beginning to see.

You can learn more about Gigwalk here. This one is a potential gamechanger.

Tags: Collaboration, Crowdsourcing, mobile, Social Media
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Weekly Pulse: 4/8/11

PulsePoint Group
April 8th, 2011

A recap of last week’s POV posts:

4/6: Google Launches +1 as Part of Social Push: Last week Google launched a new social feature called +1. For searchers with a Google account, they will have the option of clicking the “+1″ button, which is similar to the Facebook “like.” Then, other searchers who are signed into Google will see “+1″ feedback from their connections.

3/24: SXSWi Wrap Up: SXSW is over … and I’m not going to lie, I’m enjoying the decrease in downtown traffic and increase in cell signal. Overall though, I had a blast at SXSWi and was impressed with this year’s line up.

3/16: Web Now Second Only to TV as News Source: For media relations and communications professionals, understanding where target audiences go for news is critical. A new report from the Pew Research Center reveals that for the first time, the web has passed newspapers as the second most popular source of news. It’s second only to television.

Tags: Commentary, Google, In the News, Social Media, Strategy, SXSW '11
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Google Launches +1 as Part of Social Push

Brittany Aguilar
April 6th, 2011

Last week Google launched a new social feature called +1. For searchers with a Google account, they will have the option of clicking the “+1″ button, which is similar to the Facebook “like.” Then, other searchers who are signed into Google will see “+1″ feedback from their connections.

ReadWriteWeb explains Google’s reasoning for the new feature,

“But in the long run, Google says +1 will help users find relevant content, and that’s good news if, indeed, your site delivers. Google also says that ‘as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.’”

+1 Means More Personalization

Google has been working on breaking into the social space in a big way, but I’m not sure this is it. While social media has proven that people value the references and input of their real-life friends, that may not be true when a user is looking for a specific type of content rather than just browsing. Especially, when your friends might not have experience in the category you are searching for.

Ray Grieselhuber of GinzaMetrics says that search results will keep moving toward increased personalization.

“Despite its growing presence in our daily lives, one of the least talked-about, most important trends in online marketing and media today is the expansion of personalization. Within just a few years, internet users are going to expect highly personalized experiences with their brands, videos, games, websites, shopping, and yes, searches.”

Personalization will certainly mean more relevant search results and more relevant marketing strategies overall, but the user-experience of rating search results might be difficult. By the time you realize that a site is helpful for you, you’ve probably already left the search results.

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Tags: Commentary, Google, Social Media
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