The Social Concept

Writing Your Social Strategy

March 29, 2012

Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.

This installment continues Chapter 13: Social CRM Strategy. Adam lays out the creation of a social CRM strategy.

Now that we know the best practices on how a social customer team should be staffed and compensated, (if you’re avoiding a Holistic Honeycomb approach, that is, as it evenly distributes Social Customer Management across the entire company), we’ve got to examine how you actually implement the strategy. Assuming you’ve followed the lPOSTm methodology (which works regardless of the approach you’re taking), you’ve listened, you’ve picked the set of people you’re working with, and you’ve vetted the 23 use cases in order to pick your precise objective (or maybe two or three of them).

This is where things get a little tough—you actually have to write the strategy. And this is where all of the social media gurus are going to come up short. Because in all the time it took them to tell you you needed to Facebook and tweet your business, they skipped over The Art of War, The Fifth Discipline, and W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

Blue Ocean Strategy doesn’t even mention social media or CRM in its 239 pages, but it’s all about how to make the competition totally irrelevant (avoiding the battles that create a “bloody red ocean,” or Red Ocean strategy, where rivals battle over a shrinking kitty of profits), reach a ton of customers, and do it all at the lowest possible cost.

The idea, in using Value Innovation is to reduce cost (increase scale to reach your customers, actually), and differentiate, like crazy, at the same time. To do so, managers writing the strategy need to look at what’s called the Four Actions Framework. The reason you’re doing your strategy creation through this lens of questions is because you’re trying to break down all of the buyer value elements (the reasons people love you) and create a brand new value curve, which is the tool that strategy folks use to tell, visually, whether their strategy works, versus their competitors.

We create social customer strategy around these four questions (based on the Four Actions Framework, introduced in Blue Ocean Strategy):

1. Eliminate. Which factors that companies in your industry take for granted, around working with the social customer, should be eliminated?
2. Raise. Which factors of Social Customer Management can or should be raised well above the industry standard?
3. Reduce. What can we remove from the social customer relationship? Which factors can be reduced well below the industry standard in working with the social customer?
4. Create. Which factors around the social customer can we create, which the industry has never offered before?

All too often in social strategy, brands take the red-ocean strategy route (remember the sharks?), in which they compete head-to-head in a poorly differentiated market, and take similar tacks (and tactics) to manage the all-too-little-available mind share of the social customer. Consider hotel brands. Although Marriott was the first to work with the social customer, and their strategy was certainly Blue Ocean at the time (a 75-year-old hotel CEO blogging in 2007 was historic), the competitors that followed in their wake were certainly mostly Red Ocean—(Starwood, IHG, et al.), and even the most Blue Ocean of that bunch, Morgans Hotel Group, which differentiated on high-quality creative, outsourced much of their implementation to an agency (although they’re now reeling it in-house).

Here’s a clear breakdown of how to tell if your strategy is Red Ocean or Blue Ocean. If you feel like you’re competing in the existing market space and channels for social customer attention, it’s Red Ocean. If you think you’re creating uncontested market space, and a brand new tool set for your social customers, it’s Blue Ocean.

Red Ocean is when you try to beat the competition in getting to the social customer. Blue Ocean is when you make the competition totally irrelevant to that same social customer, and create net-new demand. Get the picture?

In the end, remember that you’re trying to align your whole company in the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and high value and high profit—not a crummy choice of one of those three.

Here are five more questions to determine whether you’re cool blue or bloody red around the social customer:

1. Is your brand forced to advertise in order to reach the social customer, yet you feel like the marginal impact of every additional dollar you spend on this type of advertising is decreasing?
2. List your competitive factors with the social customer. Then list your competitors’. Is this list the same? Uh-oh.
3. Are people talking about having either college-age interns or people overseas manage your social customers as the only way to be or stay competitive?
4. Organizationally, is it easier to get funding to copy what the competitor did with the social customer than to get funding to start a brand-new initiative?
5. Are people internally blaming your company’s slow growth with the social customer on your market conditions?

If you answered yes to all five, then you’re bloody red. Time for a new strategy.

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Choosing Your Social Management Team

March 28, 2012

Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.

This installment continues Chapter 13: Social CRM Strategy. Adam discusses the components of social CRM strategy, and looks at some factors regarding the composition of the team that will administer it.

Managing the social customer changes your employees’ mind-sets, permanently. Remember Vanessa Willson from MBT Footwear, the funky shoe brand that used Social Customer Insights to innovate?

“Professionally, I no longer can look at a marketing plan without having a social strategy in the forefront,” Willson said. “In the everchanging, always-evolving online landscape, a brand’s social strategy is an essential piece for their success.”

And this is coming from a mid-career marketer who had not touched the social customer prior to March 2009. “Implementing a social strategy was an essential ‘piece of the puzzle’ for MBT to truly grow as a brand,” she said. “Our social strategy was an essential step in order for us to increase brand awareness and loyalty—people simply want their voices to be heard.”

“We were lucky, for some time,” Willson went on, “to have customers who were truly brand ambassadors, speaking to everyone and anyone about their experiences with our product. What we were never able to do before was to give them an arena to speak to us and share their stories with other consumers.” Here, she’s talking about using the SMMS to unearth the right customers, and giving the customers the right tools to support your product or service.

COMPONENTS OF THE STRATEGY

So, again here’s a quick 1-2-3 to recap how the Social CRM and the SMMS work together, so you can manage your social customers to create outcomes:

1. Something happens on the social Web (e.g., customer complains that they were billed incorrectly, customer says that you make the greatest cheese fries in San Francisco).
2. It’s picked up by a Social Media Monitoring System that is integrated with the Social CRM.
3. It’s recorded in the Social CRM, and either a macro (automated) work flow is activated, or a micro (human) work flow is activated to solve the problem (by routing it to the right person or department), and the entire incident is recorded for future knowledge around the customer and the problem.

Your Social Customer Management Team

When considering the size of the team that will manage the social customer for your brand, there are many factors to take into account, the most immediate being cost. Dave Andrews of Devious Media and Community102 is well-acquainted with this concept. “Depending on the project, our teams are usually one to five people, depending on the social media activity and budget of the client,” he said. And these teams are on the small side. I typically assign two to seven people to every project, for enterprise companies, plus the internal team on the client side.

Still, if it takes one to five full-timers to manage the community of social customers around your brand, the human capital investment alone will cost $80,000 to 400,000 annually. You’re probably thinking that those numbers are a little high. Well, you just unearthed the next serious problem with who usually gets assigned to manage the social customer. Frequently, it’s foisted onto interns or entry-level employees.

“I think the biggest problem is that [companies] choose lower level employees to do the company’s social media management,” Andrews said.

“These employees often have 20 other responsibilities and cannot focus on learning and managing the company’s social [customers] properly. These employees are often young and do not have the experience or training to interact with your customers. They are just given the task of managing the company’s Facebook page and told ‘Go!’”

In addition to the advent of new positions like Community Manager, previously suggested by David Armano and Jeremiah Owyang, Andrews takes it a step further, but I’m not sure I agree.

“Companies should take social media seriously; I see in the future you will see more senior-level titles for social media like ‘Chief Social Media Officer.’”

Realistically, it’s viable that we’ll see titles like Chief Customer Officer, which would oversee front-office customer operations, inclusive of call center, sales, marketing, finance (customer billing), fulfillment, and post-sale support. This executive would likely report to the CEO. Social media is sure to dominate customer relations and engagement to the point where it is an integral part of the Chief Customer Officer’s position, not a separate component ran by a different officer. It’s just too narrow a C-Suite position: Chief Social Media Officer. We don’t have any Chief Digital Media Officers, do we?

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Social Media Strategy 101

March 27, 2012

Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.

This installment begins Chapter 13: Social CRM Strategy. Adam discusses the importance of a social media management system.

Now that we’ve covered the basics and discussed the lPOSTm methodology, let’s look closer at the importance of the connection between the concept of Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) and the Social CRM system you plan to implement along with the overall strategy.

SMMS AND SOCIAL CRM

A typical first question on the topic is: “How do you kick the data from the Social Media Management System into the Social CRM system?”

Chris Newton from Radian6 has an answer for us:

[We] use integrations in order to automate the Social Media Management System to the Social CRM system when it comes to entering leads and cases, to track all customer conversations automatically, so they may be viewed within the CRM and not the SMMS, and then contacted through the appropriate account channels.”

So why not just cut the SMMS out of the work flow and stick solely with a CRM system, since that’s where the usable information will be viewed? Let’s check in with Kevin Barenblat, the CEO of San Francisco software/advertising company Context Optional, which makes software that some huge brands use to manage all their social media and millions of social customers. First off, there’s the issue of scale: what if your brand has multiple properties or multiple compliance standards (e.g., alcohol)?

“A social marketing platform like Context Optional’s Social Marketing Suite addresses a variety of challenges that brand managers face when trying to manage multiple brand pages, across multiple platforms, with multiple stakeholders and compliance standards,” Barenblat said.

Then there’s the work flow; if you can’t create a routine for this information management process, then how can it scale? Not to mention the fact that this is a 24/7 job, taking place in multiple time zones and languages all at once.

“Using a work-flow-oriented social marketing platform,” Barenblat said, “gives brands the ability to efficiently [italics, mine] and effectively moderate and analyze their social efforts, assign roles within an organization, escalate issues, publish to multiple time zones and in multiple languages, streamline their brand message, and measure impact across all of their social presences and the broader open Web.”

So, to recap, the benefits to using an SMMS are:

• Scalability
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Impact measurement

At this point you’re probably wondering if you can actually remember any big brands that have utilized a social media management system. Barenblat has a few big ones, and a number of firsts, under his company’s belt. Chase Community Giving, for example, was the first mass crowd-sourced giving program. Another notable SMMS-driven implementation was the Travel Channel’s Kidnap, the first branded application to surpass 10 million users. Einstein’s Bagels used Context Optional’s SSMS to administer their giveaway, which increased their fan base a thousandfold, to 400,000 fans, over a couple days. It’s one thing to say that you’ve got brand loyalty or to do surveys to get customers to fess up to it, but this is a whole different level.

SMMS’s like Context Optional are also behind some of the largest philanthropic efforts ever to have taken place on the social Web. Social CRM brands like Salesforce give free or deeply discounted pricing to nonprofits, and their product also includes a bare-bones SMMS.

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Metz Methodology Explained

March 26, 2012

Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.

This installment begins Chapter 12: The Methodology. Adam shows his roots via Li and Bernoff.

The Social CRM methodology all comes down to six letters: l, P, O, S, T, and m. The m and l are lowercase, but you really can’t forget them. That’s about it. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff developed 66 percent of this concept, the POST methodology, in their seminal 2008 book Groundswell, which is the root of the overall methodology. Groundswell was really the first great book about the enterprise and the social Web.

The term POST was first referenced in Charlene Li’s speech at the Forrester Consumer Internet Conference in 2007. In terms of cultural significance, for social customer and social media measurement, I would equate this talk with Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. POST was the first time that anyone put a coherent structural vision to the mess of social technologies that has been moving onto the market since 1997. (Yes, people were blogging in 1997.)

POST METHODOLOGY

P Stands for People

When it all comes down to it, Social Customer Relationship Management is all about your company’s relationships with people—the people inside it and the people outside it. Chances are, if your company does not have good relationships with the people inside of it, then they won’t have good relationships with the people outside of it. You can group the people into four sets (your customers, your employees, prospective customers, everybody else).

To summarize: social is frequently where the conversation starts (or is restarted if the customer hasn’t engaged with your brand in quite some time). Then it gets “right-channeled” to where it needs to go.

O Stands for Objectives

These are the things your brand wants to do, with your internal and external stakeholders. When your executive team is combing through the 23 Social CRM use cases, they are generally seeking two to four different assessable measures of success from one (or more) of those use cases. Without objectives there can be no strategy.

S Stands for Strategy

This is the confusing part: the elusive “how.” My favorite quote about strategy comes from author and consultant Alan Weiss:“Strategy is vision. Planning is organization. Most people mix the two up, forget about the vision and get bogged down with details.”

When it comes to Social CRM strategy, that’s the part where not a lot has been written. It’s easy to go out and review the tools or profile use cases, and even connect how a brand (e.g., Snapple) got from Point A to Point B (from choosing an objective and a use case to picking a tool), but the strategy part is frequently left out. That’s why we’re going to spend most of this chapter on it.

T Stands for Tools

In this book alone, you’re learning about nearly 100 different tools. The tools are going to change every few months. To write a strategy based on tools (“We need a Facebook strategy!” or “We will use Twitter. That is our strategy”) is myopic, and will fail. Any of the 16,000 “social media consultants” on Twitter can tell you that. Any Social CRM platform is a tool. Any Social CRM application, either Web based or application service provider (ASP), is a tool.

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that the tools will change over time. Take a quick look at Table 12.1, which shows the growth and decline of English-language social network application platforms.

What you’ll notice as you look over this table is the clear trend over the last two or three years for tools and application platforms on the social Web to get bigger or smaller. Picking which one will succeed is rather difficult, unless you have a whole team of analysts studying the space (this is why white papers from social technology analyst firms like Forrester and Gartner still sell, even at a few thousand dollars a pop). Judging by the data in this table, basing your social customer strategy around tools would be foolhardy (and difficult to do effectively).

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LocalsLikeUs's Neej Gore Breaks Down How Local Business Can Successfully Leverage SMS

March 22, 2012

Yesterday, we ran the first part of an insightful 2-part series on how local-centric SMS/email convergence vendors are allowing local merchants to become more successful. Read on for some great tips from LocalsLikeUs founder Neej Gore.

“Smart phones are very capable. Apps slowed the adoption of SMS. But SMS achieves something different. When you see a billboard for something, like continuing education or whatever—of course you shouldn't text and drive, but it's easier and quicker to remember the short code than to download an app, or to try and line up a picture of a distant QR code.”



Gore's latest venture, LocalsLikeUs, is a service that will be able to grow into whatever convergence comes down the road. “The problem is simple—you can talk to any local merchant and they'll say, 'There are slow points of the day or week when I wish I was busier.' We're building a platform to let them fill up those times,” Gore says. 

“There are two pieces: First, provide a compelling offer.

Second, add affinity; you don't want to target the bottom feeders, but the people who like your brand and want to follow you.” The affinity marketing of LocalsLikeUs is what sets it apart from other online couponing services. “We want to tell that food truck operator who among their customers really likes their food and wants to strengthen the relationship (and eat more often),” Gore says. 



Opting in for SMS notifications is a clear indication of that level of interest. “LocalsLikeUs allows merchants to do push via email and SMS at the moment, according to the user's preferences,” Gore says. “We place a cap on the notifications so users don't get overwhelmed with offers if they follow a lot of merchants.”

The service will stay abreast of changes to communication and marketing technology, and move to take advantage of whatever best serves the needs of merchants and consumers. “There's going to be a convergence of QR codes at point of service, plus email, plus SMS,” Gore adds. As it develops, he and LocalsLikeUs will be there.

Email Neej directly at neej@mailboto.com to receive a complimentary full-featured e-marketing account for up to 1000 contacts.

- Marshall Lager, Content Manager, The Social Concept

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