The Social Concept

Know Your Social Web History

March 22, 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 11: Metrics and Rationale. Adam reviews the history of the social Web, with a glimpse of the present and future, with an eye to how data consumption has matured.

Before we even get into strategic methodology, let’s examine the metrics by which success has been measured, around the social customers on the Web, over time. This bit of historical context will put our metrics in a clear light.

Web 1.0 (1991–99)

What happened and the key metrics. Early Web analytics programs measured Web server logs and turned them into readable reports. Key metrics are Hits, Page Views, Visits/Sessions.

What we should call this wave: reporting. “What Happened?” or “How many hits to our Web site?”

What was wrong with this era, and what the next era tried to solve. Although these early metrics measured basic user interactions, they’re now considered rudimentary because they don’t show customer intent.

Web 1.5 (1999–2004)

What happened and the key metrics. E-commerce reporting grew up. Conversions show which customers committed which actions.

What we should call this wave: analysis. “How many of these people did we turn into buyers?” and “How can we remove barriers to conversion?”

What was wrong with this era, and what the next era tried to solve. Customer intent was not measured. Brands understood some conversion factors, but had an incomplete picture of customer motivation.

Web 2.0 (2004–today)

What happened and the key metrics. Web analytics solutions get slowly woven into mainstream business intelligence (B.I.) solutions, to combine customer’s on-Web actions with other information for that same customer. Social media analytics are born. The overflow of qualitative data begins (i.e., “Death by 10,000 tweets”). Key metrics are conversions, mentions, and influence, as well as media-centric social media metrics like fans/followers.

What we should call this wave: action. “We need more than static reports—what is customer intent, and why did this happen and what can we do about it?”

What was wrong with this era, and what the next era tried to solve. Still doesn’t provide a holistic view of any one given customer, or a solid picture of customer intent. All social media metrics are immature or evolving.

Social Customer Web (2011–16)

What happened and the key metrics. All mainstream B.I. (business intelligence) solutions feature Web analytics data. Key metrics for social media are evolved and integrated into all mainstream Web analytics solutions. Key metrics here include:

• Number of market-qualified leads (MQLs) derived from social

• Number of sales-accepted leads (SALs) derived from social

• Return-visit velocity to any social collateral created by your company (this is a cross-channel metric)

• Number of monthly active users (MAUs) that touch your brand's social properties

• Total Net Promoter Score®, with the social customer

• Total social customer revenue

• Revenue per social customer

What we should call this wave: intent. Companies are saying, “We need to know why our customers are doing what they’re doing, and how we can better anticipate their needs to provide an amazing brand experience, across all touch points.”

What was wrong with this era, and what the next era tried to solve. Half of the metrics haven’t been invented yet, and there’s little consensus among brands about which ones are the best to use.

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LocalsLikeUs Solves The Email/SMS Convergence Problem For Local Businesses

March 21, 2012

Connecting with your customers is a must, no matter how you accomplish it. Email marketing has been the standard for many years, but new technology and attitudes are moving us toward change.

We sat down recently for a conversation with entrepreneur Neej Gore to talk about the convergence of messaging tech and what it means to businesses and customers alike.

Gore, founded Mailboto, a fully-featured lower-cost email marketing and mobile marketing system that combines ease of use with enterprise-level depth.

Just this month, he launched LocalsLikeUs, a website that allows merchants to create and offer marketing promotions to consumers, where consumers also have the ability to specify which merchants they want to receive private offers and messages from.

“From the merchant's perspective, email and SMS are two different avenues into the same user profile,” Gore says.

“For example, with one of our clients, if you make a purchase with them, they send an email receipt as well as SMS notification.” While in some cases a double confirmation would be overkill, in many others it's a valued convenience.

That said, email is still by far the more popular method of customer contact. “SMS has been harder to tap into because of the regulations surrounding use of SMS short codes,” Gore says. CAN-SPAM covers most SMS abuses, and the Mobile Marketing Association maintains a code of conduct for marketers to follow.

“SMS had a lot of steam and momentum when email was becoming a commodity; retail chains would say, 'Text us at XYZAB to join up' and offer a coupon for it,” Gore says.
“It was good, but it flooded the space.”

Despite some reticence, however, SMS is experiencing a resurgence. “Consumers are getting more comfortable giving out their mobile numbers,” Gore says. “SMS is more realtime than email or other messaging technologies—it's great for urgent announcements, for example.”

SMS communication is a facet of modern marketing, though, not the entire gem. “Beyond email and SMS, I see the convergence of all messaging through smart devices, where the user can decide how to consume each piece of information,” Gore says.

We'll continue with part two of this article on Thursday.

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

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The Rationale for SCRM Analytics

March 21, 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 11: Metrics and Rationale. Adam begins to explain how to interpret your organization's needs for social CRM, and why it's important.

Imagine you’re back in your senior year of college and it’s a chilly Friday night in fall. You’re at a raging party. There has to be nearly a hundred people in this house! But all the partygoers are standing around, looking sort of confused. There’s a keg of beer in the middle of the living room and everyone’s looking for cups, but there are none in the house. Someone goes to the grocery store and comes back 15 minutes later. “There’s no cups at the grocery store,” he says. People begin to rumble in conversation. Slowly, everyone leaves the party, because there’s just no way to drink the beer. People wander off to the bars, leaving the house empty.

This situation, my friends, illustrates the key problem with customer social data. There’s tons of data. The data’s cheap and good (like all beer seems when you’re 21, right?). But just as there is no party without cups for the beer, without somewhere to put the customer social data, there will be no results for your brand.

So, where is all of the customer data supposed to go? From everything I’ve read about CRM, the folks at Siebel (later, Oracle, when they acquired that brand) were probably the first to put forth the “Single Sources of Truth” theory, which answers that question pretty simply.

What it all boils down to is this: every business essentially reconciles their data to one of three different places:

1. Customer Relationship Management software (CRM)

2. Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERP)

3. Supply Chain Management software (SCM)

It is easy to remember these three by considering how they coincide with people (CRM), projects (ERP), and things (SCM).

Naysayers might ask, “Well, what would you call Human Capital Management software like Success Factors or ADP?” I’d call that ERP, used for the management of human resources. They might also say, “Well, I work at Chili’s, and we can’t take all of the people posting on our company’s Facebook wall and manually put it in our CRM system. That would take forever.” This sentiment may hold some truth, but there are many ways that a brand could do “light” Social CRM and stop short of using a real CRM system. The results, however, won’t be nearly as assessable.

There are a lot of Social Media Management systems out there like Buddy Media, Context Optional, and Awareness Networks’ Social Marketing Hub. Even the small-business e-mail marketing brands like Constant Contact have gotten into the action with their acquisition of small business social media monitoring companies like NutshellMail. As small-business e-mail marketing brands (Constant Contact, Vertical Response) see the potential of their involvement with managing social customer data, they’ve invented products in the Social Event Management space, competing with best-of-breed companies like Eventbrite, in attempts to become one-stop shops for social customer information for small companies.

Regardless of what management system you use, this social customer data all has to go somewhere. So, here’s how I advocate figuring out where it should go.

SOCIAL CUSTOMER PREWORK

It may sound a little cheesy or a little “Stephen Covey,” but you have to take first things first. The following four steps to routing customer data must be taken before you engage in the actual Social CRM strategy.

Note, these steps are not the strategic methodology itself, they are only the prework. (Similar to things you need to do before you put on a tuxedo—shower, shave, a little spritz of cologne, perhaps?)

1. Figure out which systems your brand currently has working around the social customer. These systems are Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Supply Chain Management (SCM).

2. Decide which ones you absolutely need, and which ones you can live without. It’s entirely possible that your brand is too small for an ERP system. Maybe you’re using some legacy HR software that just can’t or won’t connect to your Social CRM system. This is the part where you’re going to have to make tough choices about the social customer.

3. Decide on the implementation timeline and build the missing systems. This isn’t that simple a recommendation, if your brand lacks, say, a SCRM system. This timeline could reach out 12 to 36 months into the future. You may also want to look at marketing or sales automation or lead nurturing systems here, as an extension of the SCRM (stuff like Eloqua or Marketo). It’s nice to have the customer data, but you need to make it hum.

4. Simultaneously, begin any and all “listening programs” on the social Web. These programs, running on a Social Media Monitoring System (SMMS) don’t necessarily need to be connected to the three single sources of truth, at this time. You can connect them later. If your organization has no experience with social media monitoring, just spend the first 30 days “listening” before you engage. You may be tempted to jump right in if the social customer is saying bad stuff about your brand, but try not to until your team has become good at listening. How do you know you’re good? You feel like you’re getting a reading of all of the stuff out there, across all channels. And don’t think that the integration between the SMMS and Social CRM systems is automated or perfect. Far from it.

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The 23 SCRM Use Cases: Wrap-Up

March 20, 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 finishes up Chapter 10: Seamless Customer Experience. Adam shares some thoughts behind the concept of the 23 social CRM use cases.

We pushed the envelope here beyond the original 18 use cases, but not everyone in the Social CRM space agrees that there should be 23 use cases. Lyle Fong, CEO of popular social community platform software brand Lithium, explains:

We’re certainly familiar with the use cases and grateful for the pioneering work that Jeremiah Owyang and others such as yourselves have done on codifying potential use cases for Social CRM. The original publication—I think there were 18 at that point—was a milestone in the history of Social CRM, since no one previously had drawn a definitive line around what is obviously an extremely diverse discipline.

That said, Fong thinks there may be a bit of duplication among the use cases:

We would probably quibble a bit with some of the use cases around collaboration, since [there are] those duplicate things that are already going on inside the enterprise with no immediate connection to social customers. But, by and large, the use cases are a great blueprint for companies to understand some of the things that they can do in concert with their social customers.

However, in an attempt to be comprehensive and concise, I believe these additional five use cases are essential to a brand’s performance in the Social CRM space. Without them, your company might miss out on some major benefits of a fully rounded SCRM plan.

Now that we’ve profiled the 23 Use Cases of Social CRM, what’s next? Well, since you understand this stuff, you’re going to want to go back to Chapter 4, print out that big chart, and pass it out to everyone in the meeting you call.

What I’d do is go through the chart and figure out the top three most urgent use cases. Then I’d see if I could get my team to all agree on them. Next, I’d have everybody vote on which one is the most urgent, and start with that one, combined with the top-level use case, Social Customer Insights. Start small and build on incremental success. And you’re going to hear a lot more about how to start, as we get into Chapter 11, “Metrics and Rationale,” and Chapter 12, “The Methodology.”

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Provide VIP Service

March 19, 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 10: Seamless Customer Experience. Adam goes upscale with the service model.

VIP EXPERIENCE (NUMBER 22)

What Is It?

Maybe you’ve had bottle service at a nightclub or been upgraded to first class on an international plane flight. Feels good, doesn’t it? VIP Experience is all about giving special perks to your best customers. Remember when all of those airline customers freaked out, back in late 2009 and 2010, when airlines like USAir devalued their mileage programs? Well, that’s pretty much the opposite of the VIP Experience use case. The idea here is to use your Social CRM information to surprise and delight your customers, not anger them. Any brand that has frequent direct customer contact (travel and hospitality and retail come to mind) will want to pay attention to VIP Experience.

Even my favorite airport parking spot, Espresso Parking, at the Oakland Airport, understands VIP Experience. They give their frequent parkers (Big Shot Rewards) big discounts, fast in-and-out, and relevant awards like free parking, free car washes, and the ultimate prize in airport parking—a free car detailing job. Of course, all of their customers get free Peets Coffee, muffins, and a copy of the newspaper on their way to the airport. Part of the way to build a VIP Experience is to treat all of your customers like VIPs.

Which Consumer Brands Are Using It?

From my clients, the big one is Wente Vineyards (a winery and concert venue). While stuck in traffic on the way to their location, I thought of the Wente Twitter Concert Concierge—like a VIP Concierge for their customers who might, say, be held up by traffic on their way to a concert at the venue. I figured that a customer could tweet the Twitter concierge that they’re running late, and Hospitality could then set aside an extra plate for them and their dining companion so they wouldn’t miss the delicious dinner before the concert.

This program lasted two years, and through a combination of VIP Experience and some of the other Social CRM use cases, Wente Vineyards was able to keep their concert attendance flat in a rough concert economy that was down 8 to 12 percent (2009 and 2010) in the Bay Area.

What Is Market Demand and Tech Maturity?

It’s almost Evangelizable. There are enough brands using this now that we can say it’s just barely “early mainstream.”

Which Three Vendors Are Doing It Well, for Consumer Brands?

This is a tough one. Jeremiah and Ray were unable to find any vendor that specializes in this, even in the hospitality space (where you’d think there would be plenty). I know of VIP features of property management system software, and I’ve seen it in CRM software, too—mostly Siebel (which is now OracleCRM), but I’m also stumped on a specific vendor. My recommendation is to go with a larger CRM brand like Oracle or Salesforce, or even Microsoft Dynamics (Hard Rock Café uses it), and build a VIP app on that platform.

What’s the Catch?

Again, like some of the other service and Customer Experience Social CRM use cases, these programs, once started, can’t be easily stopped or drastically modified, unless you don’t mind a bit of customer churn—just ask USAir. Also, it’s important to remember that when everyone’s a VIP, nobody’s a VIP.

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