aheadCRM - Blog #Social Media

Social media is dead - long live social media

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:13:08 -0500

Rest in peace, Social Media!

Yes, I know, you have been pronounced dead numerous times already, and that as early as 2011 by the Sillicon Valley Watcher, if not earlier. You lived on. Still, now you really need to admit that you are a dead thing walking.

You had a short, yet exhilarating life. And you, admittedly, developed astonishingly fast and far from your humble beginnings in the early 1970s and the first bulletin board systems around 1980. These have been the glory days of FidoNet, CompuServe, or AOL. SixDegrees.com followed later. The early noughts gave us a flurry of messaging systems, LinkedIn and XING, not to forget the infamous 4chan.

Anno domini 2004 brought us Facebook, 2005 brought us YouTube, Twitter followed in 2006. Google attempted repeatedly to get the hang of you (Orkut, Google+, anyone?) and still has some messaging services up and running.

All of these platforms have in common that they started up with the claim, some of them even with the objective, to make the Internet more social, to foster user generated content and to, ultimately, shift the power balance from corporations to their customers. Who does not remember the war cry “the customer is in control”. This referred to the idea that the customer could get more information that is not controlled by brands, so that they can be better informed, instead of being forced to rely on corporate broadcasts.

This should have been achieved by giving customers a voice that is as strong as the corporate one, albeit without the (marketing) budget behind. In line with the definition of social, it enabled the tendency “to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others” – mainly other people.

Your power skyrocketed with the advent of the iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent flurry of smartphones and other mobile devices. With mobile devices, you have fully become a ubiquitous set of “forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)”.

At the same time, the advent of mobile devices was your undoing – the begin of your end.

You have been truly social, in the sense of the word, as you enabled the formation of cooperative and interdependent relationships with each other.

But only for a short period.

Why?

Because, of course, the potential of reach created a caste of broadcasters, who were not interested in interdependent relationships or even interaction. Instead they were interested in reach and in creating their own brand identity … i.e. in broadcasting. Naturally, this led to some voices being louder than others. Also naturally, this led to brands becoming interested in these persons. The social media influencer was born. Of course, brands learned to leverage your power as well.

Poly-directional discussions with many equal participants got reduced to a unidirectional model with creators – broadcasters – addressing their audience. This audience has largely turned into consumers. The bullhorn that we knew from analogue times had returned.

Even worse, the platforms that called themselves social media platforms collected increasingly more data to help their paying customers – the brands – to target their customers – the social media users – even better than any time before.

The users have ultimately become the product. The excessive “use” of this “product” has led to an increasingly restrictive regulation, as the power balance between users, platforms, and brands is strongly against the users.

RIP Social Media!

The Social Media resurrection

To quote Martin Luther King, Jr., “I have a dream”. This dream is that social media resurrect, but in a better way, based more on consent and respect.

To be clear, it is by no means illegitimate for both, the social media platform, as well as brands, to be have profit objectives. The same holds true for influencers.

The secret sauce lies in setting this up in a way that maintains the user as a participant on eye-to-eye level.

The way to achieve this is making the platform instead of its users the product. The goal is to create a community again, a community that connects users with users, users with brands, and brands with brands, while equally serving everyone’s interest.

Communication between brands and users strictly happens based on explicit interest and consent expressed by the users. Longer term interests, like hobbies, affiliations, etc., are either made part of their profile or explicitly expressed during an interaction.

If users wants to interact with a brand, they subscribe to its communications, if they don’t – they don’t, and the brand does not have the ability to reach these users. Imagine this like tuning in to a radio station, or, to use a better image, joining an interest based chat room. Basically, relationships are consciously initiated by the users who also decide how much to share with which brand. Relationships can be ended by both parties.

This was also the core idea behind my former venture EpiKonic (the website is still up as a blog platform), a mobile social media and engagement platform. Some of these ideas are also part of Ephanti, a startup that I am currently working with. There are more ideas behind Ephanti, of course.

For the users, the advantages of this model are obvious. Relationships are initiated and built by them. These relationships are based on their expectations, needs and, last but not least, trust.

But what is in it for brands? After all, this approach turns the traditional social media norms and conventions upside down.

Quite simply: Precise targeting! As the user initiates the conversation and explicitly shares immediate and longer term interests, nearly all guesswork is taken out of the equation. The brand can offer journeys that the user can choose from and solutions with minimum own effort. The better the journeys and solutions are, the more trustworthy the brand becomes. The more trustworthy the brand is, the more likely it is that the user stays in contact and hires more solutions that the brand has to offer. In essence, the user becomes loyal – not captive. Ideally, the brand is even able to turn the user into an advocate, then using their own influence to convince other users.

This way, the brand can extend its business by looking at its own success as being a consequence of its customers’ successes.

The same holds true for influencers.

The platform becomes the trusted matchmaker, but more in a broker model. It needs to be fully trusted by all parties. To earn and maintain this trust, it enables the users to interact with each other, and to find brands based on their needs and interests. In addition, the platform makes sure that there is no surreptitious advertising.

The business model sounds almost the same as the one of current platforms. The service delivery is different.

The technology is there. The need and the opportunity, too.

Long live social media.

Top 5 Tips for Retailers to connect with Customers

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:41:56 -0500

Customer Loyalty A few days ago I was asked for my top 5 tips for retailers on how to connect with their customers, limited to 100 words. For a topic that one could write a novel on … Well, here is my answer: - Help customers solving their problem. This distinguishes and makes you found by the customer - Marketing/loyalty programs offer your customers value and are not mere vehicles to gather more data points - Simplify your customers’ life, e.g. with a card wallet instead of own app that directly integrates with your CRM and POS - Relevant communications at the right time, place with the right content – without appearing intrusive. For this you need to know your customer - Consistent communications across channels and interactions, optimized for used touch point They probably need some more elaboration, especially the last one. First and foremost, the reason for any business to exist is making profit for its owners. This is not equal to producing and selling things (or providing a service) with a margin. The business will succeed only if it focuses on identifying its customers needs and then delivering solutions for these needs. It is not about pushing a product into the market (mostly, consider that needs can be created by smart businesses). This thought is well in the domain of Service Dominant Logic although I am not a strong proponent. Marketing and loyalty programs are important interaction vehicles between businesses and their customers. Both, especially loyalty programs, need to be set up to be mutually beneficial. It is not only about gathering more customer data that can be used by the company. Still good data, voluntarily given by customers, is needed to be better able to serve to customers’ needs. It is also not about offering a better price to loyalty members. We all want a good price, but what does this help if the product does not work, as it should with no help being around? Similarly, marketing is not a one-way talking machine for businesses but a bi-directional interaction channel between businesses and (prospective) customers. In this sense good support can be considered marketing, too; the absence of a NEED for support is even more beneficial. At the same time it is a good idea to already simplify customers’ life at an early stage of their interaction with the business. This does not only apply to the solution for your customers’ requirements that a company provides, but also to services around. A simple example is a loyalty app that a company provides. Mostly one still needs a plastic cards to leverage any offer. On the other hand smart phones will get overloaded with apps if every business insists in having an own app. So, why not offering or participating in a card wallet system that is capable of holding multiple cards and integrates into the existing CRM- and POS systems? This immediately also addresses another point: Connecting these systems with the location awareness of a smart phone can provide instant benefit for all involved parties. It creates more relevance because only the information is sent to a customer that has a relation to current intentions at the current time and place. The customer does no more get bombarded with unsolicited e-mails or text messages that come at the time that is given by the businesses’ campaign plans but when they can take more advantage of the offers, they do not need to sift through a variety of applications, and they maintain control by just switching off communications of businesses, if they are not interested at a time – and switch it on again when there is more interest. This brings me to the last point of the list: Businesses communicate and interact with customers using a huge variety of channels; each of these have a number of “touch points". Every interaction between a business and a customer happens at a “touch point”. These touch points have been more limited in number and mostly less interactive some years before, but have become increasingly interactive now. Every single interaction with a customer influences brand perception and after all customer loyalty. Examples of touch points are: Store staff talking to me, a TV ad, a Facebook or Twitter ad, the layout of the loyalty card; the web site and its user interaction design offers many touch points, even the look and feel of the goods displayed for sales are touch points, not to talk of a customer using a purchased product to add value to the own life, or service interactions. As you can see from this list, possible interactions are very different in nature. It is fairly easy to convey different messages through different channels and different touch points. Some examples again to illustrate this point: Advertisements position a brand as a high end brand with the goods displayed in the shop in a careless manner, or having unresponsive in-store staff; or getting different or even contradicting information using different channels (calling, web site, Facebook, …). Lastly, all these channels with their touch points have different capabilities: Look at a web site vs. mobile web site vs. mobile app vs. representation on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest vs. the possibility of direct interaction with in-store personnel or service personnel. Because communication that happens across various channels and touch points is so diverse it needs to be consistent AND it needs to be optimised for the different touch points. picture courtesy of Jeanne Claire Maarbes / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Social Shopping - A Retail Future

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 23:39:32 -0500

A while ago I blogged about threats and solutions in the retail industry that have their origin in rise of social media; with this post I would like to continue on this topic, focusing on possible solutions for retail companies. This blog also ties in to a recent article by Mark Tamis on Social CRM in Retail. In his article Mark describes an interesting and elaborate scenario that showcases a technology enabled, consumer and network driven decision process, using the example of buying a party dress. This example is interesting because, although the process is entirely consumer driven, the involved companies use the technology to add value to the customer, thus achieving a win-win situation. What the involved companies (a retailer and a hairdresser) are doing is establishing customer loyalty by

Engaging the customer
Providing a superior shopping experience, combining online and offline aspects
Enabling the customer to get immediate feedback from their network

With this the two involved companies manage to align their interests with the customer’s interests. In other words, they are distinguishing themselves through service, instead of price. Trying to achieve loyalty through the offer of “least price” is a surefire way to death. To quote the 1986 Highlander movie: There can be only one. Although the scenario described by Mark sounds very advanced it isn’t. The enabling technologies exist and “just” need to be tied together. We are not talking Star Trek here. I really like this scenario as it depicts what could be. Still, integration is a hard business. Because of this I would like to come forward with another scenario that is definitely less sexy, that involves me, my wife, and our three kids, and the fulfillment of a very basic requirement: Food. I also put some emphasis on integration into a back end CRM system (now this one may be an ERP system, but I happen to be a CRM guy). It starts off very simple and gets additional bells and whistles, which I included into the scenario using some of Marks thoughts that he came up with during our continued discussion. Assume a food retail chain is running a CRM system and has its product catalogue online on their transactional web site and on Facebook, probably also transactional there. Their CRM strategy includes a seamless brand experience and the provision of additional value to customers. This leads them to providing a commented catalogue of receipts with user comment options and a news section about food relevant topics on their sites and on Facebook. As part of their technology strategy the retail chain also provides downloadable apps for e.g., iPad, iPhone and some Android devices, which are data-fed from their CRM system. The retailer also offers a shopping list application - on Facebook, on their web site, and as apps for the same devices. The shopping list can be shared between me and my wife and stays synchronized between the channels, because it is hosted on the retailer’s CRM system that drives the whole system, or on a system that is connected to the CRM system. My wife and I, whatever device we use, wherever we are, and whenever we think about it, can add items to our shopping list. We can add products and just product categories like bread, joghurt, ... from the catalogue or from the catalogue of receipts that give us inspiration. In store we get presented with matching products, promotions and cross-/upselling opportunities. These are generated based upon the shopping list, our previous shopping, explicitly stated preferences, our choice of meals, and derivations from our reactions to cross- and upselling attempts. Products that are maintained as categories only receive suggestions with real products based upon information that the company has about us. Unavailable products are substituted according to our profiles. We would use our iPhones rather than iPads in the shop as it is somewhat cumbersome to handle an iPad while pushing the cart and also handling our three little kids – although the iPad is so easy to use that we could have our 4 year old manage the shopping list in store. This is the bread-and-butter scenario that only needs me to check in to the store. How about making it even more interesting? The retailer’s stated goal is to distinguish itself by providing value to customers. To accomplish this they provide the ability to build nutritional plans for families. To support this the shopping list app offers the creation of the shopping list based upon the nutritional plan, taking preferential criteria, like “Italian”, “Rice”, “healthy”, “low calories”, … into account. As we are currently pursuing a low fat, low carb diet the system builds us the week’s menu for the family and builds our shopping list, considering our previous shopping behavior and other stated preferences. Of course, both of us, my wife and I, do some changes to this generated list. It also offers a dashboard that allows us to monitor our weight objectives against our plan. For a further phase the retail chain is considering to team up with a fitness studio chain to plan and support a diet that supports our overall physical fitness goals and and regularly establishes a fitness status using the data that gets collected at the fitness studio’s machines. Still not enough? So let’s also use the advanced location services of today’s smart phones. As the store "knows" that we are there, where we are in the store, and what we want to purchase, the in-store system can guide us the shortest way through the shelves (would be the right thing for me) or take some detours to lure me into buying some other groceries (works well for my wife). At the checkout we pay using the phone. Since the store is also offering Fuel Dockets (fuel vouchers giving a discount on the fuel price at a cooperating brand of stations) the docket gets loaded onto my phone for later usage at the filling station. As we are members of the store chain's loyalty club my account gets updated immediately and I get my new account balance displayed on my device, which is far more convenient and offers more privacy than using the customer facing screen of the checkout. The checkout process is powered using near field technology. This could be added upon further, just consider the groceries being delivered to my gym, so that I can pick them up after my training, if I wished so ... Why would a retail store that usually is short on margin go through these lengths, even the investment that is necessary for the bread-and-butter scenario? The answers are loyalty and identification of the customer. An implementation like this would greatly improve upon the shopping experience, and the perceived service level of the retailer. The chance of customers continuing to buy at “their” retailer instead of another one is greatly improving. Secondly: Retailers generally correlate purchases to target customer groups. Using the described scenario they can do this even better – they actually could identify their customers without a formal registration (e.g. using the phone identity). With this cross- and upselling attempts will be more successful, which adds to revenue and margin. The fitness studio’s benefits would lie in increased sign-up rates, getting a better insight into their customers’ lifestyles and possibly in a more attractive supply contract for food items and drinks sold in studio.

Some Klout Score Musings

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 23:37:18 -0500

Today I’d like to present some musings about the klout score. Now, mine is not particularly high – actually it is pretty low – as you can see below; but the curve is interesting, if set into a context. So far I only followed my klout score pretty idly, till I started to do some minor experiments on 16.02.2011. You see some immediate effect on the day after. This is mainly due to me posting a blog entry and communicating this via Twitter and LinkedIn. There also should be a communication via CIBER’s Twitter account. This usually leads to a few clicks and one or two followers on Twitter. However, the real point I’d like to draw your attention to is the 22.02.2011. This is the day the 6.3 earthquake struck in Christchurch downtown and caused severe devastation. As you may know, I normally blog about CRM and social CRM on the CIBER site, so that event is clearly outside my usual activity. Now the catch is: I do live in Christchurch and quite some of my network friends do know this. So I did some simple things by updating my status in the few networks that I actively use:

LinkedIn with direct update to Twitter
Facebook
XING

As you can imagine this still caused some reactions of my friends – quite some of which are real life friends. Of course there are still one or two CRM related posts of mine in there, plus an opinion on a political matter in Germany, but the majority of all conversations deals with the Christchurch quake, and the good thing is that it shows a lot of empathy, for which I am really grateful. I do not want to diminish the empathy shown by my friends but I am particularly grateful for reactions from Miriam Schwab (klout score 44) from Israel, Chris Heaslip (klout score 21) from NZ, Francine Hardaway (klout score 61) and Paul Greenberg (klout score 61) from the US, four persons who have never met me physically but who instantly asked whether my family and I are OK, which led to brief conversations. The conversation with Francine was on a mailing list, so is not relevant for the further discussion. I added the klout score here as I think the number is relevant for what happened to my klout score. A few of the sites I used are monitored by klout to calculate their score, the mailing list isn’t. Note: LinkedIn was not added to my account, this followed only on 24.02.2011, leading to a further boost to 29, as this is my most frequently used network. As you can see there is a sharp rise from 19 – 24. What does this tell me? Well, a couple of things: The number of conversations matter, i.e. not the own tweets but getting reactions. Proof will be a far slower increase of my klout score or a slow decline, as I am not as diligently blogging or twittering than colleagues (but may be I, one day, make it out of the explorer section ...). However:

The topic seems to be pretty irrelevant
there is no visible measurement of sentiment. This ties in with with the soaring klout score of Kenneth Cole who now can be used as a bad example of Twitter usage after tweet relating his brand to the Egypt revolution that came across pretty cynical
It seems logical that interactions with higher scoring partners increase the own klout more than interactions with lower scoring partners

The klout website is unluckily not particularly helpful when trying to analyse this, so all faults in this article are genuinely mine. Without being cynic we can learn some lessons from this which might help companies in their social media marketing efforts, and again, I am not cynic here, just starting off an example that intrigued me because of the effect in the system that I observed and because it effected me; and then since klout is starting to become a business tool with companies starting to use it to plan their reactions on activities on the network that relate to them. Consumers also use klout to assess brands, inferring from a high score (high influence) that the brand is of high value or trustworthy. This ties into the word of the “company like me” that Paul Greenberg dubbed in 2008. My lessons learnt are:

Interaction pays off. The klout score as a measure of influence makes some participants in conversations more attractive than others.
A quality network is important. I define quality here as the average klout of the participants.
Using the right networks is important. When using klout these important networks are at this time Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

But be aware: At this time it doesn’t really seem to be important what one says as long as it generates conversations. It also does not seem to be relevant how well received the statement is. This may tempt us to lose focus as quantity seems to be more important than quality and to start to overly polarize but this is an approach that is dangerous as

Further research by the readers easily shows that the klout score does not relate to the own competency
The analysis tools and algorithms will surely improve fast and give a more detailed picture on where the klout comes from. An early indication for this is the quadrant that klout spans already now

Did you have similar observations? This is a repost with the author's permission from the original one on http://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com.