Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Matrix: Companies Should Factor ‘Social Influence’ Into Total Customer Value

Categories: Influence, Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on February 3rd, 2010

Case Study: An Influential Mom Blogger Caused Mainstream Crises
Popular blogger, Heather Armstrong (@dooce) was dissatisfied with her non-working Maytag appliance. Following protocol, she called their support number, yet her issue was not solved. Stonewalled, she argued/warned the support staff that she was on Twitter, yet didn’t receive special assistance. Escalating further, she then flexed a muscle and told them she had over 1,000,000 Twitter followers –yet the support rep did not budge. Finally, she blogged and Tweeted against Maytag, initiating a boycott by her followers, “DO NOT BUY MAYTAG” and continues to chronicle her experience on her blog. While critics suggest she wielded her power with irresponsibility, the point is moot, what matters is her social influence was not factored into the support triage decision making process –making a minor support issue a PR issue now on Forbes.

Just as companies factor in value of a customers celebrity status, buying power or customer loyalty –companies must factor in social influence or put themselves at risk. That’s right, customers with more Twitter followers are more likely to get better service and support than those that don’t.

Trend: Consumers Becoming Influential Using Social Technologies

Companies Already Give Preferential Treatment To Famous and Wealthy Customers. Companies have given high influence customers preference for years. Take for example, shopping malls in the Los Angeles area have private entry ways for celebrities to enter the mall and receive priorty treatment. Or, how B2B companies cater to their top customers with special event days, golf outings, or other clients with deep pockets. Companies know that not all customers are valued the same, and as a result, treat them differently.
With More Consumers Adoption Social Technologies, the Problem Will Get Worse. The tide is rising, in fact with more consumers adopting social technologies, the amount of voices that companies will need to deal with will increase in volume. Treating each customer with the best possible service and support (Like Zappos unique culture) is ideal –but not realistic. Companies are ill-equipped to support millions of customers in real time on the social web. They must have prioritization programs in place to handle the high risk/opportunity accounts quickly.
Companies Who Don’t Factor In Influence Put Themselves at Risk. Companies can choose to not factor in the social influence of customers, but will be putting themselves at risk. It’s just a matter of time before a company has a social blowup, and by not trying to handle priority customers could cause a small issue to quickly escalate into a larger one. Also, savvy competitors who factor in social influence can swoop and acquire high influence customers from companies that don’t. Your goal, is to stay off this list.

Matrix: The Four Phases How Companies Factor Social Influence

	Description	Benefit	Risk/Costs
Do not factor in social influence	Companies treat all customers the same, regardless of number of readers, followers or social influence.	It’s cheap, companies don’t have to spend resources to understand if a single customer can influence others.	Run the risk of not prioritzing a customer that could influence others, resulting in missed opportunity or greater PR risk.
Ad Hoc:	Companies factor in social influence as it surfaces, such as a customer explicitly staying their influence, or a service member proactively having to find it.	Companies don’t have to invest in a program or system that tries to calculate this influence.	May miss opportunities of serviing a high influence customer, or may not realize a potential social crises till it’s too late.
Absolute Influence:	Companies factor in total number of Facebook book friends and activity, number of Twitter followers and assign a raw number.	Easy to calculate, and expect future Social CRM tools to do this with ease in the future.	Data may not be accurate: Numbers can be manipulated and gamed, resulting in companies misallocate resources. Risk of alienating consumers without social influence.
Relative Influence:	Companies factor in the true influence a customer has over their actual market –ignoring factors that may not be relevant.	Finally, companies can focus on those customer with social influence that impact other prospects and buyers in their specific market	Such a program is hard to setup and costly, and will require constant inputs and tuning. Risk of alienating consumers without social influence.

Companies Must Factor In Social Influence

Recalculate The Customer Lifetime Value Quotient. For years, companies have factored in the total value of customers over their entire lifetime, Stanford has methods to calculate this called the Customer Lifetime Value formula. These formulas factored in ability to be a repeat buyer, income level, and size of purchases over time. Just as companies spend more time with customers with deeper pockets, they should also spend the appropriate type of attention with followers that don’t.
Yet Recognize, that Not All Social Influence Is the Same. To be efficient, companies shouldn’t reward those with spammy followers they got from an overnight follow script, but recognize that influence isn’t always about quantity, recognize there are at least two types of social influence: The first, absolute influence is the total size of the individuals influence. Take Scoble for example, who has over a 100,000 Twitter followers and probally 100k subscribed to his blog is influential in a broad market. However, his relative influence within the high-end fashion market is low. D&G must factor in both types of influence in understanding how to deal with customers, therefore while Scoble’s absolute influence is high, his relative influence to the fashion market is low.
Expect New Technologies To Address This Problem. We’re seeing a whole group of companies emerge in the Social CRM space that are trying to address parts of these problems. Eventually, we should expect CRM systems to automatically indicate to customer facing employees the level of influence customers have. In the most radical future, customers may choose to broadcast their preferences to retail stores before the walk in based on preferences and past purchases in order to receive a better experience. If this happens, companies can match with their social influence, and treat them accordingly.

I look forward to hear from you: have companies treated you differently because of your social influence? What companies are doing this now? What are the risks of doing it or not factoring in social influence?

Posted in Influence, Social CRM, Social Media | Comments

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List of Corporate Social Media Strategists, Corporate Community Managers in 2010

Categories: Community Manager, Industry Index, Social Media, Social StrategistPosted on January 30th, 2010

As an industry watcher, I look at trends, data, spending, technologies, yet what’s really important is watching the trend of professionals as they grow into these roles managing disruptive technologies. Update: Brian Hayashi has created a spreadsheet of this with additional info –like Twitter handles. We’re staying coordinated so the data is matched, follow Brian on Twitter.

[Connecting with customers using social technologies is deceptively challenging, as most outsiders don't recognize the leadership to change internal cultural. Now, in public, let's recognize those who are paving the way]

Methodology: About this List
This 2010 list is an update from the original I started in 2008, it was woefully out of date as people moved around. This list is updated, as I’ve separated the large technology section in HW vs SW and am only linking to LinkedIn accounts.

A majority of this data is based off submissions in the 2008 post, which most which are self-submissions or from their fellow colleagues and we only link to their already public profile in LinkedIn for verification. We’ve spend days compiling this data, but due to the content ever changing, we expect there to be some inaccuracies, leave a comment if you see something that needs fixing. Thanks to Sonal Mehta a student at American University who I’ve hired helped me in this research.

Read Carefully: How to get on this List
In a world of noise, curation becomes very valuable, as a result, there are very specific requirements for this list, which include: 1) You must have a public LinkedIn profile page, as this is one of the best way to verify employment. 2) The profile indicates that social media is part of your full time employee role at the corporation–not just for personal or casual use. 3) You must work at an enterprise class corporation with more than 1000 employees, 4) Must be on brand side 5) You’ll kindly leave a comment below with the submission for review. Due to excess volume, submissions by Twitter and emails or other channels will not be included, kindly leave a comment in this centralized area below.

In an effort to keep information in a tight scope, I’m not able to include folks who are doing great work in other sectors. However, if you decide to create a list for other sectors, I’ll prominently link to it from this post. Update: Here’s a growing list for non-profits.

Sign Up For Upcoming Free Report: Skillset of the Social Media Strategist
The Altimeter Group is developing a free research report, on “Skillsets of Social Media Strategists” and will identify the attributes, backgrounds, experience of this emerging role, if you’re interested in receiving a copy, please register on this form. We will use portions of the data found in this post for the research report, so thanks for helping to update it.

Social Media Strategists at Corporations
The strategist is a program manager, who mainly focuses internally rather than being the external public face like the community manager. They are primarily responsible for resources, processes, teams, they are usually internally focused and ultimately, return on investment.

Airline

Automotive

Business Services

Consumer Product Goods

Electronics, Devices, Mobile

Financial Services

Health and Life Sciences

Hospitality, Food Service

Government, Armed Services, Education

Media and Entertainment

Retail

Technology, Hardware, Networking, Component, Computer

Technology, Software, Internet

Community Managers at Corporations
The community manager is primarily externally facing, and interacts with customers as the public face of the company. They are primarily customer advocates, evangelists, bloggers, community moderators, and experts at using social technologies to communicate. We honor them every fourth Monday of January on Community Manager Appreciation Day. To keep the focus tight, this list is only of corporate community managers, and not those on contract at community platform vendors or service companies on contract.

Automotive

Sylvia Marino Executive Director – Community Operations Edmunds.com Automotive

Business Services

Hospitality and Travel

Katie Hamlin Community Manager, Fodor’s Travel

Electronics, Devices, Mobile

Financial Services

Technology, Hardware, Networking, Component, Computer

Technology, Software, Internet

Social Media Researchers and Social Media Product Managers at Corporations
When I started this list in 2008, I didn’t have a specific slot for researchers and product managers who are creating these products. These roles are not folks who are using the technologies for marketing, support, or other business use cases (end users) but instead are researching and creating the products that the above professionals will use in their jobs.

I’m passionate about what these folks do, as I, myself, was a strategist/community manager at an enterprise corporation a few years ago.

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Expect Rapid Evolution of the Branded Support Community

Categories: Community Marketing, Social MediaPosted on January 28th, 2010

Companies With Support Communities Not Ready For Changes To Come
For over a decade, with simple BBS systems to community platforms, support communities haven’t undergone much innovation. Often a silo and tucked away in a website, these communities are going to take center stage. With social technologies appearing on every webpage, and more existing systems starting to connect, expect to see interesting use cases evolve. Support focused communities will evolve to touch marketing, sales, channel partners, CRM systems, and even become a thriving platform in the next few years. Let’s explore the rapid changes coming together.

A Support Community, Defined.
Take a look at Microsoft’s media centric Channel 9, VMware communities, or even AAA’s travel tips. These branded communities are offered by companies and encourage members to self-support each other, or the company will support them directly. The members are often customers, developers, or implementation partners. It’s not limited to them alone, prospects of a company may peer in to see how vibrant –or angry–the community is. There are over 100 technology vendors offer these commodity features.

The Opportunity: The Support Community No Longer A Cost Center
New forms of monetization for the brand are going to emerge. Support communities won’t just be a cost-center, we should expect to see new forms of value that meet the needs of the community members themselves, the brand, and the partners. To kick start the discussion here’s a few ideas of where I think the support community could evolve to:

Become a thriving marketplace of buyers and sellers. Not just through discussions, but through automated matching of buyers and sellers using reputation systems, and needs analysis tools. See how the concept of VRM is slowly taking hold.
New forms of value from third parties will spur innovation. System integrators, consultants, and other vendors who have services to offer community members will want to offer training, webinars, or other campaigns. Branded communities can monetize this as an intermediary.
Formalized advocacy programs will take hold beyond the organic evangelist. Some communities will offer features and programs that encourage members to join an unpaid army and reach out to prospects –and ready them to arms when the brand is under attack.
Communities members will ideate and start build new products with R&D. In some cases, they may help the brand define new products and be very involved in the R&D process.
Developer platform will let community create their own experience. Taking a nod from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, someday, support communities will offer platforms that will enable the members to create new applications, tools, and even products within the context of the community.
Connecting to CRM systems to offer better service. Community platforms will connect to CRM systems identify upsell, crosssell, and underserved accounts, increasing the efficiency of support.
Connections to other systems yield new experiences. Support communities will no longer be a silo but will connect to brand monitoring tools. ERP systems, business intelligence systems, web analytics, and social analytics tools.
The walls of support communities crumble as they connect to the public web. There are support communities in existence all around the web (see Get Satisfaction, UserVoice or even a customer created community). Expect to see branded communities tie to these off-domain systems.
Leave a comment below with your idea. The opportunities are abound.

A Key Constraint: Members first, Company Second
Despite the many opportunities for innovation of communities, first and foremost, the sanctity of the community members must not be broken. Companies have learned, often the hard way, that the members are in charge, so this needs to be a win for them first, the company second.

Join The Discussion and Upcoming Roundtable
I plan to hold a no-fee “Community Innovation” roundtable in Q1, to ideate the evolution of the branded community beyond support. Should you be interested in attending, I look forward to hearing from you in the following web form. I’ll be extending an invite to some key thought leaders in this space, to really spur the thinking from the top minds.

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Growth at Altimeter Group: Supply Chain Management, Government Innovation

Categories: Altimeter, Social MediaPosted on January 26th, 2010

Two Key Additions In Growth Areas: Lora Cecere, Alan Webber
We’re pleased to announce that we’re expanding two new partners Lora Cecere (full bio), Supply Chain Management and Alan Webber (full bio), Government Innovation. Founding partner, coauthor of Groundswell, Charlene Li discusses the hires and the changes in the market. At the Altimeter Group, we’re not forced into limited topic areas, but instead look at the intersection of major themes. Each partner has a unique perspective, and we are constantly talking, sharing, and pushing our ideas by collaborating, you’re starting to see this manifest as Ray (CRM) and (Social) converge on Social CRM. We know that customers demand a holistic experience, so organizations will follow suit, here’s how our world of social technologies merges with these two new topic areas:

Supply Chain Management: Intersections with Consumers
In my area of focus, customer strategy, it’s important to expand the thinking to ‘where the customers will be’. With the rapid adoption of simple social technologies, they’ve caused great disruption to marketing, PR, media, and customer support. With customers and prospects explicitly giving off signals of what they want, don’t want, or intend to do, it gives companies the opportunity to anticipate their needs. We see this opportunity to tie these customer signals in social media and getting the right products to customers –when they need it most. So what’s next? Beyond social media marketing, or supporting customers with social technologies, an upcoming trend we see is tying social technologies with supply chain management. There are three areas where social and supply chain management start to converge:

Demand signals by empowered consumers using social and mobile technologies. As consumers indicate their demand for new products or intentions, these signals will be transmitted to companies, their distributors, and sellers to anticipate the needs of consumers. Companies can reduce their inventory, shipping, an risk of spoilage of limited shelf-life products.

Co-innovation of new products between consumers –and engineering. We’re already seeing some companies like Uservoice, SalesForce ideas power Nokia, Dell, and Starbucks to ask their customers what they want built, but we expect this trend to continue. Aside from reducing time and cost of the R&D process, companies can produce just the right amount of inventory, and benefit from an army of engaged advocates that participated in co-creation.

We’re pleased to bring on Lora Cecere from AMR, where her domain knowledge of supply chain management will cross over with many of of our areas of focus. Learn more about her on her bio on the Altimeter site, or on Twitter.

Government and Education Connect With Communities
Open government, citizen media, and social media used to organize and rebuild after a crises have all touched our lives in one way or another. Undoubtedly, government agencies are realizing the power of these tools to understanding their citizens, learning from them, and influencing them. As a result, expect disruptive technologies like mobile and social to quickly move into the government limelight, such as the TSA adopting a blog to connect with travelers.

Build better relationships with communities. We’re already seeing government organizations benefit from understanding these tools, and using during campaigning practices. As citizens have already adopted these technologies, government organizations can benefit by listening, understanding and responding to citizens using social tools.

Use social technologies to innovate programs. It’s not just about using these tools for campaigning purposes, but also improving existing programs. Take for example, San Francisco uses Twitter to located troublesome potholes, reducing the costs for city workers to find the areas to fix –instead relying on citizens to reduce costs. Expect new forms of innovation to emerge that will improve cultures and where people live.

It’s a pleasure to welcome former colleague Alan Webber from Forrester Research, who’s got a strong background on web user experience, and a focus on government innovation. Together, we’ll be crafting frameworks for government agencies, educational institutions and those that serve them on how to harness social technologies to improve their missions. Learn more about Alan from his blog, Ronin Research, his bio on the Altimeter site, or on Twitter.

Growth At the Altimeter Group
Back in late August when Ray, Debs, and myself joined Charlene, we were excited to try a new model. Now, four months later, we’ve over 40 clients on retainer relationship, that’s little over 2 companies signing on board with us per week and are about a dozen employees. We’ve previously announced new hires, recently we hired Valerie, our operations manager, who will keep the gears going as we help our clients tackle ‘wicked’ problems.

Although we’re best known for our focus on disruptive technologies like social, web and marketing, the Altimeter Group has a wider offering that expands to enterprise applications and innovating new products.

Related Posts

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Community Manager Appreciation Day #CMAD (Every 4th Monday of Jan)

Categories: Community Manager, Community Marketing, Social MediaPosted on January 25th, 2010

Every fourth Monday of January, let’s take the time to pause, recognize, and celebrate the efforts community managers around the world to improve customer experiences.

Passionate About Customers
The title matters not, whether it’s online customer advocate, online customer support, company evangelist, disgruntled customer handler. Instead, focus on what they do: A customer advocate willing to help regardless of where they are online. Learn more by reading the Four Tenants of Community Managers.

Yet, Community Managers Don’t Have it Easy
Yet despite their admirable intentions, we know they face several uphill challenges:

Many challenges are internal: Most companies want to hide customer issues, and shuffle them into existing support systems. Additionally, measuring ROI in new media when a company wants to keep the kimono shut, increasingly becomes a challenge.
Seemingly never ending job: Customers never stop having problems, and with the global internet, the questions, complains, and inquires never stop.
Emotional drain impacts lifestyle: The sheer emotional strain of dealing with a hundreds of yelling customers and the occasional trouble maker will take a strain on anyone.
Privacy risks in the world of transparency: In an effort to build trust with customers, they expose their real name exposing their personal –and family– privacy forever on.

Now, Recognize A Community Manager, Every 4th Monday of January
While we agree with common manners to always thank someone after they’ve helped you, just take a moment to pause.. and think. Why would someone willingly go through the above mentioned challenges? Because of their passion to improve the company, and help customers have a better relationship. In many cases, a genuine ‘thank you’ can mean more than a yearly customer satisfaction survey. Take the time to recognize and thank the community manager that may have helped you while you during your time of need.

If you’re a customer, and your problem was solved by a community manager be sure to thank them in the medium that helped you in. Use the hashtag #CMAD.
If you’re a colleague with community manager, take the time to understand their passion to improve the customer –and company experience. Copy their boss.
If you’re a community manager, stop and breathe for a second, and know that you’re appreciated. Hug your family.

This isn’t just about a single role, but a bigger trend of making product and services more efficient, and thereby our world a little bit more efficient and sustainable. The comments are wide open if you wanted to share your experience working with community manager, or as one, feel free to thank them below.

Supported by Bill Johnston, Connie Benson, Rachel Happe, Jake McKee, Sean O’Driscoll, Lane Becker, Dawn Foster, Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Jeremiah Owyang, as we recognize and salate community managers!

Related Links

HRZone recognizes Becky Midgley

Jake McKee says this is (just about) the loneliest job

Bill Johnston, recognizes community managers

Amy Muller, Get Satisfaction contemplates where community management is and where it’s heading.

Amy also asks the community to showcase her community management heros.

Dawn Foster asks if you’ve thanked your community manager today.

Dawn shouts out to community managers.

Sam reasons why the community manager role is essential.

Connie Benson, a great friend, shouts out to community managers.

Rachel Happe gives reasons why we should pause and thank community managers

Connie Bensen of Alterian sent me this screenshot of mentions

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Microsoft Makes Work Fun: Office Launches “Ribbon Hero”, A Social Game

Categories: Social Gaming, Social MediaPosted on January 19th, 2010

Forget Farmville or Mafia Wars, Microsoft wants you to play Excel –pivot tables FTW.

Most software training and help resources are painful experiences written by technical publication editors. We know that most tutorial and help sections within applications are horrible to work with (I’ve shaken my head in frustration quite a few times using Microsoft’s own tutorial tools), and not every office worker can afford to attend a powerpoint training class.

Click above image to see my notes: Powerpoint users are given challenges, like this artistic effect, to win points which are used to brag on Facebook.

Learning game encourages social sharing
First, click on the image to see my additional notes. I rarely get excited at briefings, however big-enterprise Microsoft is doing something interesting. In an effort to make learning fun and increase usage of Microsoft office products, they’ve launched a pilot program called “Ribbon Hero” (read blog, or watch video). Much like a game you’d find on Facebook, Ribbon Hero lets users of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and other office applications score points by unlocking challenges –then touting it to their friends.

Microsoft staff creates ‘challenges’ in the software, and encourages users to play to learn. As users unlock challenges (see screenshot above) they can earn up to a max of 300 points per product, and can choose to share their scoring with their Facebook friends on the Fan page. Don’t think there’s any social captial here? well if people can brag about their fictitious mafia wars scores, we should expect them to tout their real-world workplace proficiencies.

Innovation exposes challenges
There are ~~three~~ four major hurdles as I see it: 1) I’m not confident that this launch will reach a wide audience in the workplace, it may skew towards Gen X and Y. 2) Secondly, they’ll need to overcome the barriers of those who score low being bashful about their scores, and not wanting to share with others. 3) It’ll take some studies to show that professionals that complete the challenges (300/300 points) are better workers, then get HR to promote, 4) Lastly, like all games, they can be cheated, like gaming hint websites, expect there to be a ‘tip blog’ for Ribbon Hero.

Microsoft most tap into new opportunities:
Although we’ve not tried Ribbon Hero, this is an innovative way to encourage users to learn about a typically single person product -and then share with their friends. Microsoft sharing data with Facebook (who they’ve invested in) doesn’t seem like their typical big box culture, kudos for them for doing something out of their normal engineering culture. Yet despite these upsides, Microsoft must:

Harness reputation points to grow the program. has just scratched the surface in using this reputation data like they have with the Microsoft MVP advocacy program to create a non-paid growing army of Microsoft Office experts.
Add features to enable game to scale. 1) Q&A features that allows members to pose questions to each other and answering them, gaining more points, 2) Challenges to be created by the members themselves, growing the game at a scalable pace for high achievers. Never letting the game end.
Develop a global leaderboard of top users. Allow them to build profiles as true ‘Office Heros’ and how they succeed at their job on a separate website, and encourage them to share their achievements on their blogs, resume and LinkedIn pages.
Measure based on new benchmarks. 1) Top line adoption curves skew up 2) Reliance on existing support features goes down 3) Ten solid case studies of people getting new jobs or promotions in part because of their proficiency at the game.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this from Microsoft –and maybe other traditional enterprise software companies like IBM, Oracle, and social fearful, Apple, will follow suit. I gotta hand it to Microsoft on this one, they’re finally making work fun. Lastly, ya know I gotta ask, but will Clippy make a cameo in the game?

Disclosure: Microsoft is an Altimeter client. We want you to trust us more by being upfront about our relationships, read our disclosure policy.

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Ongoing List of Social Marketing Efforts from Vacation Destinations, Convention, and Tourism Bureaus

Categories: Industry Index, Social MediaPosted on January 13th, 2010

Above: A photo I took on a recent trip to North Shore Oahu, inline with my plans to fulfill operation bluewater.

Recent data around interactive marketing spend indicates that the hospitality industry was ripe for spending on social marketing above all other industries. Why? This form of consumer marketing could be dependent on the human emotion and story telling between individuals, or through compelling word of mouth marketing campaigns.

As a result, Christine Tran, Altimeter Researcher and myself are kicking off this list, and encourage you to add examples by leaving a comment. The scope for this is list is a tourist destination –not a hotel, airline, or specific restaurant.

Bahamas Island Film Challenge, The Bahamas Tourist Office UK
This video contest campaign encouraged filmmakers in the UK to submit videos with voting encouraged from the crowd.
Caribbean, Caribbean Travel Organization(and islands)
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter are present on the main site, but yet each of their other travel, blog, and other sites. See Carribean Travel, OneCarribean lists out various social properties, Antigua’s forums, and Aruba’s Facebook integration.
Visit Dublin, Dublin Tourism
Site has flickr, YouTube, podcasts and Twitter integration. They also sport a Facebook page.
Hawaii’s GoHawaii, Stories of Hawaii
Hawaii has used a variety of assets such as Facebook pages, Twitter, and even created a Pandora station, in the past, Hawaii has catered to a group of bloggers who spread the word to their readers on a blogger tour. Disclosure: HVCB is an Altimeter client.
Memphis Travel
I recently met the wonderful head of social media, Kerry, at Memphis’s travel bureau on my travels, they have Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr account links on their site but haven’t yet integrated with their site.
uwishuknew, Philadelphia Tourism Marketing
An online source for an insider’s view of Philadelphia.” It’s a blog written by staff and local bloggers who are “in-the-know.” Here’s an example of their blog on dining.
The Best Job in the World, Tourism Queensland
You may have heard of the Best Job in the World campaign, a popular campaign garnering international media attention, and over 35,000 entries worldwide on youtube. The winner blogged about his entire experience.
Ultimate Thailand Explorers, Tourism Authority of Thailand
On the heels of the Best Job in the World, Thailand launched its own campaign. Contestants produced a 60-second YouTube video, and rallied for votes from their own existing social networks, effectively becoming destination ambassadors and spreading engagement. Do see the related blog.

If you’ve got examples, please leave a comment below, with a description and URL, we’ll add.

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Quicktake: Powered, A Social Marketing Suite, Acquires Crayon and Social Media Agencies

Categories: Quicktake, Social MediaPosted on January 11th, 2010

News hit this Monday that Powered has acquired three social media agencies: crayon, Drillteam and StepChange. I just had a skype video conversation with Aaron Strout and Joseph Jaffe to learn more, here’s my take. You can read crayon founder Joseph’s take and Aaron Strout the CMO of Powered and a quick mention in NYT.

A Solution Set of Services Bolsters a Marketing Platform
I’ve heard of crayon, and have many conversations and even podcasts with founder Joseph Jaffe, I’ve also spent time with the Powered executive team last year. Stepchange is a 13 person team out of Portland focused on Facebook Apps and mobile, and Drillteam, from NY, has been around for 10 years and focuses on experitntial and advocacy marketing, such as connecting events to online like street teams, guerrilla, and ambassador programs. Powered isn’t just a community platform, I learned they have other marketing features that really intent to provide a suite of offerings.

Natural Evolution Of A Growing Market:

Consolidation happens in downturned markets. As the recession starts to show signs of it lifting, now’s a great time for companies to come together and create a greater value. We saw this type of acquisition behavior from agencies during the first boom, and we should expect similar patterns here.
Acquisition provides key services software platforms can’t fill. It makes sense for Powered platform to partner up with a service(s) teams that have already been successful for some time, this improves the time to market to deployment. In addition to coming with a book of business, they can quickly deploy the Powered platform, expanding the software footprint. Joseph Jaffe has strong thought leadership, an existing marketing brand, and reach needed to the group.
Yet, brings risk for Powered and new partners. First of all, there are some big names coming together, the real stress will be can these cultures, and their strong willed leaders, be able to jive together. Secondly, it’ll be interseting to see if Crayon and services teams forces stragies on their clients that involve the Powered platform. I asked if there are any layoffs coming from consolidation, they haven’t made any plans, but when you have 4 companies coming together expect redundancy.

Impacts To Customers, Partners and Competitors:

Social Agencies should rekindle and bolster relationships. This impacts other social agencies like Stage Two Consulting, Social Media Group, AdHoc, Ant’s Eye View, ForumOne, Community Roundtable, Shift Communications, Dachis, FutureWorks, New Marketing Labs, who may be at medium and small tier, they should quickly partner up with other firms to increase their value.
Customers of crayon, Drillteam, and Stepchange should request agnostic recommendations. Any client of these three agencies should make sure that the strategy they are being offered includes other vendors and platforms –not just the Powered platform and Facebook platform. Remember, first find out where your customers are online before choosing the tools to use.
This is competition for larger agencies –yet savvy agencies will partner. This is a threat to large agencies like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, and Edelman. Yet the smart agencies won’t get defensive, they should partner with this team, and figure out what offerings they can offer that they don’t have in their portfolio.

Congrats to the Powered, crayon, Drilldteam and Stepchange team for this merger, I’m excited to see the industry emerge from small disparate startups to a larger entity going forward.

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Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing

Categories: Advocacy, Social MediaPosted on January 9th, 2010

The recession has been great for social marketing, in fact, I feel it’s spurred the industry on. With overall reduced marketing budgets, companies must innovate, and find new channels that are more efficient than the ‘carpet-bombing’ techniques of traditional marketing.

There are a handful of goals that companies can have with social technologies, from learning, dialog, support, and innovation (see Charlene’s deck, starting at slide 8 to learn more), I want to drill down in the following matrix to focus on the goal of spreading, and word of mouth, and viral. I call this “Advocacy”.

Marketers, who strive to find efficient ways of reaching customers at lower cost, seek ‘force-multipliers‘ or a method where using a small degree of energy (or the energy of another force) to your advantage. Do remember, there is a downside to any action, and with ‘advocacy’ there’s reduced control over message and therefore more risk. With that said, many marketers know the benefits of content spreading are worth the risks.

Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing

	Sophistication and Description	Investments and Returns	Strengths:	Weaknesses:	Great For:
Sharing Tools	Baseline effort. Tools like Sharethis, AddThis, Gigya, and some features in Pluck, and Kickapps.	High. Low investment as it can easily be deployed on CMS templates. Continual returns of content spreading with no additional overhead or cost.	Easy to deploy, yet transactional	Do not build deep relationship with customers	Getting started, a baseline activity.
Viral Marketing	A basic technique. Word of mouth campaigns on Facebook apps, YouTube (see popular), or Twitter (see moonfruit example)	Low. Being able to hit the right elements of the content people want, timing, and other factors are difficult. Chances are, most campaigns that intend to be viral never are	Easy for media and interactive agencies to create and deploy.	Dime a dozen. Short term and cheap. Not conducive to building long term relationships.	Traditional agencies and transactional marketers that are trying to learn social
Social Network Connections	An intermediate technique. Facebook, Twitter Connect. Easy to comment systems on blogs, to sophisicated Huffington Post social recommendations, see Buddy Media.	Moderate to High. Allowing customers to login to your site with existing connections increase value of social sharing and chance to serve up contextual data. However there are considerable costs in creating contextual content and systems that are not yet mature.	Encourages people to quickly login, share, and find others who have interests	Challenges in collecting email leads as customers now ‘login’ using social connections.	Static websites who need to inject social interactions.
Advocacy Programs	An advanced technique, see this checklist. Longer term programs with customer advocates like Microsoft MVP or Walmart’s 11 Mom’s	High return but high cost. Companies can benefit from an unpaid army that will market, defend, and support customers, but this requires significant resources to launch, grow, and maintain.	Builds long term deep relationships with a customer group that will defend brand.	Requires full resources for program, takes time to build	Companies that can’t scale their marketing in a high touch customer experience.

Companies Should Embrace Advocacy Programs
Organizations are already deploying these word of mouth tools, but often without a plan or strategy, get started now by:

Deploy simple sharing features now. These cheap and easy to insert embeds should be on every content type where companies want the content to spread. From press releases, to blog posts, companies need to make it easy for their market to share with others.
Reduce risks by providing proper support and resources. Organizations should first understand the costs, downsides and risks for each type of marketing program, with greater returns (Advocacy program) comes greater commitment of resources, and greater risk, so to reduce those risks, put the right resources behind it.
Develop new measurement techniques. Measuring the spread of information is more difficult, as often companies won’t have web analytics installed on third party websites. Instead use a variety of mention and url tracking with brand monitoring software to track how far information spreads over time.

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Matrix: Social Technology Adoption Curve Benefits –and Downsides

Categories: Analysis, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on January 3rd, 2010

Know The Upsides –And Downsides Of Your Adoption Behavior
Individuals and companies should be deliberate in their adoption strategy, there are benefits and risks to each category. It’s been interesting watching different group adopt social technologies over the past few years, I can see who benefits from being first –and the pains to be a thought leader of both individuals and companies.

Above, this is the standard Rogers Adoption Curve, it’s important to point out that my matrix below only is in context of social technologies, it will vary from technology to technology. I found this take on the adoption stages of social technologies helpful in framing how I thought about the following matrix. I built this following matrix in the context of social technologies and adoption by both individuals and mixed in with organizations and industries.

Matrix: Social Technology Adoption Curve Benefits –and Downsides

Categories	Description	Benefits	Downsides
Innovators	These brave souls take on new technologies, trial them, then will often evangelize them. I’d put those that adopted Twitter in 2006. or any entrepreneurs that creates new technologies fitting into these categories. From a corporate perspective, Dell was forced into this arena, and has benefited.	Glory for being first, a thought and practice leader.. Will have learned from their mistakes, and have far more experience than any others. Will always be able to tout they were first.	Very costly in terms of time, effort to find new technologies that are often flawed. Additionally, since innovation becomes cheaper and more accessible, this becomes more difficult as more entrants to the market launch products. Lastly, while these folks may be first for some technologies, they are often wrong for the many other technologies that did not take off.
Early Adopters	This behavior is exhibited by those that try out new technologies in a careful way, often thought leaders. Some analyst firms like Forrester adopted early, and the Tech industry deployed social. Agencies like Edelman, Razorfish have helped their clients.	Learn from the failures of innovators, they reduce risk. Often they have the opportunity to explain how it works to others. Become the case studies that other groups follow	Never first, and have to write the playbooks. They may adopt, but at higher costs than the majorities as the technology has not matured. Tech companies adopted social in 2005-2007 as an early industry, but a lack of measurement, and rapid tool change required great effort to stay current.
Early Majority	Although thoughtful in their deployment, they adopt faster than the mainstream. in 2009, we saw industries like consumer packaged goods, finance, and healthcare adopt social technologies. I think of when mainstream Oprah joining Twitter as a defining moment as she was ahead of most celebrities and media.	Technology starts to mature, reducing risk and costs. Standards emerge, although this group gets to help define mainstream adoption.	Some of the cool factor leaves, and brands start to move in on social technologies, scaring off some innovators.
Late Majority	This skeptical group only adopts when the mainstream does. Industries that only got on board with social when Obama, mainstream press, or celebrity adoption occurred fit here. Companies adopting in 2009 and beyond.	Reduced risk from learning from who’s done it right and wrong, as well as benefits from standard proccesses, and consolidation of vendors.	Not seen as thought leaders and don’t benefit from the residual buzz from being ‘cool’, instead come across as a ‘me too’./td>
Laggards	Still cautions in deployment, even after the technology has become mainstream. These folks will adopt social technologies in 2010 or later.	Cookie cutter deployment from standardization and very little risk. Deployment may actually be faster and with less effort than those above.	In balance with lower risk, lower opportunity for reward. No thought leadership, and little additional reputation or buzz value from the intended investment.

Matrix: Be Deliberate In Your Adoption Strategy
Each category has specific benefits and risks, but rather than just behaving in a way that comes natural, I encourage you in your personal and work adoption to be deliberate in your actions.

Examine your organizations adoption patterns. First, define how quickly your organization responds and adopts to technologies, and factor into your considerations.
Be a Category Ahead Of Your Company. If you’re responsible for new technologies at your company, your personal adoption should be a level or two ahead of the organizations adoption, as you cannot effectively deploy for your company if you don’t personally understand the impacts of the new technologies.
Track The Category Ahead Of You. Find an individual that’s above your adoption category (the early adopter watches the innovator) and be sure to watch their behaviors and learn from them. Adopters are often blazing their own trail, and may not ever follow anyone.

My Strategy: Early Adopter –But Not Innovator
One thing is clear, being first doesn’t mean you’re right, in fact, the Innovators have a difficult time dealing with early and late majority, paving roads of opportunity for analysis, agencies, and consultants. As a result, I make a distinct effort to be an early adopter of new social technologies, but not the innovator, as I find I’d rather be more often right, and expend less energy trying to be first.

Leave a Comment. Share Your Adoption Strategy
Let’s learn from each other, I’d like to know about your adoption behavior and that of your company. Were you deliberate in choosing your adoption strategy? How does it hurt or help your company?

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Who Reads This Blog? Find out with 2009 Web Strategy Survey Results

Categories: Feedback, Social MediaPosted on December 30th, 2009

Web Strategy Survey

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

Above: See the details of the survey results, due to heavy data, it’s best when put into ‘full screen’ mode, the fourth icon on bottom.

To me, this blog belongs as much to the community in which I serve as it does to me, as such, it’s important to find out who the readers are and what they want, to learn about previous efforts, see 2008’s results. The goals of this survey are simple 1) Find out who the readers are, 2) Find out if they are they influenced by this blog, and how, 3) How this blog can improve year-over year. With a sample size of nearly 200 respondents, some of the key findings from this survey were:

Overall, Readers Were Satisfied: Overall, respondents were pleased with the blog, and 47% rated it a “10/10″ in recommending it to others when asked “would you recommend this blog to a friend or colleague”, and 54% read more than half the posts, and over one-third shares it monthly with others (slides 3, 4, 5)
Many are Buyers at Corporate: 59% of respondents said they are buyers, 28% of respondents have budgets $100k-$1 million (although one-fifth do not hold budget), and over a quarter work at enterprise class companies with over half of respondents in the United States (slides 10, 14, 18, 19).
Some are Influenced By Blog: Over one-third of respondents said this blog strongly informs their actions at work, but it was nearly split between influence in their buying process, with 40% agreeing, and 39% disagreeing. (slide 6). Read more from Edelman’s Analyst Relations specialist, Jonny Bentwood on his take of this data.
Sophistication of Social and Mobile at Work Varies: 39% of respondents said their company was intermediate when it came to social strategy, and 43% said their novice when it comes to mobile strategy. (slide 20, 21)
Identified Many Areas for This Blog to Improve: There was a large request for adding more case studies, and interviews with thought leaders in the space, and a variety of comments in the open-ended section that I’m all taking to heart. (slide 8, and qualitative answers)

You can read the qualitative answers on a separate page, in case you want to understand why they read this blog, and what they want to see improved.

A few notes on this survey. I’m not sure this is truly representative of all readers, it’s likely those that are more engaged, and are willing to spend time filling out the survey. While some research firms take data samples from smaller numbers, this is only 195 of respondents, although there are far more readers than that.

If you want to influence the readers of this blog, it’s simple. Be part of the ongoing conversation (not be pitchy) by leaving comments and demonstrating your knowledge and expertise. Also, you can schedule a briefing with me, but I’ll have to admit up front, it’s been hard getting on my cal as we just launched this new company. I’m figuring out ways to make briefings easier, such as blocking out Friday mornings, using web based forms to collect more information up front.

Thanks to the folks who took the time to answer the 20 question survey, I read every response, and am constantly trying to improve this blog. Here’s to making this blog even better in 2010!

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To The Future! A List of Intention Enabled Websites

Categories: Industry Index, Intention Web, Social MediaPosted on December 17th, 2009

The web is quickly moving to real-time, people share the information about what they’re doing while their doing it. Yet the next step beyond real time, is future-looking data, which is called the Intention Web (get up to speed by reading this post). In an effort to map out this trend in 2010, let’s list out the vendors, companies, and beyond that will facilitate this type of forward looking data.

There are countless opportunities for people to connect with others with the same goals, or for companies that want to serve them as new technologies like Social CRM evolve and develop. Scope: These Intention websites facilitate a person to publish their future goals in the context of their community, or sometimes even in public. For example, an unshared CAL isn’t a qualifier.

To The Future! A List of Intention Enabled Websites

43 Things: This “wish list”, they suggest that you make a list on 43 Things and see what changes happen in your life. They encourage you to connect with others with the same goals.
Coachsurfing: Helps those traveling to other cities to find homes and couches to stay on, by organizing availability. (thanks jasminw)
Facebook Events: Facebook allows members to RSVP for future events, publish their own events, or see what friends are doing.
Localist: Allows those in DC and Baltimore to find events, publish their intent to attend, and organize with friends (thanks Mary)
Meetup: Encourages groups to organize events, plan events, and connect with others.
Plancast: Is a social network that allows members to publish their future plans. It allows people to see who is going to other future goals, and to publish to Facebook, and Twitter.
Tripit: This website allows travelers to plan out their travel itineraries. (thanks Sameer)
Upcoming: This Yahoo owned property allows people to find, publish, and share future events.

Leave a comment if you know of other technologies that meet this critia

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Meet the Arabic Blogosphere: Read The Comment Section

Categories: Global Web, Middle East, Social MediaPosted on December 11th, 2009

Blogging Strategy Extending Your Voice To The World

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

The purpose of this post is two-fold: 1) To share my keynote presentation about blogging strategy, 2) Help connect the Arabic bloggers with my Western business readers and community.

I’m in amazing Doha, in the nation of Qatar, who’s sponsored my travel to speak at the ictQATAR and my friends at ForumOne event about blogging. Qatar wants to reach out and connect with the world, I’m excited to be one of those who can help bridge.

Blogging conferences in the US were popular a few years ago –and have given way to Facebook conferences, and now Twitter or last week’s “Real Time” focus at LeWeb. The Middle East has been evolving quickly in the blogosphere, and this is a real focus for individuals, organizations, institutions, and governments to connect with others, and let their voice to be heard.m Embedded above, you’ll find my presentation, which has international examples of bloggers. It has a section with data (sourced cited) and then I talk about where I see blogging headed into the next era. The purpose of this event is to educate local bloggers on how to most effectively use blogging tools to connect and reach to the outside world, so I’ll give a hand, and try to connect the community right here on this blog.

Arabic Bloggers, Kindly Leave A Comment
In the spirit of community, in this case, global community, at the end of my keynote, I’m suggesting that the attendees leave a comment on this post, to shout out to the world, leave a URL, and a few sentences on what they focus on.

Web Strategy Community, Please Welcome Them
My hope is that these Arabic bloggers will not only connect with each other, but also connect with my readers in the business world. If you’re a regular reader of the Web Strategy blog –please welcome them, surf their blogs, and share about yourself if you’ve similar interests. We recently installed Disqus so we have threaded conversations –making it easier to keep track of multiple discussions. Be sure to return to this post in the future, in order to see how the conversation developers over time.

To me, success for this project is to see at least two people connecting with each other in which they can develop a meaningful relationship for understanding, business, or friendship. Blogs, a simple technology, that can bridge people around the world.

Update: It’s a few hours after the conference, and I’ve had time to reflect, and connect with other bloggers that attended. I’m told this was the first time bloggers were able to get together in Qatar, and some met for the very first time face to face. It was an privilege to be part of this historical event, which was organized and sponsored by ictQatar, ForumOne, and the many bloggers who attended. Really an honor, I hope to return in the coming months, this is one of the highlights in my career, and a milestone for the social web. Also, do see their latest blog, which was launched at the event, both in Arabic and English. The Gulf Times featured the event on the front page (pic).

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List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings

Categories: Industry Index, Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on December 8th, 2009

Social CRM: A Growing Segment
Yesterday’s post on Social CRM vendors not walking-the-talk raised awareness of this nascent space. However, not everyone was thrilled with the effort, as CTO John Moore gave us an A for effort but a C- for results, and Kim Kobza, the CEO of Neigborhood America (they were an early adopter) left a comment on John’s post suggesting we missed the mark (also, SAP ’s passionate team strongly represents). Although we stand by our scoring, both John and Kim are right, our evaluation yesterday was only on a small subset of the industry, but a manageable starting ground, as we continue to unearth the variety of players.

Tracking the Market with an ‘Industry Index’
For a few years ago, I’ve created what I call my posts called the Industry Index (see all) lists to track companies in any particular vertical, it helps me, vendors, and buyers to track the space. I expect this space to rapidly increase in size as social channels will be bolted onto CRM vendors, and many brand monitoring and community platforms are adding workflow, triage, and tracking capabilities. The purpose of this list is to quickly capture the vendors participating in this space, and to acknowledge those that were not on yesterday’s review, I expect there to be many more vendors who leave a comment, which we can quickly add to this list.

We owe it to the market to try to include as many as possible, although it’s going to be very difficult as this space quickly grows. So first, let’s try to put some scope around this space with a definition.

Social CRM Definition
We prefer Paul Greenberg’s definition of Social CRM, which he summarizes as:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” (also read his 2009 review of this space on ZDnet)

It’s a broad definition, but the key criteria he lists out are enough for me to go on.

List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings: (32 vendors total)

Traditional CRM Vendors offering Social Integration (10 vendors)

ACT!: This barely fits the scope of social crm, but ACT! allows a single individual to manage multiple types of information, including social, however if this product was extended across an enterprise, it fits the quota.

BatchBlue: While not a ‘traditional’ CRM like many of the others listed below, has traditional sales automation features, but also connect with existing social graph data, think social aggregation of contact lists. After watching the demo, it looks like you have to manually enter feeds of contacts, rather than auto-finding data from social graphs by scraping.

Buzzient: Offers a CRM platform that provides social media analytics that can be used for web marketing, customer tracking, or reporting. They have partnerships with Salesforce, Oracle, and SugarCRM.

Microsoft Dynamics: Offers Accelerators (here and here) that “Allows business professionals to monitor and analyze customers’ conversations on social networking sites, and as a result, provides real-time status updates about their products and services” (thanks Menno, who writes on the topic) They are also partnered with Neighborhood America

NetSuite: Offers social CRM with a partnership with InsideView and has Twitter integration (submitted by Paul Greenberg)

Oracle Siebel Social CRM: Promises the ability to provide insights based on the buying behaviors of similar customers, as well as shared content to be used between sales teams.

RightNow CRM: Offers several features in their suite such as Support Communities, Innovation Communities, Cloud Monitoring, and Social Experience Design. Rightnow recently acquired Hivelive an enterprise community platform.

Salesforce: Offers acces to Social Networking like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce, like SAP is importing the Twitter “firehose” feed, and has offered social features like Q&A, and social networking like Chatter, and has lightweight LinkedIn integration.

SAP CRM: Imports the Twitter firehose feed, and

Sugar CRM: Offers “SugarCRM Cloud Connectors connect via Web Services to leading third-party data service providers such as Hoover’s, JigSaw and LinkedIn”

Community Platforms Offering Social CRM (5)

Jive Software: Community Engagement, offers data integration from Radian6, encouraging management of the discussion.

Leverage Software: I recall that Leverage offers built in integration with Salesforce, but I was unable to find it on their site.

Lithium Technologies offers the Social CRM Suite offering features such as Community Applications, Reputation Engine, Actionable Analytics, CRM Connectivity, and Social Web Connectivity.

Neighborhood America: Has had a partnership with Microsoft Dynamics, read press release, (they were early on in March 2009) and commentary from Paul Greenberg on ZDNet.

Concourse: Offers a variety of integration modules to a variety of apps, including a CRM module that’s prebuilt. (via pjk54)

Brand Monitoring Offering Social CRM (3)

Radian 6: Offers brand monitoring tools that allow tools to discuss (Conversation Sidebar), triage, and manage disparate conversations, see Dave Fleet’s write up.

ScoutLabs: Offers teams workflow ability to discuss social interactions.

Visible Technologies: Offers CRM like features that allow teams to track, manage, triage, social conversations. Read Jason Falls take.

Social Media/Twitter Clients (2)

CoTweet: Offers a variety of features that allow teams to monitor, manage, and triage conversations in Twitter, see features page.

Hootsuite: Provides workflow, analytics, for teams to manage multiple Twitter accounts.

Social Customer Experience (4)

CrowdEngineering: Helps to match experts to customer problems, by using a recommendation engine and skill resource set engine.

Fuze Digital Solutions: Provides a broad and modular multi-channel customer care solution using a community knowledge base as its foundation.

Helpstream: Offers tools that allow customers to submit questions to each other, with integration into SalesForce in addition to community driven knowledge centers. see video.

Parature: Offers chat-like features for support reps to interact with customers, then measures sentiment.

Get Satisfaction: Is an off-domain (all the support is done on their site –not yours) community that now offers premium features that offer ability to manage discussions.

Sales 2.0/Social Graph Aggregation (6)

Flowtown: Allows marketers to prioritize targets to contact by a variety of influence scores, and their social graph. It then offers targeted email marketing based on those two criteria.

Gist: Offers a way to track the social behaviors of your customers and prioritize.

InsideView: Offers some unique offerings that mine a business social graph to provide alerts as a plugin to traditional CRM systems, Watch this lengthy demo.

Roving Group: Offers a product called ‘Roving Contacts’ that aggregates the social graphs and contact information from your address book.

SocioToo: Not the typical corporate enterprise company, this Dutch company offers a search page (and no real corporate site –by intent) that mines social graph data in public.

Xobni: This cleverly named (opposite of inbox) Outlook plugin scrapes your social graph and most frequently emailed contacts improving email utility. This barely falls within the scope of social crm, but if the data was able to export to other systems, it could start to apply.

CRM Applications and Plugins (2)

Appirio: Offers the ability for companies to create applications on Facebook which then marry data back to Salesforce, called Cloud Connectors.

SocialCRMTools: Offers integration with Salesforce that imports, monitors, and manages Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. (via John Perez)

Social Networks and Others

Twitter: Has made motions they plan to offer premium services to brands, that would offer verified accounts, then management-like features. The specifics are still unknown, as they sort out their business model. They have partnered with Google and Bing.

Google has announced real time search integration, and Bing has shown some early integrations. While far fetched we should not completely rule them out as eventually building a dashboard for brands to manage their namesakes, advertising, and website analytics, or Google alerts. Historically, they generate money off content created by publishers, so this actually falls in line with ‘organizing the world’s information”.

Not on this list? Leave a comment, with justification why you fit in Paul’s definition with a link to your site explaining more, I’ll take a look and add to it, please be patient while I review. Also, if you want to brief Ray and myself, please read and submit to this briefing form.

Update: Business Partner Ray Wang and I have created a more detailed matrix of this space for our clients.

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Finding: Social CRM Vendors Don’t Walk The Talk

Categories: Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on December 7th, 2009

I first posted this on the Destination CRM blog, thanks to Josh Weinberger @kitson. Update: The below is a partial view of the industry, do see this larger index of Social CRM vendors.

Surveying the Social CRM Industry
Business partner Ray Wang (focused on enterprise strategy) and myself (customer strategy) of the Altimeter Group is undergoing a major project for a client in the nascent Social CRM arena. We’re surveying the landscape to learn about a variety of vendors in the space, their capabilities and deployments. A small portion of our survey is to see who’s eating their own dog food, and truly demonstrating they understand the ’social’ aspect of social crm and living it.

Companies Who Sell Social Products Should Demonstrate Credibility By Living It
While critics may be quick to dismiss the mere inclusions of a blog or community to a product landing page, the message goes much deeper. Social CRM isn’t just about bolting on a new plugin to your system like a new air foil on your minivan but instead a new way of doing business. The promise of social crm says that companies are truly listening to their customers wherever they are, responding, anticipating, and making the commitment to improve products and services. Vendors that are assisting brands with this promise to the market need to demonstrate they fully understand the ramifications of social crm –not just a keyword checklist of the buzzword du jour.

Criteria: How We Graded the Social CRM Vendors
There are four major areas of grading, from very tactical ability to 1) Simple sharing of social content from the corporate product page 2) Surfacing a developer or business community, and a look inside of the discussions in each community, with bonus points for integration with product page. 3) Thought leadership with relevant blogs on the subject, and a gauge of their level of interaction and any twitter accounts they may have. 4) A subjective look at the overall page experience in the context of a company that’s offering a ’social experience’.

Findings: Overall, Social CRM Vendors Aren’t Walking the Talk
We’ve decided to make our findings public, at least for this part of our client deliverable to see how different vendors that are in the Social CRM space are walking the talk.

	Sharing Features on Product Page (out of 1 point)	Community and Integration (out of 1 point)	Thought Leadership: Blogs, Twitter (out of 1 point)	Overall Social Experience (out of 1 point)	Final Score (out of 4 points)
Salesforce	0	0	0	.25	.25/4
Microsoft Dynamic	0	0	0	.5	.5/4
SAP CRM	.5	0	0	0	.5/4
Jive (Community Platform)	0	0	.5	.5	1.0/4
Oracle/Siebel Social CRM	0	.5	.5	0	1.0/4
RightNow CRM	1	0	.5	0	1.5/4
Lithium (Community Platform)*	.75	.75	.75	0	2.25/4

To pass, companies need to receive greater than a .5 in each category for a total score of 2.0 plus making Lithium the only vendor to pass.

For details, see the data, and our justifications on this Google Sheet.

Highlights From Study
The product pages are devoid of true social interaction, and none of them actually surface discussions about how the market is even talking about them. Marketing machine Salesforce demonstrated they aren’t engaging in a social experience on their own product pages and SAP and Microsoft’s typical enterprise looking design stayed consistent with ‘boring’ social experiences. Although Oracle’s bland web experience looks like it’s designed for the media-phobes, there is links to community and thought leadership blogs. Despite the overall meager findings, there were a few social hopefuls such as Lithium (Altimeter client*) who integrated social throughout the experience followed by RightNow Technologies who demonstrated thought leadership through executive blogs. Honorable mention to Jive engaging online video that captures the spirit of the Social CRM movement. We know that soon every webpage will be social, even if you don’t choose for it to be, so companies should enable features that allow websites to have conversations. Social CRM vendors that want to demonstrate to the market they are experts at this space should gear up to demonstrate they’ve the ability to do as they preach –as for now, it doesn’t show.

*Altimeter Client. At the Altimeter Group we practice open leadership (also the topic of Charlene’s upcoming book) and disclose our relationships with clients, given their permission. We hope you will trust us more if we do.

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When Real Time Is Not Fast Enough: The Intention Web

Categories: Intention Web, Social MediaPosted on December 4th, 2009

Things started slow
I remember when people would go to conferences, take notes, then share them a few hours or days later. Then in 2005-2006 I noticed people started to live blog sessions, anxious readers would refresh as the page was updated in real time –sometimes with photos. Fast forward to Dec 2006, Twitter emerges to the early adopters and people begin to share in real-time. Plurk, Jaiku, and then Facebook status updates emerge, followed by the enterprise vendors like SocialText, it’s not just a product, status updates are now a feature.

[The Intention Web: A Published, Anticipated Goal.]

When Real Time Is Not Fast Enough: The Intention Web
I’ll be presenting at Europe’s largest tech conference, LeWeb next week. My topic? When Real-Time Isn’t Fast Enough: The Future Of the Web (I’ll publish slides, later). In particular, with event planning features, like Facebook events, upcoming.org, we’re starting to see people make explicity public remarks on what they want to do, when, and with who. Welcome plancast.com a startup by Mark Hendrickson formerly of Techcrunch who created this simple website that allows people to broadcast what they plan to do next using Twitter or Facebook.

Web Strategy Matrix: Asynchronous, Real-Time, and Intention Web

	What It is, and Examples	Opportunities	Challenges
Asynchronous Web	Information exchanging between multiple sets of time. People publish, someone else reads later. Examples: News sites, press releases, websites without social features.	Information with longer term shelf life can be archived and consumed.	Much of today’s information is related to real time events, people want to share their thoughts and experiences, this is quickly getting outdated as social features empower real time conversations appear, regardless.
Real-Time Web	Information published as it happens, often, content is consumed in real time, with the reader also broadcasting back, resulting in synchronous communication. Examples: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook Status updates.	Consumers can give instant feedback about their needs. Companies can respond to the immediate needs of customers.	Excessive noise from everyone publishing their status. Companies unable to sort through noise, prioritize, and react. This problem to compound over time.
Intention Web	Information that provides explicit predictions of who will do what next, although it’s not happened yet. Examples: Upcoming.org, Facebook events, Plancast. Update: Silicon Valley Insider writes about Tweetmeme, Topsy, Sency, OneRiot	People can connect to each other, improving experience. Businesses can provide a more contextualized experience for customers or prospects using Social CRM	Explicit intentions may not be true, the future is always uncertain. Companies can barely keep up with real time web –let alone predict the future.

Intention Web Provides People and Companies Opportunities
Some may call this the, anticipation web, intention web, or forward looking web, but regardless of the name, there are some unique opportunities: 1) People can now use their social relationships that have similar goals or events on their cal and improve their experience. 2) They can also identify who in their social circles are most likely going where, increasing their knowledge of top events. 3) This provides businesses with the ability to listen to provide highly contextualized offerings and experiences for those explicitly stating their intents. Once a listening strategy is developed, expect Social CRM to be in the foreground mining, organizing, and making this data actionable.

Yet Barriers Will Challenge Consumers and Companies
Yet the intent based web is also fraught with challenges for both people and companies. 1) Status updates are still getting traction. Twitter has the media hype, but not yet the mainstream adoption, so you can’t expect the social behaviors of everyone to broadcast their future intents. 2) For those that do broadcast their intent, should be concerned about privacy and personal security. 3) The future is always uncertain, a great degree of intention data will be inaccurate. 4) Most companies can’t even keep up with the asynchronous web, let alone the real-time web, and certainly not the intent based web.

Above: Plancast allows me to broadcast my goals which include, what, where, and when.

Above: My goals can now be published to Twitter, Facebook, or to my friends on Plancast.

Above: Community can subscribe to Paul Greenberg’s intentions, who’s set a goal to attend the upcoming SAP event.

Bottom Line: Intention Web Will Provide Consumers With Contextualized Experiences
Expect the real-time web to quickly evolve into the intention web. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don’t be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you.

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Quicktake: Extend LinkedIn’s Community To Your Website

Categories: Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on November 23rd, 2009

I was briefed as an analyst by Adam Nash, LinkedIn’s Vice President, Search & Platform Products to learn about today’s announcement around opening their network as a platform.

Announcement: Access LinkedIn Data From Other Locations Using The LinkedIn Platform
Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. They’ve announced that OAuth os now available at Developer.linkedin.com. Like Facebook Connect, this means that any website or any web application can allow users to login from their LinkedIn account on a third party site, and even publish information back to their LinkedIn profile and network from that third party site.

What It Means To Business:

Connect the Affluent, Educated, and Active Community To Your Site
The stats are obvious, they have a network of 52mm (a sixth of the size of Facebook’s 300mm+) engaged individuals that represent decision makers and those that aspire to be upwardly mobile in their career, view the stats page to learn more. In fact, over 51% earn more than $100k+ a year, and 23% earn more than $150K+ annually. Over 77% of community members have a college degree, making this an educated bunch, yet It’s not just about quality of community, their is an apparent degree of site activity, LinkedIn’s site rivals that of Forbes, and even the WSJ.com, according to Compete.

Your Business Applications And Website Should Never Be “Alone”
If your company is in B2B or trying to reach business professionals, chances are you have an application for them to use. Now, as you launch them, you can quickly integrate with the LinkedIn platform, this way personal data is already populated. This also goes for your corporate website, provide your users the ability to see which one of their LinkedIn contacts has been there, and encourage them to interact with your site and trigger messages back to their LinkedIn news page –fostering word of mouth.

LinkedIn Data To Be Pervasive
CIOs must wake up and realize the value of social networks, even last week, LinkedIn announced a partnership with Microsoft Oulook, extending it’s profile information to legacy email systems. Data will get pre-populated, meaning your contacts can be viewable within the context of your existing emails, empowering you to know more about who you’re meeting even though you’ve never met. We should expect in the future that existing Intranet networks will connect their LDAP to the LinkedIn profile.

And yes, if you haven’t noticed yet, the speed on innovation on the social web is increasing at a rapid pace, things are happening faster than ever. To get a good sense of the evolution of LinkedIn, I’ve created this matrix which shows it’s evolution and some predictions of where things are to head.

Web Strategy Matrix: Evolution of LinkedIn

LinkedIn Evolution	Example	Status
Destination Social Network	LinkedIn is a destination social network, users to there, login and only communicate within the confines of the domain.	Since it’s inception in 2003, this is how it’s been.
Application Platform	Allows third parties to build applications that sit on the LI domain and interact much like Facebook’s Platform	In Oct 2008, A small hand-selected group of companies like Box were allowed to do this, it’s not currently rolled out to others.
Portable Data	Third party websites can allow users to login using LinkedIn identity, see which friends are also present, then spread information back to LinkedIn.com.	This is today’s announcement, Nov 2009
Personalized Experiences on Third Party Sites	Third party websites can provide personalized content to first time users by recognizing their LinkedIn profile.	Prediction: Mid 2010
Social CRM	LinkedIn partners with SalesForce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, to allow data in LinkedIn to quickly be exported to CRM systems. As customers have queries or support issues, the CRM systems will trigger notifications to brand managers.	Prediction: Late 2010
Augmented Reality	Using mobile devices, users can quickly hold a device up a cell phone in front of a peer to see their LinkedIn data –without even having a conversation.	Prediction: 2011

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Social Technology Impacts Every Customer Touchpoint

Categories: Forbes, Social MediaPosted on November 20th, 2009

Forbes CMO Network, An Insightful Resource For Marketing Leaders
I’m serving CMOs by teaming up with the Forbes as a regular contributor. My goal? To guide marketing leadership on how to leverage disruptive technologies and meet business goals. At a more detailed level, this blog will continue to aim at providing nitty-gritty breakdowns, frameworks, and insights. Use these two resources in tandem to both develop strategies, and then implement best practices across the organization.

[Companies Must Develop A Holistic Strategy, As Social Technologies Impact Every Customer Touchpoint]

Social Technologies are a Horizontal –Not A Vertical Approach
It continues to amaze the market that such simple social technologies can impact the entire organization. In fact, social technologies, at the core, allow people to connect to each other without a middle person in the way. As a result, expect social technologies to impact every employee and customer touchpoint. CMOs must prepare in their 2010 planning how to leverage social, not as a skunkworks but as a strategic shift in all communications.

Three Resources to Use:

Use the Forbes CMO article as a guide for your marketing leadership, pass along this article “CMOs: Consumers Are Connected. You Need To Be, Too”.
Below, use the detailed matrix (and the links within them) for the strategists who need to plan out the actual programs.
Leave a comment with other suggestions, and benefit from working with the very savvy Web Strategy community, who I learn from every single day (thank you).

Web Strategy Matrix: Social Technologies Impact Every Customer Touchpoint

Medium	Description and Examples	Market Maturity	Impacts To Brands
Digital Advertising	Facebook launched “Social Ads” that allow advertisements to appear based on your profile information and friends.	Infantile	As profiles become portable (like Facebook or Google connect) people can share their personal info for contextual experiences, expect advertising to improve CTRs as social data is added. See how an interactive ad benefitted from my Facebook data.
Search Marketing (Paid and SEO)	For years, bloggers heavy linking and frequent content have scored high on SERP pages. Recently, Google and Microsoft partnered with Twitter, to offer “Social Search” which means users could received customized SERP based on their friends behaviors and preferences.	Pre-Teen	Social search will impact a prospects search results are impacted by their friends, this complicates the traditional search marketing strategy of simple keyword placement. Conversational marketing becomes a key factor in search strategy. Learn more about Social Search.
Email Marketing	Many email vendors like Responsys, ExactTarget, Constant Contact and Zeta Interactive provide simple ways to “share this” email with their friends on social networks. More advanced vendors are offering advanced monitoring, and innovative companies like Flowtown are using email addresses to identify a prospects social networks	Infantile	Email marketers can no longer be in broadcast mode, but must be prepared for emails to be shared with each other. Furthermore, they should seek how to influence content on the newsfeed in social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Learn how email and social networks are interlaced.
Web Campaigns/Microsites	Traditional microsites now have social components from simple “Share this” features to viral videos and community dialog. On the extreme side, Skittles allowed the whole site to be taken over by consumers.	Adult	A marketing campaign today without social elements is asking to be ignored. To benefit from word of mouth, marketers know spurring a conversation will cause the campaign to spread.
Corporate Site	Corporate sites are integrating social features, From Community Platforms like Mzinga, Awareness, Pluck, Kickapps, Liveworld (client) they encourage customers to talk back.	Young Adult	Even if companies don’t want their website to be social, they can’t stop it. Google’s “SideWiki” product allows any webpage to be social using a browser plugin.
Mobile, Location Based	Location based social networks are quickly emerging among early adopters. Foursquare, Gowalla, and even Twitter are allowing people to share their location, time, and social context.	Infantile	Advertising and special offers becomes more targeted as brands can triangulate contextual information for consumers –but only if they desire to see it.
Sales Efforts	Ok, this isn’t a medium, nor the two listed below, but it impacts the scope of the CMO. Most marketers provide sales enablement resources, now these sales folks are armed with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. In fact, many sales folks have had their digital rolodex in LinkedIn for years.	Young Adult	For savvy marketers, providing social marketing skill training to sales folks will provide them with best practices, and teach them to do more quicker. Those that do nothing run the risk of PR nightmares and even legal problems for the untrained department. Learn about social media policies.
Support Efforts	What happens in customer support now echos on the social web, from Dooce’s flare up with Maytag to Domino’s Employees snotting on Youtube. Furthermore, customers self-support each other in forums, Facebook, and GetSatisfaction.	Adult	Marketers must provide a holistic experience to customers, as they don’t care what department you’re in. Read more about Social Support.
Product Development	A handful of savvy companies like Dell, Starbucks, and Nokia are using social tools to improve the innovation process using tools from Salesforce ideas, Uservoice, or Getsatisfaction	Infantile	Customers want to innovate with brand, use these free resources to improve brand messaging, test new features, and to develop an army of advocates. Learn how some companies have benefitted from co-innovation.
Real World and Events	Physical events are now impacted by social technologies, and even virtual events. Attendees will connect to each other, comment about the event, and discuss if even after the event has concluded.	Adult	Event marketers must develop a strategy to encompass both pre, during, and post event to be successful. Here’s a playbook to integrate social and events.

Sharing This Content
Occasionally, I get a few emails from people asking if they can use my blog posts in their presentations. Here’s my policy: You cannot package up this content and sell it without my permission. However, it is ok to use for educational purposes as long as you give me credit on the slide, mention it verbally, and link to my blog. Creative Commons defines this as: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Love to hear your comments below, and how social impacts all digital channels.

Thanks to Christine Tran, Altimeter Researcher for her editorial expertise on the Forbes piece.

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Matrix: The Four Social Support Strategies

Categories: Social CRM, Social Media, Social Support, SupportPosted on November 18th, 2009

At the Altimeter Group, I cover Customer Strategy, which encompasses not only marketing, but also support, expect our discussion to grow as social technologies impact the whole enterprise.

The Social Support movement is afoot (see opportunities), and more companies will be connecting existing marketing and support systems with the social web. Many companies, like Comcast, Wells Fargo, Intel, BestBuy, JetBLue are responding to customers and in some cases, supporting them in near real time.

The challenge is that these teams are unable to scale, even a support team of ten full time folks at Comcast will have a hard time responding to all customers in all social channels. As a result, expect companies to resort to scalable ways to respond to customers, such as:

The Four Social Support Strategies

1) Do Nothing: Use Legacy Support Channels
Some companies will not respond to customers, it’s not in their culture, exposes them to risk, have specific legal or federal restrictions in place, or simply don’t get this space. In this case, these companies may only choose to support customers in their formal forms of support in 1800 numbers or on the official company websites

2) Employee Based Support: Employees Respond to Customers
Many companies are assigning people in their support or product teams to respond to customers in the social web. The more conservative the company, the less people are officially able to support. Take for example financial services company Wells Fargo has a handful of “Social Concierges” that tweet on the @Ask_WellsFargo account, they set expectations around hours of service (insert banker’s hours joke here) and not to disclose account information. On the flip side, Best Buy encourages their thousands and thousands of “Blue Shirt” employees to respond using a Twitter CMS system that response from the official @Twelpforce account.

3) Peer Based Support: Customer to Customer Other companies will approach this by encouraging their top customers to respond on their behalf. By creating online communities where customers can self-support each other using Q&A features like Salesforce “Answers”, or my Lithium’s unique Twitter alerting system that encourages advocates to respond to prospects. (Lithium is an Altimeter Group client). It’s not just on branded communities, many companies encourage support from third party sites such as Get Satisfaction, who centralizes support for all products.

4) Automated Social Support: Computer Generated Tweets
Social CRM systems are going to be intelligent, in fact, they’ll start to incorporate bot-like features you can find in web-based chat support, or the logic from interactive voice systems (IVR), and respond to customers. Support and product teams can already tweet from some CRM interfaces, so attaching an intelligence module will be the next step –it could even come from existing employee Twitter handles.

Web Strategy Matrix: The Four Social Support Strategies

	Benefit	Downside
Rely on Legacy Systems	This keeps customers in the right process and funnel that the company is used to. Secondly, it doesn’t reinforce that customers should yell at their friends to get help from a company	Missed opportunities: Angry customers could revolt starting a Groundswell, or leave an opportunity for competitors to swoop in and take dissatisfied customers.
Employee to Customer	Provides a personal touch to help and assist customers, builds relations and trust	For large companies, this is not scalable, and will result in companies prioritizing responses to the most authoritative or most urgent. If rolled out to support in all social avenues, it can be costly. Lastly, it teaches customers to yell at their friends to get support.
Peer Based Support	Companies can reduce costs by having customers self-support each other. Collectively, customers may often know more about the company’s products than the actual product team.	Unfortunately, not all questions may get answered in a timely way, or answered correctly by staff who may have the inside details. Also, content in knowledge bases, wikis, forums, and Q&A features are often unstructured, messy, and hard to navigate.
Automated Social Support	Companies can quickly scale by responding to customers faster, and more accurately, using automated responses.	Some customers may feel cheated if they find out they are talking to a bot, and it may be more difficult to build that personal relationship.

Posted in Social CRM, Social Media, Social Support, Support | Comments

Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang

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