I’m very thankful that Altimeter’s research on social business was featured at Baaarvoice’s customer conference to 600 attendees focused in on the retail, cpg, hospitality, and consumer technology space in Austin Texas a few weeks ago.
I was asked to share our latest Open Research (see career path of the corporate social strategist report and how to spend on social business). We know that many companies are continuing to realize that social business does not scale in a 1:1 basis. Your customer voices will always outnumber the number of community managers you can hire. As a result, companies must invest in these following five programs:
Formalize a Hub and Spoke model:
Become an enabler for business units
Scale with peer-to-peer communities
Formalize a customer advocacy program
Streamline workflow with SMMS
Read the highlight notes from Tara DeMarco of Bazzarvoice, also, while I’ve published the slides a few weeks ago, I’ve also embedded them below. Just want to add one caveat to number one: many regulated industries must maintain the centralized formation.
The practice of Open Research is continuing to become a trend, but not just limited to the research reports that Altimeter is sharing, but with websites like Wikipedia, Focus.com, Quora, Linkedin Q&A, and communities like Social Media,org, Marketing Profs, and WOMMA and beyond. I see the trend that corporate buyers can talk directly to each other –without a middleman or expert in between. As a result, some thought leaders are giving away their best knowledge and not holding back in order to be top of mind.
Above is part 1, advance to the NBC site to see part 2. An interesting thing about this state-of-the-art studio is there are no camera persons on set, just robots that are controlled from the main controller room, a slick operation. Overall, it was a lot of fun, but to be honest, an interesting experience being in the hot seat with so many rapid fire questions.
Despite that 2011 is the year of integration, I strongly argue that companies that blindly link away to Facebook and Twitter from their corporate homepages are doing themselves a disfavor.
Companies that link away, are sending away their decade of hard earned investments getting customers to come to their website. Instead, companies must have a focused strategy on how you’ll integrate social features and content into your website, rather than padding Facebook and Twitter.
In the below image, you’ll see Altimeter’s latest maturity roadmap (here’s version 1.0 from about a year ago) on how to integrate social into a website based on dozens of interviews and evaluations of existing websites. We recommend that companies quickly get out of stage 0, but skip level 1, and move to level 2 and beyond. To learn more, listen to this webinar that was funded by Janrain and Badgeville for me to present our latest independent research on this topic. We’ll be publishing a formal Open Research report on this topic in the near future –stay tuned.
There’s more to disruptive technologies than social to watch. In fact, we’re exploring a variety of new disruptive technologies, to see how they impact business, culture, and customer relationships. Slideshare has released ‘Zipcast’ a no-download video+slides technology that allows anyone to give a ‘keynote’ speech to an online audience in real time. Due to travel schedule, I was unable to produce my own, but Altimeter’s Charlene Li presented her viewpoints on disruptive technologies to watch –and those to ignore. Listen in below or go right for the slides.
What’s the future of social business? I gave my industry forecast based upon upcoming research data, on the Silicon Valley show on NBC called Press:Here. Listen in to hear our discussion with Sarah Lacy (who has a new book about entrepreneurs) from Techcrunch, Richard Waters from Financial Times, and host Scott McGrew.
Topics we Cover:
Investor funding vs Enterprise spending –why is there a disconnect?
How much brands should spend, or should spending stay small?
What’s the top spend in corporations in social business?
How companies should measure (It’s not just engagement data)
Why I think Industry Analyst is a limiting term.
Find more of the Forecast data for 2011 I released on stage at the LeWeb keynote. More forecast data based on spending by social business maturity tomorrow, stay tuned.
That very bombastic question (is Facebook American Imperialism) was posed to me at the Social Media ClubFrance Club which took place near LeWeb a few weeks ago. I was joined by my friend Paul Papadimitriou (Twitter), and we were hosted by Fabrice Epelboin (Twitter) who writes for Read Write Web.
In this discussion we discuss social media from a global perspective (not just an American one) and we discuss and debate why many of the popular social networking sites are coming from United States, and adoption across the globe (see my collection of stats)
Kit Kat got a lot of flack from the Greenpeace brandjacking, yet, I wanted to point out a marketing campaign where they leveraged popular news mentions. What was interesting is they used a simple email and some doctored photos, on Good Friday in the Netherlands (a country in which 45% are not religious)
A few questions: When consumers find out this was a hoax, does this create distrust? Does tapping into market memes demonstrate being in tune with your market? Would it have only worked in a country where a large portion are not religious?
Whether sacrilegious or brilliant marketing, perhaps it can only work in the Netherlands –it would have never worked in the US, You be the judge, I look forward to hearing your comments. (link via Donald Lim, who shared this at the IMMAP workshop)
I find that Paul Greenberg (follow him on Twitter @pgreenbe), one of the early adopter who mapped out the CRM space gives a succinct overview of what’s happening in the Social CRM space. He points out the two converging forces ‘social’ and ‘CRM’ spaces that are coming together, yet the third force, ‘companies’ themselves aren’t yet ready for the internal changes that are coming.
He raises a good point that social media empowers everyone in the organization to now have a customer touchpoint in this flattening tools. Yet this means that customers will need a consistent experience regardless of who they talk to in sales, marketing, support, or in-person. As a result, this is creating some unique cultural changes inside of companies, companies with many silos will start to have to come together to provide those consistent experiences. Do check out Charlene’s book Open Leadership which can help leaders make sense of how to approach this cultural change.
Long term friend and former colleague Robert Scoble (who’s now with Rackspace) came by to interview the Altimeter Group. Although Deborah Schultz and Charlene Li were off traveling the globe, Ray Wang (who covers enterprise strategy) and myself were able to sit down with Robert and discuss the trends we see happening in the industry. Big wave to Rocky who’s the show producer, and also a former colleague.
One of the best ways to conduct research isn’t just to go to the field, but centralized the field. Last week, mobile analyst Michael Gartenberg was in town for Apple’s new video iPod announcement and there were dozens of others in town for GigaOm’s Mobilize conference, so we organized a Tweetup on Union Square in SF. The topic? The future of mobile. 30-40 folks showed up from startups, PR firms, folks from the mobile team at Microsoft and even the Financial Times.
What will you learn by watching the video? See how GeoVector is piloting new applications for Augmented Reality. You’ll hear some exploratory discussions on how augmented reality (see other YouTube videos) can appear in a variety of combinations with the physical and virtual –beyond geo caching games. You’ll hear about how custom content from Off Beat Guide is now on mobile devices like the Amazon Kindle, and some demos of the latest augmented reality applications are quickly appearing on the scene. We also got a tour of Palm Pre’s Synergize product which syncs and aggregates social graphs into one location. We also took a close look at the new video iPod which could give Cisco’s Flip Camera (which I used to create this video –which Cisco gave to me to demo)
What’s the trend? Convergence. Mobile devices are giving birth to applications that triangulate geo data, compasses, and social data and serve up unique experiences. Facebook just released a lite version of it’s site –in order to meet the needs of the mobile experience around the globe.
Last night, I played the new Beatles Rock Band edition, it’s important to note how video game entertainment has both social components and a revival of music made popular decades ago –although some musicians worry this detracts from people playing real musical instruments. Expect other genres to appear as this expands to Hip Hop with Snoop Dogg. We’ve already seen mobile versions of these games appear, so it’ll be interesting to see how mobile device that conncect to each other make these games portable, social, and who knows what.
Stay tuned, next month I’ll have a tweetup around the topic of just mobile social networks like FourSquare, Twitter, BrightKyte, and whatever comes next.
