Customer Centric Business Strategies Blog

Feb 07 2013

I Don’t Like Predictions BUT….

By Jean Young, Vice President, ISM

I’m not a big fan of New Year predictions – or the next big thing. But, here I go. Based on ISM’s clients – a number of global best-in-class organizations – and the insights of the company’s founder and president, Barton Goldenberg, there are a number of “trends” that have become or are becoming institutionalized.

And, the “we are here to stay” winners are:

Social Media’s Impact on marketing, sales, customer service, product development and more is two-way, immediate and here-to-stay. Social media’s many iterations will continue to be integrated into daily business practices. This includes Social CRM, in which companies harvest “social insight” directly into their sales and marketing efforts, to “social” mobile devices increasing efficiencies at work and shopping and to just having fun. Speaking of fun, now gamification is increasingly becoming an incentive for adopting sales and marketing applications.

“Big Data” Analysis & Insight: In the old days, we called it predictive modeling but let’s face it, Big Data sounds, well, bigger. And, it is. With more customer data flowing into every organization (thank you social media), and with the advent of new data analysis tools, Big Data is “big” because it consists of all private and public data available about your customers/prospects from ERP and CRM systems; social insights harvested from public and private social communities; and from third party sources and more. As Barton says, “At the end of the day, all that counts is your organization’s ability to use this data to make more informed business decisions.”

eCommerce On the Go: I am always nervous with anything with an “e” in front of it but the term eCommerce has endured. And, so has the concept: when you can buy efficiently and save money, customers usually come a running. The statistics for online retail sales are daunting. Global e-commerce sales are predicted to top $1.25 trillion for 2013. The real drama is in the B2B world, which has relied more on traditional “relationship” sales. ISM is working with a number of B2B businesses, which want sales and marketing to go online ASAP. Watch for major inroads in that marketplace.

OK, we’ll do a “review” at year’s end. Until then, you better get onboard.

Tags: Data Analysis, eCommerce, social mediaPosted by - jennifermq @ 9:41 am

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Oct 25 2012

The Future of Customer Relationships Keynote Speech Summary

By Barton Goldenberg, President of ISM

Barton Goldenberg spoke October 23rd on The Future of Customer Relationships: How to Prepare for Success at a well-attended Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. A summary follows:

Social Media is all about the ability of individuals to share and connect freely online. ISM defines Social Media as:

• A set of highly interactive technology tools that leverage the fundamental human desire to interact with others.
• A new way for organizations to communicate with and relate to employees, consumers, customers, partners and other stakeholders.

The increasing interplay of Social Media with CRM has created an entirely new marketplace phenomenon, Social CRM, which is forecasted by Gartner to grow to a $1 billion worldwide market by 2013. Social CRM is the intersection between Social Media and CRM. It consists of the ability to: harvest information from Social Media Websites, integrate this information with the customer profile and use the expanded profile to better personalize customer service, marketing messages and sales offers.

At present, a majority of organizations are just gathering information concerning their customers and placing this information in a CRM system. The customer data is usually just fact-based (where this person lives, works, title, etc.).

With Social CRM, an organization can gather information about customers from information placed online by their customers (such as their opinions on a product/service) using Social Media tools. Afterward, relevant customer information can be placed into an organization’s CRM system and added to the appropriate customer profile. Subsequently, the organization can use this information to personalize their customer communications since each customer will only want to see the company communications relevant to them. Understanding what is relevant to an organization’s customers can be a real challenge, but an organization’s staff can use various Social Media analytical tools to determine what is relevant from the customers’ Social Media community profiles and their comments posted on various social communities. Furthermore, with Social Media, an organization’s staff can have an online conversation with their customers/prospects relating to their preferences and their emotional content concerning the organization’s products/services.

By marrying transactional data from your traditional CRM system with sentimental insights by customers from their participation on social sites, you gain a more complete understanding of your customers, which in turn helps you to improve marketing, sales, and service.

Tags: customer relations, customer relationships, social crm, social mediaPosted by - jennifermq @ 10:26 am

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Sep 18 2012

Barton Goldenberg leads a 3-Hour Social CRM Workshop at CRM Evolution 2012

By Barton Goldenberg, President of ISM

While the CRM press has covered Social CRM ad nausea at the 500 foot level, Barton Goldenberg landed the Social CRM plane at this year’s CRM Evolution event. In the first part of this three-part presentation titled The New Ear of CRM, Barton first defined CRM – A business approach that integrates people, process and technology to maximize relationships with all customers. A comprehensive approach that provides seamless collaboration between all customer-facing functions. CRM increasingly leverages the Internet & social media – and then noted that Social CRM builds on top of this definition but new integrates the ‘social customer’ into your overall customer relationship efforts. Barton then went on to provide a Social CRM framework along with two thought-provoking examples of Social CRM in action – one in customer service and the other in demand generation.

In the second part of his presentation titled Leveraging Social Media to Advance CRM Effort, Barton spoke about how to overcome the Top 5 challenges currently facing Social CRM: listening, filtering, public versus private social communities, CRM integration & utilization, and demonstrating Social CRM value.

And finally in the third part of his presentation titled Making Social CRM Happen, Barton presented the key Social CRM risks as well as these five areas required to make Social CRM happen:

• Strategic vision
• Structured approach (data standards & integrity)
• Structured Social CRM approach (data standards & integrity)
• Tight linkage to ongoing CRM effort/customer profiles
• Meaningful change management

- Executive Leadership
- Effective communications
- Continuous training
- Champion program
- Impactful incentives

If you would like more information about Barton’s Social CRM workshop, which he offers as an in-company training session, please contact his assistant, Tracey Hoston, at (301) 656-8448 or thoston@ismguide.com.

Tags: social crm, Social CRM Workshop, social mediaPosted by - jennifermq @ 4:42 pm

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Sep 05 2012

Need some help justifying your social media project?

by Kathy Barton, Senior VP of Social CRM

You know a technology has come of age when corporate executives start demanding an actual business case before approving new initiatives. Such is the case with social media. Gone are the days when organizations can decide to run a social media pilot because everyone else is doing it, or just to “try it out.” The definition of social media has also expanded beyond Facebook and Twitter to include social media communities. Similarly, the audience for social media has expanded to include employees, partners, and distributors in addition to customers and prospects.

From a CRM standpoint, ISM has been talking about Social CRM for quite a while now. Social media provides a unique ability to capture customer opinions and sentiment and include these valuable insights in the customer profile within your CRM system. But there’s another important way that social media can enhance customer service and satisfaction: by using internal social communities to promote communication and collaboration around new products and customer issues. First, you create an internal social media community using tools like Jive, Mzinga or Yammer (often running on top of SharePoint). Then, you let employees link from within CRM to the social community to share questions or customer problems with the community. Not only does this allow you to collectively brainstorm solutions, it creates a database of solutions that can be searched when confronted with a similar problem.

Now, a new report from McKinsey Global Institute quantifies the value of this type of collaboration. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies, social technologies can add a total of from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion to the collective bottom line these companies. Two-thirds of this value rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises,” according to the report. This should be a wake-up call for organizations that discourage using social media on company time. As the McKinsey report documents, internal use of social media can greatly increase the productivity of high-salaried, highly skilled workers, breaking through departmental silos and leveraging expertise throughout the company.

Moving requests for expertise, information or problem-solving from emails to social communities painlessly creates a searchable database of enterprise information. Remember all those business intelligence projects that failed because no-one wanted to take the time to load their information into the database? With social communities, the creation of business intelligence is a by-product of the collaborative process, and happens without any addition work on anyone’s part. Content can be shared, amended, corrected and search, so that the similar issues are solved in less time and with less effort.

Of course, as the McKinsey Report points out, to capture this value, organizations will have to foster a culture of trust, openness and cooperation, and find ways to reward collaborative work. Not an easy thing to do, but with this kind of payoff, more and more organizations will be motivated to make it happen.

Tags: social community, social media, social media project, social technologiesPosted by - jennifermq @ 11:20 am

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Jul 12 2012

The Beauty of Social Media/Social CRM

by Barton Goldenberg, President, ISM Inc.

Social Media consists of on-line communities that allow people to get information, opinions, solutions and ratings directly from each other rather than from organizations. It’s the new way for organizations to communicate with and relate to employees, consumers, partners and other stakeholders by utilizing a set of highly interactive technology tools that leverage the fundamental human desire to interact with others.

There are two types of Social Media communities: “public” communities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and “private” communities that an organization sets up and invites customers/prospects to participate in. The ideal way to leverage Social Media and make it a part of your overall growth strategy is to have a presence on one or more public social communities and to entice participants to move over from your public to your private community where you are able to have a much more intimate and meaningful dialog with these customers/prospects.

Here’s the beauty of Social Media/Social CRM: current technology allows you to listen to what your customers/prospects are saying in your public and private communities, filter this social information for meaningful insight, and then integrate this ‘social insight’ into your CRM customer profile. This allows your organization to have a comprehensive view of your customers inclusive of both transactional information as well as sentimental insights regarding what that customer says about your organization. This in turn helps you to sell, market and service your customers more effectively via their preferred channel (social or otherwise). In a nutshell the integration of ‘social insight’ into your CRM profile is the future of customer relationship management.

Many organizations have successfully moved down the Social Media/Social CRM path with meaningful success. I look forward to sharing their stories with you at the Sales 2.0 Conference on July 23 in Boston and explaining how you too can make “social” a productive and critical component of your overall growth strategy.

Tags: social communities, social crm, social mediaPosted by - jennifermq @ 5:09 pm

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Jun 28 2012

Employer Monitoring & “Shoulder” Surfing Complicate Role of Social Media Employee Guidelines to “Guide”

National Labor Relations Board Rulings Help Clarify What Employers Can and Cannot Do With Social Media Policies.

By: Jean Young, Vice President, ISM Inc.

Just when you thought tales of employers doing really dumb things re employees’ use of social media networking sites, Gartner reports employers are increasingly monitoring employee use of Facebook, YouTube and other social media networking sites. And, then you have “Shoulder” Surfing, whereby a management type literally looks over your shoulder to read your postings. Some companies are demanding workers or job applicants reveal passwords to their social media accounts but certain states, such as Maryland, ban the practice. Increasingly employers are finding ways to track employees’ online behavior.

With the country still trying to get out of a recession and jobs scarce, you would think both management and employees would not have the time for such shenanigans. Given the frequent horror stories on both sides, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Office of the General Counsel is providing some guidance. A report on seven recent NLRB rulings on employee-filed social media cases was published May 30. Only one was in favor of the employer; most cases hinged on an employer’s social media policy being “overbroad” and thus “unlawful” under the National Labor Relations Act.

In addition to these overbroad policies, ISM sees many large global companies with a proliferation of guidelines from varying departments, e.g. legal, HR, Communications — and these multiple guidelines are often in conflict with each other. Our work for a North American division of a global company with 40,000 employees uncovered six different sets of policies from various departments. This was hardly good news, but the worse news was that management was unaware of both the number of policies and the conflicting directions. Talk about a lawsuit in the making!

Our advice is the same as offered last year: Bring together the parties/departments who are or should be involved in employee social media behavior and work as a team to set overarching objectives. Then assign a team, including employee representatives, to prepare a manageable and reasonable Social Media Policy. It won’t hurt to bring in some experts and a good lawyer.

Tags: social media, Social Media Employee Guidelines, Social Media PolicyPosted by - jennifermq @ 10:15 am

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Jun 12 2012

“Analyzing the Business Value of Social Media and Social CRM” Webinar Highlights

By John Chan, ISM Software Lab Director

Attendee Polling Questions Show Most Companies Don’t Measure Business Value of Social Media Programs

On June 5, 2012, Barton Goldenberg, president of ISM, presented a Webinar titled “Analyzing the Business Value of Social Media and Social CRM”. Highlights follow:

ISM defines Social Media as: A set of highly interactive technology tools that leverage the fundamental human desire to interact with others. It is a new way for organizations to communicate with and relate to employees, customers/consumers, partners and other stakeholders in a two-way dialogue.

Barton recommends a Social Media strategy based on a “Hub and Spoke” model in which an organization uses social media networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to the organization’s website. The website is the best tool for driving traffic to a private social media community. The information gathered from the community participants, whether biographical, buying habits or “sentiments”, can then be integrated into the organization’s CRM system for more knowledgeable interaction with customers, sales operations, partners, etc.

Barton provided numerous Social Media ROI case studies ranging from AAA, IBM, Dell, Autodesk to Verizon, all showing that members who were participating in Social Media communities were spending significantly more than non-members on the company’s products/services and simultaneously bringing value to the company from their Social Media participation.

During the Webinar, participants answered three polling questions. Results are:

1. Does your organization currently analyze the business value of Social Media and/or Social CRM?

Yes – 17%; Kind Of – 44%; Not at this time: 39%

2. What type of metrics are you using for your Social Media/Social CRM efforts?

Visibility (# of impressions, click-throughs, etc.) – 36%

Activity (following, friending, etc.) – 45%

Engaging (registering, entering a contest, downloading info) – 36%

Increased revenue and/or cost avoidance – 5%

Not using metrics yet – 32%

3. What are your organization’s top two business challenges in creating a Social Media Community and/or Social CRM initiative?

Don’t know where to start – 32%

Initiative is not yet high enough on our ‘to-do’ list – 37%

Internal [mgmt] skepticism regarding the business value – 47%

Interested, but haven’t yet created our plan of action – 11%

Already created Social Media community or Social CRM initiative – 26%

“It is surprising that so few companies establish the business value of a social media program, which must support your business strategy, or set success metrics; it is difficult to know if your investment is wise if you can’t measure it,” says Goldenberg.

Barton’s key takeaways concerning Social Media communities are:

Yes, you can really make money from a successful Social Media community or from a Social CRM initiative.
Public Social Media communities are valuable to build your brand and to distribute content.
Private Social Media communities and Social CRM are valuable to enhance the business value of your customers & drive advocacy.
Business value must be identified and metrics set from the outset of your Social Media/Social CRM initiative; it cannot be an afterthought.
Because search engines now monitor social media sites, this is a critical link you need to get right.

If any readers would like to comment on Barton’s key takeaways concerning Social Media communities, please feel free to post your comments on the ISM Blog.

To access an archived recording of ISM’s, click here and scroll down to the Analyzing the Business Value of Social Media and Social CRM Webinar listing.

Tags: social communities, social crm, social media, Social Media ROI Case StudiesPosted by - jennifermq @ 10:07 am

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May 23 2012

Social Media as a Business Intelligence Tool

by Kathy Barton, Senior VP of Social CRM

For some time we’ve been talking about how slow B2B businesses have been to adopt social media. Well, after a slow start, big business is getting on the bandwagon. Forrester Research predicts that sales of social community software will grow 61% a year and be a $6.4 billion business by 2016. A survey by McKinsey & Co. revealed that two-thirds of large companies now use tools such as social networks or blogs, with the use of internal social communities up 50% since 2008. Heavy use of social tools has a statistically significant correlation to profitability, according to Michael Chui, senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute.

Companies are moving beyond using Facebook and Twitter to build brand and drive awareness to using Facebook-type tools to build teams, increase internal communication and reduce time to market. It is hard to underestimate the value of a language, tool set and navigation that is constructed with the goal of sharing information. These tools and concepts now seem intuitive to users because they are accustomed to using them. One of the greatest obstacles to classic knowledge management and business intelligence systems has always been user adoption. Facebook has largely overcome that obstacle for social media tools through sheer ubiquity. B2B companies are suddenly achieving long-standing goals around knowledge sharing, team productivity and rapid product development by leveraging social communities internally. In addition, they are using social communities in concert with their customers to rapidly incorporate customer feedback into the product design cycle.

Whatever happens with Facebook long-term, the company has changed the way that people communicate with each other. Businesses are starting to realize that, far from being something to fear or guard against, this new technology may be the solution to long-standing company challenges. After all, companies are composed of people, and a technology that is designed to encourage and enhance communication and connections between people has business uses that we are only now beginning to explore.

Tags: business intelligence, social communities, social media, Social ToolsPosted by - jennifermq @ 10:33 am

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Mar 27 2012

Key Points from Barton’s Keynote: “Analyzing the Business Value of a ‘Social’ Strategy”

At a recent Selling Power conference titled “Sales Strategies in a Social & Mobile World”, Barton Goldenberg, president of ISM, presented a keynote titled “Analyzing the Business Value of a ‘Social’ Strategy”. Here are the key points from the speech:

Barton came across this quote while doing research for a pharmaceutical company: “Over 80% of Internet consumers search online for health information, trusting peer-generated Social Media content more than pharma company Websites and what their physicians say.”

Barton foresees a date in the near future when the terms “pharma” and “physician” can be replaced with terms pertinent to your industry. Over 80% of consumers will be searching online for information pertaining to your industry and they will trust peer-generated content in Social Media Websites rather than information on your company’s Website or so-called experts in your industry.

To paraphrase Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers: “The collaboration kids get through social networking is the future of business.”

A 2011 Hubspot survey found that social media is at present the preferred marketing channel a majority of companies plan to invest in over the next 12 months. It is interesting to note that the previous top marketing channels 20 years ago, print and television are near the bottom of the list.

Gartner predicts: “By 2015, companies will generate 50% of web sales via their social presence and mobile applications”.

The Big Question is: Can you really make money from a successful social community? If Yes, how?

A few years ago, ISM helped to set up social communities for six AAA Clubs. The AAA staff monitored the activities of their members that were engaged in the AAA automobile or travel community. From this monitoring, it was determined that the members who were actively participating in the AAA communities were spending measurably more on AAA products/services than non-AAA community members.

Barton provided these key takeaways concerning the Social Media/Internet Search tie-in:

• Consumers exposed to a brand’s Social Media content are 2.8 times more likely to search on that brand’s terms.

• Consumers exposed to a brand’s Social media content are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a purchase.

• Overall, brands report a 50% lift in click-through rates from consumers exposed to both Social Media and paid search.

Tags: social media, social networkingPosted by - jennifermq @ 11:18 am

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