Walter Adamson

| 09.12.13 | My weekly ramble in social spaces and places

Where I've been this week in the social web's places and spaces:

• More 2010 social media predictions, but this time from Ron Callari - worth reading.
• Mashing up business and social applications: 2010's New Software Star:"Socialytic" Business Apps - CIO magazine.
• 3 Ways Bing Is Ahead Of Google by Alex Hawkinson.
• Facebook statistics - Farmville has more users than Twitter!.
• See how you can take 50 year old content and refresh and enhance it with new material in a digital package  - 8 Reasons Hitchcock’s North By Northwest Still Rules.
• Did you know Listorious is a Twitter List directory - the "A-List Lists" and a good search function.
• If you are especially interested in social media in the financial industry here is the definitive list, December update 36 Social Media Initiatives Launched by Financial Institutions in December.
• DIGG feed for "social media case study" add to your reader: http://digg.com/rss_search?s=social+media+case+study
• How to search the Internet more efficiently, light but helpful overview from Michal Wurm.
• Social media has influenced 28% of U.S. holiday shoppers in gift-buying decisions this year, ComScore survey.

http://xeesm.com/walter

Will customers help Telstra - Australia's most hated company

According to News Telstra is "Australia's most hated company in terms of complaints". The news is that Telstra has decided, shortly after firing its Chief Marketing Officer Holly Kramer, that it would like to hear from customers about how to "combat soaring dissatisfaction levels".

"We know we've disappointed customers," Telstra's executive director for market-based management Gloria Farler said. "It's not entirely altruistic. If we have low customer satisfaction that means low customer loyalty and if your customers are not loyal they are very likely to (leave), which leads to a high cost of marketing and that leads to disappointing profits," she added.

(Aside - it is amazing how huge those profits actually are in any telco's language given the high levels of dissatisfaction - leading to a kind of hostage syndrome among customers.)

So this is an admirable, if not altruistic, initiative.

Will or can it succeed?

On face value it would seem like a great idea, and with a sure chance of success given the pent up rage against Telstra from its customers.

But before proceeding into the unknown let's start with the known and proclaim that this will indeed be a certain success as measured by Telstra.

How do I know this? Because David Thodey, Telstra's CEO, has reportedly "offered $40 million in bonuses to staff if there are even slight improvements in satisfaction levels". Therefore, as in every large business, these numbers will be met and bonuses will be paid - there is zero doubt!!

Now, let's venture into the unknown to ponder will it actually work in reality.

There is no doubt that Telstra's customers want to give their feedback. After all the very News article itself had generated over 421 comments in 12 hours since 6am the day it was published, that's about 35 per hour or more than 1 comment every 2 minutes.

That's a remarkable number in itself, 100X the normal response.

The key to success is in the planning, the essence of having an integrated social media strategy as opposed to a campaign. So let's list some challenges, and then we can track how things progress at Telstra against these challenges:

1. Since they have 104,000 complaints on the table with names addresses and telephone numbers from the last 12 months, and now another 421 comments which are 98% hostile, is Telstra firstly going to track all those down in the real world and the social media world? Or does Telstra just let lie comments such as the following and start a brand new day with the community portal?

• I just had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn't April Fools Day. :-);
• Like there's ANY chance whatsoever they will actually listen to complaints and/or suggestions and fix anything. They never have before and there's a less than zero chance they will now. This is just a PR exercise to get some exposure;
• What a joke, you dont know what to do to improve customer service, i thought you had 104,000 customers last year who could give you an idea, just an example of the fact that youre NOT LISTENING so why will you listen to people who complete your on line surveys;
• I just want to speak to a real person that gives a damn.

2. Do they have their heads screwed on, or are they dreaming, about the tsumani of rage and complaints that will flood into "My Telstra Experience" experiment exactly parallel to the comments to the article? Presumably they will have an already detailed and approved strategic and operational plan and resources to handle these and to coordinate responses in a systematic and timely way.

3. What is the plan of the coordination needed, which will be more than once a day to start, to handle the tsumani, and how are all departments keyed into that plan including, for example, the ability of the call centres to answer basic questions about My Telstra Experience?

4. How well thought through is the risk analysis of managing the rage, managing those who complain loudest, working with the social media as people blog Twitter and Facebook their experiences with My Telstra Experience?

5. How well is Telstra prepared as an organisation to respond to the My Telstra Experience inputs given that (a) their own staff already know most of the problems and have made zero progress (according to the doubling of complaints) and (b) the inputs from customers mostly speak to symptoms and not causes. It's about the organisational mindset - the "prepared mind" as Pasteur once said.

OK, where are we?

On face value and given history this initiative has a very poor chance of real success (I don't mean that the Telstra managers will not get their bonuses!). However I'm not a fan of being trapped by history so let's see what might be different this time.

On the issue of "what might be different this time" the BIG difference since the last in a string of similar attempts by Telstra is that we are now in a new era of established social media. This means that no matter how much they try to constrain views within the closed panel it will not work. There is absolutely no doubt that this will be a public exercise.

Now given that social media IS the BIG DIFFERENCE now you would wonder why a firm would be reverting back to the past in conducting closed shop panels as market research? It seems like a backward view to me, but Telstra are obviously being advised by Vision Critical who are experts in this field and have an impressive track record.

You might also ask me how come this has anything to do with social media as it is a closed panel of surveys? Well that's a good question, and one which no doubt Telstra has thought through. My answer - the panel has people, those same people exist in the social media; the panel will no doubt ask some open questions or give people a chance to make open comments - that opens the chance for the pent up rage and the outlets into social media if satisfaction is not forthcoming. There are other reasons as well that this closed panel is no longer a close panel, but that's enough for now.

But back to my headline - will customers help? They will certainly try, whether it lasts is completely up to Telstra's management of the relationship, and once doubt sets in to the customers' minds then it is all over rover.

I'm interested to hear your views or of your experience with My Telstra Experience.

PS - Below are Poll Results from Adelaide Now which ran the poll with the article announcing Telstra's plans to ask customers for help.

How do you rate Telstra's customer service? 

• Excellent, faultless 1% (29 votes)
• Acceptable, if not perfect 5% (112 votes)
• Average, needs work 11% (228 votes)
• Poor, needs urgent fix 41% (836 votes)
• Sorry... you're breaking up 39% (803 votes)

Total of 2008 votes.

Social media brings 100X improvement in customer insights

In a report called Social Media Monitoring: Why It Pays to Listen to Online Conversation Aberdeen Group concludes that Best-in-Class organizations are 2.6-times more likely than Industry Average companies, and 93-times more likely than Laggards, to improve their ability to generate consumer insights that drive new product/service development.

That's a remarkable difference, and if you added up the money spent on investment in innovation you would probably find the Best-In-Class companies are spending significantly less and achieving much better results also because of their use of social media.

It's these kind of reports and figures which can provide essential input for a business case for social media, among those firms still to be convinced or wishing to increase their investment.

The report, covering 250 companies, adds to the unabating trend for business organisations to invest in social media, despite, for example, the GFC.

In fact, the research found that, despite the substantial cutbacks that most companies have been forced to make in light of the global economic recession, 50% of all companies are increasing their investment level in social media monitoring initiatives.

Aberdeen is a rock solid research group, so this research is quite significant. It comes on the back of Inc's recent study showing an accelerating use of social media among the Inc 500, and the Social Media Academy's recent survey showing that 75% of the Fortune 500 are engaged already in social media.

In fact the Social Media Academy uncovered the fact that many of the Fortune 500 are coy about their activities because they seem them as a competitive advantage.

It's a tsunami

This all adds up to one big wave pounding over the corporate world and how it interacts with its customers.

The Aberdeen study, found a series of other significant differences between Best-in-Class and Laggard companies in their survey:

• Best-in-Class are 3.3-times more likely than Industry Average companies, and 82-times more likely than Laggards, to improve their ability to identify and reduce risk to the brand;
• Best-in-Class organizations also outperformed Laggards when it comes to improving customer advocacy and decreasing customer service costs.

In addition to deploying the right set of enabling technologies, success in social media monitoring requires a combination of strategic actions and organizational capabilities. To that point:

• Best-in-Class companies are 42% more likely than Laggards to have a process for disseminating insights gleaned from consumer-generated content to key decision-makers and also twice as likely to have a process for applying the insights in the context of specific needs;
• Best-in-Class companies are 1.9-times more likely than Laggards to have dedicated operations resources devoted to social media monitoring, analysis and reporting. 

The report includes a number of recommendations which it says companies must do in order to achieve best performance, including:

• Integrating social media monitoring activities with customer feedback management activities at a granular level;
• Defining event triggers and implementing alerts to communicate insights that are urgent in nature.

In addition to hiring resources that have social media monitoring as part of their job description, recommended actions also include conducting online consumer sentiment analysis at a granular level, identifying and measuring the value of key influencers, and implementing time-sensitive performance metrics.

So, what's the bottom line?

Firstly, if you're "not yet convinced" or "your customers aren't ready for it" then you're already a terminal Laggard.

Secondly, if you're getting going then stay on track and have a good strategy and organisational implementation plan because if you're not committed to staying ahead then you are going to be passed by others who are.

Thirdly, if you're building a business case and you need some "facts" then go figure how much you are spending on some of these key customer and product activities today and extrapolate a conservative achievable saving if you could approach the current best practice.

Fourthly, if you are about to invest in new product development research, or brand monitoring, or customer service, then step back and think hard about the full opportunities for social media investment to bring better and more cost effective results.

Finally, because I work with a lot of Software as a Service companies helping them rebuild and shape their business and marketing models, I noted the following statistic from the report:

• 78% of Best-in-Class companies, compared to only 8% of Laggards, have improved their year-on-year customer retention rates.

That's gold, and very very expensive if the Laggards have to play traditional marketing/sales catch-up with the Best-in-Class.

Social media is game changing for business, and it is in play today, now!

http://xeesm.com/walter

Brands in social media deliver higher search rates - comScore

Here is some good news for brands - people using social media demonstrate higher search rates for a brand if they have previously been exposed to branded marketing or "name dropping" on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or YouTube.

This a result of a study conducted by comScore: "The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption", in collaboration with social media agency M80 over a three month period.

"Social media-exposed consumers are far more likely to search for brand and product-related terms, and click on a brand's paid search ad," said Graham Mudd, vice president of comScore.

"This finding provides strong evidence that investing in social media marketing can both increase initial brand consideration and drive higher conversion rates once the consumer has decided to purchase." 

ComScore's survey found that the highest click-through rates (CTR) were seen when brands actively communicated with users through specifically tailored social marketing programs - such as when a company made and actively engaged with consumers through a  dedicated Facebook page.

More good news, you can find the Scribd presentation here and a whole further analysis by Cindy Kerber Spellman.

Because your brand is already out there

As Scoopdog said:

 "Just because you don’t have a strategy for the “Next new thing” does not mean that your brand will not be out there living, growing and evolving. It just means you are not aware and certainly not in control."  

Business who don't feel that they are ready are wrestling with themselves, instead of asking themselves "where are my customers discussing our business today, and with whom?". 

Where that is - in the social media's spaces and places - is where you need to be.

For more on brands and branding: From my brand or your brand to everyone’s brand

New IT tools less than half of new customer care

IDC APAC reported that "customer care is emerging as a key IT investment area for CIOs in the current downturn", according to the findings of a new poll. 

While most organisations are reducing or freezing their investments in IT, 23 percent of the Australian-based respondees indicate they will still invest in IT solutions that can help them increase earnings or save costs. Chief among these areas is customer care, which nearly half of the respondents saw as a way to generate revenue, with many ready to progress beyond traditional customer relationship management, IDC says.

The world has changed so rapidly in the last 12 months in terms of customers informing themselves and in creating their own customer experiences that it will take a lot more than "new advanced customer care tools, such as customer analytics, customer database management and new web-based tools".

It's going to take a whole new business planning approach to social media and customer engagement, and that's hard work. It's where you need serious business-purposed planning and execution processes, such as those of the Social Media Academy.

See full article and my comment.

Related is the study released today by the Australia Centre for Retail Studies, which found that found that about 50% of people in Australia research their purchase before heading to the store.  Comments to this article centred on the need for an effective online buying website, but I think that it goes much deeper given the new role of the social web.

The social media is part of the brand behaviour, and this needs to be taken in to account in planning the whole customer interaction and how they inform themselves. Again, this is not a simple matter and certainly not something like just running a Facebook campaign or "launching" a Twitter profile. It requires serious cross-function planning and a proper social media assessment.

See full article and my comment.

It's more and more shaping up that 2010 will be the year when social media and the customer experience hits critical mass.

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Social media and the reinvention of marketing

We're probably in the 2nd year of trench warfare between brands, branding, marketing and social media, and while we see regular reports of battles the winner has yet to emerge from the fog of war. 

In fact the prophets of this war go back much further, including The Cluetrain Manisfesto 10 years ago, Communities Dominate Brands in 2005, and several others. It's only with the advent of new and mass social media platforms that the war has erupted on many more fronts.

Social media advocates have indeed raided the territory of brands and their agencies and owners. Major battles are now being waged over the future of brands, if any; the worth of advertising is of course also in the wars; the role of marketing is being questioned and not only questioned but redefined; and new means to achieve customer loyalty are being run up flagpoles to see who salutes.

What I see happening is that marketing as we know it is on the verge of exposing itself as irrelevant, yet marketing in its widest and perhaps purist form being reinvented. Social media is both forcing the reinvention and enabling the reinvention. Marketing will revert from branding back to supporting brands.

Terminology - brands, branding, marketing

What I find confusing, although this may be my own ignorance, is the terminology.

Perhaps not just the terminology but any common consensus on what we are talking about when we say "brand" and "branding". If we could get that agreed, then I think there are trends with which most of us would agree.

Brands

There is one strong element of the social media "push" which says that "brands are dead", and often this is sensationalised across the commercial and social media.

Surely brands will always exist, and have positive or negative or neutral business value.

One reason we know this is that the strongest advocates of the power of social media and its impact on brands would generally be considered to have established a "brand" for themselves.

So if brands are a promise, and translate to fulfilled experiences and satisfied expectations, then they will represent value to customers and return value to their owners. The delivery of the promise, the experience, is the brand depth.

Social media, as part of the total customer engagment and experience, will accelerate the rise and fall of brand value because of the power of communities. Where the brand promise is not matched by brand depth the social media will enable the relentless exposure of that weakness. Your brand is what your customers make it, and the customers and their networks are becoming more powerful and playing a bigger role in defining brands and brand value.

And what's interesting is that social media, through facilitating easier customer engagement, is empowering employees across an organisation to have a much more powerful impact on brand value. Not just in being able to "communicate" with customers and partners but in how they are empowered to communicate and how they feel about the company and product or service about which they are communicating.

In this context social media plays a very important cross-business role which embraces the whole breadth of customer engagement. It's this whole engagement and the holistic business planning and implementation which is missing from most social media discussions today.

Branding

Currently, most discussions of social media are focused purely on its relationship to branding. Yet it appears to me that in contrast to brands, which will survive, branding is the most likely victim of the rise of social media.

By branding I mean the efforts of marketers to convince you of the value of a brand, usually by trying to short-cut the rather arduous process of delivering consistently on the brand promise over time.

Of course marketers may often find themselves in inenviable positions, with dud products and enthusiastic owners who wish to make cheap grabs for market share or profit. Unfortunately most marketers and agencies embrace and even encourage these opportunities as a chance to show their "creative skills". And unfortunately it is with this brush that much "social media" is tarred today. It's essentially creative crap!

In the world of communities, social media, and comprehensive customer engagement and experience models, this kind of "branding" is as dead as the dodo.

This kind of branding also embraces the associated advertising which is equally worthless and it is this category of advertising which some social media experts proclaim to be dead.

As an advertising category I would agree - it is as dead as manipulative branding.

The Marketing Challenge

For all of its current weaknesses and current falling credibility marketing and advertising is not going to go away, except that associated with the "branding" as discussed above which will certainly self-destruct.

It's going to reinvent itself in the context of not pushing messages to a market segment, an audience, but by seeing itself as part of a total customer engagement and experience model.

This model will embrace the whole company, and the important spaces and places in the social media where relevant conversations take place. These "relevant" conversations could include any or all of conversations about the company, its products and brands, its people, partners and competitors.

When Marketing does this it will again create the link between brand promise and brand experience, and be part of the overall creation of real brand value.

Organisationally, Marketing will become a member of a real-time cross-functional team which as a whole embraces the customer engagment. This is in stark contrast to today, where most Marketing has degenerated to branding. And make no mistake, this degeneration is the big problem that has led to the undeniable trend of declining influence of advertising and marketing today. It is disconnected from the experience and total customer engagement.

There's nothing new in all this to purist and forward-thinking marketers as marketing was always intended to be only one part of a customer experience, and everything was meant to interact and to be consistent. It's just that it has mostly failed to deliver and been taken hostage by "campaigns" and short-term thinking.

The rise of social media is important because it exposes this "state of the art" for what it is - treating customers with contempt and ramming "messages" down "channels".

Future Brands, Marketing and Advertising

Branding, in the above context, is dead.

Brands will always have a place in our B2C and B2B ecosystems, and some will rise far above others, as now. The ones that rise the furthest will reinvent their Marketing function and their marketing to become a true part of the long-term engagement to build brand value through the execution of the tangible traits, through coordinated cross-organisational and social media contributions and participation.

Perhaps I'm drawing a long bow here, but I think that the expression of what I am saying is precisely illustrated by Starbucks and their attitude to marketing and social media. When recently asked about the future of social media for Starbucks Alexandra Wheeler, Digital Strategy Director, said:

You will see more of the same. We will only continue to grow and develop our assets in the social media space, but continue this kind of real philosophy of being where the people are but being relevant to them and providing value in those experiences. We don’t want to check the boxes and say we are in all the different channels. It’s not the right thing to do. It’s one of the reasons we were cited in the [Altimeter Group] report as the most engaging brand…It isn’t a marketing initiative. It isn’t a PR initiative. It’s cultivating and creating great consumer value and great consumer relationships. What you’ll see from Starbucks is us continuing to build and scale that up over time in a new way and new chances to converse with the brand.

To me that is a statement all about the brand and not at all about branding. It places marketing in the context of engaging with the brand experience and not trying to create the brand experience through campaigns and brand promises which cannot be fulfilled.

We could say "we're different to Starbucks" and no doubt you are. But to me that's like saying "we're not ready for social media" or "our customers are not ready for social media". It's not about you, in this context its about social media reshaping your approach to marketing, forcing its reinvention, whether you like it or not.

Forward thinking of better banking

The Better Banking Blog is a great read if you're interested in forward thinking about better banking and banking services.

I liked this post about community involvement in product and service development, and opening up the banking platform to mashups.

Can you imagine if a bank opened up development in such a way? What if customers could design their own widgets for desktop banking using your Internet banking platform? How about the capability to set up a mobile banking tool that brings in transactions from all your bank accounts? Again, it’s already happening, albeit without the permission of the bank and security issues being addressed.

In fact, as they point out, this may become a competitive necessity in Australia as competition is able to enter the payments and funds transfer business, which was previously restricted.

There's an obvious strategic role for social media, which is one of the points of my comment on that post. Brand promises are becoming worthless and in fact negative in the face of brand depth which fails - fails to deliver the promise and social media accelerates this failure through connectivity and transparency.

Utilising social media strategically to gain transparency, customer insights, and engagement is going to become a necessity over time. Although I'm not holding my breath that it will happen soon in Australia for banks per se as there is low competition and little incentive - but in financial services there are many opportunities.

- You can read here about the American Express Open Forum and some of their tactics.

In the social media world Wells Fargo is often quoted as a banking leader, and no doubt they are as they are doing more than twittering for sure. I'm not up with the best examples, but you might be interested to read some of the comments on this Wells Fargo blog post which are less than complimentary and show how well the whole effort has to be coordinated in a complex organisation.

I'm glad it demonstrates this mayhem as it brings home that social media "strategy" is not just some clever campaign from an Agency.  It takes a thorough assessment and sound business-like methodologies to create the strategy, and to execute, monitor, measure and improve it.

I enjoyed reading many of the posts on Better Banking and pleasantly surprised to see the forward view and progressive thinking in a sector not renown for such.

Social Media ROI - "return on insights"

There's a real and ongoing debate about measuring social media return on investment (ROI) and also the debate between the SMO/SEO camps who say money and time is best spend on things you can measure versus the social media campaigners.

See for example Getting Honest About Social Media Marketing on SEOmozBlog where the debate rages in the comments. It's quite often polarised between those saying social media is daft and those who see the value but can't quantify it in the same way as web analytics can.

As many commenters have also pointed out, the truth is that both have a place, and need to be used purposefully. Take for example the comment by byrneseyeview who brings up the holistic value of social media across all channels (as does Dave Snyder) and also the research value. In social media's case "research" also means participation and engagement as that's how opinions are found.

His key point is along the lines of "how much would you pay to find out what questions you didn't know potential customers were asking"?

Great question. And of great value. And social media is the most timely, and accurate, source of the answer.

Says byrneseyeview:

By running an active social media campaign, you get it for less than you would if you hired a market research company. In addition, you'll get information from active social networkers -- people who are more likely to have an outsize influence, and to be early adopters (especially with SEO). Finally, social media compounds in a way SEO doesn't. When people see your brand being discussed, they'll be more willing to discuss it. That means more free marketing from them, and more free market research for you.

That's it!

You can make a huge return on the insights you gain, and it compounds, AND gets you free marketing and brand appreciation. That's a heck of a lot more than click-throughs, and very different.

Social media brown cows win real work

Here's a nice little post about how the brown cows of social media make hay - as opposed to the super stars and purple cows (thanks to @lukegrange).

Searching for a wire service, Mary Ellen Miller gave up on her first choice of a major provider and drifted into the helpful advice of a twitter follower, and made a buying decision.

It nicely illustrates one of the core opening discussions when we from the Social Media Academy meet corporate managers who say that their companies aren't ready for the social media.  I ask if it is important to them to be in the same places and spaces as their customers when those customers are making buying decisions.

They usually say yes, unless they are being super stubborn and can sense what is coming!

So if I said "your customers are in the social media now, in places and spaces in the social media, making buying decisions" would that mean that you should also be there?

Yes they say, but they then most often follow with the killer qualifier - but our customers aren't in the social media - Twitter and all that stuff.

So now we get to negotiation - if I can show you that your customers are there, then will you take social media and social media education seriously?

So starts the journey towards their education, and towards a proper social media assessment.

And the little stories, like Mary Ellen's buying decision, help amplify the importance.