Enterprise Social 2.0: 4 more P’s in the marketing mix

As promised in my most recent blogpost last Friday, here’s a second analysis and recap of some of the most inspiring stuff exchanged at the Social Enterprise 2.0 conference (tagged #es20 on Twitter) that was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands – January 28^th & 29^th 2010. My previous blogpost covered the marketeer’s challenge of having to start inside one’s organisation in properly deploying social media. Paradoxically to most – as marketeers have been conditioned to look outside for wants, customer segments, opportunities, threats and market trends prior to doing some proper introspection. This blogpost covers the external aspects and value of Enterprise Social 2.0.  

Marketing mix 2.0
Various #es20 speakers including SAP’s Sean MacNiven and Ellen Petry Leanse (Google) referred to Forrester’s obvious yet valid POST approach for leveraging social media. Starting off any social media initiative should not only be kept modest in size, but should build on a definition of the ‘who’ (what is the target audience, or People), the ‘why’ (Objectives), the ‘how’ (Strategies) and finally on the ‘what’; with what instruments should one execute the social media strategy (Tools)? KODAK’s Kees Mulder and Nokia’s Jussi Pekka Erkkola for instance propagated moving from the good old 4 P’s (products, place, price, promotion) to the new (?!) 4 E’s in the marketing mix , i.e.:

• engage,
• educate,
• excite,
• evangelize.

To my mind however, these 4 E’s were essentially of similar weight in the 1.0 era. Whether in B2B or B2C (or in B2G | Business to Government for that matter), hasn’t the marketeer’s challenge not always been to properly raise awareness, boost customer’s interest and desire, thereby resulting in a profitable transaction and preferably a relationship? An enduring relationship in turn, that ideally renders fans and (super-)promoters of your brand, products and services. The difference in Enterprise Social 2.0 primarily is all about the speed and intensity with which this process now takes place. Also it entails a revised competitive landscape and ‘level’  playing field as web 2.0 acts as yet another of Thomas Friedman’s flattening forces. More players with their own unique service or product now have access to the same global e-market. The same flattening effect goes for branding. As Ellen Petry Leanse phrased it: “your brand is now public property. Just because you have a vested interest, doesn’t necessarily make you into a trusted source”. Petry Leanse (Google’s Head of Enterprise Marketing & Communications) continued to stress that marketing 2.0 moves beyond mere branding and building awareness to “building a movement”. To some, this may sound almost a bit Marxist or at least politically flavoured. I do feel over 1 billion people (and counting!) involved in some social media network, building a movement of committed followers (possibly in a niche) is simply becoming sound business practice.

All in all – I’d argue the new 2.0 marketing mix adds 4 new P’s: psychology, personality, people and participation.

1. Psychology
As a 1^st year university student of management science back at Groningen (Netherlands) & Warwick (UK) in the 80s, this was one of my favorite topics. Nobody would deny that success in eg sales, marketing or general management to a considerable extent depends on the ability to touch a customer’s or prospect’s deeper sentiments, wants, needs and fears. Yet the public eye seems to perceive the art of psychology as pertaining to the domain of shrinks, medics and alpha ‘grey-wool-sock’ scientists. Wrong. For organisations to successfully engage on the global 2.0 playing field, they should first of all excel at self-reflection. Who do we really want to be, for whom? What’s our passion, why are we in business in the first place? Subsequently, in reaching out to selected communities or crowds, the days of Shout & Send are over. In comes the era of listening and truly showing empathy for your customer- & fanbase. Listening to relevant conversations and when engaging, being prepared to go deep, both require psychological know-how and skill.    

2. Personality.
In addition, social media and web 2.0 provides a viable platform for personal branding as eg Dan Schwabel eloquently and tirelessly points out. It also paves the way for leveraging corporate personality. Of which Zappos.com constitutes a fine example on Twitter. As Philips’ tandem 2.0 presenters Hugo Raaijmakers and Marco Roncaglio quite candidly pointed out, “Philips has no automatic presence of its own and needs to humanize itself”. The Roger Smith Hotel’s case shows that the company personality is built by various people of the hotel’s team, not just the general manager or the Head of New Media Marketing, Adam Wallace (also speaker at #es20). “Our employees realize they are on stage too and have come to see that every visitor should be treated and considered a possible New York Times reporter.”    

3. People
Some folks would argue that people have already long been an element in the marketing mix especially when you are in the services business. I would not disagree. Yet I do see the need for a different perspective here. Every single employee or customer now has the might to influence a company’s reputation and brand. That’s why for a social media strategy to work, one should treat one’s employees all as possible ambassadors. This applies normally just as much as in times of handling a crisis as the panel discussion moderated by Jennifer Gehrt reflected on. And that’s why companies like Vodafone are starting to measure the social conversation with customers in terms of for instance social authority (who’s talking about me), social conversation (to whom do they talk), social sentiment (how do they talk), and social network valuation (churn & promoter scores).

4. Participation
It’s imperative for senior management to take part in the intra-company dialogue through wiki’s, fora and blogs as companies like SAP, Airbus and SIEMENS stressed. Externally taking part in social communities is of equal importance. Some might say that listening alone suffices. Why not tap into the millions of conversations going on there and use social media insights to keep a realtime finger on the pulse of the competition or customer trends. As Joel Comm points out in his book Twitter Power, “from a business point of view there is much to be gained from simply listening, without the intention of ever participating”. Generally, having moved external in one’s 2.0 approach,  I believe  there are few organisations that keep a stealth, low-profile approach as there’s bound to be some form of participation.

The great examples from eg KODAK (thru crowdsourcing 28,000 suggestions were submittted for a new name for the Zi8 digital camera), the RogerSmith Hotel in NY (improved brand awareness and customer advocacy), Dell as well as JetBlue (improved customer service and boost in sales thru Twitter promotions) and LEGO (huge community of enthusiasts sharing videos, innovation and product ideas amongst each other – 275,000 LEGO movies on YouTube. Top 5 have 47m views!) reflect the huge external market potential that’s only just being discovered.

Perspiration (!) might be an additional 5th P to the new social media marketing mix, as various speakers and participants stressed that for social media this mainly takes time, commitment, passion and dedication.

Social Enterprise 2.0 – start(s) inside

Yesterday as well as Wednesday this week I had the privilege of joining the Enterprise Social 2.0 conference (tagged #es20 on Twitter) here in Amsterdam, Netherlands with a crowd of some 50 social media enthusiasts, experts and evangelists. Not to mention top-notch and authentic speakers like Ellen Petry Leanse (Google), Michael Heiss (Siemens), Sean MacNiven (SAP), Georges-Edouard Dias (l’Oreal) and Kees Mulder (KODAK). Blue chip, large enterprise experience was fortunately complemented by Adam Wallace from the NY Roger Smith hotel and Chicago’s 2^nd most famous citizen and top twitterer Ramon DeLeon (@Ramon_DeLeon) who’s running 6 Domino outfits downtown there.

The two days brought tons of insights, ideas and great encounters that I will be covering in 2 consecutive blogposts, this being the first one.

Mobile & ubiquitous
“Nothing is closer to my heart than my iPhone”, l’Oreal’s VP monsieur Dias stressed. Therefore, business should embrace going mobile to more closely connect to their customers. The world’s distances, boundaries and differences are becoming smaller thanks to social media. Earlier this week the first tweet from outer space was sent. Britain’s ocean rower Roz Savage even leverages her virtual network in mid-ocean asking for advice and suggestions to fix a broken waterpump. As people’s nature is social, social media are being taken up in the western hemisphere just as much as in places like Brasil or India, where the rikshaw driver puts the picture just taken of him and the US tourists he carried on Facebook. By large, listed companies, the public sector as well as the Boston café that’s put out a sign “we have Twitter”. And unlike popular thought this is happening not just in B2C but in B2B as well. With B2B customer decisions based on peer reviews and word-of-mouth in 93% of all cases (82% B2C), this is a no-brainer.

ROI
Most speakers and participants in #es20 agreed there is no one way to properly or honestly measure the ROI/ return on investment in a business going social. I’d suggest we perhaps should start spelling ROI as ROi as the financial investment is relatively low and key investment is all about time and ongoing commitment. As there’s no social currency or common denominator yet, a 2010 priority to Vodafone is to find a suitable KPI. Enterprises should be starting their 2.0 journey small and gradually reaping the benefits of social media. When it comes to measuring the benefits, more traditional metrics don’t always fully suffice as eg HITS nowadays equals How Idiots Track Success according to SWIFT’s Matteo Rizzi. The ratio of conversations & comments per blogpost or the relative share of voice or conversation might make more sense. Rizzi from SWIFT just like the Philips 2.0 duo (no that doesn’t make 4) on stage stressed social media benefits to their business are being realized in terms of efficiency gains primarily. Perhaps most powerfully, Kees Mulder of KODAK referred to ROI as Risk of Ignoring. With 1 billion people on social communities (and counting), how can any sensible business ignore these masses as possible customers, partners or employees?! Finally, the inspiring SIEMENS’ Michael Heiss presentation almost took a scuba-diver’s approach to social media. To him, it’s Rip4ROI; or stop, think and rest before you act and reap the benefits. Benefits that are made up of a host of factors as shown in this driver tree below.

Listening
Social marketing and media are shifting the world from Megaphone & Shout mode to Connect & Listen mode. The power of listening as well as the sheer need for it are being rediscovered. Besides personal extra ‘ears’ like Tweetdeck (I begin to prefer Hootsuite btw) or Seesmic, there’s solutions including Radian6.com, Social.Arc.com, Buzzmetrics.com, Alterian.com and the pleasantly sounding Cymfony.com to enable the Enterprise Social 2.0 to do just that.

Marketeer’s paradox
To me as marketer, one of the key take-aways of the conference was phrased by all 3 German companies present: SAP, Siemens and Airbus. For social media to be effective, one should start small, building incremental steps internally (eg in knowledge management or internal feedback platforms using fora, blogs and wiki’s) with top management commitment first. This helps answering the question “who do we in essence want to be to whom” – in search of corporate DNA. And helps changing a culture into one that’s receptive to the paradigm shift that 2.0 entails. One can’t change a company’s identity with a bit of make-up on the outside, or doing one-off campaigns sporting a 2.0 image. Customers, employees and other partners increasingly expect companies to show ‘a human face’ based on a culture of openness, trust, transparency and dialogue. With management are often apprehensive of losing control, employees often feel restrained to provide open feedback. With people across the organisation have learned how to better connect, listen and learn internally, this will surely bear fruit when seeking better relationships outside the organisation.

Beyond 011010: 121 in B2B

Online business engagement just about ‘zeroes and ones’?!
On a binary day like today, January 10^th 2010 or 011010 in short, it’s perhaps tempting to view the world in digital terms of just ‘zeroes and ones’. As people in the so-called 1^st world are increasingly becoming digital citizens (whether born digitally or as ‘immigrants’), businesses do so too. Becoming digital however does not imply business or business(people) want to be treated in a binary fashion. It merely paves the way for authentic human, 1-to-1 interaction.

 B2B networking the 2.0 way
My dutch friends, family and colleagues regularly question the value of social media in business, especially in B2B. They argue that building a relationship is done offline, face to face and not in the digital darkroom of Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Nearly all B2B players of some size have recognized the need for BI and CRM. Yet social media still is being frowned upon as the latest fad from Silicon Valley, that is best left to facebook-loving teenagers or Hyves-exploring IT geeks. Others do intend to include social media in their marketing and communications plan for 2010, but quite often seem more inclined to policing their employees in saying and doing the right things on social media. Or merely want to leverage social media to shout more loudly to a wide audience.

Enriching business dialogue by going social
Here is where to my mind the social media paradox lies. In a world that’s drowning in information and data, a sustainable competitive edge increasingly relies on rich content stemming from as rich as possible a customer dialogue which in turn produces enriching relationships. Of course nothing beats good old-fashioned 1-to-1 conversation to really understand a customer’s actual motivation, wants and needs. Yet social media can help to mutually (!) find relevant insights, ideas and new contacts that in turn can be shaped into a valuable business conversation, qualified lead or otherwise. Business Intelligence and Customer Relationship Management will significantly benefit from the realtime, social insights generated by relevant communities. Furthermore, customers increasingly expect responsiveness by their business partners, off- and online. The reward for a quick and adequate response to customer queries and complaints will often be positive customer advocacy and customer loyalty, the biggest B2B pearl to cherish. As the 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study which included 2,384 participants shows,  US-based B2B companies are also even more likely to use brand awareness, prospect lead quality and prospect lead volume as social media success metrics than are B2C companies. I look forward to seeing social media further mature and take shape, especially on this side of the pond. In my next blog I hope to present you some initial findings of my B2B social media poll and would appreciate your input as well.

Social media: reflections

By now, 2009 is history in several time zones east of ours, the Central European Timezone/ CET. Time to briefly reminisce on the past year that’s brought great new insights, people, fun stuff and ideas within (my) reach – often thanks to the power of social media.

On the threshold of the launch into a new decade, we have the tendency to look in the mirror and reflect. At the same time, we look ahead at what great things the new decade has in store. Equally, our planet, economy and society face challenges that require us to be(come) more and more inventive. Leveraging the capabilities of the community, social media can act as a powerful mirror. A mirror to look ourselves in the eye. Who are we as professional, organization, community or nation? Is this really who we aspire to be? What is the perception of relevant stakeholders around us? In a world of ever-increasing complexity social media enable us to shed light and more transparency into the demands, needs and profiles of demand and supply; whether it’s professionals offering their services or businesses in demand of skilled people or offering their services and products to a global or national audience. And as if holding up a mirror to the sun, social media can also contribute to standing out from the crowd and being seen as differentiating or innovative.

Mirroring in psychology refers to 2 people mirroring each other’s gesture and body language thereby implicitly reflecting their positive attitude and empathy towards one another. The book Mirroring People by Iacaboni describes ‘The New Science of How We Connect with Others’ – isn’t this exactly what social media is all about?! I look forward to joint new reflections coming up in 2010 thanks to the power of the community, your comments and insights – best wishes to all of you!

B2B Social media eVALUEated

Valued
As mentioned in my previous post, the buzz around social media is also building a discussion regarding its soft and hard ROI. To my opinion, its measurable and financial value in B2B will further be recognized overtime yet is set to contribute to enhancing at least:

* Market | Customer | Competitive intelligence
* Branding
* Product development & innovation
* Customer support services
* (Open) innovation
* Lead / Demand generation
* Employee related benefits such as enhanced project collaboration and knowledge sharing, employee motivation, (management) development & retention

For political, lobby-intensive or CSR-related organisations social media additionally might bring value in terms of Return on Impact. Social impact therefore in terms of mobilizing citizens’ voice by organisations that target both other businesses as well as consumers such as @350, @WWF, @changents and others. But let’s focus now on businesses that need to satisfy their shareholders.

Speed, transparency & efficiency key benefits
Almost 1700 executives from around the globe took part in a longitudinal 3 year study by McKinsey on social media entitled ‘how companies are benefiting from web 2.0’. 69 percent of respondents report that their companies have gained measurable business benefits, including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.

Scanning diagonally thru its key results, it seems that bigger speed & transparency as well as reduced (travel & communications) costs are seen as most significant business benefits. Increasing revenue is mentioned by some, yet this is the lowest percentage. Whereas ‘measurable gains’ were reported, the McKinsey researchers unfortunately did not explicitly state whether and in how many cases there actually was a positive ROI in financial terms – dollars, euros, rupiah, sterling or yen.

Me, myself and my community
The McKinsey research distinguishes between the deployment of social media internally to employees and externally to partners, suppliers and customers. Judging by the relative number of respondents as well as the relative biggest gains reported, internal at present seems to be the most popular category. The survey does highlight the relative usage of SM across verticals – not surprisingly high tech and professional services frontrunners – and reports a 35% gain in employee motivation.

With the relative loose connection in most western companies between organisation and employee, this is a significant gain that merits further study. Whilst in many cases the increasing individualization and economic downturn may cause low levels of employee-employer commitment, which in turn results in suboptimal retention – the need to build a powerful corporate community is as strong as ever.

The massive uptake of Facebook, Hyves and other social, friend communities reflects the need for human beings to belong and connect. Why therefore would a corporate environment not try to build a successful, happy community of (professional) employees? To my opinion, this should definitely enhance a firm’s capacity not just to attract, but also to attach the right workers to the right place at the right time. A ‘happiness factory’ – perhaps.  

Social media: ROI (re?)defined

Marketing taken seriously?!
Current perception of marketing all too often is inextricably linked to advertising, branding and creativity. For marketing’s declining reputation to be improved, it increasingly needs accountability and a closer link to tangible business benefits and financial objectives. This was the key finding of recent award-winning research by Verhoef and Leeflang of Groningen University, the Netherlands.

As new, promising kid on the marketing block, social media need to be accompanied by tangible ROI to be taken seriously by senior decision makers. As Calibrero’s Ewald Jozefzoon illustrates, sometimes ROI in social media seems to be replaced by eg ROE. Return on Engagement is defined as “the measurement of involvement in social media based on online interactions and relationships.”

Hard or soft ROI
It’s better, ‘cause it’s new. Isn’t that almost how some fast movers promote their new toothpastes, washing powders and detergents? As new element in the marketingmix, web 2.0 or social media are receiving an ever-widening audience and bigger attention. And a lively discussion is emerging as to how to measure their actual business benefits. 

Tech Crunchies take the softer ROE stance, emphasizing the need for social media engagement and relative lack in control of who one reaches, when. In a recent blogpost they do include a handy overview of ‘All Social Media statistics and Facts’ that, quite consistently, largely falls in the ROE segment as well.

Even @equalman | Erik Qualman, emphasizes the value of Socialnomics predominantly in terms of means or inputs rather than business and monetary ends. He thereby confirms that social media in essence embody a new, highly successful channel, intelligence and communications instrument with a phenomenonal penetration speed.  

Value of social media
Don’t get me wrong. I love social media as – depending on the time of day – the digital 2.0 equivalent of an inspiring newspaper or an Irish pub. I equally welcome trials and experiments in social media to separate best from worst practices and to refine its discipline. From that perspective, I’m inclined to supporting the notion by @MktgROIorDIE that “many of the activities of creating soft ROI are often stepping stones in achieving hard ROI.”

Over the next months and moving into 2010 I will be trying to uncover best practices in B2B, resulting in a tangible, measurable financially-sound ROI. I will also be keen to jointly discovering new insights to properly/ best (re)defining the return of social media. This might refer to either improving a company’s bottomline by leveraging cost efficiencies or its top line growth. And, with the relatively smaller customer base in B2B, what tangible contribution is the adoption of social media bringing to enhancing customer lifetime value? Your feedback, suggestions and experiences are highly appreciated!

Entering the realtime, augmented, social search arena

With in excess of 70 million YouTube videos, more than 130 million weblogs, in excess of 1,1 billion tweets to date, 10 million Wikipedia articles and more than 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion!) unique URLs in Google’s index  according to the FutureBuzz –  it’s a truly insanely staggering amount of data and information that humankind is producing. Content is king. Is it?

From retrospective knowledge management to real time insights
Less than one decade ago, knowledge management experts and solutions aimed at making implicit or tacit knowledge – stored in the heads of experts – explicit in some form of content management system. Intranet, extranet and other solutions were implemented to help enable the corporate flow of data, information and knowledge within and beyond corporate boundaries. The digital role of the community was known yet undervalued. Overtime the ever increasing amount of content, added with the difficulty of keeping everybody disciplined in posting regular updates, has given rise to more emphasis on the network or community of people. Rather than making all content explicit, wouldn’t professionals be better off having a transparent and actual rather than retrospective view of who does and knows what? Here is where communities come in and why social media have started to play such a dominant role in sharing and exchanging views, information, experiences on a whole host of topics including services, products and the companies behind these.

If Google can’t answer the need for social search, who can?
Google has only been around for some 10 years and has become one of the most successful companies on the planet as @JeffJarvis brilliantly describes in What Would Google Do. Besides rumours on an updated search interface, Google has recently announced social search, by which insights from one’s network pop up to the search to complement historical, 3^rd party sources as traditionally displayed. Yet, as the Socialized blog wants it, there are new kids on the block. Microsoft’s Bing has made a successful appearance on the search scene with more relevant social search value to be announced in 2010. Integrated into Bing, Wolfram Alpha has the built-in power as ‘computional knowledge engine’ to provide the one and only just answer to a question submitted rather than generating thousands or millions of hits for the users to filter. As the amount of content and the number of sources themselves become overwhelming, the human inclination may well be to simply ask for advice or recommendation in one’s own small circle. From a consumer point of view real time answer to a quest for the ‘best’ product or service then simply comes from the most recent blogs, facebook posts and tweets generated by one’s inner circle of friends and followers. I agree with @lewmoorman in his blog Beyond 140 that Twitter therefore becomes a serious alternative to Google. In quest of relevant, authentic information and real customer feedback when researching companies, products and services, breaking news and live events/conference updates, Twitter search is a fine place to go.

Consumer trends 2010 & search
Diagonally scanning the well-defined 10 key consumer trends 2010, the new search paradigm to my mind becomes apparent in at least a blend of trends #3 (real time reviews), 5 (mass mingling), 7 (tracking & alerting) and 9 (profile myning). ‘Nowism’ refers to consumers’ lust for instant gratification as well as their almost incessant contribution to the real-time content stream of reviews and write-ups. Searching and finding relevant opinions and socializing online thru social media will lead to more physical mass mingling as people inherently enjoy meeting up with other people. Search has the notion of information pull, yet the growing usage of tracking and alerting may complement the conventional search with a push version, see for example the online tracking programme that reveals New York’s city agency performance. Lufthansa’s myskystatus keeps the family and loved ones up to date on the progress of a journey. Furthermore, data and profile myning (no, not mining) refers to the huge untapped potential of consumers revealing their preferences, needs, wants and full personal profile possibly in exchange for a lower search burden. With the strong human preference for impromptu decision making in combination with getting visual information, the forecast take-off of augmented reality (AR) should pave the way for a new generation of search platforms to be used anywhere, anytime and providing far better visual clues – solutions one could perhaps better refer to as ‘find’, ‘match’ or ‘insight’ solutions in the first place.

#TEDxAms & Social Media: ideas worth spreading?!

Two days ago the first Netherlands-based version of the world reknown TED (Technology Design Entertainment) conference was held in Amsterdam. A rich blend of dutch and international speakers covered a wide array of topics ranging from eg architecture, the produce made from pig ingredients, human fears, diversity to sustainability. And inspirational talks and ideas they brought! 

TEDx as powerful platform?
As the TED motto rightly says, good ideas are ‘worth spreading’. However a platform for some of the brightest individuals on the planet to my mind is only as effective as the influence one is able to exert as a result of this meeting of the brains and minds. I am convinced that a great deal of valuable networking took place in Amsterdam, contact details were swapped via bluetooth and intentions for new or further collaboration were nurtured on the day of TEDx. Yet wouldn’t TEDx be even more powerful a platform if and when the best ideas on say sustainability would be taken to the next level by the TEDx audience? Here’s where social media could to my mind lend a helping hand.

Social Media around TEDxAms
A brief and pragmatic analysis of the buzz surrounding TEDx Amsterdam was conducted thanks to TED participants and fans using the hashtag #TEDxAms. The analysis was done one day after the event, just before midnight CET November 21^st 2009. Some 2810 tweets were made on TEDxAms according to Tweetvolume. The average number of tweets per day according to TwitterVen amounted to 335 for TEDx Amsterdam, somewhat higher than the score for the NY-based event Web 2.0 expo #w2e but frankly speaking not a big difference[1]. The noise generated by a powerful crowd of 400+ TEDx attendees, augmented by their followers, friends and fans objectively could be a lot higher than this. Yet one could argue, quality matters more than quantity. Browsing through the word cloud and some TEDx tweets, it becomes apparent that the majority of tweets either praise the TEDx organisation, reconfirm their happiness with attending the inspiring event or indicate their favourite speaker(s). Using Twitter StreamGraphs and screening for the last 1,000 tweets on TEDxAms, this picture is reconfirmed.

Leveraging social media as catalyst for influence
First of all why not limit the number of TEDx topics and speakers? Or swap the tail-end programme on TEDxUniversity dubbed by speaker @earlybird44 as an afterthought for further in-depth review of the content already on the table? The time won could then be re-allocated to have the TEDx attendees as well as other TED fans around the globe vote realtime and online for the best idea, and have them add their suggestions, contacts and tips as to how to make that best and brightest idea come to fruition. Crowdsourcing then would become a powerful instrument to refining both the best idea and moreover its deployment. Furthermore, assuming the power of social media is better leveraged one could use both the amount of votes for the best idea as well as the general buzz around TEDx to bring to the attention of decision makers or politicians that actually will be discussing next steps on that topic. The ROI/ Return on Ideas would surely benefit. With future TEDx events elsewhere and in Rotterdam, Netherlands coming up, please share your ideas and builds on Twitter or as comment to this blogged line of thought.

 

 

 

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[1] PS Not significantly different/ higher from the combination ‘Frans, Verjaardag (dutch for birthday), Nederland (Netherlands)’ checking the amount of buzz surrounding my father’s 74^th birthday yesterday November 21st. That combination’s score amounted to respectively 278, 747 and 2645 tweets .

Social media superstar transforms superwhiner into superpromoter

Dine and whine?
Some people including @JeffJarvis in his great book What Would Google Do? wonder if overtime we don’t all end up as super whiners. The combination of the power that social media provide, examples like the Dell story that demonstrate the benefit of complaining as well as the need felt by so many consumers to be taken seriously might indeed fuel our society to develop a whining culture. Wining and dining then becomes ‘dining and whining’.

Culture of complacency
This risk is fuelled by the current prevailing corporate culture of complacency in too many sectors ranging from airlines, retailers, electronics manufacturers to public sector organisations like your local village or city. The economic recession seems to have had only small shake-out consequences let alone any real shift of perspective on how businesses should engage in improving customer relationships and offer really better products and services. In my home country the Netherlands this could become even worse because of the dutch calvinist perspective on life and the preference to believe ‘the glass is half empty’.

Social Media as corporate conscience
The ROI on Social Media is often questioned, but who can justify the multi million dollar spend of above-the-line advertising in billboards, newspapers and tv? TimesSquare therefore seems to represent the platform of corporate arrogance: my brand is so big we can spend a million per quarter just to get noticed. Yet as Buzz Bishop illustrates in a recent update of the Cyberbuzz blog explains there is room for organisations to really start listening to their key audience and engage in an authentic conversation. Social Media offer this opportunity and could almost act as a corporate conscience. Re-allocating above the line spend to social media expenditure, one could for instance kickstart a nationwide team of dedicated social media superstars to listen to individual consumers’ suggestions, needs and complaints. And then provide real attention which in turn can lead to real improvements in the way that brand is perceived and referred to. Real attention that in today’s manic world has increasingly become  a scarce resource yet to my opinion will be re-appreciated overtime.

Superpromoter
The Superpromoter currently seems to be the -all too often exceptional – customer that is not just satisfied but overjoyed with the company he has bought  a certain product or service from. Fathered by Rijn Vogelaar (@Rijn on Twitter), the superpromoter represents a new way of looking at a company’s key assets; its customers. Vogelaar claims it’s way better to focus a company’s attention on superpromoters rather than on dissatisfied customers, and refers to the power of enthusiasm. Reallocating former advertising budgets to social media customer engagement, I would argue also represents a healthy business case. Former superwhiners can indeed by turned into superpromoters, when one has the willigness to really listen and care. What about ROI? The Return of Investment (or perhaps we should rename it into Return of real Interest) will become clear to organisations really giving this their best shot and commit to listening to their customers now and in the long run – not just because it’s cool to be on Twitter or Facebook.

 

Web 2.0: Rip or ROI?!

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Hyves and other so-called Social Media tools reflect a much wider phenomenon: customers around the world are increasingly taking control over their own lives. And of course that impacts the relationship with organisations that people choose to buy their products and services from or prefer to work for, for that matter. Research by InSites that came out earlier today showed that technology companies eg Amazon, Google and HP are preferred brands to talk about for Twitterers. It also showed the typical Twitter user to be male, in his thirties and working in media, technology or marketing. Exactly the same category of people first to adopt the web some 15 years ago.

Can B2B organisations, the public sector or organisations serving a non-male audience above 40 therefore shy away from Social Media? No. I’m convinced Social Media will revolutionize our world and is here to stay. Whereas the majority of attention on Web 2.0 and social media seems to go to B2C, my passion lies in B2B which of  course is just as much a people’s business as is B2C. Btw I’d prefer not to distinguish no longer between B2B and B2C and use P2P | People2People instead. To prove my point, I’m in the process of designing my PhD research with the draft hypothesis: “there is a measurable ROI in applying Web 2.0 to B2B – in particular when it comes to managing customer value”. I look forward to hearing your builds!