“p…123 men’s casual shirts   http://did—.com?=29… @pgiblett @pklicht @Market_Markee“

or

“a…more pc desktop computers  http://did—.com?=…f5 @mikaelaekholm @blake_a_crone @Buzz_Winkle @pgiblett @pklicht“

Now the name of the sender and the name of the site have been changed here in order that they do not provide further free advertising and none of the links are active, simply coloured for clarity.

One of the point that I made in my recently published book “Is your Business Ready for the Social Media Revolution?” is:

“The traditional mode for advertising is about one-way communication, yet to leverage social media it is essential to build a trust based marketing approach. Yes, Twitter can be a cheap way to advertise, but if advertising is all you are there for then people will soon ignore you, stop following you, or worse block you ensuring they never see what you have to say ever again.”

Sending out a post like this one when it has some relevance to the recipient (in this case the person whose @username is mentioned) can assist in their choices, but they need to be of relevance to some activity that person is involved in. e.g. a purchase decision.

The danger of this type of communication is that the recipient may see it as not relevant to them, and worse an annoyance. When communications of this type continue to arrive from this user it can belittle them in the eyes of the recipient. Articles in this column have talked about the need to build trust. Trust is important in social media. With tv, newspapers, and magazines we see adverts everyday, we expect it in that media. If the advert is relevant we look further, irrelevant and we ignore it. Social media messages on the other hand imply a connection with another person, often not the case with these type of advertisements.

In these cases the link went to a blog page and not to an on-line offer, but the effect is the same it is advertising that is designed to take traffic to the site in question. Furthermore having traced posts by one of the senders it is clear that the post content e.g. “men’s casual shirts” “pc desktop computers” (from the examples shown above) bear little resemblance to the target web page. What the advertiser is trying to do is simply drive traffic to their target site, and Twitter does easily facilitate this.

There is nothing wrong with telling people about things that you have done or informing them about products you have to sell yet it really should be done in a way that is relevant to that person and not in the format of a blatant advertisement. This is about the TRUST based relationships that we build on social media. Yes, tell people about your products, but don’t break the trust you have built up over time.

Sadly there are many so-called ‘Social Media Marketing experts’ talking on this subject on a daily basis. The majority of these are merely advertising people who are simply advising businesses on how to leverage Social Media sites as a tool for traditional advertising. Lets be clear here – there is nothing wrong with leveraging the channel as an advertising mechanism. However advertising only has a tiny part to play in leveraging the Social Media Channel for business success. What is far more important is being involved in the ongoing dialogue. Therefore it is important to take a more holistic view in defining a strategy to manage your social media intervention.

One aspect of Peter Giblett’s new book “Is your Business Ready for the Social Media Revolution?“, is moving away from advertising based marketing towards building a dialogue with customers, prospects and the industry at large.

There are three pillars to leveraging Social Media for business success:

• • Building a communication & collaborative capability
• • Intelligent intervention in the marketplace
• • Generating revenue as a trusted adviser

Some advertising specialists think only in terms of generating in income from this channel, but this approach will not ultimately lead to success. So lets look at each of these in turn.

Communications & Collaboration

The whole history of business involves communication, in-fact trade or barter may have been one of the reasons we humans learned to talk. Humans are adaptive creatures and new communications capabilities will always be arriving, in fact it seems to be a large part behind driving many technological advances. Today we face a changing world of business communications where everything is more rapid, in short bite sized chunks. We naturally want to be involved in a dialogue before we buy anything, the net result is that we want to be able to trust those products that we decide to purchase.

From a business standpoint part of that dialogue involves a wide range of people who are involved in getting any product to market. This more than ever before is a collaborative process. In the past collaboration has been about reaching out via email, we often forget to involve all the knowledge-holders within an organisation, let alone with suppliers, customers etc. Collaborative efforts have always been based on team membership.

The collaborative challenge today demands the involvement of a wider audience, including suppliers, customers, and other partners we are able to improve the level of communication and take appropriate action. Understanding that a customer’s business is closing early on Wednesday for a corporate event and keeping the trucking partner in the loop will ensure that deliveries are re-scheduled and arrive at an appropriate time for processing. Included are industry experts; don’t know the answer to a problem – look it up on-line or find an expert. Social media is bringing those experts closer to your business as a normal resource and in many cases without paying an exorbitant fee (although you should always expect to pay for valuable contributions).

The section “Invest On Relationships” discusses the value to be gained from improving collaboration within the workplace. Everyone has competencies they bring with them from either their social life or prior workplace. They have a sphere of collaboration, starting with themselves, expanding to the people they work with. This builds through teams and departments to the company as a whole. Each step potentially adds expertise. Ultimately it is the individual spheres of influence touch customers, suppliers, and third party partners with whom we are able to build a trusting relationship over time.

Intelligent Intervention

When people are talking about your brand your finger needs to be right on the pulse! The response needs to be immediate, proportionate and relevant.

Googling your brand or company should show your web-site to the top of the search results, but it is unlikely to show what someone just said about you on Twitter. Using traditional search engines it takes time and a lot of effort to discover what was said yesterday. A negative blog may take months to discover via traditional search. This is where it is important to build a social media intelligence capability. is about knowing what is being said about a product and having a plan to respond proportionately in any given situation. The triggers are questions about ‘What is being said about my organisation, my product, my competitors?’ To a large extent these are traditional market research questions, but we have never before had such a powerful view about people’s thinking. People are giving their views every day about topics that may have some relevance to your business. It is driven by what is important to people at a specific point in time.

In addition we can link this general knowledge with a knowledge of the views of customers, when retaining social media ID’s of customers when they make on-line comments (and remember there may be many). This information is closely allied to marketing intelligence.

Monitoring solutions are available that will automatically monitor the Internet buzz and throw up an alert when action is needed. Rewarding recommendations is a key. What do you do when an independent person spontaneously says something good about your product and company? At the very least it is important to thank them, one airline thanked a customer by giving a 25% discount on flights because of something said on Twitter.

Helping people with their problems is one of the best ways of intervening in the marketplace. Solving someone else’s problem will win you kudos, even if the person does not use your product. What happens next time they are looking to buy? You will be high on their wish list and possibly the only candidate.

Revenue Opportunity

Advertising on the Social Media channel will generate an income, but this will generally be at the same rate as advertising on the Internet. We may be able to tweak this a few points by focusing advertising campaigns towards specific demographic groups. But this is not where the real power of the medium lies. For business the Social Media channel is based on trust and expertise. You have to demonstrate expertise in order to build trust, and it is this that will ultimately bring revenue.

This is where leveraging this channel requires a shift in thinking. The marketing communication budget is not simply about advertising, it must now think about customer involvement. A corporation’s ability to leverage the Social Media channel to collaborate and be involved in the marketplace becomes important. It builds a revenue based on trust and expertise in specific areas.

A prospective customer who has found you through a specific Social Media is interested in the services that you have to offer, they will come to you because they already trust you and they are interested in your product. Hey isn’t this better than Yellow Pages?

The ROI of Social Media

Social Media can be viewed by many as the current must-have, but at what cost? Are corporations setting aside the ROI in order to jump start their enterprise social media presence?

It has been said that it is not possible to identify an ROI for collaborative improvements and that we only see the real improvements in the rear-view mirror. Yet defining an ROI for any project or proposed solution is about producing a best estimate at the time the need is perceived. That is as relevant for any Social Media project as it is for any other corporate change. Remember the major impact of social medial is more in the area of business than with the technology that underpins it.

The other aspect here is about contributing to an improvement in business results. This should be measurable through Business Intelligence. It is valid to measure the contribution made by Social Media to the bottom line. This must include a value for the collaborative effort, and for web intervention (including the real value from promotions offered). Spending should be appropriate, but will always be based on business drivers.

—————————-

This article is based on segments of Peter Giblett’s new book “Is your Business Ready? For the Social Media Revolution”. This book is now available on Amazon.

Much of the answer is about knowing your customer and what drives their behaviour. Indeed there is a whole branch of psychology about how consumers think, feel, reason, and what drives them to select between different alternatives (e.g., brands, products, and the retailers they use). That same psychology can also give some clues to the Social Media choices that individual may make.

Let us be clear here that whether the customer/prospect is an individual or a corporation it is a person that will make the final decision to purchase or not. Get inside their mind at the precise moment of that decision and we may have the key to the greatest breakthrough in customer relationship management. Without it we have to understand generally held knowledge about what drives the customer.

The customer will use different criteria according to the different types of purchase that they are making. There is a distinct difference between buying in a closed office from an on-line store than in a shopping mall with friends ever present. Individuals are influenced by those around them.

If we look at the decision to purchase a camera. Through the web we may look at the possible candidates, know the specifications, prices, capabilities, accessories available etc. Yet going out to the mall to look at the specific models and having just decided on the right model to purchase one friend makes a passing remark “I wouldn’t buy that one it doesn’t look kewl“. Logic has taken you to the edge of the purchase – it has everything you want, it is on your shortlist, and it feels right. The friend has used emotion and potentially an irrational thought to dissuade you from making the purchase, even worse they may persuade you to purchase something you don’t want.

Moving into the world of Social Media it is possible to have the same influences act upon the purchaser as at the shopping mall. The influential friend will have an opinion, but then so can 200 other people that you are connected to, even including the manufacturer, or an industry expert. Ask the question – Which camera should I buy on Facebook and you will receive a wide variety of opinions. The answers that stand out will be the ones that answer the question and give a reasoned logic. If one of the answers comes from a manufacturer and gives a fair overview of where their camera performs better than others listed and where it under-performs the competition then it is possible that you have a logical basis upon which a decision can be made.

“The X-12 gives a superior depth of field when in landscape mode”

or

“The Y-7 provides excellent portrait options”

This information can aid in the final purchase. is the buyer interested in portraits or landscapes? This may be at the nub of their purchase decision – the logic that can seal the deal in the mind of the purchaser.

Going back to the original question where do we find our customers and prospects? To a large extent they will find you by just being available on the communities they are active on. Yet with some specialist products it is important to be active in the right places. A corporation selling health-care products needs to be active on a community where health-care professionals congregate.

In addition almost every organisation needs to have a brand or product presence on Facebook and Twitter. Being present is generally enough to build a following. Yet the following you build and the amount of trust generated will increase if you are active in the community.

Normally this is achieved by combining  the use of advanced analytics with analytical CRM components. This is one form of closed-loop Business Intelligence, the principle of which is to predict behaviour based on classes of customer. Of course a class can be encompass a group of one person, but is normally much larger. The concept is that each customer would fall into certain demographic groups. There are certain behaviour patterns that could be drawn from the generalised behaviour of specific groups of people. We are now living in different times and whilst group behaviour can still assist in determining the general needs of a group it does not assist in knowing why individual customers make specific choices.

Take Joe, he is 52 years old, middle class, owns a Mercedes on many things he is typical for his age group, a true red-blooded American, supports his college football team. On the management team where he works. He is involved with many local causes. A family man with three kids, staunchly conservative on most issues, yet a vegetarian since his youth. His whole family have followed him in this regard with each making a conscious choice.

When the local supermarket sends them special offers it is always for meat products that nobody in the family eats. This is a case of the store fitting him and his family into specific demographic groups and having little tolerance for individual preference within their data structures. For most things Joe and his family follow the norms associated with their demographics. Through traditional Business Intelligence it is possible to identify specific anomalies to demographic norms, yet there is a tendency to believe that Joe’s family purchase their meat from another store; hence the offers that are sent.

UK supermarket chain Tesco has performed much research in making special offers relevant to their customers, yet it is all too easy to make assumptions. Thus it is all too easy to misunderstand why people do the things they do. We may never truly understand why people do all they do, even with a psychologist on the business team.

What social media adds to the picture can be the views and attitudes of the customer. However to add value these must drive additional insight over and above the demographic norms. For small businesses there is often more value driven by listening to customers than can be gleamed from analytics. Of course small businesses have to think twice before adding expensive systems.

25% of the worlds population currently use the internet a massive 1.7 billion people.

The number of users has grown by 380% in the last ten years. The biggest growth areas being the Middle East, Africa, and South America, but growth is occurring everywhere.

0.001% of all information stored on the internet has any relevance to my current goals.

Unable to credit any specific person with this quote and as time goes on the number of zeros between the decimal point and the 1 continues to grow.

On-line advertising response rates are typically lower than 2%.

This is well known and advertisers often forget there are two types of web user the person who is focused on a goal and the casual surfer. The focused person is not interested in the advert irrespective of its relevance – to respond is an interruption. The casual surfer only responds if an advert is relevant.

Visitors make a decision in just eight seconds whether to remain on a web-site.

Marketing Sherpa have given us this gem in their Landing Page Handbook. I know from my own experience that there are some sites that I have visited where the stay is less than two seconds. So we had better make it interesting.

Looking for information, services or products, more than 80% of Internet users rely on search engines.

Naturally without a direct link to the important information we have to search.

85% of these searchers don’t click on sponsored or paid links.

Interesting, maybe people are less inclined to support advertising feeling that un-sponsored links represent a fairer viewpoint. 63% of links appearing at the top of search results get the majority of clicks. This demonstrates the importance of good search engine optimisation.

59.8% of men and 67.2% of women go on-line while they’re watching TV.

We humans are multi-tasking creatures. Have laptop will multi-task. How much is this driven by television advertising is not known or are we all looking up the biographies of the stars of the latest hit show?

China has the largest number of Internet users at 384 million.

Not bad for a country where democratic freedoms are limited. Yet plenty of sales opportunities do exist for the astute corporation.

Each of these has an impact if how we should be focusing many of our business development efforts.

Generally, price fixing in most markets is generally illegal. Anti-trust laws also forbid contracts or conspiracies that restrain trade. Yet here there is no allegation that in this particular case that the two corporations have colluded. They simply know what drives the other party and act accordingly. In the same industry cost margins are likely to be similar (without a dramatic new approach being present). It is not a case of direct collusion; merely indirect action that gives an appearance of price fixing. Where there is limited competition the prices tend to rise. Customer service also takes a hit in these scenarios, especially when the monopoly vendor knows they are the only game-in-town.

The internet has also been a source of monopoly building, in fact many internet vendors thrive on this. There is nothing wrong with being in a monopoly position provided the customer is not affected.

How can fierce competitors collude? Far from there being any intention to collude the two competitors tend to know each other’s business intimately. They watch each others prices, know each others policies, poach employees etc. They can often ignore the marketplace; most especially the disgruntled customer. This of course can leave an opportunity for a new player in the market; provided the barriers to entry are not too high. The broadband case discussed earlier can represent a high entry cost for anyone entering the market, particularly as it is a regulated industry.

Although in a regulated industry there should be checks and balances in place. Can we be sure that these function in the best interests of the customers?

All businesses want repeat business, we have heard the maxim of it being easier to sell to an old customer than a new one. There is much psychology and academic study in the area of repeat business. The last of these is often forgotten, but can drive so much business value.

Over the last couple of years there has been much discussion about how there is no such thing as loyalty any more. Particularly as the youth, or gen-Y and millennials, as some insist on calling them. Yet this writer has observed that loyalty is still important; it is simply driven by a different set of values than at earlier times. The value system today includes friends and on-line social contacts, they all have something to say.

The psychology of the customer has changed a little. Today the customer knows they are in command of the relationship. The psychology of buying is all about trust. This is one of the keys behind much of the move to adopt social media by such a wide audience. This is one reason why any business that is looking to build customers needs to think about engaging through that medium. it is all about demonstrating expertise and building trust.

There is much business intelligence to be drawn from loyalty programmes. Knowing what purchases a customer makes in order to drive appropriate offers is a key aspect. A supermarket sending money off tokens for meat produce makes no sense to a vegetarian. How does the store know they are vegetarian? Well one way may be through buying patterns – if they have never purchased a meat product that may be a clue, another method is through surveys – all add to the details we know about the customer. Relevance of the reward is an important factor for the customer.

Remember for a rewards programme to be successful it must focus on the needs of the customer.

The last article in this series covered “The Corporate Architecture and Complexity of Data Links“. This builds on out business understanding that impacts the selected solution. You should walk away from this series with an impression the selecting a BI solution is not merely about software selection, but about a whole range of factors that require a more holistic vision about how the corporation will be leveraging its business intelligence capability. Yes we do need to measure profitability, but ultimately we also need to measure a range of other factors.

So, what makes our business unique?

Each business has a set of products or services. Many of these may also sold by the company’s competitors, at a similar price in a similar format. There however is always some distinguishing feature that ensures customers buy our product or service rather than our competitor’s. This may be as simple as undercutting the competition’s price or may be some unusual aesthetic feature. Knowing the factors of uniqueness is essential for each business. This has been described as many things over the years, but it is generally known as the unique selling proposition, or USP.

Each business, of course, has its competitors. One of the reasons for implementing business intelligence solutions is to identify ways to take advantage of prevailing market conditions. Thus it necessary to understand the ebb and flow of the marketplace; how this industry sector(s) function. Marketplace goals will also be a driving factor.

One of the major reasons for introducing Data Warehousing technology is to identify and measure factors that distinguish this business from all of its competitors. Pre-packaged solutions are rarely capable of doing this. They concentrate on general business goals, or maybe that of the market sector. Uniqueness will always need to be added to any pre-packaged solution.

Note: the author has identified two factors that need to be considered:

►  Factors that are common within the particular industry sector. This may be all insurance companies, or alternatively may be insurance companies operating in the life and pensions sector, where specific rules have to be met.

►  Factors that make our specific business unique. E.g. the brand name – Coca Cola, the reputation for quality workmanship – Rolls Royce.

When I work with corporations to deploy BI solutions I have created an assessment form that allows these factors to be both defined and assessed for your corporation. If we take an example of a corporation involved in the travel sector some of the generic industry factors may be:

◊ Declining corporate travel market

◊ Buoyant executive travel market

◊ Growth of no-frills airlines

◊ Growth of on-line sales

◊ Reducing costs

◊ The impact of terrorism on the marketplace

Factors making our specific business unique may include:

◊ Guaranteed lowest price whether booked on-line of in store

◊ Value customer service and retention (follow up call after trip)

◊ Wide variety of sales channels, even active on Social Media

◊ Active in all areas of the world

◊ International free-call help line

◊ Links airlines and corporate customers.

Understanding these factors and classifying both their mission criticality and their complexity are both important to the financial decision making process. Some factors here may be regarded as complex because such data is not currently recorded within the company.

As a general observation the more unique the business the less likely it will be a candidate for using a pre-packaged Data Warehousing solution and the more likelihood that the corporation will have to define their own database model or make changes to an ‘industry focused template’.

Next “Suitable Analytical Applications”

This is part of a series on communications and links to other articles on this site…

There are several types of communication that are important to the average business today:

◊ Direct one-to-one, a dialogue

◊ One-to-many, broadcasting

◊ Many-to-many, such as in a meeting

On a “One to One” basis we communicate directly or through another medium. There are differences in how we communicate but there is generally a dialogue that occurs in any conversation. Our approach may be different say for a letter (if anyone writes these anymore) or an email than in a conversation, but it is a dialogue nonetheless. In a conversation we will deal with one point at a time, whereas in a letter we tend to put in all of the related detail before sending it.

Email differs from a normal letter in that it is not purely a one-to-one messaging tool, it allows us to send that same message to multiple people. We developed the ability to broadcast early in human history as well – remember the smoke-signals used by Native Americans were almost certainly used in other ancient societies; even 16 century England had a fire warning system used to send messages rapidly across the country in order to prepare for an expected attack of the Spanish Armada, allowing them to muster forces at a time when sending a message by traditional means was agonisingly slow.

“One to Many” messages are used in a multitude of ways, like a newspaper article, telegraph, radio, television. The ‘presenter’ prepares their statement and makes it via the appropriate medium. In the modern world we are putting a lot of this information on-line in the form of blogs or websites, but the majority still follows the process of one person posting for all to see.

“Many to Many” communications don’t really exist through any of the traditional communications media. A meeting may give everyone an opportunity for everyone to speak, but it is in reality held through a series on one to many communications. Us humans are simply not able to handle multiple simultaneous conversations; so we have developed a protocol that enables us to achieve the effect of a many-to-many conversation.

Computers on the other hand are able do multiple things at the same time more effectively and they can communicate with other computer at a speed allows messages to travel the globe in an instant.

The changing world of business communications is largely about empowering collaboration between people who are interested in a particular outcome. In business relationships matter and have always been vital for success, in fact it plays on another basic part of human nature. The need for a crew to work together for the success of the voyage is as vital in a trawler facing a ferocious storm as it is in your business.

Each person involved brings with them something unique that helps the team succeed. Yet today we are able  to contribute in so many ways and continue contributing. With the use of Social Media it is even possible to have our customers make a contribution to our product development which can be a vital part of our success. Collaboration is a very personal thing. Each and every person has a sphere of collaboration, which is about them, their team, the department they work for, the company, customers, suppliers, third-parties, industry experts, etc. Even their friends perhaps have a role to play.

Ultimately the changing world of business communications is about improving out ability to collaborate. It is about bringing the right people together, cost effectively, to solve a specific problem, then moving on.

Determining a strategy based on this question will largely depend on what your marketplace is, who your typical customers are, their demographic characteristics and their psyche. The person making the marketing decisions will tend to turn towards familiar territory when developing a Social Media strategy, which may not always be the smart move. For example using Social Media when trying to promote a new product aimed at on-line teens; you will not find many teens on LinkedIn for example as the site is focused towards professionals and executives and the site policy states that it is for people over 18; yet this may be where our executive spends her on-line life.

In order to market to people through Social Media it is necessary more than ever before to develop a brand persona and bring that persona to life, more so than for any other form of communication. This has characteristics which will be recognised by target market – they will identify with it. The prospective customer needs to feel that they are communicating directly with that ‘person’, so it is necessary to breath life into the product.

All social media activity must be via the brand. Continuing on the theme of the teen market you will need to understand the different locations for teens interested in music than for teens interested in sporting goods, although there may be some crossover obviously. For the business seeking to intervene in social media it is important they find the right site to be involved in from the literally hundreds available. This choice will almost certainly include the style of music, since each tends to have very different sub-cultures.

This involves a lot of research into the right locations to use for the relevant market. It is also seen to be relevant to the prospects out there – having someone aged 50 writing the posts for a teen site might not be a smart move. Would they know whether it is cool, kool, kewl, or hot? The latest recruit or even the latest teen idol you are trying to generate interest in may be the right person to make the posts – spelling mistakes and all.

Food for thought.

Reference articles:

“Brand Elevation Through Social Media and Social Business”

“Social media can strengthen customer relationships”