Not Just Simple Reporting

BI type solutions, of which CPM is a key part, are going through a transformation in the corporate world currently. For many organisations BI meant operational and management reporting reporting through simple reports and some dashboards, with low level aggregation of the data in response to many queries. In part new demands drive an understanding of  not simply what happened but why it occurred, which in turn can assist in predicting future actions.

One of the key aspects today is the movement to adopt predictive analytics. For many this is the new goal, yet in reality predictive analytics have been available for more than twenty years, it has however always been complex to implement and requires very knowledgeable users having a strong background in mathematics and statistics. Knowing that there is a correlation between TV program times and people’s shopping patterns may enable a supermarket to plan their staffing shifts appropriately, bringing in staff to cover the store peak times.

Self Service?

Another challenge here is in moving towards more of a self-service model for information delivery with the intent of lowering the total cost of ownership, yet still provide data to the business community in a timely manner. The challenge here is of course the sheer volume of data available, which is why many BI solutions have traditionally been only able to tap into a small section of it. Business challenges like tracking of orders are now becoming a BI initiative, rather than something managed through the ERP solution, thus it is vital the BI database receives continual and timely updates. The advantage here is that the BI system contains all the data whereas in many corporations operational processes are frequently split between several systems.

The delivery of data from one system to another still requires technical expertise. Data availability should be taken on a step by step evolutionary basis, each new element enhancing the existing data model. Yet this data provision is still fulfilling a specific business need, and it is important that business managers are actively engaged in the process. It is clear today that the demand for business metrics is unable to be met by loading data into Excel spreadsheets (Excel was never intended to handle large complex models). Part of making BI a success in ensuring that the business community recognises that in order to fulfill their reporting needs it is necessary to go beyond the limits of the spreadsheet. Database models have always been able to be as complex as necessary to handle the required solution, yet the BI databases provide simple to understand structures yet provide powerful capabilities in order to drive operational, management, and strategic reporting and queries.

Social Media Impact

One other aspect is the need to measure the impact of blog posts and any corporate social media presence. What kind of penetration is certainly something that should be measured. Yet there is another aspect here, called Social Media Intelligence, which should not be confused with traditional BI, yet in itself it can feed any BI solution. The goal of Social Media Intelligence is to seek out any mentions of you brand out in the multitude of social media channels. The intent behind Social Media Intelligence is to act as a listening station in order to make the corporation more responsive to its customers on each of the social channels. It is also a way of monitoring what is being said about your competitors.

How to respond is a challenge that will depend largely on the popularity of the poster. Something said by a person with only 12 followers may have little consequence when compared to the person having 12,000. The Social Media Intelligence is an additional data source that when used right can give some insight on the influence your brands wield in the marketplace – the trick with this intelligence is turning something textual into something measurable.

The Advantage of BI

To be clear Business Intelligence is a mature technology, it has existed for for than a quarter of a century, with this writer being involved in some of the earliest BI applications. Regardless of where a corporation is in respect of BI it is crucial to understand that, when used correctly, this is a powerful tool that can help any corporation make smarter decisions based upon the information at their fingertips.

We will educate your executive team on how to build a corporate social media strategy. Our half-day seminars cost $500.00 CDN + Tax. Once you have a payment receipt please email to schedule a mutually acceptable appointment. Please note that outside the Greater Toronto area travel and accommodation expenses may apply. Cancellations will not be accepted, although appointments can be rescheduled upto 48 hours in advance.

This programs brings a down-to-earth understanding of how your business can leverage these new dynamic on-line channels. Social Media is about how we communicate and build trust. It is a new way of making connections that will soon impact every business on this planet

The seminar takes three hours and discusses the following topics:

• Understanding Social Media
• The challenges to leveraging Social Media in your business
• Why you should use Social Media for your business
• The Social Media landscape
• How to leverage the Social Media Channel for Business Success
• Defining a Social Media Strategy
• Collaboration – Building working relationships
• Image Management – Having your finger on the pulse
• The Revenue Opportunity – Trust based relationships
• Delivering value through Social Media

This seminar forms an executive briefing that will allow you to formulate a corporate social media strategy. Provided as a part of this seminar will be 3 copies of Peter B. Giblett’s book – Is your Business Ready for the Social Media Revolution?

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.

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.

Over the last 12 months the value of the Chief Information Officer’s role has been called into question by a number commentators. In an earlier article (CIO Strategy Development) I stated “CIO’s role is more than simply managing IT staff and ensure that systems and networks are up and running” and that they “have largely become the Chief Change Officer by leading their organization’s strategic business change initiatives”. We are at a time when many CEO’s are questioning the value of the entire team on the top table, with The Bolton Group stating that 20% of CEO’s rate their top teams as ‘High Performing’ I feel it is particularly important that IT provides an extraordinary performance. In fact there is a revenue generating opportunity opening up right now that many corporations are missing as the world changes in front of our eyes.

Web 2.0 is adding to the corporate challenge. The relationship between employer and employee is changing. The change is more of a social change than it is a technological one, albeit founded on a technological platform. Each worker connections booth professionally and in a social context. The development of Social Media may have allowed us to reconnect with out old school and college friends but it also has the perspective to allow business development. However in some respects the world of Business and Social activities are different, but are they? The biggest group of new users to Facebook is in the 50 to 59 age bracket, many of whom are people of real influence in business today.

In the business world we are not interested on my auntie Mavis as she explores the world (well perhaps you are if you are in the Travel industry), but you may be interested in connecting with the production manager that I know in order to sell them Lean/6Sigma training. The fact that we are connected may facilitate that sale.We must understand that posting something on a social networking site has a different dynamic to chatting at the water-cooler. Having a Twitter conversation is not private – others will be listening. Whilst the majority of our listeners are ambivalent to our messages, some can have sinister intent. Some listeners may also be clients or prospects, so we had better watch what we say. The way we leverage relationships is changing, our network is one of the keys to building our business. We also have to be on our guard for mis-information, especially where we are looking to react to changes in the marketplace.

However should a corporation change everything that it is doing to adopt Social Media? This is where it is important to understand whether any new channel is going to give benefit. This understanding comes from leveraging a technology the corporation already has, its Business Intelligence solution. This is developing a new focus, a Marketing Intelligence. Marketing intelligence should look at our sales, customer services, and marketing efforts and ensure that they are correctly focused. There is little point is saying “All is well we are selling millions of widgets” when the company wishes to expand the market for ‘dongles’. The question is largely selling the right thing to the right person at the right time.

A couple of years ago I deployed a solution for a Telecom company that leveraged Business Intelligence to enhance the existing Customer Services and Sales solutions. The demographics about the customer, plus information on past performance would determine whether to offer an improved service to a customer, particularly when they wanted to terminate their service and move to a new supplier. If the demographic was right valuable offers could be made that would retain the customer. For this corporation BI drives their sales and marketing efforts. At the same time you must also be able to recognise that a customer is not worth the effort and therefore minimise sales effort as they are not profitable.

This value proposition is even more important when is comes to marketing through the Social Media channel. Whilst Dell have claimed to have made $1million via the Twitter channel in 2008, see here, I am not sure that many corporations can quantify the impact of Social Media sales so accurately. Predicting it is much more complex.

Leveraging Social Media for marketing must be cost effectively deployed. This is more that merely defining a Social Media policy it is about having a corporate policy that leverages this new channel to its advantage.