As the headline implies, even though Social CRM exists as an official category, what it is and what it is not is blurry and hotly debated. No, it doesn’t need a new definition. And, no, it doesn’t need new leadership. sCRM, and now “social enterprise” as categories could however, benefit from clarity around what it is they’re solving for, which companies actually provide solutions against those objectives, and ultimately, how everything works together for the benefit of customer engagement and relationships.

Think about the vast array of vendors selling social media solutions for a moment. Many of them are positioned as Social CRM or sCRM tools, but when you examine true capabilities versus stated positioning , you will find that many vendors are in fact stronger players in social media management (SMMS), social CMS, listening, collaboration, intelligence, and conversation management.

If you think about this from a business perspective, it’s almost impossible to identify which vendor is truly qualified to deliver against the goals of a new social CRM system.  Decision makers have to spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to sort through what is true and what is simply good marketing. Often, they must recruit experts to help survey the landscape and qualify vendors.

Earlier in the year, I met with Houston Neal to discuss the state of Social CRM, where it’s headed and where it needs to go. As you can see, I believe that 2012 is the year when we finally start to accurately segment the market while better defining what Social CRM really is and how businesses need to think and rethink their approach to customer relationship management.

So, no. This is not a post to redefine sCRM. Nor is this a post to argue about nomenclature. This is an attempt to bring clarity and alignment around real world business problems and vendor capabilities. More importantly, in 2012, I hope to see greater movement toward solving for the business issues that software and social media cannot fix. It’s part technology and part philosophy. Because, in the end, it’s about relationships.

Here’s the transcribed conversation…

Houston Neal: To begin, do you think a true social CRM suite exists in the market?

Brian Solis: That’s a good question. Let’s first take a step back. The thing that’s a little bit more interesting about Social CRM – and definitely one of the things that’s under appreciated – is the idea that it forces us to rethink the definition of CRM. By that I mean, CRM was originally about putting together an infrastructure, processes, and methodologies to support customer and sales processes and customer relationships. With Social CRM, we are introduced to a customer that resides in different channels, channels businesses don’t control. This introduces new touch points within the business ecosystem that we didn’t design around originally.

Paul Greenberg introduced a working definition of Social CRM that I think helps frame the conversation, “Social CRM is the integration of traditional operational customer facing activities including strategies, programs, systems, and technologies with emergent social channels to provide businesses with the means to communicate and engage with customers in their preferred channels for mutual benefit.”

When you ask if there are any solutions out there, the answer is yes and no. What was CRM and what will be CRM are two very different things. By this, I mean this is an opportunity to evolve an aging infrastructure and philosophy to adapt to customers where they expect engagement. And, as a result, you’re actually going to see a complete transformation in business in general. It goes by names like “social business,” “adaptive business,” and “holistic business.”

What we’re learning now with the democratization of information is that individuals are in control of the brand and brand experience as much as the business. This is paramount. This is at the heart of what’s fueling the socialization of CRM. If I could put it into one nutshell statement it would be that customer relationships and engagement channels used to be defined and governed businesses. That was because they controlled the technology and the media.

When you try to design software around capturing this activity, you have to begin by questioning your business strategy and your intentions for customer engagement. What is it that you are trying to accomplish? Are you trying to steer experiences at the beginning, during, or after? Or, all of the above? Tools are starting to emerge that allow you to identify decision making processes across distributed platforms outside of the firewall or call center at every step. They are all, in one way or another, adapting to certain parts or many parts of this social CRM idea. But if indeed social CRM is much bigger, as we’re discussing here, then it’s just getting started.

Finally, just to make things a bit more interesting, what if for the sake of this discussion, we removed the “C” from CRM? For all the pundits who read this, I’m not calling for a new category. This is about perspective or how businesses view customers. Let’s say that in a connected world where customers are gaining influence, customer relationship management becomes only part of the opportunity. What it’s really about is relationship management, before, during, and after meaningful transactions. You can influence the decision of someone before they’re even a customer. You can manage the whole information work flow process, channel it within the organization so that you’re not just learning and responding, but so that you are adapting as a business to be better structured to handle the customer of the future.

Moving on to a more specific question, what type of applications do you think would make up a social CRM suite?

I recently wrote an article about Dell and Gatorade building social media command centers. These rooms resemble NASA’s mission control with screens everywhere displaying conversations, relationships, keyword clouds, sentiment, and real-time trends. But it’s so much more than social media marketing. It’s about intelligence. It’s about learning from customer activity to design new engagement programs, better products and services, and ultimately optimized processes.

This is one way that the social CRM system would really start to begin. From there, it’s a matter of technologies and work flow that allow you to hear, see, process, respond, and adapt all within the infrastructure in the way the business is designed.

Take Nimble for example. It will allow you to track all of these different individuals, then at a point of engagement it, let’s say its Twitter, channel one individual to someone in customer service or product management.

If I send a Tweet, customer service then uses a tool like Nimble to bring in more information than what you would normally find in that tweet or bio, for example, the person’s name, what other accounts they have across other networks, etc. It would then introduce that information into a centralized database. Customer service can then push out a response and track the response. Nimble could also send a signal to the listening agent to say, “we’ve got this one handled, you can check it off your list.” If the listening manager finds a sales opportunity, they could funnel it over to sales.

If you look at my early blueprint for the social business you’ll see this thing called the conversation cloud on the left side of the blueprint. You’ll notice Get Satisfaction. What they represent is this conversation cloud that channels conversations into one place. So, let’s just say somebody asks a question on Twitter, or somebody asks a question on Facebook, or somebody goes to the website to ask a question. The magic of Get Satisfaction is that they can put together common responses and common answers from a knowledge-base, directly to the individual. So it can just constantly serve up the right answer without even having to have a human being present, which is huge. It saves them a massive amount of time. This is yet another dimension to CRM that we really haven’t seen before.

So, when you look at Get Satisfaction, combine them with Nimble, then combine with a command center, we’re starting to see pieces of this complete social CRM suite emerge. Then there is going to be some type of glue that brings it all together. That glue is probably going to be somebody like Salesforce who buys all of these pieces to offer one complete solution, or parts of the solution.

What trends are you seeing in the market, both in terms of product development, and general market activity?

I’ve seen a lot of innovation from vendors who claim to have leading social CRM solutions. Many however, offer facets of a bigger of social CRM system. There is great confusion in the market as businesses attempt to qualify vendors based on stated capabilities. For a while, it seemed that if you could track conversations on social networks and respond from one interface, that was all you need to qualify as a sCRM solution. There’s obviously more to the story. I believe we need to not redefine sCRM, but instead clarify what it is and isn’t. Additionally, we need to better align vendor capabilities with real world business needs. One trend that I see unfolding in 2012 and 2013 is a shift from a groundswell-driven process of move-and-react to a top-down leadership approach to innovation in technology adoption, innovation in processes, and a reassessment of mission, vision, and purpose. As a result, how businesses see the customer and in turn engage and manage relationships will dramatically evolve and improve to the benefit of all parties.

So basically coming up with use cases?

Ahh, use cases. Let me start by saying, I’m open to seeing case studies on this subject. Feel free to email me with your stories. Here, I’d like to talk about Dell,  a case that is often used in the realm of social marketing. But, I believe the true story is around how a big company used a crisis to innovate around processes, services, and ultimately transform its culture as a result.

For years, Dell was subject to severe problem that were catapulted into mainstream media via blogs and social networks. Michael Dell – and the rest of the company – took it so seriously that they innovated systems around solving the problem at a customer engagement level and also in product design. And it’s still evolving today. When there’s a problem on Twitter, blogs, Facebook, or anywhere else, they watch to see which issues gain momentum. As this happens, they unearth what the problem is, get a team to fix it, then push the fix before it’s a mainstream problem. This completely extinguishes those discussions. So that means that it went from a listening component to a development component to a distribution component of a CRM system. They’ve got the same infrastructure for sales, human resources, finance and legal. Dell is building an infrastructure, and more importantly, a methodology of philosophies around engaging with those experiences, dealing with those experiences, or managing those experiences. So while they’re far from being the complete example of an entire solution, Dell is by default, building a social CRM system for the entire organization.

On another note, I also wanted to send a special note of thanks to Lauren Carlson, Houston Neal,  and the Software Advice team for including me in the 2011 Authority Awards. Other winners include good friend Mr. Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant, who is someone I look forward to getting to know better in 2012.

Connect with me: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+

The End of Business as Usual is now available

Part 5 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual…this is not content from the book, this series serves as its prequel.

What do people want? If you don’t know, why not ask them?

Seems like a common sense question to ask. However, when it comes to customer engagement and relations, common sense appears to be an uncommon virtue. The good news is that asking customers what they need is now easier than ever before. Learning about what they prefer or what they’re missing based on their actions and words is prevalent within social media. Asking them directly is also a powerful form of engagement. At the very least the act expresses intent to learn and perhaps adapt.

Too many research projects or studies these days focus on what brands are doing in social media rather than what they should be doing. And at the same time, most are conducted from the perspective of the business and not from the perspective of the people affected by the actions or missteps of brands.

In February 2011 ExactTarget and CoTweet released a revealing study “The Social Breakup,” that provided a glimpse into the oft missed customer point of view. While many reports highlight why people Like and follow brands, this study divulged why consumers “break up” with brands in social networks.

Like any interpersonal relationship, the consumer-brand relationship has a distinct and fascinating life cycle. The relationship begins with the initial “spark”—the decision by the consumer to become a SUBSCRIBER, FAN, or FOLLOWER—followed by a blissful honeymoon period in which the consumer gets to know the company better through communications and social interactions. As the relationship progresses, the frequency and quality of interactions shapes the consumer’s desire to take the relationship to the next level.

If the company fails any of these relationship tests, a “social break-up”—i.e., an “unsubscribe,” “unfan,” “unlike,” or “unfollow”—is all but inevitable. When the consumer is no longer happy in the relationship, they will actively break off contact with the company…or just ignore their communications in the hopes the company will get the message that it’s over.

According to the study, 55% of Facebook users have liked a brand and then later decided they no longer wish to see the company’s posts. 51% of fans say that they really aren’t fans as they don’t visit the page or web site after the “Like.” 71% of consumers say that they’re now becoming more selective.

When asked why the honeymoon is over, the top reasons for unliking a brand in Facebook are:

1. The company posts too frequently
2. My wall was becoming too crowded with marketing posts
3. The content was too repetitive or boring

The reasons, regardless of percentage are equally revealing…

I only “Liked” the company to take advantage of an offer.

They didn’t offer enough deals. (note: if you combine these two details, “deals” would become the one of the top reasons people connected and disconnected from brands)

Their posts were too promotional

The content wasn’t relevant.

The company’s posts were too chitty-chatty without adding value

Twitter is a much different network than Facebook. However, that doesn’t stop brands from attempting to connect with customers. And, it doesn’t stop customers from experimenting with brand engagement. However, 41% of Twitter users followed a brand only to unfollow them shortly thereafter.

Again, when you ask the customer why they decided to unfollow their favorite brands, the answers are as difficult to hear as they are enlightening.

1. The content was too repetitive or boring
2. My stream was too crowded with marketing posts
3. The company posted too frequently

The remainder of responses are identical to the reasons shared earlier in reference to Facebook.

Not enough deals.

Too conversational.

Irrelevant.

Mind the (Customer) Gap

It comes down to something that’s repeated so often throughout our lives that we may have become immune to the importance of its message, “Mind the gap.” This cautionary expression is designed to protect us from our own potential missteps. But in business, we must mind many important gaps, one of which represents a dangerous pitfall in the evolving landscape of business.

The customer gap represents the distance between what we think customers want and what they actually want. The definition of this gap is different for every business and it is something that we must overcome.

Today we see so many brands flocking to Twitter and attempting to befriend new customers without realizing that they’re willfully stepping directly into an abyss of irrelevance.

It starts with answering some very basic, but vital questions.

What do customers value?

What do customers value in social networks with regard to the culture of each?

Why are customers seeking or reacting to brands in these networks?

What turns them off?

Why do they unlike or unfollow brands?

How can we introduce value to induce a sense of appreciation and ultimately loyalty or advocacy?

The answers to these questions exist. It just starts with asking the questions. More importantly, it requires that you do something with the answers…that’s the hard part.

When Perception isn’t Reality

IBM recently set out to measure the gap between customers and the corresponding awareness of businesses and their ability to meet the needs of consumers in social networks. Authored by Carolyn Heller Baird, Global CRM Research Leader with the IBM Institute for Business Value, IBM Global Services and Gautam Parasnis, Partner and Vice President for IBM Global Business Services, the study, “From Social Media to Social CRM,” teaches us about the emerging social consumer. Coincidentally, we learn more about their preferences than many social media best practices reveal to date.

The report begins with a level-setting that is refreshing and also challenging…

Understanding what customers value, especially when they are in the unique environment of a social platform, is a critical first step toward building a Social CRM strategy. What triggers a customer to seek out a company or brand via social media? What would make a customer reluctant to interact? And does social engagement influence customers’ feelings of loyalty toward a company as businesses hope it does?

The answer lies in one of the reports greatest insights and also one of its most obvious, “Obtaining tangible value is the top reason most consumers seek out businesses via social sites.”

While it’s easy to blame it on the youth, the reality is that the DNA of social customers is indiscriminant of age or any other demographic for that matter. This is more about psychographics, the linkage of people through common interests (note: interest graph) than it is demographics or the social graph.

As discussed earlier in this series, consumers are investing time in social networks to connect with friends and family. According to the IBM study, the total number of users in social networks doing so accounts for 70% of all social consumers. The subsequent reasons individuals interact in social networks is to access news and entertainment at 49%and 46% respectively. 42% desire to share their opinions and another 30% seek to access reviews. But what of those seeking to engage in conversations or relationships with brands? They number at a mere 23%.

IBM mapped the chasm between brands and consumers highlighting the separation that divides intention and actuality. 65% of businesses view social media as a new source for revenue. At the same time however, consumers claim that it is they who expect to realize value from businesses in social media. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between what customers want and what businesses think they want reside at opposite ends of the stream.

The perception gap is reminiscent of couples therapy where each individual sees the world so entirely differently that they require mediation to meet one another in the middle.

If you ask consumers why they interact with companies in social networks, they’ll tell you it’s to receive a discount (61%) or to make a purchase (55%). If you ask a business why they think consumers follow them in social networks their response is likely to mirror IBM’s results. 73% believe that consumers wish to learn about new products and an additional 71% connect to receive general information.

Perhaps most telling is the severity of misperceptions between consumers and brands. While consumers expressed the desire to receive discounts or make purchases as the top reasons for engagement in social media, businesses view these actions as the lowest two motives for connecting in the social web.

To “bridge’” these gaps requires a social CRM strategy and infrastructure to foster collaborative experiences through engagement that customers value. Social CRM tends to focus on technology and systems to provide stakeholders with access to information and processes to support informed engagement. sCRM can also greatly benefit by adapting to the 5th P in order to inspire updated methodologies for engagement that today’s customer can appreciate. It is as much a function of infrastructure as it is a matter of adapting to human nature.

Next Steps

Brands must face the tough reality that social media is in direct conflict with the mode of business as usual. Businesses must first with understanding the wants and corresponding behaviors of the social consumer to effectively adapt.

Introduce mutually beneficial engagement strategies and programs that are unique to the expectations of each community. Technology is an enabler, but customer service works best when it’s designed to serve.

Think like a customer. Or better said, take the insights that are gleaned from gathering intelligence to become the customer you’re trying to reach.

Social consumers are not looking for information, recreations of your Website or links to existing, probably outdated web pages. Recognize that the social consumer is quite content operating without your interference. If you’re unsure what they want, ask them. Then build experiences that deliver value and also build experiences that are shareable. K.I.S.S Keep it Simple and Shareable or Keep It Significant and Shareable.

Elvis once famously sang, we need “A little less conversation and a little more action…”

The End of Business as Usual will be available in the coming weeks. You can order now at Amazon | Barnes and Noble | 800CEOREAD.

Part 1 – Digital Darwinism, Who’s Next
Part 2 – Social Media’s Impending Flood of Customer Unlikes and Unfollows
Part 3 – Social Media Customer Service is a Failure!
Part 4 – We are the 5th P: People

Part 4 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual…

It seems that adding the word “social” to any category escalates its importance. From the Social Customer to Social Commerce and from Social Business to Social CRM, the common thread that weaves everything together is people. It is people after all that are responsible for placing the social in social media. Everything else is just technology. So why is it that businesses still approach social media and the services and channels that connect this very human network as it has traditional media in the past? Just as in the emergence of connected customers, this inherent behavior is simply part of the DNA. This DNA where perhaps the “D” stands for disconnected represents the very fabric of business and the very essence that requires evolution in order to genuinely connect with tomorrow’s customer, today. Operating with a business as usual mindset no longer cuts it.

Regardless of media, good business comes down to a simple process of identifying customers, learning what they want or need, feeling their challenges, learning how they communicate with one another, and observing how they discover and share information. Yet, many businesses approach what is a natural bottom-up occurrence through a top-down system of pushing information, pulling would-be customers through funnels, and confining them to artificial feedback loops. To put it simply, if we visit the traditional 4P’s of marketing of Price, Place, Promotion and Product, the key ingredient of favorable engagement and business outcomes is the very thing that’s been missing all along, People – you, me and the individuals who invest in products and sometimes the brands behind them.

Even though businesses are experimenting with engagement in Facebook, Twitter, forums, comments, et al., I’m not convinced they see us beyond our avatars. Nor do they view our communities as influential cliques, but rather as rudimentary clicks. Many businesses don’t take the time to get to know us, yet they invest in new media as an attempt to build relationships without understanding why we engage.

The bottom line is that customers are not necessarily looking to build relationships with brands. They’re, we’re, looking for solutions, direction, insights, and value. Information, contests, and clever videos are now commodities that contribute to the already clogged arteries of new media. But every day, companies ask customers to “Like” them on Facebook and “follow” them on Twitter weighing the extent of their efforts on the quantity of the 3F’s (friends, fans and followers) in addition to traffic, clickthroughs, and views. It’s no wonder why so many pundits debate the value of ROI when businesses are still not defining the “R” or the return we seek nor are brands defining outcomes.

We’re not driving experiences, we’re reacting to them.

We’re not introducing meaningful value, we’re pushing content and creative.

We’re not designing programs around intelligence, we’re focused on monitoring.

It’s time we had a click to action!

I Think We Need Some Time Apart

A few years ago, Microsoft released a video that to this day personifies the disconnect between brands and their customers.

Customer: “I want a divorce.”

Brand: “What now?”

Customer, “We don’t talk anymore.”

Brand: “I just put down a mil on a TV commercial just to talk to you.” OR sub that with, “I just invested time and resources on Facebook and Twitter just to talk to you.”

Customer: “Exactly, you do all the talking, I never get a chance to…[cut off by brand.]”

Brand: “You can talk on our web site can’t you?” OR sub that with, “you can comment, Like, RT, or interact with us in social networks.”

Customer: “Sure, if I want to say, ‘order this product.’”

Brand, “See…!”

Customer: “This isn’t exactly dialogue.”

Even in any examples of today’s social media best practices, even the dialogue isn’t representative of the dialogue customers are seeking or that they find enough value in to continue to return or interact with brands. The first step in the in a journey that lead brands and customers down discontinuous paths is the lack of understanding, context, or desire to better understand customers and the virtual and real worlds in which they dwell.

Again, customers are not on social networks seeking relationships with business. You know that better than anyone. That’s not why you’re there. You’re there to interact with friends, family, peers and everyone else who matters to you. In many ways, you are the very person you’re trying to reach and it’s that perspective that should factor into any business, marketing, service, or product development cycle moving forward. We are the 5th P of marketing and business and this is the end of business as usual…

The End of Business as Usual will be available in the coming weeks. You can order now at Amazon | Barnes and Noble | 800CEOREAD.

Part 1 – Digital Darwinism, Who’s Next
Part 2 – Social Media’s Impending Flood of Customer Unlikes and Unfollows
Part 3 – Social Media Customer Service is a Failure!
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Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ | BrianSolisTV

It’s not a widely kept secret, but customers do indeed keep companies in business. While businesses have long invested in improving customer relationships, the time has come to think beyond efficiencies and automation and examine new opportunities to rethink customer experiences overall. Why? Customers are more connected than ever before. The role they play has exploded beyond transactions and is now influencing the transactions of others as well as contributing to the brand experience at levels never before seen.

It’s said that your brand is defined by what your customers and employees say when you’re not in the room. Well, the proverbial room has now taken center stage on the social web and as a result, your brand is indeed shaped by the words and experiences of your customers and those who influence them. The future of business isn’t created, it’s co-created.

My good friend Becky Carroll just published her new book and I was honored to write the foreword. The team at Wiley has given us permission to share it with you here. If you get a chance, please take a look at “The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing your Business Through  Existing Customers.”

The Rise of the Connected Customer and the New Era of Relevance

Good customer service used to be one of the secrets to business success. Over time, however, what was considered “good” turned out to be not good enough. Somewhere along the way, customers became a burden, viewed by big organizations as a cost center and by smaller businesses as an inconvenience. Processes, systems, automated attendants, and technology eventually separated us from them and … well, here we are today, wondering how it is that the very people who contribute to the overall health of our business are farther away from us than ever before.

Let me ask you a question: When you picture customer service, do you see it from the standpoint of you as a business owner or stakeholder in a company, or do you think of it from the customer perspective, where your experiences as a customer remind you of what good service is and isn’t? I have to be honest, writing this brought to mind some painful experiences, when I just didn’t feel the appreciation I would expect as a customer. I have a feeling it’s an experience you and I share. That’s the point. As customers, we can share countless stories of unpleasant encounters—and have most likely already done so with our friends and family. How many great customer service experiences can you recall, and how often did you, or do you, talk about them today?

This is the perspective you need as you look to your customers today to grow your business tomorrow. This may sound silly, but the future of business takes a personal touch.

Let me share a secret with you, a secret that will unlock the four keys to growing your business: Empathy is the connection between you and your customers. Empathy is the bridge between your customers and their peers.

I’ve known Becky Carroll for several years, and the message of empathy is one she has shared with us time and time again. As so many relationships begin these days, I initially “met” Becky online, through Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In February 2008, I had a chance to see her in action at “The Customer Service Is the New Marketing Summit,” hosted by GetSatisfaction in San Francisco. Becky’s session was titled “Customer Experience: The Intersection of Marketing and Customer Service,” and her words still echo true today.

Great—not just good—customer service is necessary for business survival. Personalized and empowering customer service, fanned by empathy, is the recipe for viral customer service, where word of mouth becomes an extension of your marketing and sales efforts.

The future of business is rooted in shared experiences. Customer experiences will be shared, and they will either be positive or negative. Not unlike the reviews we’ve either posted or read on Amazon, people either love or hate an interaction they’ve had with a company. They feel so strongly about it, they’ll take to Amazon or any other review site to ensure that everyone else feels what they’re feeling prior to making a purchase decision. Again, customer experiences will either be positive or negative, and you can bet that they will be shared.

The wonderful aspect about all this is that you get to choose which type of experience your customers will have. More important, if you can engender a positive experience for them, you can literally plug into an entirely new world of connected consumerism that extends those exchanges beyond the typical few friends they might tell either way. Nowadays, customers are connected to one another through social networks and online groups. This isn’t new; what is new is the nature of these relationships and the efficiency with which information travels within and beyond inner networks of friends.

The average person is connected to 140 people on Twitter and 130 on Facebook, and even they can trigger a social effect that extends experiences beyond small cliques of friends and family. There’s a new genre of customers rapidly emerging, and they’re connected to not hundreds but thousands of others. The social or connected customers is your influencer. They are the gatekeepers to a more efficient and expansive network of referrals linked by shared experiences and optimized through an endless social effect that extends your value proposition beyond your reach today. Yes, that was a long sentence, but I couldn’t shorten it, as doing so would have minimized the importance of what’s before you.

We are embarking upon a new era of business, one that I believe represents the end of business as usual—and this is a good thing.

Customers want a few things:
• Products or services that meet or exceed their needs.
• The ability to find what they need when they need it.
• A channel by which to be heard.

What customers now bring to the table is the ability to get each of the above with or without you. This is your opportunity to plug in to these networks, where you can build relationships, cultivate loyalty, and learn how to adapt, all while earning greater relevance and reach. Brilliant!

Everything begins with defining the experiences you wish others to share.

There’s a mnemonic spelling lesson in English most of us learned that, to this day, is impossible to forget: “i” before “e” except after “c.” It can, however, be applied to much more than everyday spelling. To remember the importance of the customer, I’ve adapted its definition as follows:

Insight before engagement unless customer or community needs take immediate precedence.

With the emergence of social media, we are given not just a right to engage but a rite of passage to earn relevance.

Social networks are much more than Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, YouTube, et al. These networks represent a potential much more transformative: that is, the democratization of information and the equalization of influence within new digital societies. Here, everyone begins at ground zero, including you, but it is how behavior evolves that introduces us to a new future of sales, service, and business. As everyday sales and service become commodities, experiences and relationships become paramount. Peers, friends, family, and experts become trusted sources to steer and filter relationships within these new landscapes. Sharing becomes social. Decisions become social. Commerce, and ultimately service, becomes social. At the heart and soul of all of this is the very essence of your business—shared experiences connected through empathy and fortified by the desire and intention to shape them in ways that help people help you.

Take this book and use it to grow your business. More important, use it to build relationships that turn customers into advocates and advisors.

In business, as in life, you earn the relationships and, with nurture, the yield that you’ve earned and deserve.

Care. Guide. Connect. Learn.

Brian Solis (@briansolis), author of The End of Business as Usual and Engage!, digital analyst, and champion for everyday customers
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Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+

If you’re reacting, someone else defines what you’re going to do, rather than defining what people need to do.

Your businesses faces great change. This statement is true about customers, competitors, and everyone else affecting market behavior. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

Customer engagement, and specifically customer engagement in social media offers many benefits that businesses are starting to uncover, most of it unintentionally. While many champions knew in their gut that social media offered business value, to what extent is now something that is becoming a primary focus in 2011 to 2012 budgetary planning. From satisfaction and goodwill to thriving online communities to building loyalty and trust, customer engagement in social networks is revealing tangible advantages. Once champions recognize how to capture activity, document progress, and translate raw numbers into tangible business value, social media will become an integral and proven pillar in the foundation of not just customer service, but the very fabric of business.

For some of you, I’m preaching to the choir. Perhaps this comes across as rudimentary or common knowledge. But in my experience, social media is largely siloed in marketing departments. And for those businesses experimenting with customer engagement in social media, engagement insights and lessons are largely siloed within the service department. I challenge you to extend the value of social media beyond any silo to not just socialize the entire business but introduce new processes, systems, and methodologies that makes it more relevant and adaptive to an increasingly discerning connected customer.

The opportunity before us extends beyond Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and even in the communities that exist to connect customers to one another in branded forums. The challenge however lies in our ability to translate engagement into either direct or dotted lines to existing business metrics. Yes, we need to look beyond what I refer to as the 3F’s (friends, fans, and followers) to prove the value of social media. But this goes beyond just documenting converting numbers into KPIs that lead to ROI. This is also about translating insights into catalysts for business transformation.

To determine the ROI of social media, programs must be designed with the end in mind and compared to the performance of existing programs using existing measurement processes. Additionally, customers insights and trends must be documented to demonstrate the opportunity to improve customer experiences. For example, you can demonstrate that social media reduces inbound call volume and thus saves the company money over time. But that’s just the beginning. If you identify repeat problems, issues, or trends, your next step is to work with the affected business units to create or deliver a fix. Once this is communicated to customers through all available channels, customers en masse will feel acknowledged and appreciate the businesses ability to adapt to their needs and concerns. What’s the value of that experience?

As I introduced at the beginning of this post, using social media to react is just the beginning. But at some point it takes a shift to not only react, but also lead. Demonstrating the value of social media is our mission in 2011. In 2012, proving the value of the insights learned from customers and prospects in social channels will help connect disparate business units and functions into one connected and adaptive company.

This is about taking the perpetual switching of social media from on and off to on again and evolving campaigns to that of continuum engagement. A connected customer is always on and as such, an adaptive business must do just that, remain nimble.

Your task is not easy. The case must be made to leadership that there are material benefits in embracing change. To help, I’ve assembled three videos produced by Salesforce featuring my dear friend Dr. Natalie Petouhoff. In each of the three videos, you’ll learn how to build the business case, how to calculate ROI and how to make the cause for an adaptive business.

Godspeed.

Episode 1: How to Build a Business Case for Social Customer Service

Episode 2: Calculating ROI for Social Customer Service

Episode 3: How Social Customer Service Benefits the Entire Company

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook

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The New ENGAGE!: If you’re looking to FIND answers in social media and not short cuts, consider either the Deluxe or Paperback edition

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Guest post by Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light. Follow him on Twitter, please read his blog.

First things first. Thank you, Brian. I am truly thrilled that I’m getting the honor of addressing your friends and I’m more thrilled even to be able to call you a friend.

You know, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the CRM market, as an analyst, consultant, journalist, blogger and whatever other chameleon-like title you can give me. While it’s immensely gratifying to see that Social CRM is now part of the mainstream discussion process and is even being mentioned as something that is being sought as a knowledge level or skill set in job descriptions. But what is also apparent is that there are some things that need to be clarified about where in the pantheon of the gods of realism that Social CRM actually resides, because the hype about what it can do and the venom spit at it by the naysayers are abundant in ridiculous amounts.

In order to do that, let me throw something out to you guys, which may or may not come as a shock. If it does, uh oh.

Here goes.

Starting with the Social Customer….

First, I presume that all of you know that there is a social customer who wants to be more engaged than a traditional customer does – and in fact makes that well known out on the social web, so aptly shown in Brian’s now famous Conversation Prism. But, what you might think you know and what actually is the case may not be the same thing. Though, of course, maybe it is.

The social customers are less engaged with your brand than they are with their friends and what they and their friends think of your brand. Which means you have a real opportunity here and a bit of a problem.

IBM’s Institute for Business Value released a report last week called “From Social Media to Social CRM: What Customers Want” which had some eye-opening, or at least, level-setting numbers.

Take a look at these:

1. While between 72% (baby boomers) and 89% (Gen Y) have an account on some social site, 70% of them use them for personal reasons, while only 23% use them to interact with brands. Notably 39% of them use them for reviews – meaning peer trust when it comes to a brand or specific product or service.

2. That said, 79% of companies have a social network profile, 55% have media sharing sites, like YouTube, profiles, and 52% have microblogging, read: Twitter, profiles. Meaning there is a significant presence by business on social channels.

3. While 70% of the businesses who responded said that they believed that social media outreach would improve brand advocacy among their customers, only 38% of the customers believed that it would make a difference to them that way.

4. This one is the big disconnect. While customers think that the most important reasons they interact with companies on their social sites is because they can get discounts and make purchases, those same companies think that this is the least important reason.

What makes these numbers interesting, scary and a real opportunity, is that the social customer is not just a social customer but a socially engaged person who is communicating differently now than they ever have been. That means we are in the midst of an irrevocable revolution, but not in business, in communication. In reality, the business of customer engagement with these channels is only a little past infancy.

Now Moving to Social CRM

One thing that is clear though is that the social customer, when they choose to engage with brands, can impact that brand positively or negatively whether the brand does anything or lays back and does nothing.

Social CRM, which is an evolution of the more traditional CRM built around sales, marketing and customer service, is a response to this customer control. In fact, the short definition that I gave it (and tweaked a little too) is:

“Social CRM is the company’s programmatic response to the customer’s control of the conversation.” (If you want a lengthy look at what SCRM is, take a look at this post, “Time to Put a Stake in the Ground on Social CRM” that I wrote in 2009).

What that means is that every company that has a substantial number of its customer conversing on the social web, whether personal or not, needs to have a presence on the social web. Even if only 23% of the customers are using the social web to interact with brands.

Know why?

First, and foremost, even though most of the social web action is personal, the revolution has been a communications revolution, first and foremost, not a business revolution. As a result of this irrevocable change in the what, where, when and how we communicate, businesses need to learn how to use these new communications channels – because that’s how their existing and potential customers are communicating. Its simple really. If you as a business want to talk to your customers e.g. interact with them then you need to do one of two things or both:

1. Find out where they are communicating such as Twitter and Facebook as well as traditional channels (phone, email) and understand how to use those channels. Outreach, in other words.

2. Find out what they need from you to communicate and provide them with the channels to do that e.g. a service community. Inputs, in other words.
By understanding this, you are giving your business a change to genuinely engage with the customers where they want to be engaged, provided you’ve asked them where that might be. Don’t presume.

If you’ve done that and accessed those channels available and didn’t limit yourself to those you’re comfortable with, the simplest thing in the world occurs. The customers begin to trust you a bit more because they see that you’re making the effort to reach out to them where they are and to provide them with the pipelines they need into you to make sure that they can get enough information and have enough access to make an intelligent decision on how they choose to interact with you. They have control of the conversation and of the kind of relationship they want with you. That’s real value to them.

The value to your business? Happy customers. The same as always. Something that never stopped and never stops giving.

The other key benefit is the data that is out there about you as a result of these new channels. Capture it, analyze and use it to make some judgments about your customers based on the insights that you’ve gained and you have the foundation to optimize the experience that your customers are having with you.

Let me bring this home with an example and you’ll see what I mean.

The Case of Vocalpoint

Back in 2006, Procter and Gamble created Vocalpoint. This is a community, a social network of moms who typically have 25-40 other moms in their personal networks. P&G’s purpose was to get product feedback, 50% P&G products and 50% other products from these active moms by distributing products to the networks and asking them to use the products in their natural environment.

The way that the moms lived was the way they distributed these products to their networks. This doesn’t mean that moms can’t participate in focus groups and surveys, but P&G more so than perhaps any consumer oriented company has understood the value of a natural environment in getting higher quality product feedback.

How successful has this social network been?

By the end of 2006, there were 600,000 members of this targeted social community.
Think about this. Theoretically, this gave P&G the ability to distribute products to a number of people ranging from 15 million to 24 million. Not only would they get feedback garnered from people using the product in their actual living situation but also brand awareness to that very same crowd without spending anything on traditional advertising.

Their thinking was simple. Steve Knox, the Vocalpoint CEO at the time said, “We know that the most powerful form of marketing is an advocacy message from a trusted friend.”
This program has been such a success that as of now it is a profit center for P&G, spun off from the parent so that the feedback could be more agnostic and the benefits monetized.

One final matter of interest.

P&G doesn’t call what they do Social CRM but…

It is.

The customer at this point is slowly but surely learning how to engage with the companies that they are interested with. In order for SCRM to be a successful strategy, it not only takes a village to engage the customer but it takes a program like P&G has with Vocalpoint.

So, once again, thanks Brian. You’re a champ. And those of you reading this, thanks too. Now let’s make this a reality everywhere.

It’s good for business – and for the customers.

Who owns social media? Is it marketing, customer service, public relations?

Looking at a recent study conducted by the Pivot Conference, the top four departments where social media is currently run are as follows:

1. Marketing
2. Public Relations
3. Sales
4. Customer Service

Perhaps, it’s the wrong question to ask however. It’s not unlike asking who owns email. But, here’s another question and as we think about it, let’s broaden our perspective as the answer may not appear immediately.

Who owns the customer relationship?

The short answer is everyone.

If that is the case, then examining how social media is run today is not at all how businesses should think about it tomorrow. A not so long answer to the original question is “any person or department affected by outside activity where public interaction impacts decisions.”

Businesses tend to have a single or narrow view of the customer and as we’re learning, they’re connecting with one another and sharing experiences that transform their roles from prospect to advocate to adversary to influencer and everything in between.

Social media is not about conversations on Twitter and Facebook nor check-ins on Foursquare or Places, or flipped videos on YouTube. It’s about using this opportunity to build bridges to a new genre of customers and the people who influence their decisions. Our mission now is to pave paths to future relevance. The reality is that we are as much competing for the future as we are for the moment. And as a result, we are perpetually competing for relevance.

We can blame it on process, hierarchy, ignorance, lack of budget and anything and everything standing in our way. Or, we can own the acts of socializing the company using social media as a banner for customer centricity across the organization. Maybe we could all follow the advice from my dear friend Hugh MacLeod (@GapingVoid) and create our own #Evilplan for change. Then grab a pair of self-sharpening industrial scissors and run through the hallways to begin the long and arduous process of cutting red tape to free people to collaborate internally and externally.

Someone has to do it.

Without you, even though we’re operating with the best of intentions in social media, we are still operating from silos. The customer however, does not see silos, they sees the company as one. It’s time for an integrated approach to create an adaptive business, a collaborative business, an aspirational business….a business of one.

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I’ve received many inbound requests for comments based on a report from Gartner, an IT analyst firm, that estimates as many as 70-percent of social media campaigns will fail in 2011. There are a series of discussions hitting the blogosphere and the Twitterverse exploring this very topic, some elementary and others on the right path. I contacted Gartner earlier this week and the problem is, that this data isn’t new at all. In fact, these discussions are fueled by information originally published in 2008 and in early 2010. Yet another example of the importance of fact-checking in the era of real-time reporting, yes, but, when I paused for a moment, I appreciated the timelessness of this discussion.

Are many of the social media programs in play yielding tangible results?

No…

Are they designed to impact the bottom line or are they tied to meaningful business outcomes?

No…

The truth is that you can’t fail in anything if success is never defined.

eMarketer recently published a report, “Social Media in the Marketing Mix: Budgeting for 2011,” that documents the increase in social media spend we knew was imminent. However, in addition to showing us that companies are actively investing in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms and campaigns, eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson says that businesses are spending more money for all the wrong reasons.

Indeed, business are moving from experimentation or ready, fire, aim approaches to deeper phases of implementation and integration.

Williamson shares a perspective long cautioned against here and in Engage, “many companies are expanding budgets for social media marketing not because they have been successful at it, but because they are relying on gut instinct—the feeling that ‘this is something important so I’m going to do it even if I don’t know why.’ Or worse, they have watched their competitors earn accolades in the press for their work in social media, and they are afraid of losing any more ground.”

#FAIL

Failing to plan is planning to fail and this is a lesson that strategists and practitioners will learn as they progress. If transparency and authenticity were prevailing maxims over the last several years, accountability, metrics, and outcomes serve as the foundation for social media success in the immediate years ahead. An effective social media plan must address business dynamics and it takes much more than a Facebook and Twitter presence. To keep things simple, social media are transformative…but essentially they’re channels, services, and networks used for intelligence, communication, and visibility.  If we introduced email to the organization today, would it focus solely on marketing or customer service? Of course not. Email is not owned by any one department. It extends the reach, voice, and capabilities of every person from the inside out and the outside in.

Viewed this way, we see that a social media strategy must gain attention from the very top of the organization and see its integration across relevant business teams. Activating processes and engagement in business units is not tied to one switch either. It takes time to learn, to visualize new processes and systems, to open doors between departments. But, doing so sets the foundation for the social business, for an adaptive business. Switches will get introduced as their needs are defined and the electricity is tied to each one in order to perform specific actions.

The lens in which businesses must view social media is through an integration aperture. Social extends and empowers every business facet that is affected by online activity. That includes marketing, communications, sales, CRM/sCRM, product development/R&D, HR, finance, legal, et al.

According to eMarketer’s report, integration is strongest in marketing and weakest in critical business functions. To envision the future of social media, we would see each of the grey bars slide from left to right, initially led by an internal team or business strategist to help with a change in culture, process, and overall goaling.

#WIN

To gain support, we need to make the case to the C-Suite. It’s the evolution from champion to business strategist. Everything starts with defining the mission and purpose at the top so that respective business units can perform according to goals and tasks. By focusing only on one or two aspects of social media, we narrow an important view of the 3F’s (friends, fans and followers) and what the real needs and opportunities are that lie before us. The answers you seek are not limited to catch blog posts that promise “The Top 10 Ways to Master Social Media.” Your answers require research…not just listening.

Approach the search box of social networks or monitoring and research tools such as ReSearch.ly, Radian6, Spiral16, etc. as a blank slate. Fill in the blanks to enliven the 5W’s +H.E.

Who
What
When
Where
Why
How
To what extent

Then categorize the information you discover to make the case for each of the affected groups within your company. Success here requires more than one community manager or one team leading the social effort. It’s not an easy process. But then whoever said social media was easy…is wrong. Unearthing the intelligence that exists when we read between the lines, we become the experts in which we initially sought guidance and we open up individual career paths beyond the social media “help desk.”

Success is not a prescription. ROI isn’t discernible when the R (Return) or the I (Investment) are undefined. There isn’t one way to excel. That’s the point. Success requires definition based on intentions, goals, and mutual value…across the organization from the top down, bottom up, inside out and outside in. Success is defined departmentally and also at the brand level. Additionally, success is tied to desirable actions and outcomes. Indeed, there’s much to do…

We are not simply competing for the moment, we are competing for relevance now and in the future. The future of business is indeed social, but more importantly, it’s adaptive.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook

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If you’re looking for a way to FIND answers in social media, consider Engage!: It will help…

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Social media and marketing have become synonymous over the years. At the same time, social media is placing the customer back in customer service. Each movement represents important and overdue (r)evolutions within business, but this is just the beginning. With every step toward progress we make in social media, we uncover what’s necessary to make real headway in the progress of progress.

The future of business is social and as such, every aspect of business affected by outside activity will require a social extension. Businesses must shift from reacting to the outside in, bottom up groundswell to also leading a top down, inside out program to earn relevance, community, and authority. In order to do so, the social business will take a human touch…and internal transformation.

At the moment, it is the champion who ignites change from within. They understand how social affects business dynamics and builds support among key players to engage. Typically marketing and/or customer service run pilot programs to prove the merit of new media. From there, trials graduate to ongoing initiatives dedicated to social marketing, service or both. It starts with listening and monitoring and evolves to reactive engagement. Through strategy and creative processes, social programs eventually mature into proactive participation over time.

Everything starts with defining the voice and the persona of the brand as well as its mission and purpose for engagement. While intention counts, it is our actions and words that define outcomes. In the last mile of engagement, consumers must see beyond the personal brand tied to the representative to see the brand the individual represents. The elements of traditional branding still apply, they’re just humanized now.

When we shift from monitoring to hearing what people are saying and the context of their conversations, we discover that reactive and proactive engagement spans across the entire business. And even in the cases where participation isn’t required, there is still much opportunity to adapt products and processes based on insights gleaned from concentrations of meaningful dialogue.

Many of the social media cases that I review today and even those that I have worked on in the past, reach one audience…an audience of existing and potential customers. So, when we run a creative campaign or a personalized social customer program, we quickly realize that our audience is actually an audience with audiences who also have audiences. And, within each, are subsets of people with distinctive needs and also those who represent real world opportunities.

At any one moment, they are…

Peers
Advisors
Influencers
Decision Makers
Customers
Adversaries
Advocates

We are on the right path. We just have much to learn. In 2011 and for the next several years, social businesses will transform the organization from within. For those ready to lead tomorrow’s businesses today, we are indeed talking about organizational transformation and change management. Starting with the philosophy, culture, and reverberating throughout systems, processes, workflow, business units and the people at every step of the way, the business of business will evolve…it already is.

Please read and share…

The 2010 Series on the Social Business

- The 10 Stages of Social Media Integration in Business

- The Social Media Style Guide: 8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona

- The Last Mile: The Socialization of Business

- Social CRM is Just the Beginning: Looking Beyond Customers

- SCRM and SRM: Potay-to, Potah-to When Done Right (Paul Greenberg)

- The Socialization of Business: Your Dirty Little Secrets are No Longer Secrets

- Social Business Takes a Human Touch, No Really

- Following Dell’s Approach To Social Media

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook

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If you’re looking for a way to FIND answers in social media, consider Engage!: It will help…

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Get The Conversation Prism:

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Served as inspiration for The End of Business as Usual…

The socialization of media is the undercurrent for the Industrial Revolution of our time. Yet, here we are today, forcing social media into the aging paradigms that the social revolution set out to upset in the first place.

Businesses still weigh the ROI of participation. Teams debate over who owns the company’s social presences. The parochial in middle and upper management see it as either a playground or an extension of existing broadcast channels. Champions believe it is a time to engage and improve experiences. Visionaries recognize its ability to socialize the entire business. Yet, almost every example we see today of successful social media endeavors is in reality, siloed and disconnected from the rest of the organization.

Marketing runs a creative contest on Facebook, but the rest of the business is unaware of the campaign.

Customer service reacts to customer problems, yet product development is unaware of the recurring problems and themes.

Representatives are unwittingly diluting the brand they represent with unguided tweets, updates, posts, comments, and videos.

HR monitors the mistakes made by employees, but no one guides them through training, guidelines, or branding.

Customers ask questions about products and services and while these updates show up on the monitoring reports of community managers, they do not receive a response from the sales team.

The list goes on and on with little resolution as we are focused on real-time vs. real world. We need not only champions, but we now need leaders to help us cut through the red tape and unite the organization behind a flag of relevance and evolution.

Everything starts with recognizing that we must cater to an audience where its parts are in fact, greater than its sum. We must partition our social strategy to engage the diversity of the social consumer and address the unique requirements and attention of each.

This is about humanizing not only the brand, but also the methodologies that govern customer relations and adapting the systems that support it.

Socializing CRM

sCRM is the hot ticket in enterprise 2.0 at the moment, yet its champions are mired in technology as are the champions for social media in general. In many ways we’re blinded by the networks and our need to listen, respond, and update. But, we miss the intimacy necessary to learn, adapt, and earn relevance. And now, we’re consumed with wiring Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Yelp into our existing CRM infrastructure to help us automate enlightenment and engagement. While we close gaps caused by the distribution and scale of social web and the people who define it, we fail to see the human touchpoints to connect with the right people in the right places at the right time. That is, after all, where scalability resides; the ability to engage influential consumers in a one-to-one-to-many practice to amplify intention, purpose, and value.

1+1 = Many

Essentially, we’re practically fooled into a belief that we should not over think social, but not doing so, we trivialize the opportunity, ultimately investing in a program that at the end of the day, falls short of meeting the needs of the social consumer.

What’s the value of a Like?

What is a Twitter Follower worth?

What is the significance of a Tweet, check-in, or comment?

How do we reduce the costs of support through social?

To answer these questions, we must have a vision of the experience and actions we wish to introduce into these rich and active social ecosystems. Yes, this is a “click to action” and in order for businesses to socialize CRM, they must socialize the entire business. Not all of the 3F’s (friends, fans, followers) are created equally. Individually, rarely collectively, they are looking for substance, direction, recognition and even empowerment. In order to activate the social web and unlock meaningful conversations, we must look beyond customers. We must officially recognize all those who influence their actions and introduce a conversational workflow that traverses the business chasms to learn and lead – in public.

Social Science is the Center of Social Business

Customer Relationship Management > Social CRM > SRM >Relationships > Relevance

One of the celebrated companies renown for its innovation in social customer service is actually a lesson in how social “anything” becomes great PR. When you look behind the scenes, you actually see more duct tape and rubber bands than fluidity and polish. Business units are still siloed and even the chief executives have gone on record saying that the acts of engagement do more for the company’s PR than it does for the improvement of products and services. Just look at your favorite social media source and you’ll see an endless array of examples of how brands are succeeding in social media. Again, most of them are basking in the brilliance of individual victories, some are actually breaking through the internal barriers that prevent collaboration, and others are simply stunts designed to spike conversations, sales, and PR. Nothing wrong with it…especially if it work as intended.

You and I are here together, right now, to do something greater. It’s up to us to lead the way for the socialization of business, understanding that it’s an uphill journey for the foreseeable future. But in the end, our experience and triumphs are unparalleled.

Social media are the goldmines of anthropology, sociology and ethnography.  To excel here, we must embrace social science to create and earn relevance. Some businesses already get this. For example, Intel employs anthropologists such as Genevieve Bell to understand how certain cultures adopt technology and also how products should be designed with humans represented in every step of the process. I challenge businesses seeking to socialize their business to hire social scientists to not only understand culture and its role in consumerism, but also to humanize the processes and systems erecting to facilitate engagement and social CRM. It takes a human touch to embrace and inspire the social consumer, build communities, and activate advocacy. If we can hear, see, and feel the customer and all those who influence them, then why would we think social is where we can excel. Surely, it’s not because we show up. It’s only because we earn and deserve our place within each network.

We must humanize our brand, our products, and our processes to improve and influence experiences. Doing so will help us find our voice, our mission, and our purpose…our cadence. Give people a reason to connect with us, trust us, and represent us.

Now, once more…this time with feeling.

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Please consider reading, Engage!: It will help you find answers to your questions…

Listening is only the beginning. Engagement is the beginning of the end of business as usual. Once we hear, truly hear our customers and the people who influence our decisions, effective engagement is inspired by the empathy that develops simply by being human.

We start to see things through the eyes of our consumers.

We feel their pains, frustrations, and also happiness.

We sense what it takes to encourage positive sentiment.

Once we put “people” back into the mix, a new culture will take shape within the organization…and that’s when we will truly realize what it takes to socialize our business. It is quite literally, the beginning of the end of business as usual.

Much of my time these days is spent helping businesses restructure management and departments to shift from inside-out workflow to also one of outside-in engagement and adaptation.

Words are just that…words. Our ability to transform and adapt based on what we hear, feel, and learn will earn us relevance and community in order to compete for the future, today.

I recently sat down with Chris for Pilbeam for Vocus and I wanted to take a moment to share that discussion with you…

“Social media is growing in prominence on a daily basis, and I believe that the consequence of not engaging, or not even listening, is, unfortunately, the beginning of the end.”

The author of Engage! and principal of FutureWorks reveals how an expert overcomes some of the obstacles we face in driving social media within organizations, and why a well-executed social media strategy involves far more than just setting up a Twitter account.

Three years ago, Brian Solis wrote the warning: “Engage or die” in The Social Media Manifesto, a rallying cry he was publishing to urge businesses to engage with their public online. The principal of Silicon Valley new media firm FutureWorks was simply ‘in the moment’, as he puts it – but the term has come to sum up the scene across the landscape of PR, advertising, and marketing as organizations scramble to come to terms with the openness and transparency that social media marketing demands.

“The term seems to have taken on its own life,” smiles Solis. “It wasn’t necessarily intended as a dire warning. But what it does mean is that conversations and evolution are taking place with or without you. And you have a choice to make.”

Vocus has caught up with Solis at its Users Conference, where his Engage or Die keynote speech has just gone down a storm. His message to businesses and organizations is that not engaging with their public – and failing to listen to what the public is saying about them – isolates them to an extent that they’re in danger of losing their relevance altogether. As more and more consumers turn to social media to make their buying decisions, the need to adapt becomes more critical by the day. Engage or die, in other words.

“The question is,” says Solis, “can you afford not to participate? Can you afford to be absent from the decision-making process? Can you afford to give up market share to your competitors? Social media is growing in prominence on a daily basis, and I believe that the consequence of not engaging and adapting, or not even listening, is, unfortunately, the beginning of the end. And I think it also removes the inspiration for starting or running a business. If you don’t learn, if you don’t listen to people, if you don’t adapt, if you don’t engage, then you lose the ability to earn mindshare or share of voice.”

It’s a convincing argument. So why are many businesses still lagging in the social media sphere? Solis believes it comes from a misunderstanding of the dynamic of social media, and a fear of relinquishing control.

“Social media is not just a technology: it’s a movement,” he explains. “It’s permeating business from the outside in and the bottom up. Usually, technology, innovation, strategies and processes are introduced from the top down. Social media, however, is driven from the outside – by you and me.

“What management tries to do with social media is analyze its importance, its meaning, its impact – in order to bring it back to the top down, but without personal experience.. The issue is the willingness and ability of a company to change, and also the very levels of management’s willingness to at least research or embrace what social media offers or what it promises, in order to start experimenting or piloting a program that gives it some semblance of control or understanding so that they can then introduce this from a top-down process.”

Solis has a great deal of experience in overcoming reluctance to engage online. His firm FutureWorks specializes in social media consulting and counts brands including Cisco, Conde Nast and Budweiser among its social media clients. So what advice would he give to marketing professionals struggling to sell social media upwards in their own organizations?

“Everybody has to feel that they have a piece of it,” says Solis. “To get this change going, everyone has to feel like a stakeholder. They have to believe that this is going to benefit them and those around them. A lot of it has to do with empowering individuals. I spent two years working with one Fortune 50 brand, getting the right people involved, building new teams around social media. We could then put it in a way that it was now a top-down process with policy, governance, infrastructure, support and budget and everything was data-driven.”

It’s a very different model to the experimental approach favored by many other social media experts – the idea of starting a Twitter account and seeing what works, then scaling up later. Solis doesn’t discount experimentation out of hand, but believes it can be self-defeating.

“It’s a start,” says Solis. “But it works for you and against you – usually the latter. Many businesses create a profile and a presence – but then they find that it’s not delivering the best reward against the opportunity cost. And that’s simply because it’s not rolled out as part of a strategy. If you’re not introducing it with a strategy and some metrics, and a cause, and the ability to inspire some type of measurable and meaningful action, it’s not going to perform very well. Of course not, as it’s not designed to perform. The danger is then that the management sees it as a waste of time.

“Instead, we should be very intentional about it, designing it so that you can earn support in the process. I approach everything I do with research. I have to get the numbers and data. I have to get the extent of what’s happening or where it’s happening in order to make a case. It’s not just to grab the data: there’s the sociological, emotional, and physiological aspects of everything as well. And, where we really bring it home is the ability to package the information for various stakeholders within the organization. There’s service, there’s business, there’s sales, there’s marketing: there are so many opportunities. It’s not just any one particular division of a brand that can benefit. But it will be one part of the organization that leads the change and becomes the champion. With Dell, it was customer service, initially. With Comcast it was customer service. At Starbucks it was all driven by marketing. One part of the organization realizes the opportunity. And then it starts to spread and permeate the culture within once everybody sees the data, the information and the research, then the strategic plan – and then sees how well it works when it rolls out. Then, people start to say: okay, we’re onto something – and the group of change agents starts to grow and spread.”

Fundamental to the strategy, says Solis, is communicating the rewards: the return on investment from social media. His new book Engage! features an entire chapter on different ways of measuring ROI, but he doesn’t believe in a one-size-fits-all solution.

“People will come up with metrics and people will constantly introduce formulas,” he says. “For example, there is an ad agency that calculated the value of a Facebook fan as $3.60. Do we agree with that? No – I don’t personally.

“First of all, define the ‘investment’ part – many people aren’t quite sure how to capture it. Obviously your time and resources are not free. Twitter and Facebook might be free to create a profile on, but at the very minimum, you’re investing your time, which inherently possesses value. There’s also an opportunity cost: what else could you be doing?

“Then consider, what do we want to see as a return? What do we want to drive? What do we need to measure? When you’re earning friends or followers, there’s no way to just realize the return on investment because it’s not quantifiable. One way is to quantify the return is in terms of sales. But there are other metrics. For example, we now know that social media or just online media is where a potential consumer goes to make a decision. If you understand where they’re going, what they’re looking for and your share of those conversations, that becomes a benchmark too. I believe that the metrics that will work are those that are specific to what we’re trying to accomplish – the ones that document where we’re trying to get to.

“We have to understand what we want to measure from the program, and design it in. And it’s not like we’re inventing that concept – we look for benchmarks in other things that we’re doing today, right? We have benchmarks for how PR is performing, or we should, how sales is performing, how direct marketing is performing. They help us to understand the opportunity cost in the equation. But many companies aren’t thinking that way about social media yet.”

With Solis on the case, however, it’s likely that they will be thinking his way soon. We’re out of time – he has a plane to catch to Sweden, where he’ll be delivering his Engage or Die message to Stockholm, Skellefteå, and Copenhagen. For those hungry for more, you can find the Social Media Manifesto on Brian Solis’s blog, follow him on Twitter and read his books.

Brian Solis Engages With Vocus

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If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear it, did it really happen?

On August 5, 2008 JESS3 and I introduced version 1.0 of The Conversation Prism. Today, I’m proud to announce The Conversation Prism Version 3.0. With the introduction of 3.0, our view of the social media panorama is updated and also reflective of the real world that is embracing and organizing the social Web.

One of the aspects that make social media so fascinating is the conversations that define the culture and value of each community. While many of us operate on the information that fill public streams, sometimes the most interesting aspects of a story take place in the back channel. The Conversation Prism has its own story and I’d like to share it with you.

Version 1.0 was inspired by the Social Media Starfish, which Darren Barefoot and Robert Scoble debuted in November 2007. Initially, it was intended to show the vastness of the social topography and that its size and shape expanded far beyond the most often cited networks, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, et al. As such, The Conversation Prism was designed with three goals in mind…

Goal #1: Create Social Map Based on Observation and Study

As an aspiring social scientist, I was inspired to map the social media universe by both features and capabilities and also how people were really using these tools, networks and services. Doing so, would help us better understand how to survey the landscape by approachable groups rather than as a single entity, which to many, was and still is, an intimidating task.

Goal #2: Search, Listen, and Learn

At the time, there were many posts and discussions that created a perception that people and brands needed to expand their reach and presence by engaging everywhere. It occurred to me that each network featured a search box and as budding brand managers, both personal and professional, we could use keywords to reveal conversations and determine whether or not our presence was required. In the networks where activity was flourishing, I was able to listen, document, and learn how to engage in each community with a mission, purpose, and value-added perspective. Keep in mind that at the time, listening and monitoring solutions were fledgling.

Goal #3: Set the foundation for sCRM and Introduce New Social Technologies + Methodologies

In 2008, I was mapping the connection between the results from social search, the organized structure of conversations, and how they impacted every facet of the business. Conversations were largely viewed as the responsibility for either service, communications, or marketing. In reality, conversations affect the varying divisions of a company, including…

Sales
Product
Support
Marketing
PR
Community
Crisis
HR
Finance

With Version 2.0, introduced in March 2009, The Conversation Prism visualized Social CRM (sCRM) to help businesses recognize the opportunity to listen, learn and adapt. The hub was now a rotating visualization of conversational workflow to inspire the socialization of business and to introduce conversational touchpoints across the organization.

Introducing Version 3.0

Without further ado, allow me to introduce you to The Conversation Prism V 3.0.

Like its version 2.0 predecessor, 3.0 represents considerable evolution. Of course certain networks and tools have vanished or merged and at the same time, important new services have emerged. You’ll notice that the categories have also transformed quite a bit. Some branches have collapsed, consolidated and new classifications were established.

New groupings include…

Social Curation
Nicheworking
Social Commerce

Version 3.0 is hosted at TheConversationPrism.com. We’re adding a variety of sizes and formats for you to download and use freely (with credit to Brian Solis & JESS3 of course). And for those who enjoy wall art, v 3.0 is also available as a 22 x 28 vertical poster.

Click to Order Poster

The Evolution of The Conversation Prism

Version 1.0

Version 2.0

Version 3.0

Visit TheConversationPrism.com

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For decades brands basked in the glory of control, control over consumers’ perceptions, impressions and ultimately decisions and ensuing experiences. Or better said, business leaders enjoyed a semblance of control. While businesses concentrated resources on distancing the connections between customers, influencers and representatives, a new democracy was materializing. This movement would inevitably render these faceless actions not only defunct, but also perilous.

Fueled by the socialization of media, content and connections served as the foundation for this new democracy and “we the people” ensured that our voices were heard. Social Media would forever change the balance of power within markets, placing the fate and stature of brands in the words and actions of consumers and the people and groups that influence their decisions. Brands didn’t just “lose” control of defining impressions, businesses lost the ability to govern shared experiences.

Suddenly people enjoyed the freedom to publish their thoughts and the capacity to earn prominence in these fledgling social ecosystems. No longer was it an era of brands saying what they wished us to think; it was now clear that people were in control of their impressions and more importantly, how, where and when they shared them.

It’s no longer about what we say, it’s what they say about us now that counts.

Sometimes truth and reality awaken us to a new reality. And in this case, everything changes…for the better.

Contrary to popular belief, social media didn’t invent conversations, it just allowed us to organize and surface them.  But, when we look at the importance of branding, the mechanics and methodologies for defining, protecting, and growing the brand profoundly change. As such, the value of brands are at risk of dilution based on the aggregate of shared experiences by the new social consumer. And, perhaps the greatest challenge that faces brands in addition to dilution, is the inability to right its course in real-time. As media democratized, the meter for establishing prominence started to accrue varying levels of influence for its participants while many businesses missed their calling. It’s not too late for brands to engage however, the difference is that everyday people have earned greater reach than some businesses within these social channels.

The Evolution of Brand Marketing

The medium is no longer just the message. In social, the medium is the platform and as such, people now represent both the medium and the message where reach is defined by a blending of the social graph, the context of the story and ensuing connections, and also by the state of the attention aperture of those to whom we’re connected.

Simply stated, social media is changing brand marketing and forcing a (r)evolution that will unfold differently within each organization.

MiresBall and KRC Research recently conducted a study that found 4 out of ten brand marketers believe that social creates challenges to maintaining brand integrity. In addition, more than a third believed that social networking affected brands to the point where marketing strategies would require new thinking. This new direction however, is rife with new challenges as well as opportunities.

Belief that Social Media Creates New Challenges for Protecting Brand Integrity, 2010

Belief that Social Media Provides an Opportunity to Reach New Customers

Brand marketers realize the importance of social media, but they’re unclear as to how it can specifically help with engendering loyalty. 35% believed social lends to loyalty, but 30% disagreed and another 35% were neutral on the subject. While marketers were split on loyalty, over one-half agreed that social media serves as bridges to reaching customers and prospects.

Update the Brand Style Guide

The study also revealed a growing concern among brand marketers on how they engaged with consumers today. The consensus was that in order to successfully connect with consumers in such a way that reinforces brand attributes, representatives require training, messages, and empowerment.

When it comes to brand dilution, consumers aren’t alone in their endeavors. Brand representatives and the lack of a prevailing strategy, mission, or purpose in social media causes the breakdown of branding and messages directly from the source. At the moment, a disconnect exists between the brand, its representatives, and consumers in social media. This disconnect starts with understanding the brand’s voice, presence, and personality and what it is it needs to say to the varying roles of the social consumer.

I refer to this series of fragmented touchpoints as The Last Mile. And in order to establish connections with individuals in their domains where they are in control of their experiences, it takes empathy combined with value, reinforced by branding elements that strengthen the story, the engagement, and the resulting activity. Without first defining the brand in these prominent social networks, how can we expect it to thrive and flourish let alone inspire consumers?

To prevent the dilution of our brands in social media, everything must begin with revisiting and revising the brand style guide. This style guide must be embodied by brand representatives where engagement is clearly led not by the “brand you,” but instead the brand “you represent.”

In an era where brands are both created and co-created, defining our brand, its meaning, and its value and humanizing it, will set the stage for collaboration and brand concentration.

Losing control in an era of socialized media and equalized influence, actually gives birth to an important form of empowerment. With a new found ability to listen to conversations tied to brands, products, and experiences and also analyze associated sentiment in real-time is stirring and enlightening. If ignorance is bliss, awareness is awakening. We now have the ability to understand impressions and perceptions and through engagement, we can contribute to their accuracy as well as define our brand relevance and legacy through every profile, conversation and social object we introduce.

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Twitter is a human seismograph and it represents a transformative channel where everyday people possess the ability to affect actions. The cloud of collective consciousness that houses our thoughts, experiences, and conversations is also a data trove for experts to measure and mine serendipitous and organized behavior and events.

Twitter is less of a social network in its design and operation and more of a series of interconnected social nicheworks. It brings together disparately connected personalities linked through friendship, admiration, education, and context. Here individuals align around people they know, would like to know, and bound by the topics, themes, and connections that attract them. This highly contextualized network, or as Twitter refers to it, an Interest Graph, offers individuals an organized, indexable, and searchable stream where they express sentiment, share observations and information, and also directly and indirectly communicate with one another.

For marketers, Twitter represents so much more than a real-time focus group. While the activity of its users is available for interpretation and analysis, the information contained in certain tweets published by notable individuals possess the capacity to influence agendas and resulting activities. And even in aggregate, everyday users define the direction of the stream and ultimately impact the subjects of their conversations.

Any organization impacted by outside activity must dedicate focus and resources to monitoring and analyzing activity, the extent to which it shapes perception today, and how to share and steer activity to benefit stakeholders online and in the real world.

A recent study by ExactTarget and CoTweet surveyed 1,500 consumers to identify top motivations for following brands on Twitter. As a result, we can glean insight into the expectations of elusive and prized consumers when interacting with brands online.

The ExactTarget and CoTweet study reveals an important part of the social ecosystem that demonstrates why businesses need to consider not just a 360 approach, but a socialized approach. Of the consumers surveyed, 72% publish blog posts at least monthly, 70% comment on blogs, and 61% write at least one product review monthly. The social consumer is vocal and they’re connected.  Considering now that audiences are shifting from content consumers to curators and creators, our market is now defined by audiences with audiences with audiences. Individuals maintain active and expanding social graphs and as they grow, the network effect only escalates.

In April 2010, Performics and ROI Research found that 33% of Twitter users share opinions about companies or products at least once per week. More so, 32% make recommendations while 30% seek guidance and direction.

Wait. What?

- 33% talk brands 1x per week

- 32% make recommendations

- 30% seek advice

Among other interesting stats, 20% of consumers follow a brand in order to interact with the company, which is much greater than those who subscribe to email newsletters or those who “like” brands on Facebook in order to remain connected. In fact, nine out of the ten stated that the most common reasons to follow a brand on Twitter involved the ability to obtain direct information from a company.

In other studies, upwards of 80% of Twitter users stated that for those deserving brands, following equated to referrals. Of those who followed brands, 51% did so because they were an existing customer and 44% expected discounts or promotions.

One of the more interesting data points to emerge was that men were more than twice as likely than women to follow brands on Twitter, 29% compared to 13%. This stat requires deeper analysis as it, on the surface, rivals two primary research pillars in my current work, 1) More women than men account for the overall Twitter population and 2) Women, in aggregate, are more influential than men on Twitter.

If you were to take one thing away from this research, it’s this…Twitter users are the most influential social consumers online today. This revelation is constant across many published research reports. Not only are they influential, they put their money where their Tweet is.

While money doesn’t grow on trees, it does however, grow on Tweets.

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If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear it, did it really happen?

Conversations do not fall into a black hole never to be heard again. And, there is no event horizon preventing their escape.

The social effect is more powerful than we realize. The truth is that if one voice or a chorus of voices finds the right audience, not only will businesses realize that conversations are taking place, they will find a miraculous cure for deafness. And rather than merely reacting, they’ll take the position of leading situations and opportunities.

Social networks are pervasive and it’s where over half a billion people share experiences and seek and offer direction.  The conversations that take place within them are amplifying from sporadic mumblings to thunderous roars. Suddenly businesses find that their dirty little secrets that were once imprisoned in semi-private phone calls, emails, and enlivened through trouble tickets now live in the readily public view of existing and potential customers and the people who influence their decisions. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

Sound familiar?

I was told, “We’ll show up from 2-6 to fix your service problem,” but they didn’t. Not only that, I took time off of work and wasn’t even given the courtesy of a phone call that they would not show up. I HATE xx company. I’m done.

This airline sucks. When I check in, I was told, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do about bumping you off this flight or losing your luggage.” Really, well not only did you just lose a customer, I’m going to go out of my way to ensure that no one I know flies you again.

Why do I have this phone if I can’t make phone calls. I don’t care if you’re on Twitter or Facebook, fix the service. I don’t need to hear, “experiencing dropped calls? We’re working on that…but it’s quite normal. What? Your neighbor received a complementary MicroCell because they’re a valued user and your not? We have no idea who sent that unit. We are not aware of such a program.” Yeah…I googled it and guess what I found? Now I’m pissed.

As consumers climb the ranks of social hierarchy, they earn prominence with every new connection they make. Suddenly what was once a simple social graph of friends, families, and peers, is now a market transforming network where the nodes dictate the stature of your brand at any given time. All it takes is for enough of these conversations to align as well as index in search to organically shift impressions and opinions that fundamentally differ from what you push. While both impact decision making, at some point, the myth of control is shattered and the shock of reality materializes a view that is as surprising as it is promising. Depending on the jolt that shakes someone into reality, it boils down to either “aha” or “uh oh.”

If Ignorance is Bliss, Awareness is Awakening

2011 looms on the horizon and here we are still debating whether or not social media is worthy of more than simply relegating casual participation on the world’s leading social networks.

Social media is rich with the very people who are equalizing the landscape of relevance and influence and as such, it creates an exclusive ecosystem where peer-level attention and engagement is not a given right, rather an earned privilege. To succeed in business here requires the recognition of new opportunities combined with the ability to take action. Focusing on the uncertainties that stem from any combination of fear, ignorance or stubbornness guarantees a steeper incline in the uphill battle that surely awaits. Underestimating the role your brand plays in social media inherently alienates you from connecting with the influential and hyper-connected consumers who define a real-time, real world. As it is, very few companies today are positioned, let alone optimized, for embracing the methodologies that scream for attention and personalization.

From CRM to sCRM to Engagement Management

No one department owns social media. While many of the examples we see highlight what’s possible in marketing or customer service, the reality is that social media demands nothing less than the complete socialization of the entire business. Every division and nuance of business as usual transforms to business unusual as once closed roots between consumers and brand representatives now open to two-way interaction, co-creation, and collaboration.

Even though no one person or group owns social media, it begins somewhere. As such, the path of social media within the organization as well as its scenery and duration is largely defined by who the champion is and where they reside within the company.  The traffic, toll booths, road closures, and dead ends that lie ahead are dictated by the prevailing culture, infrastructure and philosophy set forth by executive management. For years, technology was built around the philosophy of the business to support a top-down, inside out approach to the market. Now social media introduces the need to support a bottom-up and outside-in system to respond and adapt to the needs of a very different type of business ecosystem.

A Blueprint for Social CRM (sCRM) and Brand Relevance

The migration from CRM to sCRM is much greater than the technology required to modernize processes and systems around social media. It is a pivotal switch in principles, methodologies, and philosophies that humanize the business while also ensuring its relevance. This change is not easy nor is it immediate. We face a leadership that must embrace change and change through openness.  The idea of the customer always being “right” now becomes the reality of placing social consumers at the center of business dynamics. This means that listening and responding is not good enough. The ability to listen, adapt and in turn lead, is what it will take for businesses to compete not just for the “now” web, but also the future web.

A Blueprint for Social Engagement (SRM) and Brand Resonance

At the core of social media’s rise to pervasiveness within business is its reputation among decision makers. As individuals, many executives are unsure of how to use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, et al. in their personal lives, let alone understand the opportunity for building brand relevance in a new medium. Opportunity is abundant for risk takers over the risk averse. The challenge is that without an infrastructure that supports social engagement and collaboration enterprise-wide, we inadvertently fuel social anarchy within. I was one of the early voices to make the case for social CRM. And now I’m championing a new philosophical framework for expanding the role of social CRM to support engagement through Social Relationships Management (SRM).

This blueprint was inspired by my friends at Get Satisfaction and it represents both the landscape for a social business ecosystem and also the gaps that require bridging. This represents the interlacing of disparate systems and thinking while also building an infrastructure or organizing distributed social conversations and experiences. It’s the harmony of CRM, sCRM, and VRM (vendor relationship management) creating a true 360 business that adapts, responds, and leads markets where the markets are defining and emerging.

Again, the future of business is defined by more than technology and a management infrastructure. For this blueprint to lead to the construction of new internal paradigms requires a complete culture shift that results from the initial culture shock. And it’s only made possible through an absolute change in perspective, requiring a more open leadership.

Business leaders are now responsible for defining and reinforcing the consumer experience at every step of the decision making process. Doing so ensures that brand relevance and resonance are built into conversation workflow.

The social consumer is forcing the socialization of businesses. No longer are customer problems and negative experiences contended with behind closed doors. Conversations and connections are unfolding in public and as such closed systems, processes, and technologies isolate businesses from meaningful engagement. The social consumer represents customers, prospects, and influencers and they refuse to be herded. Instead they seek collaboration. These sophisticated consumers are building communities where they are at the center of their experiences and as such, those businesses that step out of their comfort zones will find comfort in new archetypes.

Without listening outside of our walls, we cannot engage. If we cannot engage, we can’t collaborate. Without collaboration, we cannot learn. The inability to learn prohibits adaptation.

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Welcome to the premier episode of (R)evolution, a new series that connects you to the people, trends, and ideas defining the future of business, marketing, and media.

In show number one, Forrester’s Josh Bernoff discusses his new book Empowered, co-authored with Ted Schadler.

An old proverb declares, “may you live in interesting times.” Indeed we do. The markets that define the business landscape for brands, organizations, and local businesses are democratizing. At the same time, the dynamics of influence, who wields it, and how, is also transforming. Influence and attention are now equalized. As a result, businesses must now compete in domains where consumers define their experiences through the connections they decide to make. In order to compete for the future, businesses must now establish a presence and earn attention, build new connections, and cultivate meaningful relationships to foster trust, loyalty, and advocacy.

Now available, Empowered empowers business leaders to embrace a new genre of influential customers and employees. In a world where a single tweet can torpedo your brand, businesses must empower employees to solve the problems of empowered customers. The book provides real-world examples of how innovative leaders — and their teams — use technology to solve customer problems. Defined as HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives.

If you’re an IT, marketing and strategy, or tech industry leader wondering how to get more creative solutions out of your team, this book is for you.

Credits:

Andrew Landini, Producer

Adam Eckenfelder, Audio Tech/Re-Recording Mixing

Location: Portabello Grill, Redwood City

Transcript

Brian: Hello everybody. I am Brian Solis, and welcome to Brian Solis.com. My guest today is Josh Bernoff, the author of a new book called Empowered, co-authored with Ted Schadler. Josh, you are kind enough to join me here on such a beautiful day. I think of playing hooky, but this video will prove otherwise.

Your customers now wield unprecedented power through social, mobile and other technologies. Your employees are already using these technologies to transform the way you do business. Empowered, what a good way to start the conversation.

Josh: Since we wrote Groundswell two years ago, the amount of activity on these social applications and social networks has exploded and it has also gone much more to mobile and to video. This means customers have an unprecedented amount of power. It also means that people within companies are using the same stuff as consumers and are realizing they can reach out in the same way. This is great. It is a good idea, but it creates chaos within those organizations, as so many people have ideas about new social applications – iPhone applications, whatever it happens to be. So, we really thought now is the time to help companies to understand how can you actually organize in such a way that you can take advantage of this activity, that you can become comfortable with it; that it can actually benefit your company.

Brian: You say chaos. I actually refer to this as also social anarchy within the organization as well as in the marketplace, because everyone is empowered, so who organizes it? Let’s talk a little bit about the organization first. Who is the roadblock right now within a lot of businesses that you are looking at?

Josh: The roadblock is your boss; it is the upper management, it is anybody who is uncomfortable with the idea that every employee now is in a position to actually represent the company and every employee is in a position to use technology, technology, so cheap and so simple that anybody in marketing and sales and customer service can actually be building these things.

The way to get past that roadblock is for the company to organize itself so that this activity is recognized and also to educate your own staff so they know what is and isn’t appropriate. So rather than shutting them down, it is a lot better to inspire them to work in ways that benefit the company.

That brings up some interesting questions. Like should everyone be empowered, and you talk about the idea of using technology to solve problems and in today’s economy where we need this hero.

Josh: Hero is actually an acronym that we have in the book. It stands for Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operative. And we all know these people. These are the people who come up with the idea. We should have a customer community; we should have a Facebook page; we should have an iPad application. We should build a way for people to see videos about our products. These ideas are relatively easy to implement and now people throughout the organization want to use technology to do them. This is a challenge to IT, which is used to controlling that technology and it is a challenge to management, which is used to controlling the voice that the company has.

Brian: When we start talking about sort of business evolution and empowerment, we start to run into the culture of the business. And so, how do you address the idea that technology was not in and of itself supersede culture or transform it? That’s actually going to be – it is going to take a Hero, and it is going to take a lot of champions. So how do you see, sort of this book helping individuals help redefine the culture of an organization?

Josh: In the first chapter of the book we talk about two companies, Whirlpool, the parent company and Maytag that had to deal with a person that had gotten very poor service ended up writing about just how bad it was and then Tweeting a Tweet that was seen by a million people about the challenges with these Maytag washing machines.

On the other hand, we also talk about Best Buy, where their system set-up called Twelve Force, 2,500 Best Buy employees are able to share one Twitter system to respond to problems and how that actually turns detractors into promoters of the company. And that is not a coincidence. That exists because Best Buy has a culture in which people who come up with ideas are supported. The CMO at Best Buy, Barry Judge, says, we like half-baked ideas. I wanted to make sure I understood that. Half-baked ideas. What does that mean? It means that if you come up with an idea and you haven’t quite figured it out yet, they are going to support you and try and turn that into a reality. And it was those half-baked ideas coming to fruition that created Twelve Force and made it possible for them to be responsive where other companies really haven’t gotten the cultural necessity or the cultural way of thinking to be able to get to that point yet.

Brian: You talk about this Four Step process to help businesses become a little bit more customer facing, a little bit more engaging. So why don’t you talk a little bit about that idea?

Josh: IDEA is exactly what it is. That is the Four Step process, IDEA. And these are the four things that companies need to do to become able to respond to customers that are empowered.

One, the I is identify your mass influencers so that this is define the people in your market that have the most influence. Sixteen percent of the people account for 80% of the influence, so you have to identify them. D is deliver groundswell customer service. In this environment we live in now, customer service is marketing because any of your customers could be Tweeting or writing about you. You have to be able to monitor that and deliver on it. E is empower with mobile information. That is really how to take customers and make them happy is to give them all the information they need, and the A is amplify fan activity. When you find the people who love your product, you have to find ways to take that activity and make it much more visible. We have a number of case studies in the book about exactly how that works.

Brian: Is empowerment enough? Is just the ability to have empowerment enough to be successful now, or do you think that there is going to be some notion of relevance in order to sort of, I guess, inspire resonance in an economy or in a social economy where attention is just so thin or focused for those optimists out there. What is it going to take beyond empowerment to really, truly engage?

Josh: Well, empowerment is just the beginning. And if you empower your employees, you end up with a lot of people doing a lot of stuff. It may or may not help the business. In fact, it is about getting those people to understand the company strategy and getting a process that enables their innovations to actually be recognized and supporting them. So, empowering your employees doesn’t work unless you have actually designed a management framework that enables them to work together and go from – I have a great idea – to I am actually doing something that can help customers and it is in line with the company strategy.

Brian: So, Josh, where can people get the book?

Josh: Well, it is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and it is going to be in all the bookstores starting on September 14, and also a special offer. If you are seeing this just after Labor Day, and Tuesday through Friday, the 7th through the 10th of September, it will be available free for download on Kindle. So, if you have a Kindle that is one way to get the book really inexpensively.

Brian: Well, I do encourage you, whether you get it for free or whether you pay whatever the cover price is. Do pick up this book, because this is the age of empowerment. I will leave you with this, as Josh says in the book, “Overall, people generate 500 billion online influence impressions about products and services every year,” and as Josh said earlier, “16% of the people online generate 80% of the influence.”

So, with that, this is your time to empower your community and empower your employees. Thank you, Josh.

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Twitter presence…CHECK

Facebook Brand Page…CHECK

YouTube Channel…CHECK

Socialized Business Strategy…TBD

While showing up to the party represents a noteworthy effort, a bona fide social media strategy this checklist does not make. Creating presences, listening to conversations tied to keywords and superfluously responding to updates and questions creates a facade of engagement that is at best trivial. And, quite frankly, without a true investment of intention, attention and conviction (I.I.A.C.), we minimize the opportunity before us as well as the thoughts, emotions, and overall potential of our communities rich with would be advocates and influencers.

Much of my time these days is spent working with businesses to first deepen their understanding of social media and subsequently broaden their outlook for what’s possible. As a result, we flip the switch to a more sophisticated level of creativity, vision, and execution. So, when I stumbled across recent research that reported most businesses claim that they are operating with a genuine social media strategy, I was surprised and also unsurprised. Many executives and brand managers believe that once social media shifts from pilot programs to a dedicated function, regardless of goals, objectives, purpose, or capacity, it becomes strategic.

In June 2010, King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42 published an interesting report, “2010 Social Media Usage Attitudes and Measurability: What do Marketers Think?”

According to the results, 72% of businesses claim to operate under a banner of social media strategy. 27% stated that they did not possess an official strategy. The trio surveyed 457 US marketers and managers, with 52% of the respondents representing the publishing, media, advertising, and marketing industries.

Companies with a Social Media Strategy, June 2010

While these numbers indicate maturation and comprehension, I question the definition of “social media strategy.”

To the contrary, a May 2010 study by Digital Brand Expressions found that 52% of social marketers are running social media programs without a defined “game plan.” This finding was in line with an April report by R2Integrated that documented one-half of marketers were reacting to social rather than leading it.

The study also found that a majority of the businesses polled planned to increase their social media investment over the next 12 months.

Companies that Plan to Increase their Social Media Investment in the Next 12 Months

Defining Social Media Strategy

Social media are measured by the sum of its parts. In general, many strategies I’ve reviewed are designed to generate visibility. Social services such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, et al., represent syndication channels to push content. Listening tools are then used to measure activity, responses, reach, and sentiment. In addition, the activity that fills the columns of a brand, community or social media manager’s “brand dashboard” triggers responses, conversations and engagement that do not contribute to overall business performance metrics or missions. I believe, there are differences between visibility and presence. In social media, presence is felt. Presence is driven by a strategy and architecture designed to inspire impressions, evoke guided responses and drive desired outcomes. This affects brand and go to market strategies as well as brand promises.

Consumers, or let’s just say people, are learning how to navigate social networks more than we may think or credit. They are defining and personalizing their experiences based on who they connect with, what they consume, share, and discover, and in turn, what they publish. Simply earning a response, “like,” RT, comment, or the coveted follow, does not equate to anything more than a moment in time. Friends, Fans, Followers (The 3Fs) are neither KPIs or metrics worthy of establishing or measuring a social media strategy.

Social media is bigger than any one departmen. A true 360 approach will eventually socialize and transform organizations, processes, and platforms from inside-out to now also include outside-in perspectives and all that it inspires.

Marketing
Service
Product Development (R&D)
Sales
HR/Employee Relations
Communication
Finance

We have much work ahead of us and together we will lead social media from the confiinments of corporate silos and weave it into the very fabric of the brand and organization.

The socialization of business is a sophisticated framework of reimagined philosophies, business processes, supporting technologies, each enlivened by the cast of characters who faithfully portray the brand and its personal characteristics.

Social Media programs are not rewarded with participation ribbons simply for their existence. Recognition, response, and trust are the rewards for the investment of ongoing, thoughtful, and personalized listening (really listening, not monitoring) and engagement.  Programs and actions rooted in empowerment galvanize advocacy and loyalty. And, strategies built with processes that feed into decision making cycles that lead companies to innovate and adapt through outside-in learning ensure relevance and contribute to legacy.

A true social media strategy socializes the entire business as well as the individual pieces that perform dedicated functions – both inbound and outbound. Again, when integrated, social media is measured by the sum of its parts and the interconnection of strategies and processes and as a result, starts to construct the hallmarks of sCRM.

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Reprint of CRM magazine, August 2010

Influential Leaders: The Engager

by Joshua Weinberger (@kitson)

Brian Solis blogs circles around you. He also posts, updates, and twitters faster than you can, helps develop graphics prettier than yours, and analyzes patterns in public discourse long before you ever see them show up as a Trending Topic. In short? Solis—as principal of consultancy FutureWorks, cofounder of the Social Media Club, speaking-circuit fixture, and best-selling author—is a content and communications machine.

But Solis is so much more than a flashy hashtag. He and his A-list social graph value substance, and he makes it a centerpiece of his new book, Engage!. In an exclusive interview in this month’s Required Reading, Solis makes a compelling case for the multitouch customer experience.

Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group—and a fellow Influential Leader—calls Solis “a brilliant PR business strategist and social media leader,” a sentiment others echo. “Brian is the quintessential PR person,” says Esteban Kolsky, founder and principal of consultancy ThinkJar, clearly intending that as a compliment. “His writing is always right on the mark, and his use of data to highlight points is unparalleled. Excellent research skills make him a rare combination of smarts and talent, placing him in an excellent position of influence.”

“Brian was key in bringing the social CRM message to the wider social media community,” says Brent Leary, cofounder of CRM Essentials, “helping it gain prominence in ways traditional CRM folks couldn’t have done.”

—

Thank you Josh! I don’t think I’ve ever read so many nice things about me in one article.

Ray, Esteban, Brent, thank you for the kind words! I’m honored…

—
Point of clarification: I am a business and new media strategist. I help organizations identify and make sense of relevant online communities, cultures, and dynamics. I work with teams to develop engagement strategies and creative campaigns, connect with influencers, and organize and adapt processes, technologies, and methodologies to scale with new opportunities and the change that always ensues.

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In social media, is there truth to the proverb, “seek and ye shall find?”

As our experience in new media matures, learning what it is we wish to seek and also accomplish is at the forefront of rapid evolution. Converting questions into objectives is how we grow and succeed. While the opportunities within social media in general are sweeping, one such possibility that’s largely untapped in business social networking is the ability to find customers and prospects as well as learn what inspires them to make decisions and share experiences.

Customers and those who influence their decisions take to social media to learn, discover and share. As a result, social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn as well as hyper-local networks including Yelp and Foursquare are evolving into potent touchpoints for customer acquisition and retention.

Social Networks in Customer Acquisition

Regus, a provider of workplace solutions with over 1,100 business centers in 85 countries, recently published a study that explored the role of social media in customer acquisition. Based on input from senior managers and business owners around the world, the study found that almost one-half of small businesses are successfully connecting with prospects through social networks. On the other side of the spectrum, only 28% of large firms reported finding new customers in social networks. Medium-sized businesses landed appropriately in the middle at 36%.

A Global Perspective

The worldwide survey also ranked countries who found success in customer acquisition in social networks. With 14 countries reporting, an average of 40% reported that social networks were indeed ripe for converting prospects into customers. At the very top of the list, 52% of businesses in India reported success followed by Mexico, Spain, The Netherlands and China with 50%, 50%, 28%, and 22% respectively. The US ranked 7th with 35%.

1. India – 52%
2. Mexico – 50%
2. Spain – 50%
3. Netherlands – 48%
4. China – 44%
5. South Africa – 43%
6. Germany – 41%
6. Australia – 41%
7. US – 35%
8. Canada – 34%
9. France – 33%
9. UK – 33%
10. Japan – 30%
11. Belgium – 27%

combination of search and focused keywords

This is Just the Beginning

Leading metrics firm, comScore, released its Q1 U.S E-Commerce Spending Report and found that Facebook and Twitter visitors spend more money online than average Internet users. And, as social networks usage increases, so does the propensity to spend online.

These numbers will only continue to grow. Everything begins with search, and for those businesses who master the art and science of transforming basic search queries into lead generation in social networks will find an entirely new landscape of opportunities.  The question is, what are you going to do about it? And once you’ve converted prospects into customers, how will social media factor into your retention and advocacy strategies?

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Email, we love to hate it, yet we hate to love it. For better or for worse, we are tethered to our inbox and continue to send messages and respond to those individuals and organizations to which we’re tied or vested. Over the years, I’ve labeled email as the world’s largest untapped social network and even though many services attempted to socialize the inbox over the years, email, for the large part, remains regressive.

For the time being, brands and organizations continue to rely on email to connect and stay connected with various stakeholder communities. While message open rates and conversion ratios remain abysmal, email is nonetheless, effective en masse. However, the time individuals spend in their email labyrinth is eroding. Analytics firm Nielsen recently reported that nearly 25% of the time Americans spend online is now spent on social networks. Additionally, email only accounted for 8.3% in June, down from 11.5% last year.

Social networks represent something promising to any organization dependent on communications. Each network represents an “always on” series of engagement opportunities that are each inherently opt in whether they’re in the front or back channel.

- Wall posts
- Direct messages
- Invitations
- Gifts
- Public @ messages

Businesses are now attempting to migrate or extend their communities to social networks including Facebook and Twitter. The ability to do so offers organizations the ability to not only build communities in more modern, real-time and interactive domains, social networks offer a new way to connect personally and contextually. Engaging in social networks presents two immediate benefits:

1. Connect value 1 to 1 to many individuals

2. Connect information 1 to many

Either way, meaningful and substantial information in these paradigms triggers the social effect, which expands reach and also the community overall through comments, shares, likes, retweets, and connections. This activity is visible by friends and friends of friends, and so on, and when combined with an appealing click to action, also enhanced performance and metrics in the process.

eROI recently released a new report, “The Current State of Social, Mobile, and Email Integration,” which found that 66% of marketers included links to social profiles in email campaigns. StrongMail released research in its study, “2010 Email Marketing Survey” that not only corroborated the data from eROI, it upped it to 71%.

StrongMail interviewed business executives in its most current study released in July 2010.  Second to the promotion of social presences in email campaigns, was the ability to provide social sharing functionality inside email. We’re already witnessing the migration as well as integrating the social effect into the inbox. eROI also found that this clickable functionality was secondary in terms of importance with 59.1% of all responses.

Of those social networks most actively promoted in email, eROI found that Facebook was the top promoted network with 91%. Twitter ranked second with just under 84%. LinkedIn and YouTube earned third and fourth spots with 48% and 34% respectively. Other studies found that most small to mid-sized businesses rarely promoted on other social networks outside of Facebook and Twitter.

Social Databases

As engagement evolves from email 1.0 to social networks, expect to see experimentation with one-to-many communication through automated one-to-one and one-to-many mass messaging systems. This capability will evolve from messaging existing friends and followers to sophisticated frameworks that find and connect with individuals who have publicly shared information related to industries, products, services, and interests via keywords. These systems will seek an opt-in relationship through a reciprocal friend, follow or “like” in order to experiment with direct messages that offer promotions, rewards, or exclusive access or content for establishing and maintaining the link.  Initial experiments will resemble dedicated push streams such as @DellOutlet or Twitter’s @EarlyBird promotion channels where followers subscribe to accounts for clearly articulated benefits. Over time, marketers will seek to enhance responses and ensuing actions through varieties of messages aimed at  segmented users as indexed by expressed wants or defined preferences. Eventually, we will see personalized, contextualized and value-added engagement to induce positive word of mouth and consumer responses.

In the end, it’s what you introduce into your messages and streams that counts for everything. Regardless of the incumbent social messaging solutions that are available today or those soon to debut, what’s clear is that intention speaks volumes here. Any mass-marketing that mirrors email blasts of today will only create animosity and immediately alienate communities. In social media, you earn the relationships and inspire the desired outcomes that you deserve.

Remember…Relevance + Resonance = Significance (RRS)

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Please consider reading, Engage!: It will help you find answers to your questions…

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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

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