Part 8 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual…this series serves as the book’s prequel.

Social media says so much and so very little at the same time. First, social media implies that media is just that, social. But when you study many of the best practices or test the advice dispensed through popular “top 10″ posts, you find that at the heart of notable social media successes is simply brilliant creativity and desirable incentives, not necessary authentic or genuine value or engagement.  With every Tweet or Like to win campaign, hilarious viral video, and user-generated promotional series, businesses make social media more of an oxymoron than a movement to transform two-way conversations into improved customer relationships.

According to an annual IBM study, getting closer to customers is the overwhelming top priority for CEOs. And, social media is lauded as the great facilitator for engagement and renewed business relevance. What we tend to forget however, is that social networks are merely platforms for people to connect with friends, family and peers. Businesses are not the primary beneficiary of connections, but they can certainly benefit once they realize that a Like or follow does not equate to an opt-in for marketing communiqué.

If CEOs are placing increasing importance on customer relationships, why is it that we are less aligned with the “R” in social CRM and closer in alignment to the “M,” where M stands for marketing and not management. That’s because of where social media lives within the organization today.

In IBM’s recent “From Social Media to Social CRM” report, it was revealed that social media is already siloed within marketing, marketing communication, or public relations, accounting for 52%, 45%, and 42% ownership respectively. When we think about the primary function of each of those functions, it’s clear to see why the premise of many of today’s top social media best practices are marketing driven rather than market driven.

The difference between a social brand and a social business is internal connectedness, preparedness, and collaborative approach to customer and employee engagement.

A Social Media and Social CRM Strategy are Different

As good friend Paul Greenberg noted in his book CRM at the Speed of Light, “The underlying principle for Social CRM’s success is very different from its predecessor….traditional CRM is based on an internal operational approach to manage customer relationships effectively. But Social CRM is based on the ability of a company to meet the personal agendas of [its] customers while, at the same time, meeting the objectives of [its] own business plan. It is aimed at customer engagement rather than customer management.”

At stake here is relevance among the growing base of a more connected consumer landscape. Engaging consumers from a marketing-driven approach may work for the short term, but engagement requires a holistic approach. Consumers see one brand, one company, one experience and not a series of disconnected silos experimenting in social media without a common vision, mission, or process. While businesses are building an infrastructure to support social media, governance, policies, and strategies are only as strong as the experiences they’re designed to create, the problems they’re intended to solve, and the ability to adapt to and lead consumer experiences because you can see what others don’t.

IBM studied how businesses view their foundation for social media and found that many times, the prevailing corporate culture impeded innovation and collaboration, not just with consumers, but also within. And for any change agent, that will come as no surprise. Whether they know it or not, change agents are becoming hybrid cultural anthropologists and politicians learning how to adapt the culture while rallying internal champions to bring about real change.

Here you can see the number of businesses that have defined KPIs, flexible business models, established policies, adaptive approaches to incorporating social media into business strategies, and defined governance. The blue shades on the left equates to those that strongly agree while toward the right, companies start to show that they’re not where they would like to be. According to the IBM report, only 38% are confident in the support of their company in innovation and creativity. Just 30% can comfortably say that they have strong executive sponsorship for social media. And, a measly 27% say they share insights across functions.

Once you see these numbers, it’s clear that businesses are on the right path, but we’re really just at the beginning. More importantly, one could argue that the direction of the path is questionable. Even though the businesses on the far left are established and confident, they might be operating without a holistic strategy that spans across lines of business, products, functions or across the globe.

And what of a centralized or holistic approach, defined by a common goal and reinforced through not only governance, but compliance?The effects of connected consumerism require nothing less than internal transformation and in many ways, a new outlook.

The challenges that businesses face are still relatively immature as IBM discovered. ROI, employee use of social media, and negative brand exposure lead the top three challenges companies face today. In the number four and seven spots however, we see the true threat to progress, lack of strategy and lack of support. We can not march into new territory without a unified vision. We can not lead consumer experiences if those experiences are either undefined or unsupported by the leadership organization we’re to stand behind.

When’s the last time you looked at your mission and vision statement? Can you Tweet it? Does it speak to you? The truth is that in addition to processes, businesses must rethink who or what it is to a different breed of consumer. This consumer is not just social, they’re connected across networks, devices, and they influence and are influenced differently than traditional consumers.

Mo Data, Mo Problems

What we need to do, where we need to be, how, why and to what extent is available to us today. We won’t discover these answers in the form of brand or competitive monitoring using social tools. We must capture data, interpret it, and also act upon it, now and over time, to learn and pursue relevance without forgetting our core markets and competencies.

Companies are clearly capturing data as IBM found. But as you can see, how data is analyzed, interpreted, and in turn shared across the organization is scattered. And, what happens to information (or insights) once its distributed is unclear in this study, but we can assume that it isn’t embraced and acted upon across the board.

Businesses are experimenting. Businesses are learning and adapting. But this can’t just be about social media. This must be about using disruptive technology to improve customer experiences and relationships. We can’t find comfort until we’re clearly operating outside of our comfort zones. And even then, we can’t rest until we are meeting the needs of connected consumers, where they are, how they connect, and reinforce the values, products, and services that are important to them.

Times are a changing and as a result, the foundation of business must also change. It’s a new era of business and consumerism and you play a role in defining it.

Order The End of Business as Usual today…

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 – I think we need some time apart, it’s not me, it’s you
Part 5 – We are the 5th P: People
Part 6 – The State of Social Media 2011: Social is the new normal
Part 7 – I like you, but not in that way

Image Source: Shutterstock

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

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.

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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Get The Conversation Prism:

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Image Credit: Shutterstock

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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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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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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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…

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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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There’s a saying that good things happen when you least expect it. Such is the case this past week.

As part of its CRM Evolution ’10 conference, CRM Magazine announced the winners of its 2010 CRM Market Awards. I’m proud to say that I was listed as one of eight CRM “Influential Leaders” by the magazine, to which I am quite literally speechless. To say that this came as a surprise would be an understatement. To be included among a list of mentors whom I greatly admire is nothing short of dreamlike.

The list of 2010 Influential Leaders:

Marc Benioff, cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer at Salesforce.com (see CRM’s November 2009 issue for our cover-to-cover special report on Benioff and Salesforce.com)

Bill McDermott, co-chief executive officer at SAP

Doc Searls, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, head of the individual-empowerment initiative ProjectVRM, and one of the co-authors of the landmark Cluetrain Manifesto

Brian Solis, principal at FutureWorks, cofounder of the Social Media Club, and author of Engage! (see this month’s Required Reading for an interview about the new book)

Ray Wang, partner at Altimeter Group, a new and noteworthy analyst firm

Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a unit of Microsoft Business Solutions at Microsoft

Michael Wu, principal scientist of analytics at social CRM innovator Lithium Technologies

Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and chief executive officer of social networking behemoth Facebook

The magazine also inducted Paul Greenberg, one of my heroes, to the CRM Hall of Fame. Paul is the president and founder of consultancy The 56 Group LLC, author of industry bible CRM at the Speed of Light, and prolific industry consultant, blogger, and columnist.

CRM Magazine named eight Rising Stars this year:

Wunderkind analyst firm Altimeter Group

Small-business CRM specialist BatchBlue Software

Email marketing provider (and CoTweet acquirer) ExactTarget

Location-based social gaming site Foursquare

Content conductor Open Text

Listening platform Radian6

A pair of companies providing human resources software, SuccessFactors and Workday, that may help expand the parameters of CRM itself.

Congratulations to all of the winners!

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In the spirit of sharing dialog that transpires outside of this domain, I would like to invite you to read a recent discussion with good friend Jacob Morgan, co-author of Twittfaced (I contributed the foreword). While the discussion centered on Engage!, as you’ll soon see, it expanded to analyze the effects of social media in the enterprise.

#EngageorDie

Why is sociology and anthropology so important to understand for social media?

I believe that at the top level, all of social media is driven by anthropology and sociology – it’s just the nature of the network. I never formally studied social sciences in college, but was inspired to become versed in them because it’s clear that human nature and culture define social networks and therefore require insight, research, observation, and forethought. On an even deeper level though, social marketing and service professionals should also explore psychology to create experience-driven connections, interest graphs and ultimately contextual networks that are linked through meaningful and mutually beneficial communications and engagement. All of these things help weave everything together.

These fields of study earn greater importance today as technology and innovation evolve at an increasingly blurring pace and with it, the adaptation of human behavior and culture. In Social Media and in the real world, in order to become relevant, you have to earn relevance.

Hutch Carpenter from Spigit recently wrote a post in which he describes a two year lag that companies experience when looking to adopt web 2.0 technologies. How can companies deal with this apparent lag time and what’s the best course of action for them?

There definitely is a lag time between the introduction of innovative tools and their rate of adoption across the Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers (also known as the technology adoption bell curve). What we need to remember though, is that adoption is driven and necessitated by the tasks and the objectives at hand. As you pointed out (Jacob), culture and behavior can never adopt and change as quickly as technology so companies need to stay agile and limber; I agree with this. What makes social media so interesting, especially for the enterprise, is that it’s among the first platforms to affect a business from the outside in and from the bottom up. The brief (compared to other business processes) history of technology is introduced and managed from the top down. New media, services such as Twitter and Facebook, are at their very core, social operating systems (OS), and as such, are introduced into the corporate culture through the individual. The Social OS is unique to the individual as their experiences are defined by the applications they use, how and why. Essentially, instead of IT coming to teams with new technologies, they’re now forced to examine the use of social networks from inside the fire wall and also how they connect to outside networks and how the social OS impacts and possibly benefits or harms the corporate ecology.

As champions, it’s not only our job to demonstrate the potential of social networks and services, it is necessary to become the IT of social technologies to our internal decision makers to prove their value to workflow and productivity inside and outside the organization.

Social media is now forcing the company culture to change and adapt based on these social operating systems. Actions and reactions are now more tangible, direct, and immediate.

With any new and pervasive technology, we as decision makers within the organization, are now responsible for defining guidance and education in order to improve their applications for both business and personal use. Just because it’s introduced from the personal side of the workforce doesn’t mean that users have mastered the potential of these networks nor identified their risks.

In order to support this radical transformation, it has become clear that governance, responsibility, and accountability is needed – not restraint.

There has also been a lot of discussion around Social CRM as these services also represent new opportunities for businesses to improve the bond between customers, prospects, and brands. This isn’t just new technology, it’s forcing decision makers to change methodologies around what this all means. This in turn, creates a lot of change within the enterprise and that change needs support to make sure it happens for the right reasons. Social CRM, at the very least, is propelled by engagement with purpose. And, when you think about it, in order to do so, genuinely, everything needs to change to support an outward focus and an inward process for adaption – otherwise, this is all lip service.

In order for organizational transformation to take shape, social architects are required to blueprint the grand design, but also the incremental steps defined by realistic milestones that encourage progress rather than disruption. You have to allow your company and its team to breathe in the process. It’s like drinking wine. You have to pour it, swirl it around the glass, smell it, and then drink it, slowly.

In my experience everything has to start with a pilot program that is intentional, well executed, with metrics that show advancement. Success begets additional pilots until dedicated budget is earned and continually justified. Taking this approach also encourages analysis and development by exploring and attempting to answer the following questions:

What are we trying to accomplish?

What is the change we’re seeking to enliven?

What is the action we’re hoping to spark?

At what levels?

Why?

What resources would it take to support it?

What does success look like at the end of the pilot?

How do these results compare to other programs currently in place?

This is why I’m forever a student of new media. The answers and the path to these answers is different within each organization – governed by the prevailing corporate culture and hierarchy.

Remember, technology, before and after social, changes quickly and as such, I encourage businesses to consider the development of a department or team responsible for identifying, evaluating and testing innovation. Good friend Deb Schultz of the Altimeter Group is leading work in this field and helps companies, such as Proctor and Gamble, determine where technology can benefit specific areas of business units. And for those that perform well, examine rollout strategies for other business units to improve processes through the constant integration of proven innovation.

What’s the difference between social media and Social CRM vs. SRM?

Social Media equals any tool or service that is used the web to facilitate conversations and networks. Social CRM, as discussed, is the socialization of CRM methodologies and processes. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact. What it does not represent however, is yet another acronym. It’s simply a social object, intended to broaden the discussion for evolving sCRM.

The social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority among stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision-makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels. Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognized wherever and however it takes shape.

The last thing I’m trying to do here is introduce a new acronym. People are very very literal, so you have to be careful with what you say and how you define things. New media affects the decision of a “social” customer at every level. Why just build an infrastructure around customers when you need to build it around the entire decision cycle? Infrastructure decisions are expensive and require a lot of support, I want companies to think about the investment they make because it’s much bigger than they know now.

Is a large part of social media common sense? You have a quote from Business Week in your book that ends with “don’t be stupid” why do you think companies are having trouble following this?

If you tell someone not to be stupid you are evoking common sense. What people need to do is be specific. Common sense is not enough. You have to define what common sense is and provide guidelines, rules, and training around it. Why? Because the definition of common sense is different to everyone and the greatest example of how common sense fails is the assumption that individuals employ common sense in all that they do. If you take a look at what happened to Nestle and Green Peace and the conversational carnage that ensued, social media pundits and consumers alike, called for the head of the community manager responsible for fueling the attacks in Facebook. But, regardless of the behavior, working, and the absence of “common sense,” I’m willing to bet that this individual didn’t actually break any of Nestle’s rules per se. The community manager was most likely doing the job as instructed or perhaps, as assumed. This demonstrates a real life example of how the personal compass that guides each one of us points differently and what appears as common sense to one, is absolutely “un”common sense to another. Creating a foundation on common sense is no different than erecting buildings on marshland. As leaders, it’s our job to create guidelines, training, and management systems for social media engagement similar to the processes that establish the quality and significance of service training programs that present employees with various real world situations and desired outcomes where they are expected to excel. For example, “if you are greeted by someone who is challenging and hostile towards your brand in a public forum, here is what you need to do…”

Without understanding the processes, culture, and the “how’s” and “why’s” of Nestle, it’s not really possible to advise them and tell them what to do. But one can guess where it needs to start, and that’s a much bigger discussion.

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This is Part Two of Two in a series exploring the promise and potential of Social CRM and SRM. In Part One, we reviewed the importance of sCRM as well as introduced the concepts of Social Relationship Management (SRM) to look beyond customers in Social Media. Originally intended for inclusion in Engage!, Paul Greenberg contributed his view of sCRM and SRM to continue the discussion…

There is little doubt that customers are ruling the roost right now — to a point that should be of concern to business — and a reason to rejoice. On the one hand, because we are human, we love to complain and thus the virally negative press and publicity that a bad customer service problem can lead to grab much of the headlines. But there is a converse side to the seemingly scary reality that says, “OMG; the customer can talk about my business outside of my control.” It also can mean that the customers, who are not only newly empowered but increasingly pro-active in managing their own experiences and interactions, can become advocates who support you, endorse you and engage others in providing benefits (and sales) to your business.

What makes the changes in the world interesting is that even customer engagement strategies, a radical idea not more than one or two years ago, now need to be nuanced to recognize far more than just customer lifetime value (CLV) which measures how much revenue and profit a customer will bring to you over his or her lifetime with a company. The gradations of traditional CLV analysis incorporated the impact that your business decisions would have on the purchasing behavior of that customer and his immediate family – but not much more than that.

But now, influence matters. That doesn’t just mean the industry pundits either. It means that with the new social tools available, individual customers who could be your friends or enemies could influence tens, hundreds, thousands of people who are not even personally known to them but are “someone like them.”

Don’t underestimate the power of this. The Edelman Trust Barometer, which is the most trusted source for figuring out who the most trusted source is, has indicated that “someone like me” has been the most trusted source since 2004 when it was chosen as that by 51 percent of the respondents. It’s only gone up since and as of 2009 was 58 percent. That peer is who the influencer influences.

This is where Social CRM for business comes in. Not only do you have to identify the value of a customer or person to an institution from their purchasing habits but also their influencer value which is often, at least in the business world, something that can be non-existent one day and have a major impact a week later.

But, it is now so much more than even that. As Brian points out in Engage!, Chapter 23, “The Social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority amongst stakeholders, prospects, and peers.” He even goes so far as to eliminate the “C” in Social CRM because it goes beyond customers. He calls it SRM, I call it the collaborative value chain but it’s potay-to, potah-to. We are now in a world that not only is forcing businesses to engage customers but to consider the influences on their business that rests among their partners, suppliers, prospects…hell, all the stakeholders in the company’s particular ecosystem. This makes business more complex but far more intriguing than ever – with a value proposition and flexible strategy for success that just blows the doors off if carried out effectively.

The best way to measure this business value and a good way to understand the difference between traditional CRM and Social CRM is to look at this influencer value over time. CLV by itself is no longer sufficient. What Dr. V. Kumar, Chairman of Georgia State University’s Marketing Department and the Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Brand and Customer Management (CEBCM) calls “customer referral value (CRV)” now enters the stream. CRV is a measure of advocacy and positive business value that an influencer brings. It fundamentally acknowledges the existence of the social customer that Social CRM deals with.

The key here is that it shows a measurement that validates the existence of the social customer and the positive impact they may have on a business as advocates.

But that’s not the only part of influence that Social CRM measures. Keep in mind, an advocate is typically known to the company and has a history of interactions with that company — they often come from the ranks of loyal customers.

But what about those influencers who are either not positively interacting with the company or who have had a very few interactions but at the same time can influence large numbers of consumer decisions because of their stature in some community?

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has a set of metrics that they think need to be used to “hear the whispers” on the social web, to find out who those influencers are and what kind of influence they may have. The metrics are:

1. Volume – How many times has this been mentioned versus its historic patterns?

2. Tone – Are they saying positive, negative or neutral things?

3. Coverage – How many sources are generating this volume of conversation?

4. Authoritativeness – What kind of qualitative ranking (reputation) does the individual source have)

Measuring the whispers gives you some idea of how influential someone can be or how fast a trend can grow or what kind of chatter is spreading about your company — good or bad — and who is spreading it.

It’s the ability to capture this unstructured and also structured customer data e.g. transaction information, then measure it and identify both key trends and key individuals that is one of the distinguishing features of Social CRM from just social media.

Optimally, using these measures will help you gain some insight into individual customers and their particular influence. If you then provide them with the personalized products, services, experiences and tools they need to sculpt their own relationship with you, because the customer is prone to trusting “someone like me”, it is entirely possible that they will think of your business as a “company like me.”

That’s some of what Social CRM is. AND that’s a good thing.

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In Engage!, I review the important catalysts and methodologies defining the new era of Social CRM or sCRM. In the discussion, I also introduce the idea of SRM (social relationship management), a concept that may at first blush, seemingly appear to introduce yet another acronym or perhaps challenge the promise of sCRM. However, its only intention is to spur thinking beyond the literal frameworks of traditional customer relationship management, whether it’s social or one-way.

Much of this chapter was cut as the book was already well over its target word count. As it’s an important topic, I’ve reassembled the pieces into a two-part series to spark useful conversation and innovation around the subject.

At a minimum, SRM focuses beyond the social customer and escalates the promise and potential of sCRM across an entire organization, not just customer service. Equally, SRM zooms in to evaluate the various stages of decision making and the channels and people that influence outcomes.

The Culture Shift: CRM to sCRM

If we look at CRM and the methodologies and technologies that support customers today, social CRM represents much more than a modernization or even socialization of an aging system of support and service.

I believe that among the chief attributes of social media, the ability to identify active communities of relevance, trace channels and voices of influence, and also discern and dissect the various stages of decision making, all in real-time, is nothing short of profound and transformational.

Information is becoming commoditized. Conversations, sentiment, inquiries, and intentions are vocalized and open for organization, categorization, and analysis. Our newfound sense of hearing is there for the benefit of learning. Accordingly, adaptation will be the key to earning relevance in our markets and this continuing practice of adaptation is how we will ultimately establish prominence.

This is easier said than done of course.

The culture that prevails within businesses today actually works against the pillars of socialized CRM. As such, everything begins with change and the compelling case to do so. While social media has traveled a great distance from our personal exploration to our profession endeavors, this unstructured groundswell has forced a bottom-up revolution led by us, the social champions who believe that the customer should once again, come first.

Eventually however, we hit a ceiling where the effects of championing change are met with challenge and skepticism. This opposition is natural, as the energy and persuasion necessary to break through the ceiling and impact the entire organization from the top-down, requires much more than enthusiasm.

Before businesses can collaborate within their communities, they first have to learn how to collaborate internally.

As Charlene Li points out in her new book Open Leadership, organizational transformation is only truly attainable through the willingness of leaders to embrace a change of course, act, and do so without having all of the answers. But, neither Charlene nor I endorse changing for the sake of change, nor do I suggest that we take any steps blindly. Instead, I believe in the power of data and as such, I rely on the real-time social information that visualizes impact, influence, sentiment, and opportunities.

Research, analysis, and insight offer clarity and direction. When combined with recommendations for process enhancement and ultimately compelling forecasts, we can then begin to demonstrate the ability to increase customer acquisition, retention, sales, and market share overall. This is the only language, for the time being, that seems to resonate with executives.

Introducing the Mantra of SRM

The premise of SRM is that the Social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority amongst stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision makers, and peers.  The activities that govern each form the separation and distinction between customer acquisition, retention, and advocacy. I believe at the heart of sCRM methodologies, the recognition that customers are only part of the new equation, sets the stage for long-term and advantageous change.

Every day, customers and prospects are faced with making decisions and the paths that they take are increasingly open to input. People are not only taking to the social Web for options, research, and recommendations, the insight they receive is derivative of the experiences and observations of others.

We reap what we sow.

This is why the concept of SRM shatters the boundaries set forth by CRM and the prevailing methodologies that inspire the progression towards sCRM.

Again, the idea of SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended, purchased, or simply recognized a product or service publicly each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels.

In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed. If we define influence as the ability to inspire action and measure the corresponding activity, the socialization of influence now expands beyond the strategies and software that organize and optimize customer relations and the management processes that govern it.

The entire organization needs to socialize and optimize in order to affect decisions and earn relevance.

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff formerly of Forrester Research called for sovereignty through jurisdiction in her post, Who Should Lead the Customer Social Media Interaction:

“The best strategy for a company is always to have everyone do what they do best. That’s why the various functions departments got created”

Customer service, combined with participation and engagement, forms a powerful foundation of marketing without blatant marketing. And, as the socialization of our business is introduced through open leadership, engagement brings into focus the fifth “P” of the marketing mix – people.

Indeed, this is about people and the recognition of influence wherever and however it takes shape. Equally, this is about relations and relationships. As such, we need principles, guidelines, processes, and systems to identify and engage in relevant communities and corresponding activity to trigger, cultivate and harness the rewards for paying attention and connecting.

This is just the beginning. The road to SRM is rich with insight and it affects the entire organization and in turn, the ability to impact decisions.

In Part Two, Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light, continues the discussion of sCRM and SRM.

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What follows is the unedited version of my latest post at AllThingsDigital…

The Altimeter Group today released a new report on Social CRM and while analysts release reports all the time, this is different. The report is free to read and share under Creative Commons and this is a big disruptor, one that reflects the socialization of information and the spirit of social media.

The New Rules of Relationship Management

The essence of the new report by Altimeter’s R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang is putting the customer first. While that seems like a simple principle, it’s easier said then done. The case the duo make is rooted of course in social media and the self-actualization of personal influence.

As the report notes in the beginning:

Rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect with individuals and communities who share mutual interests, increasingly leaving organizations out of the conversation.

Simply hiring more people to keep up with social marketing, sales, and support will not be sufficient, as consumers and their new channels will always outnumber employees. As a result, companies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web – giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.

And indeed, they’re right.

Social media didn’t invent conversations, it simply amplified and connected them to audiences and the actions that are triggered as a result. With the right tools, and more importantly mindset and resolve, we can now uncover these incredibly valuable, insightful and prominent conversations where and when they happen. Listening is only the beginning however. As in anything, we need a little less conversation and a little more action.

As the report notes, Social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts, it complements it with an outbound extension to connect with the very social beacons that shape and steer perception – those previously untouched with inbound only infrastructures. Essentially the “s” in sCRM should be viewed as a verb…as in socialize. Actions speak louder than words and thus, sCRM transforms words and intent into action.

As the “Godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg notes, “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction – or the data associated with it… Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

The Socialization of an Entire Organization

The social customer is only one part of the equation. As any listening program will reveal, conversations map specifically to departments within an organization and as such, all units affected by outside activity will socialize over time. This is why I believe that over time, we should focus less on the “C” of sCRM and focus our attention, energy and ingenuity on the aspects of SRM – social relationship management.

The Social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority amongst stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels. Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.

SRM is a doctrine aligned with a humanized business strategy and supporting technology infrastructure and platform. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact.

But we must begin somewhere and for many businesses, the evolution from CRM to sCRM is in fact, revolutionary.

After months of study and interviews with over 100 organizations, Altimeter Group identified 18 use cases for Social CRM to help businesses assess, adapt, and create new programs and processes to socialize their brands.

As the report notes, Social CRM programs start at the departmental level, but require corporate support to transform fiefdoms into united efforts.  The challenge lies in mobilizing and organizing resources around distributed conversations and building the connectors that link CRM systems to social networks. And, organizations must prioritize based on market demand and technology maturity.

Customers have already migrated towards new channels and in the process, companies that are not in pursuit are quickly falling behind. Relationships between organizations and customers might be better defined simply as “relations” as the existing framework was traditionally optimized around the organization and not the customer.

Traditional CRM projects have failed to grasp the complexities of the customer-company relationship. Though these CRM programs started out with the goal of providing a single customer view and 1:1 relationship management, early efforts quickly refocused on automation of front office tasks and improving management visibility across marketing, sales, service and support. Because these programs have often failed to support the front office worker’s needs to manage relationships, internal adoption halted as users grew to resent, and in some cases revolt, against CRM.

To begin at the beginning, businesses  must deploy Social CRM for business value and not get caught up in the hype of Twitter and Facebook. We have to go where our customers seek, discover, and share information.  Alitimeter suggests focusing on bite-sized entry points as today’s tight budgets, limited resources, and little time will ensure that companies get the most bang for the buck initially.

In the report, each one of the 18 use cases brings definable metrics that should be incorporated in each Social CRM program.

- Begin with the end in mind

- Metrics should be aligned with an organization’s entry points

- Quantify the baseline and determine the effort

- Adjust ROI targets to align resources with efforts to move the needle

- The goal – drive business value

The 18 recommended use cases are organized in seven categories and in order of operations. As observed, most organizations start their initiatives by building out the “5 M’s” and deploying a customer insight program that matures with experience and earned intelligence. I previously discussed the maturation of social media infrastructure in business usually evolves in at least 1o stages.

Social Customer Insights form the Foundation for All Social CRM Use Cases – Everything begins with listening

1. Social Customers Insights

Social Marketing Seeks to Achieve Customer Advocacy

2. Social Marketing Insights

3. Rapid Social Marketing Response

4. Social Campaign Tracking

5. Social Event Management

Social Sales Enables Seamless Lead Opportunities

6. Social Sales Insights

7. Rapid Social Sales Response

8. Proactive Social Lead Generation

Social Support and Service Drives Sustainable Customer Satisfaction

9. Social Support Insights

10. Rapid Social Responsse

11. Peer-2-Peer (P2P) Unpaid Armies

Social Innovation Streamlines Complex Ideation

12. Innovation Insights

13. Crowdsourced R&D

Collaboration Reduced Organizational Friction and Stimulates Ecosystem

14. Collaboration Insights

15. Enterprise Collaboration

16. Extended Collaboration

Seamless Customer Experience Sustains Advocacy Programs

17. Seamless Customer Experience

18. VIP Experience

The Customer (R)evolution

The methodologies, systems, and people that entwine CRM are unquestionably forcing a historical (r)evolution from the outside in. As customers earn prominence online and ultimately in the marketplaces they define, CRM is far more consequential to the prosperity and relevance of businesses, than perhaps ever before.

This is about earning a prestigious position in the hearts, minds, and ultimately decisions of customers, prospects and those who effect their actions, today and tomorrow. Essentially, with the socialization of media and the redistribution of authority and influence, we are competing for the future simply by listening, responding, learning and adapting.

The social customer is disrupting the balance of power and they’re actively exerting their new found eminence within every social network and community that thrives off of shared experiences. The socialization of CRM is effectively measured by the dedication of resources and resolution the organization commits not just to social media, but to all existing channels where customers, influencers and prospects seek help.

Divided we share…United we change.

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I spend a great deal of time working within the B2B sector, among other things, and social media is a growing and or pervasive program within a comprehensive, integrated communications and service strategy. In almost every scenario I’ve encountered, executives, marcom and service executives, and brand managers have generally assumed that social and interactive activities and programming were ideally best suited for consumer applications. However, as we recently explored, in Social Media, it’s not just business, it’s business-to-business.

Indeed, Social Media is not limited to B2C applications, its impact and effects are actively measured and felt in B2B as well as government, education, military, and other prominent verticals. As decision makers take to the social web, their research, activity, communication, and most importantly, their relationships only intensify over time.

If you’re working in B2B, perhaps this post will provide you with value. Or, at the very least, it will arm with you data necessary to convince, compel, and persuade those skeptical or uninspired colleagues, clients, and managers.

Business.com recently conducted a study that evaluated Social Media activities of those in B2B and B2C. In its report, “2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study,” Business.com found that North American companies focused on B2B were much more rigorous in the world of social media than those in B2C. As you’ll see, B2B leads the fray across the entire regiment of campaigns and programs.

Social Media: B2B vs. B2C

Maintained company-related profiles on social networks:

B2B: 81%
B2C: 67%

Participate in Twitter:

B2B: 75%
B2C: 49%

Host blog/s:

B2B: 74%
B2C: 55%

Monitor brand mentions:

B2B: 73%
B2C: 55%

Engage in discussions:

B2B: 66%
B2C: 43%

Participate in Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn, forums:

B2B: 59%
B2C: 44%

Upload content (social objects) to Social Networks:

B2B: 50%
B2C: 32%

Manage a community dedicated to customers or prospects:

B2B: 49%
B2C: 51%

Monitor/support user ratings and reviews:

B2B: 49%
B2C: 51%

Produce Webinars or podcasts:

B2B: 46%
B2C: 22%

Advertise on social networks:

B2B: 42%
B2C: 54%

Utilize social bookmarking sites such as delicious and digg:

B2B: 38%
B2C: 21%

Employee recruiting:

B2B: 36%
B2C: 27%

As expected, those companies engaging in social media, whether B2B or B2C, focused efforts on creating social network profiles, microblogging, blogs, and brand monitoring, hitting a high of 81%. Most social activities however, maintained a level of participation with an average of around 50%. There is room for growth for brand engagement regardless of industry.

Business.com also evaluated where companies were focusing their attention and resources. The study surfaced that not only are a greater number of B2B companies experimenting with Social Media, they are also extending their presence across multiple networks. However, B2C businesses dominated engagement within Facebook and MySpace.

Notice the disparity between B2B and B2C adoption of Twitter. If these numbers truly reflect that of the greater community of businesses, B2B companies are at the forefront of this wildly scrutinized and popularized social property.

Facebook

B2B: 77%
B2C: 83%

Twitter

B2B: 73%
B2C: 45%

LinkedIn

B2B: 56%
B2C: 27%

YouTube

B2B: 43%
B2C: 30%

MySpace

B2B: 14%
B2C: 23%

FriendFeed

B2B: 9%
B2C: 2%

Plurk

B2B: 1%
B2C: 0%

Other

B2B: 4%
B2C: 8%

Also according to the Business.com study, 60% of B2B respondents leverage Twitter search to monitor brand or company mentions compared to just 35% of those in B2C. With Facebook slowly revising their privacy settings to open up real-time search capabilities within the 350 million strong network and MySpace recently announcing the availability of a real-time API, businesses will have the ability, and the responsibility, to search for relevant conversations outside of Twitter and Google.

Google search results, at least prior to the real-time search revolution, also proved valuable for mining and unearthing relevant content. 59% of B2B and 40% of B2C companies report using Google Alerts and 61% of B2C and 60% of B2B reported that they actively googled themselves.

With the rapid evolution of search, business monitoring will assuredly shift its focus from traditional to real-time. Just recently, Google announced both Social Search, the inclusion of content generated by your social graph in traditional search results, as well as real-time results from Twitter and other social networks. We already know that customers, regardless of industry, are actively taking to search engines to learn more about brands and products mentioned in their social stream.

A New Era of Influence

- 20% of tweets published are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives

- About half of Twitter users who were introduced to a brand on Twitter were compelled to search for additional information

- 8% of those who came into contact with a brand name on Twitter went on to search for additional information on search engines with 34% searching other social networks

Customers Take to the Social Web

- 44% admitted that they have recommended products in Social Media and 39% stated that they have discussed a product specifically on Twitter

- 46% of Facebook users talk about or recommending products on the 225 million strong social network

- Social Media already accounted for 18% of all information searching in early 2009

- 30% claim they wished to learn more

- 27% reported that they were receptive to receiving invitations for events, special offers or promotions

- 25% stated that they visited a site after learning about a product on their social network of preference

Engagement Has Its Rewards

In a recent Razorfish study, 40.1% of consumers reported friending a brand on Facebook or MySpace. Once a connection was established, the resulting activity was profoundly beneficial to the awareness and potential revenue of the brand.

Recommend the brand to others:

Always: 22.94%
Usually: 39.15%
Sometimes: 33.92%

Consider the brand when in the market for a similar product of service:

Always: 22.69%
Usually: 40.90%
Sometimes: 34.41%

Raise awareness of the brand:

Always: 21.45%
Usually: 38.65%
Sometimes: 36.66%

Purchase a product/service from the brand:

Always: 17.46%
Usually: 42.89
Sometimes: 36.66%

ROI: Return on Investment or Ignorance?

I recently wrote about the lacking of an industry-wide practice for measuring social media. According to one study, 85% of businesses engaged in interactive programs were not measuring the ROI.

Even though measurement was more pervasive in B2B over B2C, participating companies appeared to actively measure social media in this case – at least those surveyed anyway. B2C companies tended to focus on revenues to assess ROI (where the I represents investment and involvement). B2B companies typically evaluated Web traffic, brand awareness, and the quality and volume of lead generation. That being the case, B2B and B2C reported that Web traffic was considered the top metric.

It appears that an industry typically characterized as lethargic is in actuality, pioneering new forms of communications, service, sales and branding in the social realm.

Questions remain for me however, in order to better ascertain how and why businesses are using these new tools and to what extent. For example, I would ask those within B2B and B2C what their level of engagement and commitment to social media is across multiple departments within the organization. I firmly believe that every department affected by outside behavior or those that have the ability to affect it will ultimately benefit from socializing. Therefore, conducting a benchmark survey to capture the state of the industry as it corresponds specifically to service, sales, branding, communications, HR, etc., will help us better surface opportunities and potential strategies. In addition, I suggest introducing one more set of questions that focuses on what I refer to as the “ a ha” vs. the “uh oh” moment, when a company decides to embrace or experiment in Social Media. Are businesses jumping online because they realized the opportunity specific to a network or because they felt it necessary based on a negative discussion or series of negative and public instances.

The Attention Economy and Earned Relevance

Attention is increasingly thinning and as such, it is considered a precious commodity.

Whether it’s B2B or B2C, we are each in the end, consumers. And, as consumers, we seek information online in order to make more informed decisions based on research, the advice of friends, peers, and experts, and the recognition of our questions and commentary directly from brands. In order to make an impact on the bottom line through sales and the ongoing investment in engendering goodwill and earning loyalty, we must focus our time and resources on the attention dashboards of our prospects and customers, as well as those who also influence them. If we do not, we will quickly find ourselves outside of the parameters within every business decision-making process.

If it is one thing that we learn right here, right now, is that Social Media affects every part of the buying cycle. This is why a company-wide SRM program must be engineered and deployed in order to effectively monitor behavior and sentiment to effectively and genuinely shape perception, cultivate meaningful relations, and inspire action.

General Buying Cycle

1. Acknowledging the need

2. Awareness

3. Research

4. Consideration (the short list)

5. Evaluation

6. Purchase

7. Applications

8. The Experience

9. Reaction

10. Opportunity for advocacy

It should also not go unsaid, that while women rule the social web, the buying process in B2C is also influenced by women in a relationship setting. According to Marti Barletta, author of Marketing to Women and PrimeTime Women, when men and women buy as partners, women control at least four out of five stages of the purchasing process. While this isn’t representative of the bigger pitcure, it is still nonetheless interesting and worthy of consideration.

This is why in the world of B2C marketing, women are considered the Chief Household Officer as they’re actively driving and steering purchase decisions.

Five stages of the purchasing process:

1. Kick-off – women
2. Research – women
3. Purchase – men
4. Ownership – women
5. Word-of-mouth – women

It is how we engage at each step of this cycle that determines our place and stature within the inevitable path of attention, analysis, and action. Once we learn how and where to engage, we can then focus our efforts on earning affinity and advocacy. This is our time to garner relevance through the intelligent practice of poignant and relevant listening, understanding, and participation. In parallel, this is also our opportunity to establish authority and attention. Without it, it’s easy to vanish from the cycle of awareness and consideration. Out of sight, out of mind…

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In a conversation recently with good friend Jeremiah Owyang, he encouraged and motivated me to finally publish this post…

Over the last decade, Social Media has slowly evolved not only as a new content publishing, sharing, and discovery medium, but more importantly as a peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world conversations that affect the perception, engagement, and overall direction of the brands we represent.

Socialized media didn’t invent “conversations,” it simply organized and amplified them.

My foray into the social web and D2C (direct to customer) engagement as a complement to traditional media harks back to the early days of bulletin boards, which evolved into communities such as Yahoo Groups as well as the new era of HTML-efficient enthusiasts who created influential websites that shared news, thoughts, rants, and observations related to their passions and interests (the precursor to blogs).

Here were are, over a decade later, and mainstream brands are finally starting to pay attention. We’re waking up to a new world of opportunity that no less changes everything about how, what, and to whom we communicate.

Blogs paved the way for individual authority.

MySpace and Facebook carried the baton and created an important paradigm of visible tastemakers and trendsetters.

And now Twitter is forcing the next level of reinvention for how we identify, track and respond to online conversations that are pertinent to brand perception and resonance. Twitter is the catalyst that will spark the change for how brands truly engage across the Conversation Prism a.k.a. The Social Web.

Reviewing Nielsen’s analysis, Twitter growth has skyrocketed by almost 1,400% in just one year and projections predict similar jumps ahead.

Perhaps most interestingly, Nielson documented something that I’ve been observing for quite some time, Twitter’s largest adoption is stemming from adults, not primarily via teens or college students as you might expect. In February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience.

In a recent post regarding Nielsen research, this is similar to the demographic that is driving Facebook’s growth as well. While, Facebook started out as a service for university students but now almost one third of its global audience is aged 35-49 years of age and almost one quarter is over 50 years old.

For a detailed view of the demographics defining individual communities, please read, “Humanizing Social Networks.”

Recently, I wrote about how to track brands on Twitter and also measure their effectiveness in order to base your listening and response strategies across every affected division from public relations to customer service to product development to HR and finance.

SocialRadar recently released the top Twitter Brands for February 2009 based on overall Tweets measured by day (green) and over the course of the month (blue).

While Twitter is the shiny catalyst for corporate introspection, the social web is one big stream that requires listening, empathy, and also engagement and response.

InsideFacebook recently shared a great story of how brands can cultivate communities on Facebook using Coca-Cola as a leading example. Did you know that the Coca-Cola fan page is the 2nd most popular Page on all of Facebook with over 3.3 million fans, second only to Barack Obama? Did you know that the fan page was actually created by true fans and not the Coca-Cola marketing department?

In a recent AdAge story, the two founders, Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski, shared their story of how Coca-Cola asked to partner with them to manage the Page in a move that showed a humble and effective approach to social media.

For guidance and ideas for other forms of corporate sCRM, visit Peter Kim’s blog.

Establishing the Conversation Index

It’s not just about the networks we KNOW, it’s also about the communities we don’t know – this is the source of inspiration behind the Conversation Prism. Listening to the dialog related to specific keywords within every community, initially, will help us define and chart an accurate social map that pinpoints the exact communities that require our attention, the volume and frequency of relevant conversations, and the tonality and reach of those conversations within their respective networks.

This is what I call establishing the “Conversation Index” so that you have something to benchmark against moving forward.

Tools such as BuzzGain, Radian6, Trackur, PeopleBrowsr, SocialRadar (and many, many others) are helping brands monitor and steer dialog to ensure online reputation management (ORM) in and around Twitter, while also presenting individual, real world opportunities for building relationships with the very people who contribute to your brand essence. Many tools also have integrated call center-like functionality to measure, route and manage conversations to streamline and improve the process of engagement along with influencer satisfaction.

Online discussions, rants, and observations are either alarming brand managers or fooling them into a trap of under estimation. Either way, the statusphere, blogopsphere, communities and networks, and the social web has ushered in a new genre of Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM) that answers questions, solves problems, establishes authority, and builds relationships and loyalty, one tweet, blog post, update, and “like,” at a time.

Conversations are flying in Twitter Time, communities are broade”Ning,” friends are feeding, and brands are Facebooking their customers.

While only a glimpse of what will transpire over the next several years, Twitter is humanizing the strategies and the tactics for engagement with every 140 character tweet – or 120 if you want to spark retweets (RTs).

At the very least, simply listening directly in each relevant network is a great way to start:
- Try blogsearch.google.com for relevant blog posts.
- BackType to reveal the conversations that exist about you in the comments section of blog posts.
- Search.Twitter.com for related tweets or Advanced Twitter Search to measure conversations by timeframe, sentiment, location, or individuals.
- FriendFeed.com for comments about your brand from various social networks aggregated in one stream.
- Ning, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook Groups to see what others have built around your company or product.

This isn’t something you can jump into without first reading the instructions. Your failure to first listen, empathize, and formulate a genuine strategy that inspires the community to grow the community will unfold publicly and damage the very attributes you wished to promote.

This is about becoming the customer you want to embrace.

Tools aside, it’s your role and actions in the engagement equation of Social CRM that serves as the cadence to future dialog and ultimately shapes brand personality and allegiance with every beat of your social rhythm.

Helpful Posts:

- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Tracking Brands on Twitter to Improve How You Listen and Engage
- Make Tweet Love – Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The State of Social Media
- Free ebook: The Essential Guide to Social Media
- Free ebook: Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media

Connect with me on:
Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, or Facebook
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Businesses, individuals, and organizations will, from time to time, make honest mistakes or in some unfortunate cases, intentionally support unethical decisions to dissuade or conceal something significant from its public.

Whether it’s an oversight or a matter of deception, savvy companies usually employ and deploy a crises response team to prepare for, manage and attempt to positively spin the potential backlash from customers, partners, and employees related to almost anything.

Crisis communications is a branch of PR that is designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization, usually from a reactive response, facing a swelling public challenge to its reputation, brand, and community.

Throughout the course of history, we’ve learned that all that’s required to ignite a negative firestorm is a spark from a single voice or an organized congregation.

If a conversation takes place on the Web and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it really happen?

More often than not, we miss the very things that provide insight into a future response simply because we’re not conditioned or trained to proactively discover and diffuse threats or negative experiences.

Our weakness, however, is also our opportunity to manage and also respond to any potentially damaging or menacing public groundswell.

Conversations related to your brand, company, executives, products, and competitors take place each and every day, without our knowledge and perhaps worse, without our participation.

In the era of the Social Web, a story, and the ensuing public recruitment, rallying, and support, can rapidly spread unlike any crisis wildfire witnessed or experienced in previous generations.

Social Media is pervasive. At the very least, it is transforming how we communicate with each other and also how we discover and share information. As the adoption of Social Tools and applications progresses from the left to the right of the bell curve, Social Media will simply coalesce back to “the Web.” But, its migration, exploration, experimentation, and education will only contribute to its significance and resilience and ultimately change behavior and expand the infrastructure for corporate communications in the process. Regardless of genre, the sum of all social channels today equate to a powerful, influential, and revolutionary archetype for exposing and diffusing public opinion.

Perception is formed through the unique, individually-filtered experiences we each bring to the table. In that regard, our brand, and more specifically, our actions are open to public interpretation, support, and dissection. It’s what you say about you, what they hear, how they share that story, and how you weave that insight into future product and service iterations, communications, corporate infrastructure, and public conversations.

The tools and platforms available today are sophisticated, evolved, and designed for social distribution and redistribution. The Social Web forces a new level of understanding and participation in order for all communications professionals, in addition to crises response and reputation management teams, to understand its dynamics and the prevalence of information, positive, neutral, and especially negative.

To date, crisis communications and reputation management were relegated as a reactive response, while the groundwork for a potential predicament and the development of strategic communique is among the best practices for proactive crisis planning.

The traditional crisis communications planning and response workflow:

- Crisis Planning
- Negative Groundswell
- Crisis Response
- Public Relations
- Assessment/Monitoring

In the Social Web, I propose that many, if not a majority of potential crises are now avoidable through proactive listening, engagement, response, conversation, humbleness, and transparency (repeat).

I’d like to introduce you to an old, but new again, dynamic process to integrate into the existing corporate communications and marketing workflow. Today’s social tools and communities that can work against us, can also work with us, when proactively managed and embraced with an open mind, sincere intent, and genuine participation.

- Active
- Listening
- Observation
- Conversation
- Learning
- Planning
- Continued Adaptation and Engagement

The art and science of proactive listening, observation, and participation will not only inspire the creation of in touch, relevant, and poignant PR and marketing strategies, but will also dramatically reduce the potential for reactive response and crisis communications programs. Crisis communications teams can also partner with those responsible for monitoring online brand reputations (ORM – online reputation management) or vice versa, to jointly listen, respond, and incite change from within. This creates a more effective “public relations” organization.

The point is that this is about proactively diffusing visible, but not yet large-scale predicaments before they’re full-blown public crises. And, also through direct listening, engagement, and actively addressing concerns both inside and out of the organization, we’re diverting the momentum from tropical storms before they have an opportunity to form unforeseen and unanticipated hurricanes. It’s the ability to avoid a storm without knowing a storm was brewing by identifying weaknesses and opportunities as they emerge.

This is community-driven communications in its purest form which begets a community-focused and customer-centric organization.

Everything starts with openness and the ability to learn and adapt. It’s the acceptance that it doesn’t matter if the customer is always right. After all, a happy customer will share their good fortune with a group of friends and peers, but an unhappy customer will tell everybody.

Perception is everything.

For communicators, it’s our role to actively listen and translate conversations into actionable next steps. It’s not an automated process. It requires dedication and empowerment. Much of this responsibility is falling upon community managers and the new role of research librarians who are quickly acclimating to online conversations and how and where they apply to the internal decision makers, traffic coordinators, and metrics analysts. By partnering with these new, socially adept resources, Public Relations can can more accurately and genuinely participate with influencers, whether they’re media, analysts, bloggers, or tastemakers. When we step back and assess our markets, we just may find that they’re collectively one in the same.

What if you don’t yet have these roles or resources to help you listen and follow meaningful conversations? It’s not impossible for you to proactively monitor conversations and the cultures and behavior associated within each digital society in order to identify and prioritize opportunities for engagement, reform, and evolution.

Start with using free search blog search tools such as:

- blogsearch.google.com (set up Google Alerts via RSS or email)
- Technorati
- Blogpulse

As we all know, or should know, the social web extends far beyond blogs, relevant online conversations are pervasive and rampant in social networks and microforums as well. In that regard, be sure that your initial waves of search include:

- search.twitter.com
- Ning
- Facebook
- Google and Yahoo Groups
- Uservoice
- Getsatisfaction

For those with a moderate budget to evaluate dedicated SRM (social media relationship management) or ORM tools, consider:

- Trackur
- BuzzGain
- Radian6
- BuzzLogic
- BrandsEye

Search for keywords related to your business, such as the company and product name, key executives, as well as scouting discussions for the “suck” or “die” factor. This includes adding a combination of the following criteria in your search process:

- “product+sucks”
- “company+sucks”
- “die+company”
- “i+hate+company”

As the Web itself grew in pervasiveness, it also paved the way for customers to easily launch sites to vent publicly. Examples already number in the thousands, with some capturing significant public attention including starbucked.com, ihatestarbucks.com, boycottwalmart.org and againstthewal.com.

Fairwinds recently released a study that documents the power of Internet gripe sites. The Wall Street Journal explored the topic with an in-depth article, “How to Handle ‘IHateYourCompany.com,’” which explored what some companies are doing, or not doing, to protect their brands online.

In its study, FairWinds researched the Web to identify gripe sites specifically containing “sucks.com.” The study uncovered over 20,000 domains with only 2,000 ending in the phrase “stinks.com.” Of the major consumer-facing companies surveyed, only 35% own the domain name for their brand followed by the word “sucks.”

But domain names are only one of the many opportunities for customers to share their discontent, and in the new era of the two-way web, communications, customer service, and brand and reputation management teams must all work together together to actively survey the landscape to detect and diagnose negative experiences.

The Social Media and conversation landscape is a diverse universe. In order to identify a potentially dangerous asteroid on a glancing or full-blown collision course with your brand, you’ll also need a powerful telescope, or, a “Conversation Prism.”

The Conversation Prism was designed to provide a snapshot view of dialogue within mainstream and vertical social networks and communities that may be consequential to your brand. Every network provides a search box to unearth threads of discussions tied to connected keywords and inherent developments, negative or positive, that may affect the company brand and reputation.

Conversations and developing crises are probable across a multitude of online channels, including:

- Blogs and Comments
- Microcommunities aka Microforums
- Social Networks
- Lifestreams
- Customer Networks
- Groups

The ensuing conversations tied to your brand can quickly and easily amass, across multiple networks simultaneously. Don’t let those conversations fall upon deaf ears.

For the first time, we have the ability to identify and address potential crises as they surface. And not only do we have the ability to engage with people to address their grievances or discontent, we can also learn from each engagement and feed the corresponding lessons, experiences, and criticisms back into the sales, service, and product development departments to change everything for the better.

It’s the difference between simply placating customers and improving our business and products to satisfy many others who would have been potentially exposed to a potential deficiency.

Customers are among the new influencers and have the tools and platforms readily available to them in order to share their experiences and potentially incite the masses.

It’s not just about the gripes we’ve identified, it’s about the dialogue and actively and publicly addressing each issue to minimize the unforeseen eruptions from those who have yet to publish or rally others against us.

While our control has been crowd-sourced, perception management and crisis communications are ours to lead. Perception is reality and it’s our responsibility to invest in the relationships and the correlated activities that will help us cultivate and manage an industry leading, market relevant, and in-tune brand.

Listen, learn, and adapt. In the Social Web, and in the real world of business, companies will earn the relationships, and the crowd-sourced brand, they deserve.
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UPDATE:

Now available as a downloadable and printable Word or PDF file at Docstoc and Scribd.
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Recommended Reading on PR 2.0:
- The State of Social Media 2008
- In the Social Web, We Are All Brand Managers
- New Communication Theory & the New Roles for a New World of Marketing
- Comcast Cares and Why Your Business Should Too
- Will The Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Free ebook: Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
- PR 2.0: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
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Crisis Communications 2.0 Series:
Where the Streets Have Names: Learning from Bono’s Facebook Dilemma
Nike, Just Do It: When a Local Story Runs Away on the Web
Apple and the iPhone Price Bomb
The Skype is Falling
Microsoft PR Sparks a Blogstorm