Brent's Social CRM Blog

Social Blog Carnival: Getting the 411 on Social ROI

This post is part of the Social ROI Blog Carnival at Think Customers: the 1to1 Media blog. Visit the blog carnival post “Calculating the ROI of Social Media” to check out the full lists of posts from numerous well-known social media thought leaders.

As part of the One on One conversation series I do over at SmallBizTrends.com, I recently talked with Cory Hartlen, a product marketing manager with Radian6.  During our discussion Cory mentioned quite a number of things that hit on the topic of social media ROI.

One story that really caught my attention was around how some of their clients were using listening tools from an HR perspective. By listening for mentions of people that have graduated with their MBA, or are looking forward to graduating with their MBA, a few of their clients had success in finding potential candidates for their junior executive training programs. So instead of having to rely on more traditional avenues for recruitment from headhunters, they were able to use social listening to help reduce some of those costs.

From a more traditional angle, Cory said Radian6 themselves listen to social conversations so when people reach out to their social networks and ask for advice, they can lend a hand and share a link to our review of monitoring systems. Then those conversations are very measurable because they can figure out how many leads they are getting from the social space over a given time period and get those input into their system.  Then they actually see how many of those leads they are able to close on over a given time period to get their ROI from a program like that.

One last point Cory made is that he believes when it comes to social media ROI it all comes down to goals and strategy. And this seems to be backed up by the results of CRM Essentials/SMB Group Social Business Study performed last year. 

Our survey of 750 executives at small and mid-size companies found that companies who characterized their approach to social media as strategic seemed to find more success with it than those who felt their organizations were more informal with its use.  In fact, people working at strategically social companies were twelve times more likely to predict an increase of twenty percent in 2011 revenues over the previous year, compared to more informal social media users. And employees who said their companies did not use social media were twice as likely to expect a decrease in 2011 revenues compared to strategic users.

Below are a few differences in approach to social between strategic vs. informal users:

• Strategic users 2.5X more likely to have Sales involved than Informal users
• Strategic users 2.5X more likely to have HR involved than Informal users
• Strategic users almost 3X more likely to use social media for product development than Informal users
• Strategic users 2X more likely to use social media for research than Informal users
• Strategic users 2X more likely to use social media for internal collaboration than Informal users
• Strategic users 2X more likely to have integrated CRM with social than Informal users
• Social media was 2X more likely to be selected as top activity for improving customer service by Strategic users than Informal users

And along with the differences in how strategic organizations leveraged social media throughout the organization, they also kept track of KPIs differently:

• Strategic users 5X more likely to measure customer retention metrics than Informal users
• 3X more likely to measure sales conversion rate from online community
• 2.5X more likely to measure number of followers on social networks
• 2X more likely to measure net promoter score
• 3X more likely to measure share of conversation
• 1.8X more likely to measure new ideas generated

 

When asked about the ROI of social media, Cory says you could very easily ask what the ROI of his telephone is.  Without a goal and a measurable strategy, you pretty much are left in the dark. But if you decide to make three more sales this month, then you know you need to make X number of phone calls to be able to close that number of sales.  So now you have a goal and a strategy which can be measured to prove how successful you were. 

He thinks that social media is no different, and the numbers seem to back this up.

 

 

Come to Atlanta to Get Down to Social Biz…and for Some Biscuits

I have the opportunity to go to a lot of CRM/Social events during the course of the year, most of which are held in cool places like San Francisco, Boston and Orlando.  And while I love going to those places, I’ve always wanted to have one of those events down here in Atlanta.  And while I’ve threatened to do
it, I would always find an excuse (or 200) not to do it.  Not the right venue, not the right time of year, nobody in the industry would come, nobody likes me… man I better stop before I really depress myself.

Anyway, thanks to my friends and some great sponsors, I’ve completely run out of excuses.  So I have no other choice than to say that on Friday February 3^rd I’d love for 
you to join me in Atlanta for the Getting Down to Social Business conference being held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Conference Center.  It’s also being called Social Biz Atlanta because the event site is SocialBizAtlanta.com.  And it is free to attend if you register online in advance.

This is a full day event that will focus on the need for companies to transition their approach to “social” away from a narrow, reactionary set of disconnected activities, to a full-fledged corporate culture strategically aligned to build long-lasting relationships with today’s empowered customer.  And it's aimed directly at small and mid-size businesses - and even you enterprise folks working at the departmental level of your organization operating like a small business.  

Now I said my friends deserve all the “blame” for this making this happen, and let me tell you why…

A Venue I Couldn’t Pass Up

I’ve said to many people that I’d only organize an event if I could get a space like the GTRI Conference Center, because it’s a great location in Midtown Atlanta, has great amenities for attendees, and even has free parking.  This made for a great excuse for not doing something, until Donna Ennis of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute said I could use the GTRI venue.   Gee THANKS Donna!

Incredible List of World Class Thought Leaders Volunteering to Come

 Now that I couldn’t use the venue excuse, I really was relying heavily on the “nobody would come to Atlanta” excuse.  And, of course, not only did people want to come, many of them even offered without me having to ask.  I mean, who would’ve thought a group of thought leaders, experts and influencers like this would say yes:

• Anita Campbell, CEO and Publisher, Small Business Trends,  
• Robin Carey, CEO, Social Media Today,
• Ginger Conlon, Executive Editor, 1to1 Media,
• Bert DuMars, Vice President of Digital Marketing and eCommerce, Newell Rubbermaid,
• Donna Ennis, Project Director, MBDA Business Center,
• Art Hall, Director, Alvarez and Marsal,
• Cory Hartlen, Product Marketing Manager, Radian6,
• Jeanne Hopkins, Vice President of Marketing, HubSpot,
• Paul Greenberg, President of the 56 Group & Author of CRM at the Speed of Light,
• Adam Naide, Executive Director of Social Media Marketing, Cox Communications,
• Jeff Nolan, VP of Product Marketing, Get Satisfaction,
• Larry Ritter,SVP & General Manager, Sage CRM Solutions,
• Michael Thomas, Customer Success Manager, Microsoft,
• Matt Trifiro, SVP of Marketing, Assistly,
• Lauren Vargas, Community Management Strategist, Aetna,

Emily Yellin, Author of Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us

OK so I knew Paul G. would come and do it even if it were just me and him…which would have made it a CRM Playaz episode anyways.   But who knew all these great folks from great companies would say yes? Now I was down to my last excuse…

I CAN Have Regular Guy (or Gal) Food For Lunch At One Of These Things?

This is the biggie.  Having been to a number of cool events, the lunch situation can sometimes be dicey.  And I said to myself if I ever organized an event I’d have to have some “regular guy” food available.  Something I could sink my teeth into like some Chick-fil-a; a chicken biscuit perhaps...  And just when I thought it was illegal to serve this kind of food at a business event, I found out that I could actually do it.

No More Excuses…I’m Talking to You!

So now I’m all out of reasons for why I shouldn’t host a social business event here in Atlanta.  And due to having great sponsors like Microsoft, Radian6, Sage, Assistly and Georgia Tech, we’re able to make this whole event free! So if you work at a small or mid-size business and live in or near Atlanta (or you’ve been looking for a good reason to come here) you’ve run out of excuses not to attend.  Let’s see:

• Great Speakers – Check!
• Great Venue – Check!
• Great Location (with free parking) – Check!
• Great Eats (if you’re like me and dig Chick-fil-a) – check!
• Great information on an important topic – Check!
• And it’s free – Check! (or is that no check since you don’t need your checkbook )

In all seriousness we really do think we’ve put together a great day of content coming directly from experts, practitioners and vendors who can help your organization transition to becoming a social business.  So here are the details:

Title: Getting Down to Social Business: The New Business as Usual in the Age of the Collaborative Relationship (AKA Social Biz Atlanta)

Date: Friday February3rd

Time: 8:30-4pm

Place: Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center

250 14^th Street NW

Atlanta, GA 30318

Cost: None with online registration

Event Site: SocialBizAtlanta.com

I hope to see you there!

 

HubSpot Introduces Marketing Grader

The folks who brought you the Website Grader, the tool that has graded over four million sites to see how SEO-friendly they were, is at it again.  HubSpot – the makers of the popular Internet marketing platform and a host of free tools to help measure your effectiveness on Twitter, Facebook, writing press releases, etc. – released their latest creation: The Marketing Grader tool.  And yes, in the tradition of the other grader tools, it’s free.

According to the press release:

"Marketing Grader analyzes 30+ measures of marketing effectiveness – usually in under 60 seconds – and grades the business on a 1-100 scale.  Marketing Grader evaluates performance at the “top of the funnel” (ability to generate new interest and traffic), “the middle of the funnel” (whether that traffic converts into prospects, leads and customers) and analytics (measuring and comparing the right things)".

As popular as the Website Grader tool was (and still is), I think this one has the capacity to be even more popular, as we're now in the place with content then we were in 2006.  Content goes to where the people are, so Marketing Grader may be able to give you a better picture of how successful you are a getting your message to the people, compared to getting the people to you.  As I think about it, they are both important, so you probably should use Website Grader and Marketing Grader to get the full picture.  And it won't cost you a thing to do it either.

This is just another reason why I think 2012 is the year marketing automation hits big time at the small business level.

One on One Back Story: Jeff Haynie of Appcelerator

My latest One-on-One conversation just went up at SmallBizTrends.com.  Jeff Haynie, ceo and co-founder of Appcelerator joined me to share his perspective on the fast moving area of mobile app development.   Appcelerator is a platform and services company that enables Web developers to build applications for smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

Appcelerator also partners with IDC on a great quarterly survey of mobile developers to track what trends are taking place in the industry.  The latest report came out earlier this month and can be downloaded for free.   A couple of nuggets that stood out for me include:

• Kindle Fire is the Android device mobile app developers in North America are most interested in creating apps for...already
• Kindle Fire’s low cost and numerous content offerings are the two main reasons driving this interest
• Windows Phone 7 is has separated from the pack to become the clear third choice (after Apple and Android) among mobile platforms, while BlackBerry slips further behind
• Connected TV app development continues to slide.

There’s a ton of stuff in the report, so if you have any interest in what mobile app developers are focusing their efforts on check out this report…each quarter they put it out.

You can check out the conversation and see an edited transcript by going to the show page at SBT.

Here’s a quick take Jeff had on the impact of app marketplaces, and in particular the Amazon Android marketplace:

“There’s a perfect storm from external factors. Apple has helped the world understand how to buy things digitally. Apps have been somewhat removed from the traditional process of [software] distribution and maintenance, which has really helped oil the machine.

Amazon has a phenomenal consumer transaction engine, combined with Web services infrastructures, which is a bigger and bigger part of their core business. That is going to propel the adoption of applications, and it provides a great community from a distribution and marketing standpoint”.

I couldn’t agree more about what Jeff said about Amazon, but if you’ve read this blog recently you probably already knew that.

In addition to all the great insights Jeff has to offer about mobile app development, he also shares why he moved to Silicon Valley from Atlanta to start Appcelerator – and why he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what he has with the company anywhere else.

So check out the conversation today if you get a chance.  Jeff can’t, because he and his wife took their family on a mission trip to Mexico.  In his own words – “This week we decided to take the family down to experience life in a different world and work in an orphanage. Let's all be thankful for what we have and remember that a lot of people have very little this holiday”.

I couldn’t have said it any better…

 

Reaching The Social Customer: New Tools, New Strategies - Webinar from Social Media Today

I know our collective minds are beginning to focus on turkey and football - ok I guess my collective mind has turned to turkey and football - so before I dive mouth-first into Thanksgiving there is one thing I wanted to mention.  My friends at Social Media Today are hosting a free webinar next Tuesday (November 29th) at Noon et focused on tools and strategies for reaching today's social customer.

The webinar, sponsored by Marketo, will focus on:

• New tools and strategies to communicate with the social customer
• Why listening to customers is essential
• Sales intelligence to learn more from the customer
• Engaging and retaining customers
• Customer-centric vs. customer service?
• The Use Cases for Social Customer Management

I have the pleasure of moderating the following great panel of experts:

• Jon Miller, VP of Marketing and Co-Founder, Marketo
• Adam Metz, VP of Business Development, Metz Consulting
• Michael M. Lazerow, Chairman and CEO, Buddy Media, Inc.

Here the details:

Title: Reaching The Social Customer: New Tools, New Strategies

Date: Tuesday November 29th

Time: Noon ET / 9am PT

 

Cost: Free

Registration: You can use this link to register. 

Hope you can join us next week.  And I hope each of you eat as much turkey and watch as much football as I plan to over the course of the next 4 days...although I don't think it's possible.

One on One Back Story: Phil Fernandez of Marketo

I host a conversation series over at SmallBizTrends.com called One on One.  I’ve been doing it for about a year. The series is sponsored by RIM, and allows us to gather some really great insights from some of the best and brightest folks driving small business and entrepreneurism today.

 

The conversations are typically published on Fridays right before lunchtime here on the east coast.  Just think of them as informal chats with people who have been there, done that, still doing that….and because of their experiences have great insights to share with those of us who want to do, well….that. People like Nimble's Jon Ferrara, Hearsay Social's Clara Shih, Zuora's Tien Tzuo, Google's Rajen Sheth, Social Media Today's Robin Carey, and a host of others.

The latest One on One posted a few days ago features the Phil Fernandez, CEO of revenue performance management vendor Marketo.  Marketo  built its reputation as a leader in the marketing automation space, and recently announced a service geared specifically for SMBs, with Spark by Marketo.

With companies like Marketo  InfusionSoft, HubSpot, Pardot and others focusing applications and services to help SMBs optimize their marketing efforts, it was great to hear Phil talk about how automation can impact customer retention.  In fact he encourages their customers not to think about marketing automation as just a customer acquisition tool, but as a way to cost effectively stay in touch with their customer base over time to build deep customer relationships.

You can check out the edited transcript of the conversation over at show page on SmallBizTrends by clicking here.  And you can check out the full conversation down below:

With more marketing automation vendors focusing on the SMB space, 2012 should be a big year for adopting more sophisticated, integrated marketing initiatives.  I haven't seen Spark as of yet, but plan to get a briefing/demo in the near future.  But after talking to Phil, and knowing Marketo's reputation in the space, I'd be surprised if Spark doesn't become a player at the small business level.

Amazon is on Fire, But Kindle Isn't Prime Reason They are the Company to Watch in 2012

I've been playing with my new Kindle Fire for the past 24 hours, and I have to say it's a nice little device. The display is nice and crisp. Video streaming from Amazon worked great, or maybe I was just really excited watching episode one of Felix the Cat while walking around my house...

You do get the feeling that they've optimized this device for streaming content from their servers. That's really important since it only has a 6.54G hard drive. Netflix streaming is good as well. Battery life seems about on par with other devices. Sound quality is pretty good as well.

It's a nice little device, but you really need to be an Amazon Prime member to get the most out of it. This is definitely a content consuming device, and you Prime gives you access to no cost downloads and free book borrowing. And I can't wait 'til they beef up their movie/tv content libraries.  

But I'm not writing this to do an in depth review of Kindle Fire.  Believe me you'll be able to find those anywhere you look. I’m writing this because year in and year out Amazon does things that impact customer experiences and business models.  And while so much of our collective business focus is on Google and Facebook and Apple - which is totally understandable - Amazon is the most fascinating company to watch for me.  I expect that to be the case in 2012 as well.

I think I bought my first book on Bezos and the Amazon.com crew in 1995 or 1996, back before I ever  Googled anything and before Mark Zuckerberg was born…ok not really, but he had to be in grade school at most.  And when many people panned them for not turning a profit in the early days of ecommerce, they stuck with it and proved to everyone buying online was the future.

They perfected the art of distribution and logistics, and turned fulfillment into competitive advantage.  They used the transactional and behavior data from the things we bought and the products we looked at to recommend similar things…in order to sell us more stuff more efficiently.  And by applying extreme analysis and business intelligence tools and best practices, they combined their logistical expertise with their customer knowledge and created Amazon Prime.

I’ve been an Amazon Prime member since the beginning, because paying $79 a year to get free two day shipping on anything I buy seemed too good to be true.  Apparently I wasn’t alone in this thinking as millions of people jumped on board.  So Amazon turned sporadic purchases into a membership program that –at least in my case- led to more buying (and more regular buying) than would have occurred without it.  To me this was a stroke of genius, and one of the early examples of the power of The Subscription Economy.

I haven’t even got to how they changed the way most of us buy books with the original Kindle.  Or how when they added profiles years ago to your Amazon account they created a more social experience to buying stuff long before most people knew what social networks were.  Or how once they built out their infrastructure and best practices for running their business they made it available to other business and became pioneers in cloud computing.  Or how they created their own Android App Store to leverage the power of mobility. Or now how they’ve created their own Android tablet in the Kindle Fire – which is optimized to work with their cloud services for streaming content…with their new Silk browser.

Yeah the Kindle Fire is cool little device that is getting a lot of attention, and at its price I’m sure it will expand the tablet-buying population, making these devices even more popular.  But this is just another example of how Amazon keeps doing things to stay connected to their customers.  Giving them what they want buy knowing what they want, how they wanted, when they wanted..etc, etc, etc,  And they know we want access to content immediately from wherever we are.  They still need to work on the video content, but with the opening Netflix has given them you have to believe that will be addressed in 2012.  But what may be even more interesting is to see what they do that we aren’t expecting.  They have a habit of doing stuff like that. 

It’s Time to Put the ISH back in CRM…OK I Definitely Need to Explain This…

Back at the end of 2009 Paul Greenberg was going through his extremely thorough process of creating his CRM Watchlist for 2010.  As the focus of his list tends to be on the enterprise players, I started thinking it would be pretty interesting to put together a list of vendors in the industry I thought were worth watching that catered to the SMB space.  I tossed the idea at Mr. G, and he graciously invited me to post my list on his ZDNet blog in conjunction to unveiling his Watchlist. 

Since Paul was using Watchlist, I needed to come up with something else.  And really many of the companies that were doing interesting stuff at the time weren’t your traditional CRM vendors, but they were doing things that I thought were CRM-ish…especially in today’s social world.  And even though some of them probably didn’t view themselves as CRM vendors, they were CRM-ish to me, which made them important to watch because they were poised to impact what CRM is (and will be).

With that, the CRM-Ish List was born, and because CRM-Ish List is kind of awkward to say, I just shorten it and say the Ish List…which of course leads me to do a lot of explaining – believe me I think highly of companies I put on this Ish List. 

The initial Ish List was rolled out on Paul’s blog, and the folks at ZDNet created a pdf document combining Paul’s Watchlist with my Ish list in January of 2010, which you can check out here below.  I received some pretty good feedback from the list, and with so many developments taking place throughout 2010 I was really looking forward to doing a 2011 Ish List, and was really happy Paul invited me to roll it out again in tandem with his Watchlist.  And as I was beginning to go through the process of scheduling briefings and doing some initial analysis, my brother unexpectedly passed away on November 4^th 2010. 

The thought of doing briefings, analysis, writings and anything CRM related was gone for me for quite a while.  So there was no CRM-Ish List for 2011.  But I’m glad to say that there will be one for 2012, and once again it will be rolled out in tandem with Paul’s 2012 Watchlist.  There will even be some interesting (hopefully) new wrinkles to it – that is if I’m able to pull a couple things together in time. 

Now I have a number of companies in mind already, mainly ones that I have been watching over the past couple of years, but even since the last list just two years ago things have changed dramatically.  There are so many companies out there I won’t even front like any one list can include every company that deserves watching.  But I will try to put together a list that will help small businesses find some solutions that will help them find, catch and keep good customers.

I'm setting up briefings, and doing some digging and analysis stuff.  And if you know of any vendors that I should talk to, STAY TUNED as I will be posting instructions on how you can nominate companies (you can nominate yourself too) very shortly.  And stay on the lookout for the #crmish tag.

So with that, I’m glad to say The ISH is back, baby!  And this year we’ve even got a logo!

 

Smarter Commerce for the Mid-Market: An Interview with IBM’s Ron Kline

In conjunction with IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today's customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them.

Here’s an edited transcript of the podcast series that SMB Group's Sanjeev Aggarwal and I recorded with Ron Kline, director of marketing for IBM’s mid-market division, about IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions for SMBs.

If you’d like to listen to the recorded podcast series, clickthe player below:

Brent Leary:  We’re really excited to talk to Ron Kline, director of marketing for IBM’s mid-market division. Ron, before we jump into the Smarter Commerce Imitative, IBM has been doing so much around this whole idea of a Smarter Planet, can you talk a little bit about the big picture of the Smarter Planet initiative.

Ron Kline:  Sure. What we mean by Smarter Planet is that the world we live in is becoming smarter. Everything around us is becoming more and more instrumented, and that allows us to measure really almost anything. 

Think about it: there are over a billion transistors for every person on the planet. Over 30 billion RFID tags are embedded across the supply chain around the world. Everything is becoming instrumented.  Supply chains, health care networks, even natural systems like our rivers.  As a result of being able to measure and instrument from various touch points, the world becomes much more inter-connected and intelligent. By measuring and connect this information, you can build a more intelligent planet - one that can respond much more quickly to change.

Take an example like in San Francisco where they’ve launched a parking system so you can see what parking spaces are available throughout the city and determine where there is an open place to park. I actually have this app on my iPhone now. With the next step, you’ll be able to pay for your parking using your smartphone as the payment device. 

Sanjeev Aggarwal:  Thanks Ron. So what is Smarter Commerce, and how does it fit into the bigger Smarter Planter picture?

Ron Kline:  Smarter Commerce is about how we deliver the customer experience using all of the insights that we are gaining about our clients and supply chain to provide a much better customer experience. 

For example, you used to just go out and buy a car, or a company would just order parts from a supplier. But as consumers got more information at their fingertips, they could start to get price comparisons online and hear what other people had to say about a particular product before they go shop. Things have quickly moved on to include people sharing information and opinions on social networking sites and blogs.

Smarter Commerce helps you maximize the insight that you generate through customer interactions, whether in the store, over the web, from smart devices - what is being said out in social communities and taking that insight and pulling it together to improve the customer experience. Then you can tailor your offerings to what a customer is interested in.  You can improve profitability by targeting the right offerings to the right customer at the right time, or by reducing the cost of returns, restocking, and supply chain expense by having to handle reverse logistics because you just didn’t know what the customer was looking for. The bottom line is improving the overall customer experience and living up to customer expectations. 

We sort that into four big buckets, but it all comes down to customer experience. It’s the marketing, how do I target and personalize my marketing?  Yes, to get better yield out of my marketing dollar but really to have a better experience for my customers – so that I am providing relevant, targeted, offerings or information. Then, how do I manage that whole sales process, fulfillment across stores, the web, social sites. And customer service has to span all of the touch points. It’s not enough to have a customer service department anymore, customer service is something that a client experiences when he is buying a product or shopping for a product and when he is looking for additional service. On the internal side,  how do I control the procurement of goods and source the goods. I can have a smarter procurement process and a smarter supply chain process only if I know really more about my customer.

Brent Leary:  Talk a little bit about who should care about Smarter Commerce in an organization and why they should care about it.

Ron Kline:  Well, the customers care about it, so therefore, all of us as businesses need to care about it.  It’s something that any business of any size really needs to focus on.  It’s just as important for small and midsize businesses to deliver a superior customer experience as it is for a large enterprise.  In fact, Smarter Commerce and Smarter Planet can help level the playing field for midsize companies. In this environment, its all about building a more loyal customer, understanding that customer better, and then being able to deliver a better experience.

Sanjeev Aggarwal:  Can you give us an example of how a midsized company is using Smarter Commerce today and what type of results they are achieving?

Ron Kline:  Sure. One example I find pretty interesting is Elie Tahari, a high fashion clothing designer and retailer. Nobody is more focused on appealing to the tastes and the emotions of their customers, but those tastes can change very quickly and a manufacturer who is caught with too much of yesterday’s style has got a lot of money tied up in inventory that is out of date.  

Elie Tahari implemented an IBM Cognos solution that allows them to have a unified view of all of the information available from their different systems to make better decisions about what the market is saying and what specific customer needs are. 

So now, instead of following what was a typical practice in the retailing industry--sending stores the same distribution of sizes based on historical information across the country--Elie Tahari has insight from their customer data for each particular store over a period of time. They can say, the distribution looks a little different over here, and distribute accordingly. It’s a better customer experience because the chances of being out of stock had been reduced. It saves money on costs of returns or discounting to try to move product that is not selling, either because you don’t have the right style in stock or you have to return it back to the parent company because you ordered too many of one size. This has enabled them to improve the customer experience, and on the supply chain side, they don’t end up with too much of the wrong type of thing. 

Another example is BJU Press, a publisher in the United States that provides home schooling materials for kids in the K-12 age group.  They have developed a web store front end with an IBM partner, CrossView, using WebSphere Commerce, and Coremetrics, a web analytics application. Now they can provide customers with an easier online experience to search for products, continually improve that search experience.

In both cases, IBM and its patterns were able to not only improve the customer experience, but also the economics for the company as well.

Brent Leary:  Ron, those are some great examples, but how is IBM making Smarter Commerce accessible to the SMB market?

 Ron Kline:  In fact, the examples that I gave you are midsized companies. They have the same pain points as larger companies; they just haven’t had the ability to address it in the past because a lot of the technology and solutions were out of reach. 

IBM has bridged that gap a couple ways.  One way is to provide offerings that are built and designed for the mid-market.  We have a process in IBM to insure that the offerings that we bring to market for this customer segment are built and priced appropriately for midsized companies.  An example, Unica Email Optimization Solution is $1,500 a month for running up to twenty five events.  It’s very a very affordable solution with a lot of really great technology in it.  Unica Marketing Ops is another one, marketing operations on demand is $6,000 per year for up to ten seats.  These are very much within the range of a midsized company, and provide the kind of analytics and insights that help a company deliver this Smarter Commerce experience.

We’ve also learned that customers are looking for local trusted advisors and that’s where IBM’s investment in a very large partner ecosystem has helped bring the IBM technology to these midsized companies through local business partners.

Sanjeev Aggarwal:  How does an SMB that wants to learn more about this get started?

Ron Kline:  Absolutely, first of all, you can talk to your local business partner because they are the trusted advisor for you there locally.  At www.IBM.com/smartercommerce you can learn about what Smarted Commerce is and get a bigger picture view of what other customers are doing in this area and how they are benefiting, and of course, what our offerings are.

Brent Leary:  Ron thanks so much for your time today and explaining what Smarter Commerce is all about, thanks again.

Ron Kline:  My pleasure, thank you very much. 

Are You Ready? Transforming Your Business for the Smarter Customer

In conjunction with IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today's customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the second post in the series authored by SMB Group's Laurie McCabe.  

Take it away Laurie!

 

Many businesses feel like they’re in an uphill race to keep up in our increasingly connected world. With social media sites and conversations multiplying like rabbits, and 24/7 access to learn about, shop for and buy stuff on mobile devices, the world of commerce is radically and irreversibly changing. 

 

Businesses that want to keep growing must keep learning and embrace change. As much as we like the show, the Mad Men tactics to push out messages and information to customers to entice them to buy will no longer suffice. Think about it:

 

• In February 2005, just 5% of all U.S. adults said they used social media sites.
• In 2011, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project, 65% of adults use a social networking site like Facebook or LinkedIn, and 35% use smartphones.

 

Today, social media and mobile are the changes that businesses need to embrace. Businesses must find better ways to listen and engage with customers—when, where and how they want—to more accurately gauge needs, provide better service and strengthen customer loyalty.

 

If you’re in the same boat as many midsize companies, however, embracing the change isn’t easy—even when you know it’s the right thing to do and want to do it. You didn’t get to the point of having 500 or 1,000 employees overnight. You have existing processes and systems that probably weren’t designed for this much more connected, interactive world of commerce.

 

For instance, in the past, sales and marketing have often focused more on pushing out messages to the market rather than actively listening to and engaging with customers to understand their wants and needs. The focus has been to move the customer through the pipeline, close business and push out information to get him or her to come back and buy more.

 

Thanks to the explosion of social and mobile technologies, however, things aren’t so neat and tidy anymore. The number of social sites and conversations is multiplying exponentially, and customers are more vocal. With mobile access, people can join the conversation, evaluate solutions and make purchases from any place and at any time. And their expectations are rising: They expect companies to be as agile in responding to their needs as they are in voicing them. They want things faster, on the devices they use; and if they don’t get what they want from Business A, they’ll just go to Business B.

 

A great example here is Blockbuster, which used to own the movie rental business. Then Netflix came on the scene, giving customers a more convenient way to rent movies than Blockbuster, first with its DVD-by-mail business, and then with video streaming. Netflix had the added twist of enabling users to rate movies and then receive recommendations for other films they might like—with a focus on delighting its customers. Meanwhile, Blockbuster stuck to its traditional model too long, was late to the game and ended up filing for bankruptcy—although it has recently been purchased by DISH Network and could rise again if it can create an edge in deciphering and responding to customers’ needs.

 

But it’s not just big companies that are tuning in to the smarter customer. For instance, my hair salon promotes its Facebook page to customers, and every day it posts any unbooked appointments for hair styling, coloring, facials, manicures, etc. on its wall. Customers such as myself that “like” the salon see these appointments each morning—and can book the open slots for 20% off! It’s a win-win: I get a great discount and my salon fills the slot. Another case in point is the medical practice that my family uses. The practice recently deployed an SMS text messaging service and started to offer patients the choice of being reminded of scheduled appointments via a traditional phone call or via a text. It’s in the early stage, but they’re finding that most patients prefer the texts—and that fewer patients are no-shows when they get a text reminder.

 

While monitoring and engaging in social media conversations is a great start, the area is so new that social media monitoring is often siloed and separate from traditional CRM, procurement or other systems—and the people who use them. If this is the case in your business, you’ve probably experienced disconnects between customer demand and your ability to satisfy it—and as a result, your business may have missed opportunities and lost revenues.

 

The mandate is clear: You need to adjust business processes to market to, sell to and service customers on their terms, consistently across all channels, to survive and thrive through this sea change. In a nutshell, work smarter. But how? While the die isn’t yet fully cast, we see several key points to consider when creating a transformational plan:

 

1. Start with a strategy, not tools and technologies. The strategy should revolve around customer engagement and interaction. Different businesses will have different goals, depending on their particular needs, but are likely to include things such as maximizing the insights you get from customer interactions to better anticipate and respond to requirements; improving the customer experience; and improving decision-making efficiency throughout the commerce cycle. Think about the different customer and prospect touch points in your organization and how you can strengthen them, incorporating both internal and external input into the process.

 

1. Consider how you’ll get the voice of the customer into the company. Does your company know where customers and prospects are talking about your brand, competitive brands and related industry trends? Are you participating in these conversations? Social media monitoring and management solutions can help you identify and manage outbound and incoming online interactions more efficiently. They streamline and consolidate relevant conversations from different places—blogs, social networks and other public and private web communities and sites. They help you to more easily monitor what people are saying about your business. And automating the process of delivering outgoing messages through multiple social media outlets can help you to amplify your presence across several social media sites.

 

1. Determine how you’ll make social information actionable and measure outcomes. Getting information into the hands of marketing and sales people, product managers, developers or inventory managers is critical. Businesses need to get the data in a way they can use it, say to run a marketing campaign, close deals or better manage inventory. Information and analysis tools should also be integrated with existing CRM, supply chain or other systems—instead of siloed—so business users can see results, adjust and improve. 

 

1. Make consistency a priority. Providing customers with a consistent experience across channels is key. Whether they want to buy online, via a mobile device or in a retail outlet, the goal is to provide the best user experience. This means you need to make it easy for users to shop and buy where and when they want. It also means giving your partners an easy on-ramp to sell and support your products. Provide partners with the capabilities they need so that your customers can have a universally exceptional experience, regardless of which channel they buy from.

 

This is the second of a six-part blog series by SMB Group and CRM Essentials that examines the evolution of the smarter customer and smarter commerce, and IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions. In our next post, we’ll talk to Ron Kline, director of marketing for IBM’s mid-market division, for an overview of IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions for SMBs. In the meantime, please share with us the successes you’ve had and the challenges you face in adapting your business to better serve smarter customers.