Is measuring online influence bad for customer service ?

January 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : now that lots of tools exist to measure online influence (or whatever we think it is), businesses are perfectly tooled to target their messages and communication programs. Provided they get the notion of influence right. On the other hand there’s another trend that may be dangerous in the future : using a tool that’s adapted to one shot operations to systematically define the level of service and advantages a customer deserves. This may lead to decreasing the standard level of service and break the relationship with true loyal customers that will notice that his loyalty and financial contribution are less valued than the number of followers others may have.

Now that anyone can exist on the web, the worldwide network as become a wonderful platforms to measure one’s influence. And this concept has been brilliantly sold to internauts and businesses. The first need to become influent to exist, the second need to know who’s influent in their ecosystem. And guess what ? Agencies and vendors all have “the” solutions that will measure influence in an objective and undisputable way. Influent internauts will benefit from a kind of “recognition label” and businesses will be able to focus their efforts on those who deserve it (understand : serve influencers better).

Such an approach my distract businesses from what matters and lead them to failure.

Let’s start with influence. Influence on the web has been a very trendy topic for years but no objective definition of what an influencers is has really emerged. It’s not easy to do anything when no one know what it’s about. The upside is that anyone can use his own definition, what surely makes his solution unique. Is influence a matter auf audience size ? Everybody says no…but no one can neglect such an easy way to reach many people. But being listened is one thing, influencing is another. No credibility matters in the definition. But how to measure it ? Most of all, influence has to do with context : one can’t be credible on everything. A couple of example :

• Mary has tens of thousands followers on twitter. Influencer ? Yes for some, not for others that will say she’s “negatively followed”, because of our mistakes, hand people follow her to see ser fail.

• Robert has 200 followers? Influencer ? Surely not. But he’s a specialist of frog breeding in polluted urban environments. He’s very influent in his niche. But only when he talks about frogs.

• Kevin has thousands of followers and is very influent on digital marketing. All industry professionals recognize he’s in the top 10 list. But when he talks about restaurants, knowing his taste (or lack of) no one listens to him. Bad news for the famous 3 stars restaurant that offered him a free lunch, expecting a mention from Kevin.

So, we can use any criteria and even admit that one may be positively influent while negatively popular (people follow him to make fun…but they follow), one thing is sure, influence is vague and subjective.

But since there are a lot of services offering to measure influence on the web, businesses logically wonder what they could do with it.

What did we see these last months ? Events where anyone could go…provided their “Klout” was high enough (Klout is one of this tools supposed to assess how influent people are). Businesses also use such tools to prioritize customer service and even do “a little bit more” for some. Hotels are using similar tools to decide whether upgrading customers or not.

After all, there’s nothing bad here ? What can be reproached to a business favoring, among its customers, those who are the most listened to ? Those with the louder voice ? Nothing if we only consider it’s a communication operation. But, seen from the customer service side, they’re moving on a slippery ground.

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Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0 and social business : what to expect in 2012 ?

January 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Résumé : what will be the enterprise 2.0 / social business in 2012 ? It will highly depends on choices organizations will make to deal with the paradox of finding ways to go out of the crisis while not having much money to invest. 2012 will certainly be the year where window window-dressing projects and deeper corporate ones will diverge as well as those aiming at adding a community layer to the existing organization vs those aiming at reinventing the organizational structure and operation models. Should the world be perfect, we’ll see budgets shift from technology to organizational transformation, from adding new layers to integrating existing ones, community approaches becoming more operations-driven, social becoming more a transformation than transplanting an external body. In a non perfect world we’d see window-dressing projects surviving a little bit before the final collapse, because of approaches too disconnected from the enterprise world to deliver results and sustain long term engagement.

A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

 

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing  social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Software & Tools, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Do you need a brand strategy on the social web ?

January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the presence of brands on the internet is a major concern for businesses entering the social web. But there’s a big difference between thinking and definining oneself as a brand and an ogranization. A brand is the expression of an identity while the organization is rather an action driven approach to customer service. Both should come together but, unfortunately, the social channel is often owned by the people in charge of one of these two approaches at the cost of the other. As recent surveus show, customers, even if they appreciate appearances, often prefer to value the execution of the promise. It’s time for organization approaches to replace brand strategues on the web.

Every time a new platform or service is launched on the web, the first question that comes is “how to make brands exist there.”. From a personal standpoint, as an internaut, I find it exasperating. I don’t want to rub shoulders with a brand or to become “friend” with it, most of all when it corrupts the system. You may retort me that I sometimes interact with brands and appreciate it. In fact I appreciate these interactions as long as it helps me to satisfy one of my needs. According to what I see, the more a business acts like an organization and less as a brand the more it succeeds at satisfying my needs. And, according to reports I mentioned in a previous post, it seems that I’m not the only one who thinks this way.
What is the difference between a brand and an organization ? And what are the deep consequences of the differences between a brand oriented approach and an organization oriented one ?

A brand is a matter of identity. “This is who /what I am, what I embody, my image”. Having a brand strategy is unavoidable when we see how much time we’re spending online and to what extent our online experiences impact our lives and decisions. Brands have to be known, have to let people discover and know them better, deliver a message that’s better understood when carried by conversations instead of declaration. So, having an online brand strategy is vital. But not enough. The post I mentioned above clearly shows that internauts, contrary to received ideas, don’t value neither social conversations with brands nor being part of a brand community. They want concrete and operational outputs.

For instance, let’s consider a clothing business. It can hire a kind of muse that will embody and carry the brand, make people buy its products. But if the product has a poor quality or when it need some cleaning, I not sure that asking the muse will be of any help. Not because the muse won’t want to help, but only because it’s not her job.

Another example. Everybody knows that I appreciate KLM a lot. Of course, they have a very good brand strategy but this is not the reason why I began to watch them and pay attention to what they were doing. It all started because of their effective organization strategy that once turned what could have a nightmare into a nice travel experience. Without excellence in customer service, brand strategy has little value and may even be counterproductive.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Is your organization good at multiplexing ?

September 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Knowing who should drive and own social media in the organization is a recurring question. Experience shows that when the project falls to a “central department”, this latter often struggles to spread adoption outside of its own range, what causes the system to be underused or the emergence of internal competing projects. In the end, it’s a costly and counter-productive situation. New approaches a needed that rely on new methodologies and attitudes : those who own the platform need to learn to share it with others, involve them from the early stage, listen to their needs and let them use it the way they want to meet their own needs.

This post is a synthesis of many discussions that followed what I wrote on the use of social platforms both for external communication and intranet purposes.

Such projects are often owned by a department that drives them. That’s the reason why many organizations start by wondering which department should own social media.

When one owns something, he uses it for his own purposes. There are many reasons to that. Most of all because one does not know anything about others’ needs, because some uses are counter-cultural to the DNA of a given department or because internal power games and politics makes it logical to keep one’s projects for oneself.

Consequence : a communication department that drives an internal social network struggle at making the most out of its collaborative potential. Sometimes because they don’t want but, most of times because it’s out of their competence field for obvious reasons. Replace communication with HR, IT, Innovation or business unit, the result is the same. It’s no use to blame the people in question because the situation is often caused by the lack of means and the irrelevance of some uses regarding to their mission and not by unwillingness. In fact, most of time you can hear them say “We’d like to but don’t know to”.

Whatever the owner, a social networks serves for communication, collaboration, innovation, expert location, talent management, supports some processes. If each of these needs rely on a different tool and project, there are lots of chances everything fails.

That’s the same for external facing projects. Marketing, communication, innovation, customer care etc…should be able to use the system, whatever the official owner is.

That’s why we can see more and more competing projects that, in the end, cause unproductivity and waste resources, those needed to drive them, to implement them and, last but not least, employee’s attention.

As one of my readers said, these are only channels, channels that can convey many kinds of signals, of flows. I usually use the pipe metaphor. One can own the pipe but it does not mean that it can be used to convey lots of things, for several purposes, from and to third part people.

Organization will have to embrace the culture of multiplexing. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Turning lurkers or unhappy customers into fans. Stroke of genius or swindle ?

March 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : what’s a fan on facebook ? Someone who likes a product or a brand of course. Are we wure ? When, to be able to use this channel to get information or the solution to a problem with the product people have to become fan, the system is biased. So the only question is to know what one think of a system that turns lurkers or unhappy customers into fans despite of them. Clever trick or false advertising ?

What company is not trying to recruit as many fans as possible for its Facebook page ? No one is quite sure of the valuation of a fan (while the acquisition cost is well known) but fans are needed. Some will buy more, some will share the essage…fans can have several role what makes it difficult to know what their contribution to the business is. That said, they have an intrinsic value for any business ; if between two competitors there is a big difference on the number of fans it must mean something.

I’ve already discussed the relativity of the concept of community membership. That’s the same with fans. And I’m close to think that it’s even worse.

What can make me go on the page of a brand toward which I’m neutral ? Get informations, maybe in order to buy the product later, know them better before thinking of sending them my CV…

In some extreme cases, I may want (rather…need) to meet the brand on its page because I’m not happy with their product, service, and would like explanations or a fix. Why not, after all, since they say “we do customer service on Facebook”.

But it’s often impossible to read of write anything without being fan. Not a serious issue after all…only a button to click. But the mechanism looks like swindle :” you want to complain, you need information, so tell the world you’re a fan first and then only we’ll talk”. Like if, before going to the customer service desk in any store, customers had to run in the street shouting “I love [the name of the store]“.

Ok, sometimes it’s only an impression. If some brands keep their contents only for their fans, in many case people only need to know were to click to get rid of the welcome page and access the content without become fans. But Mrs Anybody is not aware of that and thinks that only way to access the page and get rid of the welcome page is to click on “like”.

We can also un-fan after having done what we needed…but who’ll think about doing so ?. And  how many neutral and unhappy people did have to demonstrate their “fan-ness” to access the most basic level of information ? Sometimes I feel I’m deceiving my network when I become a fan only to have a look…

Swindle ? If you think that when I become fan while I’m only looking for information or I’m unhappy with the brand may make my network think I recommend the brand in question…there’s a real point here.

Ok…I’m quibbling. It’s all about wording and ethic. And who cares about that today ?

 

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Engage with customers. And then ?

August 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that the use of social media within companies and between companies and customers are not compartmentalized but complementary disciplines. If the “internal” company is more and more trying to get in touch with customers, the world of marketing struggles to make his way toward internal departments. As communication is becoming service, initiatives that target customers can’t be separated from those that aim at reversing communication flows inside the organization, redefining roles  and realigning the whole organization with the needs of employees who are directrly in touch with customers. To demonstrate its value, social and community makerting will have to replace “push” with “pull” not only in its interactions withn customoers but also in the way the whole organization works.

Even if the external/marketing/communication part has never been my prefered one, it has become obvious that it’s impossible to dissociate the evolution of work from what’s happening outside the corporate walls. First, because no company creates value on its own et a high level of internal performance is useless when a business is not as efficient with its external partners and clients that it is internally (theory of the limiting factor or bottlneck…as you prefer), second because the internal shift from push to pull logically leads to consider customers.

The time when 2.0 was either about marketing or collaboration but not both at the same time is over. Yet, the concept of enterprise 2.0 evolved overtime and everybdoy finds logical to include all external stakeholders into it, what is confirmed by the rise of social crm. But even if enterprise 2.0 is heading down toward customers, marketing struggles to head up toward internal activities.

I recently found this interesting deck about the failure of social media initiatives. It tells us that

- there’s a lack of strategy (81%) and most marketers don’t undestand the value of interactions…and how all these things work.

- consequently, businesses invest more on technology than on people and relationships.

Why Social Media Project<s Fail?! – A European Perspective
View more presentations from BSI.

I’d like to go a little bit further and sum it up in one sentence : when marketing and communication people use social media to communicate better and differently, there are two possibilities:

- either they (or their company) don’t get it and that doesn’t work.

- Or they understand how to make a good use of social media and…they deceive their customers.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Community Management is a “processus in processum”

May 17, 2010 By 1 Comment

Even if community management is still an unclear concept with changing boundaries, many senseful and insightful things are slowly emerging about it. A few weeks ago, I came across a very interesting web tv show about it (sorry…it’s in french). While watching the video, a sentence grabbed my attention. You know, the kind of thing that makes you think “yes…that’s it…he/she gets it all right”. The sentence was “community management is a processus” (and the author Sandrine Plasseraud from We are Social).

It’s possible that I’ll go a little bit far from what they said and meant on the video in the following lines but I’d like to go further in this discussion that I find senseful. As just once won’t hurt, I’ll mainly address external community management issues even if, as we’ll see, they have very little value if not connected to the inside.

Community Management is a processus

I’d like to apologize to those who like the pretended “freestyle” and “village fest” side of community community management, but not only it’s a processus but a processus that has to be tightly managed. Whatever are the autonomy and the seniority of the person in charge (and most of all when both are low), it’s about:

• defining the goals of the activity

• defining its scope, the issues to address and not address, what to talk about and what to never talk about.

• defining how information will be processed : what kind of information has to be pushed, what kind of information has to be pulled to internal business people and what to do with it, how follow-up will be managed, what kind of reporting, what actions ?

• Autonomy level : how far community managers can do, what kind of initiative can he take, to what extent can he speak in the name of the company.

• Organizing subsidiarity : when out of the autonomy scope, to whom must he refers, ask an anwer, a permssion, an action.

• Setting-up support for community managers : in the above-mentioned case, be sure that the person who’ll be asked something by the community manager know that answering and taking any necessary action is not facultative and that it should be done in a time limit that’s compatible with customer or audience’s expectations.

• Define the “online style” : what tone to adopt, how close and friendly can the community manager be.

I agree it’s a little bit constraining but that’s the price to pay to make community managers feel comfortable, make them sure they won’t be any mistake. It will also help the company to be comfortable with its communitu manager, trust him. Community managers need to know what they can and can’t do, that they’ll be supported in their initiatives and get the needed help in the same way that organizations need to be sure their CM won’t put them at risk. It’s a matter of reciprocal trust : guidelines are the best way to carry on while waiting for trust to emerge and each player to deserve it.

But that’s not all. The above statements make it clear that community managers are not isolated protuberances on the web isolated from the rest of the company but their actions have to take place within clearly definined and known business areas. If community management is a processus in itself, it has to take place within more traditional processus. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Freemium and enterprise software : frustrate the right person !

February 26, 2010 By 2 Comments

The freemium model, that is everyday more popular on the web, is now entering the world of enterprise software. What is it about ? Allowing people to use a software for free, with basic functiunalities that are enough for a minimal use, while proposing a premium version, richer, paying, and try to make most users switch to the latter once they’ve experiencied the free one.

The secret of the switch : make users feel they could do even more if they decide to use their credit card and pay. In fact it’s not a business model but a marketing tactics that leverages frustration. Has a good friend of mine often says : “that about showing a very small parts of one’s pants to give others ideas they didn’t have at the beginning”.

So this model in entering the enterprise with the same logic : allowing to start with simple usages for free and betting that, discovering everything that would be possible, organizations will switch to a paying version to host more users, have more functunalities which interest takes time to emerge etc…

Copying a model sometimes works…but translating it is better.

An easy way would be to apply the model that consists frustrating users who will always want more.. But a fundamental difference exists : when I’m on linkedIn or Flickr, when I want to go further with a service, I weight the pros and and the cons and if I come to the conclusion that’s worth the price, I take my credit card and I pay. But is the same in the workplace ?

Allowing people to upgrade themselves ? Unthinkable and not serious. Not only I can’t imagine that people would pay for what’s a corporate responsabilité but, more, I don’t think that enterprises would tolerate that users won’t be able to benefit from the same functiunlaties not depending on hierarchy but on their own will.

Thinking that people will ask their employer to upgrade ? Bad idea because frustration will be pushed from the end user to the administrator, the first not knowing what’s the cause of the limitation. More, nothings proves that, even if bombarded with requests, the administrator will be able to change anything since he doesn’t have the financial power. And I don’t imagine the administrator explaining that “we’re using a free version and don’t want to pay a cent to make users have more functiunalities”.

Conclusion : the frustration logics works when it impacts the person who can decide and pay or, sometimes, to someone who directly reports to him and can convince him with tangible arguments.

When you want to frustrate a decision make, you have to choose the right limitations. It will be more about scalability, number of licences, integration with existing tools than about practical things that improves the user experience but which benefits can’t be understood by people that have not the same use of the tool. On the other hand, frustrating the users by showing him everything he would be able to do but is impossible at this time is useless and even counter-productive. End users should even not be aware of the limitations, the risk of seeing them puting the tool in quarantine being very high.

When the freemium model is applied to enterprise software, it’s important to know who’s the right person to frustrate and decide of the limitations according to that. On the contrary, frustrating someone who does not have the power to pay to improve his experience is more than pointless: it’s dangerous.

Filed Under: Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , ,

blueKiwi : the good use of conversations

February 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

blueKiwiThe last “Virtual Enterpise 2.0 conference” was  a good opportunity to visit some vendor’s booth to know what to expect from them in 2010. I finally had a look at  blueKiwi to see what was new at our European leader.

[Disclaimer..: I joined blueKiwi at the versy beginning of the company and left in last décember. I don't have any kind of  stake in the company anymore]

Since of my most important rules is “never trust a sales guy” I quickly left the tchat to start a skype conversation with CEO Carlos Diaz (sometimes being an alumni helps…).  A good way to know more about the news, share some thoughts and try to guess what was not offically announced.

• New positionning

You may rember my last post about conversations, their potential and their limits in a business context. Carlos intuitively got the distinction and aligned his strategy with the product’s DNA : conversations and communities.

If I had to define the “new blueKiwi” I’d say it’s a “space for engagement and sourcing”. It addresses the need to get the most of what employees can give beyond their assignments and, most of all, the need to gather an ecosystem that includes clients either in B2B or B2C. A space that’s not dedicated to execution activities but to conversations that makes tomorrow’s proudcts and business models emerge while strengthening the relationship between the enterprise and the ecosystem for a long term value creation.

This distinction is more than words. In my opinion there’s no “one and only enterprise 2.0″, each need, each business line may need a specific approach in terms of tools, methodology in order to harness the full potential of the ecosystem. And a clear positionning is needed to achieve that.

So let’s check how the discourse impacts the facts.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Will you know how to export your conversations and focus on transactions ?

December 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The world of communication and marketing is worried because of the consecration of digital medias, an highbrow word used to talk about the web by people who are suddently feeling out of date.

For many people, the revolution brought by the web is the so-called new “power” that’s in internauts’ hands. According to me this power, that has to be relativized because old rules still apply and only 1% internauts really use this power, is only one side of a global shift of the point of contact between a business and its environment.

People didn’t wait for web 2.0 or social media to talk about companies and products in their back. Over a cup of coffee, in real life, first, then on forums and, after, on social medias. It changes many things and made them more complicated for businesses is that discussions are scattered all around the web what makes it hard to take an inventory of them and follow them. This scattering is not a bad thing when one know of to take the most of it but causes headaches to people who consider corporate communication as a centralized thing.

Scattering can be an opportinity. The (few) companies that “buzzed” wisely are a good example. Those who crowdsource too even if they could do much better. As a matter of fact, what’s sure is that internauts don’t want to be pulled toward a corporate site anymore. On the other hands they are opened to the messages and to discussions provided the subject is relevant and the discussion takes place on their own ground. Now the only way to adress the audience is to do it on Facebook, Linkedin or any social network of this kind (even blogs but it needs some targetting), most of all if rather than delivering a message the purpose is to start a discussion to get opinions, advices, to ask for participation.

When a business decides to follow the internaut on his ground, there is something to be aware of and an answer to find. Be aware that no one can prevent a discussion from happening and an issue to be discussed. The question is to know how, among all  these discussions, some of them will be about something the enterprise wants to be discussed, even questions it would like the audience to answer.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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