Marketing | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

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

December 7, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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of the consecration of digital medias, an highbrow word used to talk about the web by people who are suddently feeling out of date.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.

How to understand and position enterprise 2.0 in the real enterprise

December 1, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

It’s time to sum up all the thoughts I had these last months. I tried to start from both the concerns expressed by C level managers asking for a global vision and ground managers who needed a “hands on” vision because they don’t have time to waste to try to understand such nebulous things. Having to focus on day to day delivery and short term objectives, many see such a fallen-from-the-sky (and on their head) gift as a source of misunderstanding and discomfort.

These concerns are not surprising at all : what is it, what does it bring, how does it work, how to position it and integrate it in the organization as it is today… Talking about a new discipline, lots of things were learnt from early adopters who worked on a “try / fail / improve” model and, in so doing, helped to build a knowledge and know-how corpus. As a matter of fact this corpus was build upon failed and successfull implementations that helped to refine some presupposition that were prevailing at their beginning. The whole helped “followers” to benefit from these experiences.

But we still have to be aware that that’s not by saying “that’s that, that’s not that, one must, one must not” that things will improve. Businesses need to undersand the path that lead to these conclusions to make them theirs, and we all know what happens when one content himself with copying a result without understanding what reasonning often leads to : lack of self-confidence, fear of the unknown, defensive attitude….then failure.

Rather than proposing an attractive future at the end of a vague road, let’s start from what actually exist to build the future. This will also help to explain the “why”, relying on what can be learnt from past experiences.

7 web 2.0 words to use cautiously with real managers

November 25, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 4 Comments

Even if enterprise 2.0 has its source in web 2.0, everybody now recognize that what we can see and use on the web needs to be tidied up to enter the workplace. One of the stumbling blocks can be found in language : sometimes even if two people agree on the content, the form can make them not understand each other. That’s why, sometimes, the enterprise 2.0 subject was not taken seriously by the (serious) people who needed to be convinced.

In fact it was one of the conclusions of the discussions that followed the last enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston : the enterprise 2.0 world had to learn the enterprise language and not the reverse. The confirmation was given in this post by someone from Booz Allen Hamilton (which internal 2.0 platform is a true success) : “In the end I’m not concerned with what we call it. I’ve got work to do.”

Anyway, here are some magic words our web experience makes us use (even unconsciously) too often in enterprise oriented discussions and that make our interlocutor look at us with doubtful and surprised eyes (really…you never had this feeling ?). Either because the words that are used are not relevant in a business context or because they make him uncomfortable.

Social CRM and lead generation : headaches ahead !

November 2, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Objectively, to my mind, Social CRM is the first concrete and operational formalization of the wider enterprise 2.0 concept. But it won’t go without bringing many questionings for marketing people as well as possible disputes.

One of the social CRM principles is to create attention, then relationship in order to “pull” the business. It’s not about jumping at the first comer and try to make him buy something but to make people come by themselves, in a trusted context, in order to build a relationship that goes far beyond the only fact of quickly reaching a sale transaction.

On the opposite side, the traditional marketing approach has one main goal : generate leads, that’s to say a list of qualified names ready to be wolfed down by a starving sales team.

Two cases to understand the difference.

1st case : imagine a store where the salesclerks are nice, give you all the information you ask for without trying to “flog” anything you don’t want to you. Imafine another store, where a vulture jumps at you at the moment you open the door and asks you to give your name, address, phone number, email address to bring you into the logic that will make you buy something, whether you need it or not.

2nd case. Imagine you are managing a company’s online presence (large business, no good or bad repution, b2b market) and, above all, the social networks side. Imagine you managed to develop the brand, deliver your message, that people are getting interested in what the company is, what its business is. And imagine that, one day, Directors X and Y rush into you office and say : we need the phone numbers and emails of all our “Facebook Fans”, of all our followers on twitter…then disqualify, block, all those who don’t have the power / the position to make their company buy our products. What would your reaction be ?

Some may argue that, things will have to change whether businesses like it or not anyway. Even IBM tells us that advertising as we used to know is dead. Conclusion : the goold old lead generation is dead, goodbye vultures and welcome teddy bears ! I have to admit that I would really like it to happen (as for me, I can’t stand giving any personal information to know more about a product…rather contact the contenders if they are more open and friendly…and don’t try to contact me…I’ll find you if I need to)…..but I’m quite skeptical about that.

Maybe both methods could lead to the same results. But there’s nothing sure, and even if it was possible it would take more time, what is something businesses are running out of. So should we throw the baby out with the bathwater ? No, there are indisputable trends that will make businesses change the way they behave. But the answer is not in choosing the one and the other, it’s to find the right balance according to the context, the need, the target. Territories will have to be well defined and “traditionalists” will surely have to learn some good manners.

According to me, both will co-exist and will be assigned to different people who will have to learn to understand each other and work together. Extremists will have to make concessions anyway. At the end, it’s the action of selling that will be deeply transformed. You didn’t know ? Traditional selling is dead and salespeople will have to learn how to be counselors instead of haggling over everything.

More questions than answers here…but a surely a future hot topic.

And you, marketing and sales professionals, what do you think about that ?

lead generation, marketing, social crm, vente,attention

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: attention, Customer Relationship & Marketing, lead generation, marketing, sales

A socialnomics Manifesto

October 12, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I rencently mentioned the word “socialnomics“. Whatt’s the interest ? In an interconnected world (not only by the net…a world were everything can impact everything, it’s essential to understand the context to define the systems (enterprise, project, organization, management) we have to implement. So let’s try to summarize things.

- the world is full of stakeholders. You already knew for your shareholders, your employees. For your partners and clients too. Now even your non-clients are a part of the game, they all have expectations, they all thave things to say about your products, why they trust your or not, they can all be the cause of a mass reaction that may impact your business, either positively or negatively.

- stakeholders matter as much as shareholders : it becomes harder everyday to satisfy the ones while neglecting the others. Worse, sometimes you have to listen to the first to satisfy the second.

- value is a flow. It does not self generate in the till or when a contract is signed but though a flow (many people already got that) that has its source outside the company, go through it and ends outside.

- localization is obsolete. People recently start to understand that interactions between the enterprise and its stakeholders did not depend anymore on where each was physically located but have moved online. But “online” does not mean the corporate website anymore, it could be anywhere, depending on the blogs or social networks people use to read/use. Businesses can’t afford to wait for customers to join them, they have to join them where they are.

- the way business is done is at least as important for performance than operations. It’s a matter of values, of culture (what a company like Danone has identified and turned into a key asset years ago) but also (for how long ?) of ethics.

- The famous “to” in B2C, B2B…. and its “one way” connotationis being replaced by a bijective “with”.

- vertical hierarchy won’t disappear but articulates with an horizontal one. As a matter of fact the above mentioned flow does not advance by itself. It is fed by noise that has to be turned into information, then in decisions, then in actions that have to be monitored. It implies an horizontal decision making model in organizations that are structured for vertical decisions making only. So the organization has to be rethought in order not only to obey to “people from above” but also to “next door colleagues”.

- the value chain becomes social. Processes too.

- la chaine de valeur devient “sociale”, les processus également.

- in an information econmy, the only things that businesses can value is what the public can’t create alone, without them.

- what matters in communication (both internal or external is not how much information is pushed but the level of gained attention.

That won’t go without some challenges such as :

- implementboth the process and the “human factors” that will help to embed stakeholder’s creativity and knowledge into products, services, operations.

- manage employee’s schizophrenia. They are a part of the ecosystem, of the stakeholders, but often have radically opposite behaviors depending on whether they wear their corporate or their customer suit.

- rethink the enterprise, still as a production driven organization, but not as a push engine anymore, rather as the industrial element of the market to market loop.

- offer only products, information, services that mass collaboration between internauts can not produce.

- separate the wheat from the chaff in all the social noise and not go to the opposite extreme what would be like a “social submission” with inconsistent actions and unreadable

chaine de valeur, création de valeur, Innovation, Management, marketing, parties prenantes, social crm, socialisation, socialnomics, valeur, .

Filed Under: Innovation, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Innovation, management, marketing, socialization, socialnomics, stakeholders, strategy, value, value chain, value creation

With Social CRM, enterprise 2.0 goes out of the black box and marketing gains importance

October 5, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Many things have been told and invented in the 2.0 field since the word was coined in the internet world and become trendy in the business world. With more or less success. Sometimes it was great step in conceiving new models for operations, sometimes if was only a smoke cloud aiming at making people forget that the previous smoke cloud failed.

Internally (enterprise 2.0), we suffered a lot from the black box syndrome. First becaue projects were mainly internal while enterprise 2.0 is about ecosystems and both external and external stakeholders. Second because social activities were cut off from the operational reality, from the real business, preventing it from demontrating any business value.

Externally (web 2.0), we have to admit that things quickly turned into noise and smoke through clumsy use of social media by marketing departments that did not get what the chage was about and were trying to do business as usual. Of course, there were valuable things, mainly in the crowdsourcing field, with tangible benefits, but too few compared to all the mistakes that were made in the marketing field.

Sometimes, we can see the emergence of really sensible things. That’s the case with “social CRM“, which is, according to me, the best thing that happened in the 2.0 world these last months.

Why ?

Lessons from a crisis and the behavioral economics

August 26, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 6 Comments

A year ago, the world entered a crisis that didn’t let it unhurt. A crisis I won’t call economic or or financial since I think the disease was deeper. Anyway, many people understand that, this time, we’ll have to be more creative than in a past and not rebuild things as they were. But we still have to draw all the consequences of this crisis, even if they makes us uncomfortable, because keeping our eyses closed is the best way to face an even more critical situation in the upcoming years.

Among others, there is the failure of one core credential the economy has been built upon for decades : the rationality of economic players. What made us model everything as indicators and forecasts that could not be wrong. Clients were predictable. Employees too. The price of raw materiels, interest rates, shareholders… everything was writen. Modeled. Under control.

So we were all elements of a complexe mathematical function which was guaranteeing us endless growth and enrichment.

And everything collapsed. We knew (or should have known) that nothing is rational on earth. Easy to say. In the future we’ll have to take irrationality into account in all business and economic decisions if we don’t want the same causes to have the same effets. Of course, uncertainty can be reduced…but not removed. That’s what we used to forget.

In one word, as writen in this HBR article, businesses now have to pay more attention to their employees, customers, partners. Not only because it’s positive for business, but also because it’s the only way to avoid making huge mistakes anymore. This is about behavioral economics.

Surveys showed that the whish for rationalization, that is often embodied by an increased control, makes people cheat and is an obstacle to collaboration. They also point out (but is it a surprise) that a discontented customer looks for revenge toward the enterprise, regardless to the cause of discontent Businesses can’t afford anymore saying “it doesn’t matter” because the price to pay is immeasurably more important that the cost of a lost customer, whatever is prejudice is and even if it’s only subjective. Some could see crowdsourcing as good way to improve things : if things are not predictable, listening is a good means to lower uncertainty. In the same way, no one is sure that customers will accept a new product as predicted by surveys. Involving them in the innovation/design process can reduce uncertainty.

Cheat and revenge seems to be the consequence of not taking people and their irrational ity into account. And the price to pay is high.

One can found that depressing or demoralizing, but it’s a part of our economy from now on. According to the author, business will have to get the right capabilities to face it. It may be long and uncomfortable regarding to acquired habits. It means listening to people and an ongoing experiment system A new way to embrace marketing and customer relationships, but also employee’s motivation.

Who said that value chain and processes has to be socialized ?

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: behavioral economics, collaboration, crowdsourcing, customer relationship, customers, economy, irrationality, marketing, rationality, socialization, value chain

Social CRM needs more than a CRM approach

August 24, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 7 Comments

Ross Mayfield recently published a fundamental post about “social CRM“. The statement of fact is simple : 1% of customer’s conversations improve the organizational knowledge, 9% touch the organization without changing anything and 90% are not heard at all, businesses miss an impressive source of possible improvemens. I’m not meaning 100% of these conversations are valuable but harnessing only 1% of them is a real risk. At this point, the question is not to know how to take this conversations into account but, first of all, to be able to join them and participate. Even the stupidest conversation may be of some interest since not paying any attention to it can be seens as disdain. More, statisticians would tell that if businesses want to harness the conversations that can bring real opportunities, they also have to pay consider the less intereting ones : we’re talking about a domain where, if one aims at excellence, he has to accept a high variability, what is the opposite of the beliefs most our business processes rely on.

Those who’d look into this subject because they have a traditional CRM issue may suffer from vertigo : it’s about CRM…but also many more things at the same time. As Ross writes, it’s impossible to change the way a business considers and implements its customer relationship management without changing the way people actually operate inside the company. Knowing how hard it is to change things internally, the point of deciding what has to be changed first (internally or externally), one pushing the other, can be discussed. But the fact is both are needed and that they are the two sides of an only project.

Will you have to throw your marketing outside of the window ?

August 17, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

McKinsey recently issued a report entitled Managing beyond web 2.0 which is about constraints businesses are meeting in a connected world. Those who relied on the title to pounce on it may have been very disappointed since it’s more about the realtionships between businesses and their ecosystems than about internal management issues. But that’s not because I didn’t found the title relevant that the content wasn’t worth. Those who are used to the subject may not learn lots of things but the McKinsey stamp will attract conservative people that are often reluctant to web 2.0 things and will help others to provide their superiors with a document that will be considered as a more trusted source than a blog.

The starting point is known by everyone. In a world that gets more interconnected everyday, consumers do things on thgeir own that are totally out of marketing people’s control and do not always please them. They make their own opinion on a produc, give pieces of advice the one to the other, share their positive and negative feedbacks, propose ideas to improve products or to conceive new ones. Consequence : some say nice things about a product, passionate communities are forming. But the opposite also happens.

The truth is that marketing depts do not control what’s said about products anymore. Worse, people don’t listen to marketers anymore. Hence the consequence (hastily ?) drawn by the report : marketing is being replaced. Consequence : rather than keeping pushing messages, businesses should listen. That’s not without reminding me of the community management debate. Those who are passionate about this issue should read how Xavier Comtesse revisited the value chain, taking into account the 2.0 paradigm and the concept of “consumActor” (detailed here) and very well illustrated by this chart.

Valuechain20

I won’t add anything about ideagoras, crowdsourcing and similar things that have already been discussed a lot on this blog and all over the web. But it’s obvious everything is converging. One more example of business socialization.

McKinsey proposes a pragmatic model judiciously called LEAD (listen, experiment,apply,develop). By the way, it does not bring anything new to the abundant litterature on the topic. More, it has already been implemented by many businesses (P&G for instance). At the end, by pointing at marketing’s weaknesses, it’s the need for a re-invented innovation that’s highlighted.

Beyond my disagreement on the title, I don’t thing that the conclusion that has to be drawn from the report is the pointlessness of marketing. Marketing only has to be rethought regarding a value chain that should be coherent with today’s business context and highly involved in innovation processes (and idea sourcing) which are the the fuel that will power companies in the upcoming years. This is the needed shift from a logic of local push to a global pull one.

As for the conclusion that suggest businesses have to get prepared for web 3.0 I let you make your own opinion. Nobody knows how the future will look like, and since businesses are only starting to understand how to embrace web 2.0 without mistakes and unnecessary worryings, I find the injunction irrelevant, premature and superflous.

This document is not about internal issues. But drawing its consequences in terms of management would be an interesting exercise…and I’m sure McKinsey have its ideas about that.

Filed Under: Innovation, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: community management, crowdsourcing, ideagoras, Innovation, LEAD, marketing, mckinsey, pull, push, socialization, value chain, value chain 2.0, web 2.0, web 3.0

A 15 yo consultant wrote a white paper about teenagers. And so what ?

July 23, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

The case made much noise last week. A 15 years old consultant at Morgan Stanley produced a white paper on how young people of his generation uses medias. And all the world to swoon over the document, to such an extent it was propelled on the front page of the Financial Times website. I hastened to read this report that was supposed to change the face of the world.

I let you read them before we dig a little.

Media&Internet How Teenagers Consume Media

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