From Social Media to Social CRM : a recent experience with airlines

January 11, 2010 By 13 Comments

I already wrote many posts about social CRM on this blog and I recently had the (unfortunate ?) opportunity to add a real life experience to my thoughts. Those who’d prefer to pass over the narative of a long story may directly go to the bottom of the page to read the conclusion.

The situation

A simple holidays week. The discovering of an airline I never took before and, on my trip back home, the experience of very bad weather conditions that made thousands of people strand in many airports.

The background

I have many topics of interest outside of enterprise 2.0. Among them are travels, airlines industry and planes. I’m following and reading some specialized blogs and twitter accounts (airlines, professionals..) as well as some people who share these passions. Some of my “friends” and “followers” are also frequent travelers, ranked “Elite +” by their favorite airline and, like me, they consider that it’s more than a means of transportaion : it’s a true passion. Discussing with these people has a real added value when I need a piece a advice about an airline, a place to go, an aircraft, an airport… better ask it to people who fly more than 60 000 miles every year. Mind you, this is also true for many other fields…but I’ll discuss that later in this post.

Of course I follow the twitter account of my “usual and favorite airline”. They use twitter to broadcast more or less the same things that can also be found on their site or their newsletter, mainly advertisement about promotions. No discussions nor “retweets” of any message coming from a third party (clients or other professionals). The account is not very active and is mainly a one-way channel, with a very weak community side.

For instance, when the “community” live tweeted the delivery of their first Airbus A380 that was broadcasted in video on the web (btw that was a great idea…) and asked some questions to the airline about the plane or wanted to know if the videos would be available for reuse on blogs…no answer, no interest. No more sign of life when I took the time to bring my personal blog back to life (I rarely have time to blog on it) to share the experience of my first flight on their A380. A position that is, a priori, neither bad or good and must be the consequence of a well-though-out strategy.

So, this is the state of my social media experience with “my” airline. Quite frustrating when you’re both an “Elite” and passionate passenger, but the community is large enough so I can share this passion even without the airline. Of course there are many opposite examples (no need to mention Southwest…), but I’m only considering my own personal experience.

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

October 5, 2009 By 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 ?

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

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

August 17, 2009 By 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.

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Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?

July 21, 2009 By 1 Comment

So this is the continuation of the reflection I started here. The purpose is not to discuss any management related thing but to position enterprise 2.0 regarding to the real enterprise.

Why ? Because lots of feedbacks converge on this point. The question about Enterprise 2.0 is not anymore about knowing what are the benefits, if a business should try or not, if it’s a fad, but how to implement it in a company that has a past, certainties and used to work without that for ages.

So what we need first is a reflection about positioning and integration with pre-existing logics. As a matter of fact, a reason why so many projects fail is that they were not positioned in order to have any impact on business, would it be negative or positive, and, consequently, failed to engage people who didn’t understand both the purpose and the method.

Let’s take knowledge management as an example. When businesses faced issues that needed such projects, the very name of the approach was meaningful enough to make people understand what it was about. It doesn’t mean that KM projects were successful, but understanding what things are about are essential for success. Say “we’re launching a KM project” doesn’t mean it will be successful but makes everyone understand what it is about. Say “the solution to you problem is Enterprise 2.0″ and have a look at the doubtful face of 95% employees and you have to admit the road will be very, very long.

Everyone needs to understand “why, what, how”. It’s the preliminary condition to the ownership that is needed for success. This ownership means that people should not be taken to an unknown ground they will consider as hostile, but need to start from a well known groung and, step by step, push its frontiers. The whole while being aware of making sense regarding to they day to day job and concerns, what is their current paradigm.

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