Many B2B companies have not embarked on social media projects because the ROI of such activities has been hard to quantify.  As it turns out, that may not be a bad thing.

Customer experience management (CXM)

B2B marketeers need to know they are creating communications pieces that drive real world results like increasing revenue or decreasing customer service costs. As such, many social and mobile projects have fallen outside of the to do lists because they are hard to quantify against typical B2B metrics.

Brian K. Walker, Forrester

A new type of solution is emerging on the commerce technology landscape that promises to help eBusiness leaders drive customer targeting, content relevancy, and personalization on their sites and across digitally enabled consumer touchpoints.

Customer experience management (CXM) solutions aim to support these personalized experiences across digital experiences such as websites and mobile sites, as well as mobile and tablet apps. In the era of agile commerce, more eBusiness leaders will look to take advantage of CXM solutions to drive optimized experiences and increase sales.

With the advent of Customer Experience Management, B2B marketeers now have a new set of tools and procedures to link social channel communication with traffic to central websites and the actions performed by users once they get there.

A strong central digital hub connects other marketing initiatives like paid media, search engine marketing, social media and mobile apps. Making this connection allows marketeers to develop sophisticated digital lead generation strategies that keep pipelines full with high value prospects. Coupled with advanced listening and  analytics tools, B2B brand marketers can now define, refine, track and optimize against KPIs in real-time.

TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR DIGITAL CHANNEL

At THINK we specialize in helping clients look at their whole digital ecosystem. We work to develop engagement models that can be measured across channels.  We develop content strategies that allow marketeers to quickly and effectively communicate their brand message to existing and potential customers.

No matter where you are in the process of improving your digital customer experience, THINK can help. Give us a call today to find out how you can get the most out of your digital properties.

THINK specializes in helping brands understand their customers and then finding ways to break through the cluttered marketplace to make meaningful connections with them. We’re skilled in the creation of compelling experiences with sustainable models that drive ongoing ROI for businesses. Please feel free to reach out to us; we’d love to hear from you.

Executive Summary: Consumers expect any brand communications to happen as quickly as communications in social networks.  With the ultimate goal of increasing customer engagement, new tools and practices calle Customer Experience Management are emerging to help brand marketers observe, orient, decide and act in the digital channel. Taking advantage of these new developments will help brands increase sales and satisfaction in a fast paced, multichannel environment.

Many companies are beyond thinking of CRM as a solitary outbound messaging tool. As social networks reached mainstream usage, companies were forced to develop faster communication strategies to accommodate clients’ and consumers’ expectations for personalized, rapid attention.

Not only have social channels sped up expectations, they have also become the trusted source of news, information and product recommendations. According to Eldelman’s , “Social media, which consists of social networking sites, content-sharing sites, blogs, and microblogging sites, saw the biggest percentage increase (75 percent) in trust among media sources.”

Social media is more than marketing communications… Social media is really about engaging communities in new ways to achieve otherwise impossible business value. It is about strategy. It is about thriving, surviving or disappearing in a new age of human behaviors fueled by mass collaboration.

Carol Rozwell,
Gartner, VP Distinguished Analyst

The Age of the Customer & Splinternet

Empowered buyers demand a new level of customer obsession.

As companies grapple with the speed of social, one thing emerges across all category segments: we have entered the age of the customer.  Today’s empowered customer can communicate brand likes and dislikes at an alarming speed, and the potential reach of one well-connected individual can be in the millions.  Today’s brands must meet consumers in the stream of social conversations. Brands must find ways to connect with and engage their customers in ways that build trust, delight and evangelism.

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff defines this level of relationship as “customer obsessed.” A customer obsessed company invests in four areas:

1. real-time customer intelligence;
2. customer experience and customer service;
3. sales channels that deliver customer intelligence;
4. useful content and interactive marketing.

If this seems pedestrian and obvious it is, but not when viewed against our second dimension, Splinternet.

In May 2011, Webtrends commissioned Forrester Consulting to study the phenomenon frequently referred to as the “Splinternet.” Forrester’s study yielded three key findings:

• The Splinternet disrupts the marketing landscape. Technology and channel fragmentation are a very real phenomenon; marketers know that adapting to a multichannel environment is critical and are racing to understand the effect of the Splinternet.
• Marketing strategies need a reboot. Firms must take a fresh look at their foundational strategies to evaluate how they will create mutually beneficial relationships with customers in light of new channels, technologies, and the expectations of sophisticated consumers.
• Multichannel success requires mastery of multiple disciplines. Firms must take a multidisciplinary approach to harnessing the opportunities that the Splinternet presents. Technology, organization, process, and measurement are all interrelated contributors to a marketing organization’s effectiveness.

The age of the customer and the challenges of Splinternet combine to present marketeers with a host of new technical challenges but also offer the hope of attaining a new level of understanding, dialog and influence with their consumers.

Customer Experience Management

Finding success in digital marketing initiatives has always been a cross-discipline effort. With the requirements of social speed and the vast array of digital channels the challenge continues to grow, simply staying on top of each channel can be a daunting task. Managing campaigns across channels and measuring individual customer needs may seem out of reach.

“In response, a new concept in marketing has appeared. It’s called Customer Experience Management (or CXM for short). And while it may be a new concept, the principles behind it have existed for a long time. Now, however, the tools and techniques to deliver on the promise are new and powerful, and rapidly emerging and evolving, making CXM truly possible for the first time.

CXM requires web content management, on-site search, commerce, customer service interaction management, marketing automation, analytics, testing, optimization and personalization to deliver Forrester’s vision of CXM. To truly deliver a strong customer experience that maximizes business results, you need to understand what your customers want, and deliver them a one on one experience and relevant offers across channels and touchpoints, when they want it.”

CXM components as defined by Forrester

The New Rules of Engagement

The term engagement first found its way into the mainstream in a Forrester article from August 8, 2007 called “Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement,” by Brian Haven. Haven called for a new method for analyzeing customer interactions with brand communication pieces. He stated, “We believe that marketers need a new approach to understanding customers and prospects. This new type of measurement — engagement — encompasses the quantitative metrics of site visits and transactions, the qualitative metrics of brand awareness and loyalty, and the fuzzy areas in the middle best characterized by social media.”

“Engagement goes beyond reach and frequency to measure people’s real feelings about brands. It starts with their own brand relationship and continues as they extend that relationship to other customers. As a customer’s participation with a brand deepens from site use and purchases (involvement and interaction) to affinity and championing (intimacy and influence), measuring and acting.”

The four parts of engagement build on each other to create a holistic picture.

• Involvement: an individual’s relationship with a company or brand, visits to a site or a physical store, time spent per page, and pages viewed. Often the first point of interaction an individual has with a brand.
• Interaction: individuals contribute content about a brand, provide contact information, or make a purchase. Interaction measures actions. ·
• Intimacy: the affection an individual holds for a brand, likes, shares, opinion or perspective. Intimacy can be tracked in real time, providing the opportunity to correct a problem or seize an opportunity.
• Influence: individual’s likelihood to encourage a fellow customer to consider or buy a brand, product, or service.

Take control of your Digital Channel

THINK specializes helping brands satisfy consumer expectations across multiple communication channels.  In leveraging CXM, brands can confidently navigate today’s fragmented communication channels and ultimately create a higher, more profitable level of customer engagement.

Thinking about apps?

Should you build a smartphone app? I don’t know. What I do know is if you haven’t asked yourself that question you need to do so very soon. Here are some stats to digest…

• Smartphone penetration as of June 2011 reached  38%
• 55% of new phone sales are smartphones
• Nearly 50% of smartphone owners are 25-44
• Mobile application downloads are expected to reach 48 billion (uh huh, that’s a B) in 2015

So it’s fairly obvious that you need to ask the question. How to get to an answer is a little more difficult. We would, for most businesses, recommend that a base level of customer facing information (e.g. product, about us) and tools (e.g. store locator) be made available in mobile friendly formats (more on apps versus mobile sites coming up in the next post).  For this discussion let’s assume you have that base level covered. If you don’t have it covered, you probably want to do that first.

To get closer to an answer on the app questions, ask your self these questions

1. Does your target customer fall into the smartphone user demographic?
2. If so, are there brand or product related tasks that they would potentially use their phone for on a semi-regular (e.g. not one time or rarely) basis?
3. If the answer to question two was no, then would it make sense to use an app to sell (e.g. think about helping then shop) to your customers?
4. If the answer to number two and three are no, then ask yourself this: would it make sense to use an app to inform or entertain them?

To help you think in general terms about what people are using their mobile phones for the most, here are the top activities of US smartphone owners: email, games, social networking, instant messaging, mapping and directions, music and radio, and weather apps – these are the growth areas.

Vintage ratings on mobile anyone?

With this this data in mind, let’s think about an example of a case where we would and a case where we wouldn’t consider using a smart phone app…

Would

• A brand with lots of valuable data that their customers access frequently
• The customers like to search and sort the data
• This may be a great opportunity for a branded app
• Examples: IMDB, RedBox, Wine Spectator

Wouldn’t

• A brand has a commodity CPG product that competes on price and reach advertising (e.g. loss leader)
• Customers do not research the product category much if at all
• This is probably a good case for not doing an app
• Examples: Brawny, Tide, Clorox

Of course no two business situations are identical and these are very simple examples. THINK specializes in helping brands understand their customers and then finding ways to break through the cluttered marketplace to make meaningful connections with them…some times through mobile sometimes in other ways. Please feel free to reach out to us, and of course do comment below!

j

References
http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/Nielsen+news/feature.asp?c=31117
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=25901
http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2011/06/us-smartphone-owners-by-age/
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2011/06/08/113514.html
http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2010/3952/seven-types-of-smartphone-apps-driving-mobile-market

Facebook introduced Timeline, a radical new way of organizing and presenting “wall” information.  With large format images and content widgets Facebook page owners, both people and brands, can take advantage of the new freedom of expression as they tell their story in a visual, time based, scrap book.

Paul Papadimitriou's Apple Timeline mock up

Facebook further extended the importance of its Open Graph feature by adding Custom App actions.  In his presentation, Mark Zuckerberg said that if 2010 was the year of the noun, 2011 was the year of the verb.  With Custom App actions users can now go beyond liking something and instead talk about watching, cooking, flying or reading something.  These actions can be enhanced with more information: instead of saying “I am cooking,” a new Facebook action may say, “I am cooking chicken for dinner.”  Of course for brands the idea would be to have a custom app action that said, “I am making Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner.”

A new activity ticker at the top right of the Facebook page alerts user to other people’s “light weight” media consumption activities.  Working with a host of media partners,Facebook now shows your friends (and friends of friends) when you are listening to a song on Spotify or watching a video on Hulu.  The stated purpose is for users to be able to discover new entertainment based on what their friends like. The ticker is also another place that custom app actions can appear.

These updates may seem like more features updating in the lifecycle development of a product but for brands they represent a significant opportunity.  Having amassed the largest group of connected user ever assembled, Facebook’s new features offer brands a better channel for telling their story and engaging users in an ongoing conversation.

Credits and Commerce were not areas covered in the F8 conference but represent huge opportunities for brands to add teeth to any marketing communication and use Facebook as a direct sales channel.  As the Facebook credits program continues to grow and integrates both psychical locations and Groupon like redemption models, brand will have a new tool to drive product purchases.

Direct commerce via the Fabebook platform also represents a real opportunity for brands to sell products.  At THINk we have seen success through offering a curated product selection or bundle on Facebook as a virtual pop up store to drive additional sales around specific popular items.

While Project Spartan has not been officially announced it is well known that Facebook is working on a major enhancement of its mobile offering.  Facebook mobile is currently used by 350 million of its users and has significant advantages for brands, particularly brands that operate physical retail environments or sell in brick and mortar locations.  Consumers are relying more and more on their mobile phones to do in store price comparisons and take advantage of coupons and offers at the point of purchase.

This is Project Spartan?

Over the course of the next few weeks we will look at each of these features sets in greater detail and explore the opportunities for brands to directly improve sales via Facebook campaigns

THINK specializes in helping brands understand their customers and then finding ways to break through the cluttered marketplace to make meaningful connections with them. We’re skilled in the creation of compelling experiences with sustainable models that drive ongoing ROI for businesses. Please feel free to reach out to us; we’d love to hear from you.

Pet ownership in the US is at an all time high and with 63% of American households owning a pet the market for pet food and related products is considerable.  The Pet Food Association of America estimates that on average people spend $254 per year on pet food alone. With 78.2 million dogs in the US that make the dog food category worth a whopping 19.6 billion dollars per year.

Given this large and growing market, establishing brand preference is a high priority for pet product makers.  Industry data suggests that around 80% of pet owners develop lifetime brand affinity while their pets are puppies.

With this in mind, THINK has developed a content based Puppy knowledge center that a pet food brand could rapidly incorporate into their digital portfolio to introduce and nurture a life long relationship for people that care enough to provide the very best for their pets.

The presentations by Ben Alman, Nichlas Zakas and Addy Osmani were the team favorites.

From the site:  About the jQuery Summit

Released in 2006, jQuery was designed to be a cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. Since then it’s become an essential component of over 25% of all Web sites speeding up development time, while also allowing designers to add pizazz to their sites.

Join some of the Web’s most experienced jQuery professionals as they share experiences culled from working on sites big and small. Learn from the pros how to tackle jQuery difficulties head-on with proven methods in use by some of the most popular sites on the Web.

In addition to learning about jQuery, we also explored other frameworks like  In addition to learning about how other folks are using jQuery, we explored related technologies such as Backbone.js and Jasmine.  These tools are providing a richer ecosystem for building today’s dynamic sites and web applications.

As the demand grows for multi screen executions and responsive web approaches, we will continue to explore tools such as jQuery to keep our client’s projects on the cutting edge of industry standards.

The presentation, titled “The Role of Digital Agencies in the Age of the Customer,” urged today’s agencies to re-define themselves in the age of the empowered consumer.  Corcoran made it clear that he is “bullish on advertising,” as many B2C marketers plan to increase interactive marketing spending across the board.

Another graphic below illustrates Forrester’s take the growth of interactive marketing budgets in over the next five years from 2011 to 2016.  What say you? What’s your five year outlook?

The reaction to Timeline has been positive.  Its a new way to organize content in a more conversational manner.  Its also a way to scrapbook or for lifecasting – thus potentially displacing the previous market for both of those kinds of online tools.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb highlights the three key points Timeline brings to Facebook:

1. “Timeline is all about sharing personal content.
2. Timeline is also about making that personal content much more social than it is on your old Facebook profiles.
3. That’s because a timeline is a highly effective way to organize social media content (making it easier to like, comment on and re-share).”

Each of those elements can just as easily be applied to a brand and opens a new channel for  brands to communicate with customers.

“Time is the perfect tool to organize social media.”
Eric Lagier, CEO Memolane

The key dimension of Timeline is time, as the name implies.  Gone are the days of a forward moving, linear stream of wall posts with photos, videos and apps all living in individual tabbed wells.  With time as the unifying construct people and brands will have to rethink the way they organize and post information to tell the brand’s present and past.

Looking again at the great Timeline mock up of a fictional Apple page by Paul Papadimitriou, the most radical content type is the company history on the right. Companies will be able to highlight major milestones, recent successes and founding stories all with images videos comments and apps that tell a fuller picture of the brand’s person and story than before possible, either via Facebook or via their corporate website.

Paul Papadimitriou's Apple Timeline mock up

Paul also calls out several additional features:

• “The Billboard. The cover image feature for personal profiles —here’s my customization— shouts “branding” since I’ve seen it ^[3]. Perfect for the latest product —still not the iPhone at the time of this writing.
• The History. From Apple’s foundation, to 1997′s coming back of Steve Jobs, to today. Brands have a past, a present and a future.
• The Fans. You, me and all the Apple fanboys.
• The Application box and its Selector. Here a feature of Apple’s main areas of interest —as shown on its website.
• The Storytelling. Quite evidently, the stories. No more falling from a cliff —as in the current news feed, but in chronological order.
• The Product Display. A featured story, here images of the iPad line. A Facebook version of the point of sale display.”

So what can brands do to leverage Timeline and how should they plan for the upcoming capabilities? Let’s use Paul’s mock up to drive a planning list that can help get brands and their agencies ready to tell a new kind of brand story.

Timeline provides brands a different format for conversation and that means a different set of content generation requirements.  Its not enough to do a quick wall post or tweet nor is a blog post or press release easily repurposed for the task.  Let’s focus on three of the features to see how they will effect content development.

The billboard is a great opportunity for a big brand image, but which one?  Its not a rip from the company website, not just a big logo: what will it be?  Who decides what image to use?  The regular Facebook team probably needs to get input from a variety of internal and external constituents to decide what best communicates the brand’s persona in this new format.

The history offers a unique opportunity to tell a brands formation and milestones but is any of that history already written?  Where are the media assets needed to bring that story to life? Who decides what is important and who approves the final copy?

The product display allows a brand to highlight and promote its products to a huge online audience that can like and share those products with all of their friends.  Which products are the most important to display?  Who decides what products to include and how are they integrated into the company’s e-commerce and reporting systems?

With 800 million international users, Facebook is the first mainstream, global social channel. Timeline is the next generation of social story telling. Will your brand be ready to tell its story to the world?

THINK specializes in helping brands understand their customers and then finding ways to break through the cluttered marketplace to make meaningful connections with them. We’re skilled in the creation of compelling experiences with sustainable models that drive ongoing ROI for businesses.