Jason Swenk

Now that social media has redefined our social lives and the way in which we communicate with each other, it’s time for us to recognize that social business is the next realm of global change. At first unsure of what the social revolution had to offer them, businesses have still only engaged with social media as primarily a new set of marketing tools. But this use is only a small piece of the potential for improving the way businesses act and interact with internal and external stakeholders

Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, described this brave new world in a recent blog post on Fast Company. “Social media is about media and people, which is one dimension of the overall world of business,” he writes. “With social business you start to look at the way people are interacting in digital experiences and apply the insights derived to a wide variety of different business processes.”

One example of how social innovations are affecting business is in the way employees communicate with each other. Email was a very powerful innovation and completely changed internal communication in business environments over the last 15 years or so. But the problem with email is that it tends to create silos of information – conversations are limited to only the individuals directly addressed and important knowledge isn’t shared with other parties that could make use of it. Social technology opens up the possibility of online collaborative communication portals that the company can learn from, with powerful filtering and analysis mechanisms to share key information with anyone who might be able to make use of it. Such a solution would also allow management to more quickly identify problems as or before they arise and address them sooner rather than later.

Social business practices and technologies, focused as they are on collaboration and sharing, will allow companies to gain a better and faster understanding of their customers, employees and partners, using that understanding to better drive the way they do business.

In our business, we get a lot of inquiries about search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of increasing website visibility in search engine results. Traditionally, this has been accomplished through a variety of tactics including editing content and HTML source code to incorporate keywords meant to capture a wide range of search terms. But the ascendance of social media channels and the popularity of social media interaction offer another great way to boost your website’s visibility. A well thought-out social media marketing campaign can provide the following benefits for SEO:

1. Increases your inbound links – people coming to your site through a social media campaign provide numerous new inbound links to your site, which is key to influencing search engine rankings.
2. Increases online interactions featuring your company – when people discuss your site or company on social media channels, it increases your web presence and the number of results featuring your company’s name.
3. Improves ranking as a secondary effect – Search engines pay close attention to social media rankings and sometimes it is easier to get noticed through social media outlets than search engines, which then pick up on social media activity as a secondary effect. Piggyback on this effect by focusing first on social media and be sure that everything you do through social media features clear links to your primary site.

To take advantage of these benefits you need to be strategic, creating a road map to guide your social media and SEO efforts. Start by identifying and learning about the audience you are hoping to reach. Research their interests, behaviors, and preferences through their interactions on social media channels. One way to do this is through social CRM, which monitors social engagements and can help you identify conversational themes and key opinion makers that can boost your efforts. Read more about social CRM in my blog posts here and here.

Next, identify your objectives for the campaign based on what you have learned about your intended audience. Your primary goal in a campaign of this type is not necessarily sales – rather, it is to reach out to and gain a foothold in the audience communities that you have identified, with increased sales to follow.

Create a plan based on those objectives that includes tactics also based on the research you have done. Address your audience through the channels that they prefer, offer them interactions that provide the types of value they prefer and you will see positive results that boost your overall SEO while creating a new group of loyal fans for your brand.

Finally, be sure to measure the results of your efforts against your objectives. Without measurement, it is impossible to make sure that your efforts are as tightly focused as they should be or that you are having the greatest impact you can have. The research phase described above should never really end. Throughout any campaign you should be continually learning about your audience – how are they responding so far to your efforts? How can you sharpen those efforts to produce even better results?

These are the basic benefits of using social media to boost SEO and a simple outline for completing such a campaign. At Solar Velocity, we excel in working closely with you to develop detailed plans with demonstrable results. Contact us to find out more about how your company can dramatically increase its search engine results and become a more prominent player in today’s marketplace.

As smartphones swiftly take over the world, we’ve all come to expect constant information access at our fingertips. Lead Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker famously predicted last year that mobile internet access in the U.S. will exceed fixed internet access sometime in the next couple of years. This change has shifted mobile websites from a nice luxury that a business can offer to a necessity.

What impact does this have on website design? Well, it takes us back a few steps down the evolutionary ladder to working within a much smaller window. In recent years, computer screens have grown, giving designers a lot of real estate to work with. Mobile development reverses that trend, meaning that intelligent choices have to be made regarding formatting and content to maximize benefit to the end consumer while maintaining good design.

Fortunately, mobile access can be detected and users can be redirected from your company’s primary site to a mobile-specific site, so all sites aren’t limited to the lowest common denominator of mobile design. The most effective mobile sites only contain about 25% of the content of a company’s primary website because visitors are usually looking for quick and easy for information. Think phone numbers and not in-depth company histories, prices and not lengthy product descriptions. When developing your mobile website, ask yourself the following interrelated questions:

• What is the purpose of the mobile website? Honing the central purpose you’re seeking to accomplish is even more important with mobile sites than primary sites. Do you want the site to simply serve as a basic signpost letting consumers know where your store is and how they can visit? Do you want to sell products directly through the site? Do you want to provide access to information and commentary that users might find useful? Do you want to allow consumers to interact with each other and with the company? Decide what you want to accomplish and build the site around that central purpose, trimming details that don’t contribute.
• Why would users come to your mobile website? What you want to accomplish with a site is all well and good but if it doesn’t match potential consumer need it won’t be effective. Answering this question can be very complicated or very simple – think about how you access mobile websites. Put yourself in the potential user’s shoes and think about what they want from your site. If you’re a product manufacturer, your primary purpose in a mobile site is undoubtedly to encourage sales of your products. But how best to do that? You could offer long, in-depth details about your products and the manufacturing process. But mobile users are much more likely to prefer access to very basic product details, contact info if they have questions and a dealer locator.

These are just two key questions that need to be asked in the mobile development process. Because you never want to duplicate your primary site on your mobile site, questions like these help you to start thinking about how to pare down your assets to a more streamlined and effective site.

In my last few posts I’ve tried to demonstrate the importance of discovering what your target consumer wants in an increasingly consumer-driven market. Today I want to turn away from social CRM as a tool for uncovering that information to how we can better develop brand engagement channels, and especially websites, to improve the user experience. Just as it’s important to know what consumers want and tailor your products to their desires, it’s also important to ensure that every form of interaction they have with your brand is driven from their perspective and shaped to appeal to them.

With most creative assets, and especially websites, you have a limited time to get your message across to your audience and, by following these steps, you can ensure you are headed in the right direction. When developing a website, the entire process should be undertaken with a deep understanding of overall business goals, project-specific business goals and the perspective of the end user. Perform an initial assessment focused on discovering and understanding these aspects, including who the intended audience is and what their challenges are. This is the only way to create design that is truly for the people.

Ask yourself these key questions:

• What is the ultimate goal of the project?
• What will be the call to action?
• How will you define project success?
• What do you know about who you are marketing to?
• What are all the current marketing actions being taken or planned for the future?
• Who are the competitors and what are they doing?
• What are the probable preferences/goals/intentions of our intended consumers?
• How can we help our consumers achieve those preferences/goals/intentions?

These questions will help you begin to discover your company’s strengths and determine consumer needs. From there you can start to define a clear road map of what kind of architecture, look and feel will have the best usability and produce the best results.

Although the questions above are not the only important questions you’ll need to answer, they will give you a great jump start on designing for the people. This type of process might seem like common sense as you’re reading this but many companies ignore these basic steps in the development process, designing only based on their own internal perspective. That type of design results in user engagement that feels awfully one-sided and is likely to be unrelated to what the user is seeking through the site. Instead, strive to develop an experience that recognizes and gives value to user needs and you’ll really be designing for the people.

In Kirby's last two posts on our blog and in his new white paper (download here), he's been covering what colleges and universities can do to improve communication through the use of new technologies. In this post, I want to suggest another tool that institutions of higher education, or any institution that relies on donor or engagement, can use to improve that engagement - social CRM.

You might think at first that social CRM seems like a strange fit for higher ed, especially given CRM's origin in the corporate world. But social CRM is really just about improving engagement with any audience and gaining a deeper understanding of that audience's makeup, opinions and desires, all of which are critical to maintaining good student, alumni and donor relations. The tools that are available today can provide incredible value and greatly streamline your institution's communications engine.

If you're new to social CRM and still trying to get your head around what the term means, see my white paper or earlier posts on this blog. Basically social CRM refers to a strategy, a process and various forms of technology all aimed at gathering data from online conversations among a consumer group (i.e., students, alumni) and delivering that data in meaningful ways to shape strategy and tactics on a variety of fronts - from recruiting to student retention to donor cultivation.

A typical social CRM strategy for a university might feature a hosted community allowing students, alumni, faculty and staff to interact with each other, exchanging insight, impressions and opinions and forging stronger bonds with the university community. Data from community interactions, both through the hosted community as well as various external channels - posts, tweets and mentions on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels - would be collected. This data can be sorted and analyzed to discover opinion trends, such as how your alumni feel about the new sports mascot, and communications preferences, such as a preference for online communication over print or a widespread desire to receive fewer fundraising calls. This information can be easily shared with key decision makers across the university to shape overall strategy for the institution as well as greatly sharpen the effectiveness of your marketing communication. Social CRM technology thus leads to better information and an improved information flow, reducing data silos and lowering costs.

As you know, your students and alumni are willing to share their ideas and everyone wants to feel that their voice is heard. Through social media and other channels, your constituent populations are already making their opinions known, but are you gathering that information and making the most of it? Are you offering a central point for sharing that also contributes to improved engagement and participation among your students and alumni? A social CRM solution can do all of the above and at the same time provide you with the best and most up-to-date information about the people you are trying to reach.

In my last few blog posts I’ve focused on the business-to-customer (B2C) aspects of online social engagement through social CRM. Today I want to talk about how great benefits can be achieved by applying these processes in the business-to-business (B2B) realm and or even to the internal business environment.

Many larger companies now employ protected portals to engage and share information with their partners, vendors and employees, either through one-on-one engagements or through community interaction. A vendor might post a question seeking clarification on particular capabilities of a new product and receive an answer from a company rep, or multiple partners of a software developer might share tips with each other about how best to integrate that company’s software with other elements. If your definition of social CRM depends on Twitter and Facebook, these portals might not seem to fit. But if you recognize that social CRM is about improved social engagement, whatever the method, you’re already starting to see the possibilities.

Because these engagements are not shaped from the top down but rather from the bottom up, driven by those seeking information rather than those giving it out, the portals offer many of the same positive opportunities of B2C social CRM systems. More tailored, direct and helpful engagement is possible, increasing perception of the company as responsive and helpful and improving the experience of those ultimately selling, implementing or using a company’s products or services. This type of engagement can go a long way in boosting overall satisfaction and brand loyalty. Some of these portals and internal networks are already taking advantage of these opportunities, with Microsoft’s Partner Network standing out as a particularly good example. However, many others could stand for real improvement through the integration of communities that foster collaborative engagement and reward those who are more active in the community as thought leaders.

The biggest room for improvement, however, is in the area of gathering and using data from portal engagement to drive business strategy. Just like in the B2C social CRM realm, a large amount of helpful information is out there if you know how to gather and analyze it, information that can help you figure out what’s working well and what’s not working at all. Tracking questions by keywords can demonstrate who is asking the most questions and what they’re most frequently asking about – information which can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your sales and support communication or help your product development team identify helpful design improvements. You can identify regional issues that might point to a problem in the product supply chain or identify particularly active participants as being good candidates for a partner advisory panel. This type of information-gathering can be more active as well, by running surveys or voting on particular product features and perhaps offering incentives for participation. All of this information can enable a company to make better-informed decisions based on actual evidence.

Similar benefits can be gained even through the internal networks for information-sharing in larger companies. By paying attention to how employees are making use of these networks, businesses can identify where needs exist for improved training materials, internal processes, etc.

Making the most of B2C engagement, like any social CRM engagement, requires good strategy and a bit of effort but the payoff can be great.

Recently I’ve been working closely with a client, an automobile company, to develop and implement a social CRM strategy. The company wants to utilize the technology to gain a deeper understanding of their potential customers, their tastes and desires, information that will be used to drive product development and marketing strategy.

Social CRM offers businesses a real opportunity to develop what traditional CRM has been attempting for years – a truly dynamic and contextual understanding of the customer community with all of its internal segmentation. The importance of this type of understanding is clear – customer communities are not made up of clones but of a broad range of individuals. However, individuals with common interests can be identified and grouped into segments, with typical personas developed to represent each segment. Once these personas are identified, incentives and product elements can be more closely tailored to speak directly to the needs of each segment.

Moving at the speed of online communication, a well-designed social CRM system will utilize not just passive monitoring of customer interaction but also active engagement tools such as a branded community, surveys, contests, and informational opportunities to find out what customers are thinking. These many touchpoints can provide a much more well-rounded understanding of customer segments and what factors shape each segment’s decision-making. Feedback from these channels can then be used to develop well-defined personas that represent customer types. Because customers are real people with shifting ideas and desires, for these personas to be effective they should also shift to reflect these changes. Social CRM, with its many touchpoints of customer engagement and constant access to customer information, is the greatest tool we have to date to identify these shifts as they occur.

Although we’ll never be able to fully automate such a process, the capabilities of social CRM represent a huge leap in our ability to understand our customers and to allow customer interests to drive the way we do business. Through it, we can make better informed decisions on how to develop a marketing campaign, interact with customers, build customer loyalty and develop improved products and services.

I recently attended TechMedia's Digital Summit conference in Atlanta and heard Gary Vaynerchuk speak on the topic of ROI and social media. He told a story about an executive who kept pestering him with questions, wanting to know what the "real ROI" of social media is, and Gary finally responded by asking, "What's the ROI of your mother?"

Gary's point was that there are just some things that are hard to describe in terms of ROI because there are too many factors in play, it's too hard to locate the value. And there are other instances where the value is so clear you might not feel like it's necessary to determine ROI. Although it's true that social media, and the value of social engagement, involve a lot of complex factors that are difficult to track, if you have a clearly defined objective and key deliverables you can always determine ROI. And even in the cases where it might seem somewhat unnecessary (what's the ROI of a piano when Elton John plays it?), determining which elements are effective and which are not can help you derive even greater benefit next time.

In his talk, Gary also went on to emphasize that the most valuable way for a business to distinguish itself in the present context is through one-to-one engagement. Royal Dutch Airlines KLM's ongoing KLM Surprise campaign is a terrific example - the airline monitors passengers on Foursquare and Twitter to find special ways of engaging with them to thank them for their business. When one customer tweeted that she was flying home for Mother's Day a KLM rep found her in the airport and gave her flowers to take home for Mom. This type of one-to-one engagement develops an emotional connection, a life-long customer and brand advocate who is going to tell everyone she knows about what KLM did for her. If businesses focus on paying it forward, the positive effects will come back bigger each time.

Using social CRM tools and branded communities ensures that you have more opportunities for similar engagement and that you can track the ROI of campaigns like KLM's, where the value can be difficult to determine. Who will the woman tell about what happened to her? How can we know that new customers came to KLM because they heard about the flowers? With a well-designed social CRM strategy, businesses can track online customer engagement and comments about these types of interaction and have a better sense of their impact. They can also better tailor future efforts, continually honing based on customer response to find the best possible methods.

In my last post on social CRM, I talked about how, when we engage customers through social channels, we need to make sure intelligence from these engagements is being gathered and used to shape business strategy. In this post, I want to talk about a very different but related mistake – gathering intelligence without engaging customers. Each of these mistakes results from striking the wrong balance between engagement and intelligence-gathering in social CRM strategy, and either form of imbalance means you’re not getting the most out of your social CRM investment.

When different companies seek to develop their social CRM strategies, they start the process with different strengths and weaknesses. One company might have a strong history of interacting with the public through social media and needs to focus more on developing strong CRM practices. Another might have an excellent CRM process in place and tends to lean on that strength rather than taking full advantage of the ‘social’ side of social CRM. This company, which I’ll call Acme Corp., closely monitors Twitter and Facebook comments about their products, effectively analyzing and distributing that information to shape overall strategy in their marketing, customer service and product development departments. They are effectively carrying out their social CRM strategy, but because the strategy itself is imbalanced they’re not reaping the full benefit of social CRM.

Reaching out to your target market through the channels that they prefer creates great benefits. Consumers today are overwhelmingly turning to online social channels of engagement and expect their voices to be heard and even the most basic evidence that someone at Acme is listening to the concerns of customers is valuable. By engaging directly Acme could better shape brand identity, bolster customer loyalty, and develop brand advocates and thought leaders.

Besides the ability to improve loyalty and customer relationships, Acme is also missing the opportunity to generate more, and more useful, intelligence about their customers and their desires. The company might do a good job of grabbing 100 percent of the useful information that’s currently circulating about their brand and products. If a customer’s tweet about Acme’s flagship product simply states that he is disappointed in the product, the only useful information Acme has is that the product could be improved. That’s not much for the product development team to go on. But by engaging customers, starting conversations and asking questions, Acme can get better information, such as being able to precisely identfy what specific improvements to their flagship product would have the greatest impact.

Although at times the rules might seem to have changed, the basic principles are still the same – the company that does the best job of identifying the desires of the consumer and meeting those needs is the company that comes out ahead. Consumer engagement and intelligence-gathering, when effectively integrated, can help you identify and meet needs in a continually-improving process, resulting in ongoing success.

Pat Perdue’s recent piece, “Social Media and Customer Engagement”, offered great examples of how, and how not, to provide customer service through social media. They also got me thinking about the ways good social CRM strategy could be effectively applied to similar situations.

A social CRM system works to improve overall customer experience by gathering data from customer conversations and delivering that data in meaningful ways to shape strategy and tactics on a variety of fronts – from customer service to sales strategy to product development. In the examples Paul provided, customers were complaining to Comcast and Expedia via Twitter about service outages or dropped calls to customer service. A well-designed social CRM system would improve such customer experiences in four ways:

1. Identifying problem trends. Through a keyword system, complaints about similar problems could be aggregated into reports that are used to identify and improve systemic shortcomings. For example, instead of viewing a random tweet about a dropped customer service call and assuming it was a one-time occurrence, customer service leadership could see in a single report that 50 similar tweets were made in a single month, pointing to an ongoing issue in the contact center that must be rectified. Another example might be frequent use of the term “wait time” in customer tweets. This might lead to the inclusion of a wait time counter on the company’s contact page or an automated message on calls to customer service that informs customers of the expected wait time and what they can do to get a faster response.
2. Improving response time. Because many businesses have only a small team of customer service representatives, scalability can be a problem in times of increased demand. Rather than making customers wait a long time for a meaningful response, automated responses can be keyed to tweets about particular problems, again based on a keyword system. If a telecom company knows that its systems are down in a particular area due to storms, they could set up an automated tweet response to complaints about service outages that explains the problem and tells customers when they can expect service to resume. In the example Paul offered in which a Comcast customer tweeted that they “need a call back ASAP” because they were told it would be ten days before their problem would be addressed, the social CRM workflow could recognize the key words “call back” and “ASAP”, moving this customer to the top of a queue and alerting a customer service rep to reach out right away.
3. Retain current customers, gain new ones. By automatically prioritizing tweets that indicate a potential lost customer, such as tweets that contain the words “cancel” and “Comcast”, social CRM can help companies such as Comcast act faster to help customers that are within minutes of severing the relationship. Similarly, whenever someone tweets that “AT&T sucks”, Comcast has an opportunity to gain a customer if they have processes in place to recognize it. Through a social CRM system, identification of tweets like this could be automated and a queue devised for sales outreach. The ROI of such efforts would be easily trackable, defusing a common complaint about the uncertain value of social media efforts.
4. Increase successful outcomes. By tracking successful against less-than-successful engagement processes and aggregating data, a social CRM system can help companies identify the types of responses customers prefer and improve their methods accordingly.

These represent only some of the ways that social CRM can be used to meaningfully improve customer experiences. I’ll be writing more soon about how data gathered through social CRM can be used outside of the customer service department to better enable companies to satisfy customers and distinguish themselves from the competition.