Social Business Blog: 2011

Quick question for you

Got a very simple question to pose today, after somebody asked me to explain the benefits of a 'trigger event'.

Read a fascinating insight on social media strategy from Gartner yesterday and wanted to share some results from the survey straight away. See if you can spot the discrepancy between these two answers:

There was a fantastic article in Forbes yesterday from IBM's vice president of social business. Follow the link and have a read as it's a really in depth look at what a lot of businesses are now facing. They key points I took from it were how social business really does increase productivity, enhance innovation and reduce cost. It's the continuing evolution of communication which means failing to keep up leaves you with a distinct disadvantage.

For a sales professional or account manager who spends time racing up and down motorways, keeping up with paperwork and generally trying to balance 8 plates on one, thin pole hearing sentences like 'take a while to get to know social media' is probably not a very favourable suggestion. In fact, though they'd probably never admit it to their bosses, that line probably wakes up a few internal neighbours with continuous expletives being held back from actually making it past the voice box.

Cloudforce 2011 hit London today and the message seemed very, very clear: The cloud is the new place to woo customers through social engagement. If you didn't believe the hype around social CRM then you may be surprised to learn it's already here. "We were born cloud, now we’ve been reborn social" was the stand out statement from Marc Benioff's key note speech at the Royal Festival Hall this morning.

When you see a global brand like Coca Cola launching a 'listening review' you know the signs are good for social CRM. Last time I checked (and this is a school playground fact I picked up many years ago, so maybe wrong) Scotland is the only country in the developed world to not have Coca Cola as the number one selling soft drink (Irn Bru if you're interested). Even if that fact is no longer correct, let's not pretend like Coca Cola is not a dominant force on the world stage.

Read a really interesting article from Gartner analyst Michael Maoz this morning which looked at the idea of jumping into unknown waters too quickly, just because everybody else was donning their swimming caps and readying a dive. He argues that businesses are guilty of taking this approach a bit with social CRM, realising they're joining the game late and wondering how it can all really make things better.

Finding the relevant data

Autonomy's mantra on their website best concludes what we've all known for a long, long time: "Human-friendly or unstructured information is not naturally found in the rows and columns of a database, but in documents, web pages, presentations, videos, phone conversations, emails and IMs". The web is changing and that is only good news for the enterprise.

I watched with interest last week as many media pundits and social experts alike blamed a better way of communicating for causing the shocking riots that rocked much of the UK. Indeed, many spectators and opinion leaders were calling for the sites to be banned, not just temporarily but altogether, as if a leech on society draining it of common decency (admittedly the latter did spring from the Daily Mail). Forgive me for being naive but surely better ways of spreading a message and sharing conversation can not be classed as 'dangerous' just because of a certain niche audience that choose to abuse it?

Because of pressure to do so, and word of mouth that has turned more into Chinese whispers, there seems to be an obsession with tracking everything on social media. The desire is there to watch for every mention, decipher between the good and the bad and hear every last word about a company that exists on the world wide web. Why? If you are planning on doing this ask yourself that very question. What are you going to do with that info.

For business, Twitter is not all about what you're saying or even what you're hearing. It's about the interactions taking place whilst you're doing both. Make no mistake, I hear pretty much every big news piece break on Twitter before anywhere else, and I also pride my feeds on valuable and engaging content. But that is not what makes Twitter so special.

After two years of biding our time for the perfect blogging re-launch (patience is a fine virtue) The Artesian blog is having a bit of reshuffle. After studying the form and getting some reader feedback this little page here is to become a how to/what is/for the love of social media I'm stuck ....help guide to all things online. You can pose questions via our twitter feed and have them answered as soon as possible and also take advice from fellow professionals trying to take the leap into online sales intelligence.

Check out this great article from CEO Andrew Yates in MAD.co.uk

Need to have sales info

One of the common things said about sales intelligence is that it's a nice to have, not a need to have. But I wanted to argue that with the table below using salesperson A and salesperson B (creative names I'm sure you'll agree).

Just wanted to point you in the direction of this rather swanky little piece in B2B Marketing featuring our CEO Andrew Yates:

Social CRM provides a secret weapon for the sales team

Make that your read for the week and I shall spare you my ramblings...

Super injunction is super interesting

Let us not pretend like social media and the more traditonal print presses have not been set to square up for some time now. The papers have played social media's games simply because they felt it necassary but the underlying tension based around the increasing fuzz between social and factual has been there for all to see.

I saw another piece the other day claiming that companies were failing to adopt online social techniques because they lacked the time to do so. For me that's like saying the aforementioned title. 'I don't have time to take the escalator, I'll just take the stairs.' It's falls under the category of all the excuses relating to time:

There are still far too many situations where a sales pro is answering the question 'do you use social media?' with the lacklustre response 'no, not really' or 'I know about it, but haven't got round to looking yet.' Amongst the many reasons for this attitude include:

Have you ever bumped into an old acquittance in the street who you maybe haven't seen for a few years or so and receive the unanswerable question 'well, what you been up to?' Hopefully, unless it's been somewhat of a write off 730 days, you'll have been up to much more than can fit into a hurried sentence. This question always seems very lazy to me, a sign that the person in question doesn't really care what you've 'been up to.' If they did, they would've made contact, or at least been asking around about you so, they knew roughly what was going on.

Following on from last week's attempts to demystify common beliefs about online sales intelligence, part 2 looks at further concerns and misconceptions:

"I don't have time to insert another process into my daily routine"

The idea of integrating online sales intelligence into your routine is to reduce the time it takes to scour the Internet for relevant content each day, not increase. If you're a sales professional on the road, or one who spends a lot of time on the phone, getting a timely morning email or a quick summary from a personalised dashboard can be hugely time saving, rather than having to head out onto the World wide web to find out what a customer's doing. It means more knowledge in a considerably reduced period of time, meaning you can abandon your searching days and concentrate on the sale.

With online sales intelligence becoming more and more sought after, I thought I'd compile a list of regular beliefs, oppositions and questions and reveal the truth, much like one of those rogue magicians who covers their face and shows the audience where the rabbits are really hiding in the hat. Here is online sales intelligence - The truth:

Don't like using this blog to promote too much (as any 'top 10 list of blogging don'ts will tell you, IT'S WRONG!!!) but technically I'm promoting 99 others here too, so in my book, it doesn't count. So Artesian have been selected in the top 100 Start ups featured in the Telegraph and we couldn't be more thrilled.

I've written many times about the importance of not getting too obsessed with the 'social' side of news online, as there is still a vast amount of sales intelligence which can be drawn from the more traditional online sources, as it were. Recently there has been a lot of buzz around social investment and to be honest, much like a broken record, I thought I'd try and emphasis the point once more (because who doesn't like listening to a broken record repeating itself?...)

Was alerted to a really interesting article in Information Week last Friday which hinted that companies had begun taking a more 'watch from distance' approach to social media, rather than leaping in and creating their own content. In a survey incorporating 114 executives across 10 countries, 97% of those questioned used Linkedin in 2010 compared to the 33% using Twitter (down 7% on 2009). More notably Facebook usage had dropped from 51% to 20% in one year.

One of my favourite scenes of cinema has to be the moment in Airplane II, when a worked up William Shatner completely loses the plot over hundreds of flashing warning lights and 'mystery' control units beeping away around him. It's a moment of utter brilliance where Shatner pokes fun at his own sci-fi past and suggests that everything running his control tower is far more complicated than it really needs to be.

Reading the headlines each morning can be enough for even the biggest optimist in the World to suddenly start referring to their glass as half empty, apposed to half full. If you buy into the daily press, petrol prices are currently on a par with the GDP of New Zealand, house prices are falling faster than a Lib Dem candidate's voting numbers and if you have any money in your possession at all, you're doing rather well...but you should probably hide it under the bed and not tell the tax man where it is.

The old saying goes 'if it ain't broken don't fix it' but does that really stand up to modern day business? Those who have built up years and years of experience like to lean heavily on that, and quite rightly so, but that's not to say you shouldn't be willing to try new things. In fact the likelihood is, opening yourself up and exploring possibilities is probably what made you so successful in the first place.

Bold statement alert: The increasingly referenced role of Chief Listening Officer within large organisations could well be THE breakthrough for companies getting to grips with online, social sales intelligence. The CLO seems to popping up more and more in the opening months of 2011 and as a landmark position, it's importance can not be underestimated in the current content heavy climate. Kodak and Dell have been the front runners thus far but if other companies aren't looking to follow suit then I will quite happily take advice from a dated phrase and offer to eat my hat.

If you're in sales, or sales intelligence what do you consider to be more important; a huge heap of knowledge syphoned from lots and lots of data, or calling at exactly the right time? This is an important question in today's market as two trains of thought appear to forming about the best way to tackle the vasts amount of information on the web and turn it into valuable sales insight. It's data v timing and both corners would claim to have a considerable amount of support.

Here's a few things I ask myself pretty much every morning now, right after my first hit of coffee and just before I start to let everything else get in the way of the day. In my opinion, it's a simple and affective Q&A session with myself to make sure I'm staying in touch with the game:

If you're a football fan like me, on this the day of the transfer window, £600million might not seem like an awful lot of money (about 3 Manchester City signings to put it into perspective) but make no mistake, in reality that number is absolutely huge. That spend, in terms of CRM implementation will increase from 4% to 10% of all projects this year which tells you something about the upward curve facing the social business craze.

Someone recently alerted me to a Guardian blog talking about how the way we speed read things on the Internet has made us all more stupid with much shorter attention spans. Or something like that anyway, I was just skimming it and got distracted by something else...

Hands up who's played social media bingo? You know the game, sitting in a meeting crossing off your sheet every time the phrase 'tapping into social media' is referenced or hearing the echoed belief that it's time to 'get to know our customers'. The thing that everyone expects from social media (largely because this message has been preached to every sales team everywhere) is that the platform will act as a silver bullet that will provide effortless access deep inside the hub of a company and shed endless hidden secrets that you wouldn't see in the usual press circles.

We've all been there haven't we? That stage where we become perfectly comfortable in routine and close our minds to any other way of thinking. It almost becomes a bit like a superstition. I am not superstitious by nature but it pains me to admit I once went through a spell where I wouldn't walk onto a football pitch without listening to Chumbawamba's 'I get knocked down.' For some reason that went over the head of all therapy groups attended, I truly believed I couldn't possibly kick a football until I'd been graced by the presence of such an outrageously ghastly song.

It was beginning to become more and more apparent towards the end of 2010 that companies were starting to re-evaluate how they used social media and discovering that listening was just as important as broadcasting. I won't try and hide the facts, this blog did the very same. Strategists began to realise the value in reaching out to the pool of online knowledge rather than just adding to it.

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